The Known World won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and the 2003 National Book Critics Award in fiction. It is a stunning story in that it imagines the reality and consequences of a free black man in pre-Civil War Virginia who owns slaves.

From the publisher:

In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can’t uphold the estate’s order and chaos ensues. In a daring and ambitious novel, Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all of its moral complexities.

A story from NPR.

Author’s Web site.

Jones will be in the Capital Region to give a reading with the New York State Writers Institute. April 18 (Wednesday): Novelist and short story writer Edward P. Jones
Reading – 8:00 p.m., Room TBA, Rensselaer (RPI), Troy

Thanks to Lisa Stevens for pointing out this book.

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 Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
“I Have a Dream” speech”
“Sula” by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s “Sula,” first published in 1973, was chosen as an Oprah book club pick in 2002. This is how the TV show’s Web site describes the book:

Nominated for the National Book Award, this rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines—from their growing up together in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.

Nel Wright chooses to remain in the place of her birth, to marry, to raise a family, and to become a pillar of the tightly-knit black community. Sula Peace rejects all that Nel has accepted. She escapes to college and submerges herself in city life. When she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel, a mocker and a wanton sexual seductress. Both women must suffer the consequences of their choices; both must decide if they can afford to harbor the love they have for each other; and both combine to create an unforgettable rendering of what it means and costs to exist and survive as a black woman in America.

What that fails to mention is found in a 1996 essay by Rita A. Bergenholtz from the African American Review “Toni Morrison’s Sula: A Satire on Binary Thinking”:

Toni Morrison’s ‘Sula’ succeeds as a satire for its entertainment and thought-provoking values. Binary thinking is likewise promoted and constitutes the novel’s essence. Through ‘Sula’, Morrison examines the apparent contradictions that are inherent in the perceptions and lifestyles of blacks toward whites and vice-versa. The characters in the novel exemplify the need for the binary perspectives of both races prior to some sort of mutual understanding.

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Many people are familiar with Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous words, especially the closing of his “I Have a Dream” speech:

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! thank God almighty, we are free at last!”

But how many people have heard or read the entire speech? Here’s the video of the complete speech.

Click “more” for the text of the speech.
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I first read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley, while in high school. At that time, what stood out were his experiences as a young man putting lye on his hair to straighten it out (which, he points out, is the kind of self-inflicted pain some blacks put on themselves to conform to white notions of beauty), his reading habit picked up in prison and details like his statement that he always wore a watch because he knew his time was limited and that, in restaurants, he always sat facing the door so he could see who was coming in. Of course, knowing that he feared for his life and that he was killed only added to the sense of urgency of the book.

Most of all, what I took away from the book was his final transformation that was sparked by his hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. In seeing Muslims of all colors from all nations, he rejected his previous anti-white statements and recognized a universal humanity and that fighting racism was a human struggle. Soon after, though, he was killed.

Since first reading the book, I have also incorporated portions of it into college writing courses I have taught over the years, especially the passages when, in prison, he states that reading transformed him, beginning with copying out the dictionary by hand.

I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something; from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. … In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life. … No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this new world opened up to me, of being able to read and understand.

Here are some links:
An excerpt from the book.
Encarta encyclopedia entry.
The official Malcolm X web site.
Biography of Malcolm X.

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 Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

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.

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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.