Tag: literature

Booker T. Washington’s 1901 autobiography “Up From Slavery” was a best-seller and traced the educators rise from slavery, through the mines, to his education and, eventually, the establishment of the Tuskegee Institute.

Here’s an excerpt from the book (which can be found here and here):

ONE day, while at work in the coal-mine, I happened to overhear two miners talking about a great school for coloured people somewhere in Virginia. This was the first time that I had ever heard anything about any kind of school or college that was more pretentious than the little coloured school in our town.

In the darkness of the mine I noiselessly crept as close as I could to the two men who were talking. I heard one tell the other that not only was the school established for the members of my race, but that opportunities were provided by which poor but worthy students could work out all or a part of the cost of board, and at the same time be taught some trade or industry.

As they went on describing the school, it seemed to me that it must be the greatest place on earth, and not even Heaven presented more attractions for me at that time than did the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, about which these men were talking. I resolved at once to go to that school, although I had no idea where it was, or how many miles away, or how I was going to reach it; I remembered only that I was on fire constantly with one ambition, and that was to go to Hampton. This thought was with me day and night.

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
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead

Click “more” for a travel article about Tuskegee.

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This 1999 novel by Colson Whitehead imagines a world in which a new style of elevator inspectors — those who inspect via intuition — are disrupting the mainstream inspectors — the empiricists — who work by checking everything out. And in this original, fully imagined world, which has in addition to its speculative fiction — or even sci-fi aspect to it — a 1940s or 1950s feel, the issues of race and gender still dominate.

With this first novel, Whitehead established himself as a fresh, vibrant voice in contemporary fiction.

Here’s an excerpt for a great interview he gave with Laura Miller at Salon.com:

Another unusual thing about your book is that often, when black writers are writing about race, they feel it needs to be very realistic. Do you feel you have more freedom than previous generations?

Yeah. Definitely, decades ago, there was the protest novel, and then there was “tell the untold story, find our unerased history.” Then there’s the militant novel of insurrection from the ’60s. There were two rigid camps in the ’60s: the Black Arts movement, denouncing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for being too white, and Ralph Ellison calling the Black Arts writers too militant and narrow, not universal enough. Now I think there are a lot more of us writing and a lot more different areas we’re exploring. It’s not as polemicized. I’m dealing with serious race issues, but I’m not handling them in a way that people expect.

You’re using elements of a style that people associate with white men — the Thomas Pynchons and Don DeLillos of this world. People who don’t like that kind of book tend to dismiss them for being white men. By writing these big novels that make big statements about society they’re supposedly showing a bogus sense of entitlement.

I love all those guys. And I certainly don’t feel that way. I think they’re great writers and I think they’re attacking, grappling with, the culture in a way that interests me. I think if it’s a good book, it’s a good book.

You are in this literary territory that isn’t usually associated with black writers, though.

I think Ishmael Reed has done it — “Mumbo Jumbo” and “Flight to Canada” are in the same sort of vein, I think he’s overlooked as a groundbreaking voice in black fiction. And Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” a ’20s novel. He’s a Harlem Renaissance guy. I think it’s always been there, it’s just that mainstream critics, maybe even readers, don’t see the linkages.

They don’t see that there’s a tradition of the black intellectual novel?

Yeah. This guy Charles Wright, not the poet, had some very crazy books that came out in the ’60s, and Clarence Majors, his book “All Night Visitors,” which came out in the early ’70s. You could say it’s been ghettoized. No one’s really picking up on experiments that were going on in the late ’60s.

The complete interview is here.

Listen to the author read an excerpt here.

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
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker

Alice Walker’s 1982 novel “The Color Purple” won the Pulitzer Prize, and has been made into a movie and musical. Centering on the story of Celie, a woman who is abused and made powerless, largely because of her gender and the color of her skin, the novel moves toward her finding strength with the help of other women.

Here’s an excerpt from a review on the African American Literature Book Club Web site:

Alice Walker once told an interviewer, “The black woman is one of America’s greatest heroes. . . . She has been oppressed beyond recognition.”

The Color Purple is the story of how one of those American heroes came to recognize herself recovering her identity and rescuing her life in spite of the disfiguring effects of a particularly dreadful and personal sort of oppression. The novel focuses on Celie, a woman lashed by waves of deep trouble—abandonment, incest, physical and emotional abuse—and tracks her triumphant journey to self-discovery, womanhood, and independence. Celie’s story is a pointed indictment of the men in her life—men who betrayed and abused her, worked her like a mule and suppressed her independence—but it is also a moving portralt of the psychic bonds that exist between women and the indestructible nature of the human spirit.

The story of Celie is told through letters: Celie’s letters to God and her sister Nettle, who is in Africa, and Nettle’s letters to Celie. Celie’s letters are a poignant attempt to understand her own out-of-control life. Her difficulties begin when, at the age of fourteen, she is raped by her stepfather, who then apparently sells away the two children born of that rape. Her sister Nettle runs away to escape the abuse, but Celie is married off to Albert, an older man that she refers to simply as “Mr.” for most of the novel. He subjects her to tough work on his farm and beats her at his whim. But Celie finds the path to redemption in two key female role models: Sophia, an independent woman who refuses to be taken advantage of by her husband or any man, and Shug, a sassy, independent singer whom Albert loves. It is Shug who first offers Celie love, friendship, and a radically new way of looking at life.

The complete review is here.

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

From Playbill, about the making of the musical version of the novel:

The one-hour documentary “The Color Purple: The Color of Success,” about the making of the Broadway musical The Color Purple, will premiere on the cable channel TV One Feb. 18 from 8 PM to 9 PM.

“The Color Purple: The Color of Success” looks behind the scenes at the development of the musical and follows the story’s path from book to film to Broadway. The documentary includes interviews with Alice Walker, the original novelist, Quincy Jones, a producer of the film and the musical, and others involved with the work.

The documentary debuted on TV One’s video on demand service on Feb. 5. After its premiere Feb. 18, it will replay later that night at midnight, plus on Feb. 20 at noon, Feb. 22 at 11 AM and March 3 at noon. TV One is a cable channel aimed at African-American adults.

Some other links:

BBC audio interviews.

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
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones

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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