Words from 1982

 

Witherspoon: A Novel by Lance Jeffers (1983)*

 

INTRODUCTION

Such Agonies Suffer Our Men of War

 

                Reading Witherspoon, one is moved by its aesthetic and its morality.  Lance Jeffers does not depend on mutilation of language, allusion to the arcane, or puzzles in logic to achieve effects.  He is too good and too honest an artist to engage in easy tricks.  He knows, as wordsmiths have known since the pre-history of Africa,  that a good story told in language the community can understand is not to be surpassed.  The grace and strength of fiction are located in its ability to show us our lives with more order, insight, and clarity than we can normally obtain.  Good fiction pushes us toward recognition, toward a profound, relentless honesty about ourselves and others.  It forces us to make moral decisions while satisfying our penchant for narratives about man’s endless contest with the fate of being human.  Because it fulfills these criteria superbly, Witherspoon is a fine, important novel.

 

                In the poem “When I Know the Power of My Black Hand,” Jeffers wrote:

I see my children stunted,

my young men slaughtered,

I do not know the mighty power of my hand.

 

I see the power over my life and death in

another man’s hands, and sometimes

I shake my woolly head and wonder:

      Lord have mercy! What would it be like…to be free?

 

                Lucius Witherspoon, James Corwul, and Willie Armstrong are characters who, in varying degrees, come to know the power of their black hands, their interrelated life-stories being metonymic:  the essence of Black life and the complexity of Black male psychology in the South are compressed in their ability or inability to assert power. Through these characters, Jeffers examines what it means to be unempowered and how Black men and women do possess the inner strength (and latent social power) to be great and human without ambivalence.  Witherspoon does not seek to tell what it would be like to be Black, free, and Southern.  It shows what the unsung heroes among ordinary Black folk must do to achieve individual and collective freedom.  And what they must do involves tragedy and love, the willingness to push one’s humanity to irreversible extremes, and determination to stare death straight in the eye. Black people, especially Black men, will know the power of their hands when they know themselves totally.

 

                Witherspoon does not validate how we are now, nor does it evade the Black man’s critical problem of confronting, in the words of Robert Staples, “the contradiction between the normative expectations attached to being male in this society and the proscriptions on [his] behavior and achievement of goals.”  With the skill of a surgeon, Jeffers performs an operation in the underexplored depths of Black male psychology.  Therefore, he enables us to discover the agonies suffered by our men of war and the long journey they and we must take to find psychological freedom.  The great achievement of Witherspoon is the destruction of the historical and social myths behind which men try to mask.

 

                Evoking the wisdom of the spirituals (a fact apparent in the novel’s original title The Lord is a Man of War), Lance Jeffers has given us fiction that is convertive and blacktrocuting.  In its affirmation that descent into the inferno of racism leads to rising like a phoenix, Witherspoon offers to us the grandeur that is ours.  Witherspoon is the sorrow song of our new day, the martial song for Black men who would know the power of their hands.  It is an ode to the invisible men and women whose authentic humanity must become the model of our own.

                                                                                                                                                Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

                                                                                                                                                Tougaloo College

                                                                                                                                                May 3, 1982

 

*Jeffers, Lance. Witherspoon. Atlanta: The George A. Flippin Press, 1983.

 

 

 

 

April 4, 1997 document

 PHBW DOCUBLOG

April 4, 1997

Remarks for panel “Making Black Literary Anthologies: Past and Present” at University of Wisconsin-Madison symposium “Canonizing African American Literature: Black Anthologies in America 1843-1996”

                Memory, according to current thinking in neuroscience, can be talked about as long-term and short-term.  In light of the probability of having these two kinds of memory, we might consider The Poetry of the Negro (1949, 1974) edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps as an anthology designed for long-term memory.  On the other hand, Black Fire (1968) edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, which did not pretend to ideological neutrality was short-term.  Anthologies assist us in remembering and in forgetting.  They remain quite essential for the reconstruction of group memory, the architectural work that use pieces of the past to create for the present matter for remembering.  The forgotten aspects of literature never come forth as they were.  They come through the filter of distance, through the lens of the editor looking toward a future.  We editors have to worry about what we help people to remember and to forget.

                When I compiled Black Southern Voices (1992) with John Oliver Killens and Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997), the notion that I was participating in canon formation did not dance in my head.  If people want to see these two anthologies as part of a canon-making effort, they are welcome to do so.  Black Southern Voices is Mr. Killens’ anthology; it was his idea; I was called in to help, and completed the work after his death.  The anthology was shaped according to his ideas about the social responsibility of artistic voices, and I thank Keneth Kinnamon for saying this morning that the anthology gives credibility to the idea of regional difference.  The phrase “social responsibility of artistic voices” (open to multiple disputes and debates) is an accusing finger, eliciting dread among the clerics who have given up hair shirts for the comfort of cardinal red silk.  In a nutshell, Black Southern Voices casts some light on the South and the Black South, reminding us of the origins of oppositions, of where everyday opposition is real.  With all its imperfections, Black Southern Voices is there for discovery or rediscovery.  Perhaps it reminds us of the importance of attending to African American writing in opposition to a narrow attention to literature (as literature is variously defined), a subset of writing.

                Trouble the Water only deals with poetry.  I was always mindful in making the anthology of Eugene Redmond’s Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry.  Perhaps the anthology has a mission.  Perhaps it records a wondrous accident that black poetry addresses so many different audiences at any given time.  It reminds people of the rage and sweep and placidity of water, the ineluctable necessity of water.  Thus, its title.

                As I mentioned to William Andrews yesterday, there is a secret design in this anthology, a call and response pattern based not on textuality or intertexuality so much as on historically (narratively) situated responses.  My own vision of African American poetry and poetic tradition is invested in memory.  My subjectivity is invested in preservation and in what the poetry induces us to do for a future.  The anthology is a sampler.  When people complain that something is missing, I hope they will go out and read that something.  It was also important in making this book that young people who can spend $150.00 for tennis shoes have it at the affordable price of $6.99.

                Perhaps my mission as editor was to wade in the water and to practice a nice Southern madness of helping others to make trouble, so we might all get wet with wisdom.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature

Tougaloo College

May 25, 2012

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From: Beverly Butcher [bbutch02@nyit.edu]
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 10:09 AM
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Cc: Ward, Jerry (Mr.)
Subject: An Invitation to Dillard University Professor Jerry Ward's presentation on "Richard Wright and 21st Century Questions," May 25, 2012, from 12:30 - 1:30 pm

Dear Students, Staff, Faculty, and Friends,

Please join us on Friday, May 25, 2012, from 12:30 - 1:30 pm for Dr. Jerry Ward's presentation on "Richard Wright and 21st Century Questions" in the NYIT Center for Humanities and Culture at NUPT, Teaching Building One.

Professor Jerry Ward is a distinguished professor of English and African American World Studies at Dillard University, New Orleans, Louisiana. He is a leading authority on Richard Wright as evidenced by his co-editorship of the Richard Wright Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, 2006). His work appears inFurious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (UVA, 2004); this poet scholar is the editor of the anthologyTrouble the Water, 250 Years of African American Poetry (Signet, 1997), and author of the memoirThe Katrina Papers (UNO Press, 2008).

We greatly look forward to seeing you there!

Sincerely,

Beverly Dean Fang

Beverly J. Butcher, Ph.D. Dean Fang Zongxiang

Director, Center for Humanities Associate Director, Center for Humanities

and Culture at NUPT and Culture at NUPT

Enslaved Voices

Randall, Alice. The Wind Done Gone.  New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

               

                According to words provided on the publication page, “This novel is the author’s critique of and reaction to the world described in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.”  Those words and the dates January 1, 1940 (movie premiere of GWTW) and July 1936 (publication of GWTW) satisfy the minimum requirements for cultural literacy in America.  Well, perhaps you want to know the phrase “gone with the wind” is from Ernest Dowson’s poem ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub rego Cynarae “ [I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cyrana].  That information puts you one up on people who only know the wind done gone.  And Mr. Dowson got the title for his poem from the Roman poet Horace.  Enough said.

                Ms. Randall makes an effort to insert her first novel into the American novel (romance novel) tradition by imitating Hawthorne’s Custom House preface for The Scarlet Letter.  In “Notes on the Text,” Randall pretends to have discovered the document (a leather-bound diary) by Prissy Cynara Brown  in the 1990s among “the effects of an elderly colored lady who had been in an assisted-living center just outside Atlanta”(v).  Inside the document was “a fragment of green silk.”  Inside his document, Hawthorne discovered  a bit of cloth, a scarlet letter.   Let us recall that neither Hawthorne’s heroine Hester Prynne nor Mitchell’s heroine Scarlett O’Hara was a lady; they were useful tools in the making of whiteness. Unlike the superior oral narration of the enslaved heroine in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose which tells us so much about the world described in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, the febrile writerly voice of Prissy Cynara Brown tells us more about the pathology of the segregated South that incarcerated Margaret Mitchell than it does about the slave community.  In that sense it justifies Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s  claim that The Wind Done Gone is “a moving act of political commentary.” The novel, however, deconstructs the parodic puffery of his saying that in Randall’s novel “at last the slaves at Tara have found their voice.”  The enslaved at Tara will never have a voice to which one feels compelled to listen.  We are too much reminded that the unwritten parody of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust is entitled Stranger in the Mud.

                Alas, in the United States, literature continues to be equipment for assisted-living.

Jeremiah Ramcat

August 14, 2012

Comment on THE KATRINA PAPERS

Received also with gratitude, though the bridge it provides is purely fortuitous—and fortunate—is Claude Wilkinson’s “Anything That Floats,” New Orleans being the heart of the final essay in the series known as “Notes on the State of Southern Poetry,” “Controversies, Connections, and Coincidences”:

Before even opening The Katrina Papers by Jerry Ward, its cover art ferries us toward the book’s thematic and metaphoric heart. Herbert Kearney’s construction All Mothers Are Boats is composed of paint, driftwood, lumber, dirt, masonry, and other rubble found around the artist’s studio post-Katrina. The literal importance of boats during and after the hurricane is evoked by the image alone. However, as we soon find out, Ward’s very act of writing a journal was for the author, a means of survival. His introduction refers to Katrina as “a matrix of stories,” and indeed whether speaking of the storm or the journal, there are situations within which something else originates, develops, or is contained. Although the book is in part documentary of a cataclysmic event, design elements such as no table of contents and the use of varied fonts and forms throughout the text remind us that The Katrina Papers is in fact one man’s memoir.

Generally sequential in its arrangement, the book begins under the romantic heading Early September Preludes. Ward’s first entry on September 2, 2005 sets out, “Being in the First Baptist Church shelter means . . . damn, the words don’t want to come out of the pencil . . . that thousands of us have been abused by Nature and revenge is impossible” (11). As one might expect of such writing, Ward’s iteration of the importance of home and the force of loss is constant. Considering his own transformation even near the end of the journal, the author thinks to himself and then writes,

You are fooling yourself about bright moments. All moments from now until the time of your dying shall be dull and prickly. You shall laugh, and laughter will bring you no joy. Sadness shall season all your waking minutes. Peace will exist when you are asleep. You will never be conscious of it. Stop wishing and dreaming. Wake up. (202-03)

What readers may not expect however, is Ward’s sometimes humorous, often Zen observations and his continued professional engagement in the face of catastrophe. At one point he asks, “Does water walk when you swim?” (210). Six days earlier, Ward expresses his annoyance over a fellow juror’s tardiness in making a selection regarding a literary award.

The Katrina Papers also presents the Zeitgeist of Ward’s vexing trial of registering online with FEMA and his reflections on the joy of getting a much needed haircut, as well as vacillating, conflicting emotions—from the brief happiness of finding out via e-mails that friends and family are still alive to the sorrow of his situation. “Be happy, then be miserable,” he writes (11). Interspersed in the entries are associations that Ward makes between experiences such as watching telecasts of people struggling through the flood and his having edited a poetry anthology subtitled Wade in the Water, followed by the mimetically iambic thought, “A boat is anything that floats” (11).

Ward’s claim of “trauma affect[ing] the mind, the soul, the body” is buoyed by descriptions of “wading in poisoned water with snakes and the dead bodies of animals and people floating by” (12). Although certain entries vent anger through commonly voiced political stabs at the American military’s involvement in Iraq by suggesting that the true terrorism is here in the flooded coastal areas, The Katrina Papers is also a stocktaking of sorts. Under the heading You Don’t Know What It Means, Ward describes the awful task of preparing to abandon one’s most secure place in the world, possibly never to return: “You hurriedly pack—vital documents, granola bars and water, sports clothing and toiletries for a week, put on your Army dog tags for good luck,” reminding himself “[You did survive Vietnam], lock up the house and leave at 12:06 with a backward glance at John Scott’s ‘Spirit House’ on the corner of St. Bernard and Gentilly (13).
Yet in the scope of other atrocities such as 9/11, slavery, and “the AIDS/famine/ethnic laundering crises in Africa and the triumph of evil elsewhere,” the author ultimately considers himself blessed (13). Nevertheless, Ward, a Richard Wright scholar, poet, and English professor, remembers and clings to sundry safety nets, stating: “You do have unfinished work at Dillard University, and suicide, damning your Roman Catholic soul, would hurt the relatives who love you. Wear the mask. Smile. Pretend you do not hurt” (13). The journal is evidence of an unquenched desire to ruminate on Emersonian philosophy and Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize speech, to read new works of literary theory, and to communicate with colleagues. Alongside Ward’s Olympian pursuits are his mundane but necessary lists reminding him to write checks for bills and file a claim for flood insurance.

Near the anniversary of his leaving New Orleans just before Katrina hit, the author recalls other personal traumatic events—namely the death of his father on December 25, 1957, which hence hardened him against any celebration of Christmas. On the death of his mother in April 1992, which he admits to being better able to handle, Ward writes, “By then I had experienced the rising and falling rhythms of life”—an ominous, apt segue to the coming storm (232). Thus the journal closes in a manner reminiscent of an absurdist play. Exclaimed in bold font are the directions—which I ask you, dear Readers, to follow with me on 29 August 2012, the seventh anniversary of Katrina’s landfall:

STOP & EXITThe journal stops. Trauma doesn’t conclude. No tidy solutions demand summary.Stop.Clear the throat.Exit into a pre-future of unknowns. (233)

Work Cited
Ward, Jerry W., Jr. The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery. New Orleans: U of New Orleans P, 2008.

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