Wesley Brown Revisited
Like the walking bodies in our country that are in a slow
hurry to advertise the fine art of tattooing,
we best be asking hard questions about keeping Black real compared to what. Or can we defamiliarize an answer to
Roberta Flack’s explicit question by saying Pink passing for White
ain’t real?
In a pure fantasy that lacks referentiality, Wesley Brown’s
second novel Darktown Strutters (New
York: Crane Hill Press, 1994) is the inspiration for Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled ( 2000). Fantasy precludes proof. But we can have a
noisy shock of recognition by juxtaposing the mumbling surrounding the film
with the silence that engulfs the novel.
Lee addressed the history of blacking up from the outside, from the
vantage of an imminent present, and his satire sticks like water on Teflon. Brown, on the other hand, dealt with the
racecraft of minstrelsy in America from the inside, from the interiors of its
languages by allowing his characters Jim Crow and Jim Crow Two to be the
partial narrators of the story. His fiction informs a consciousness of American
class and caste formation; Lee’s film trivializes that consciousness and cashes
in on entertainment values.
We should note also that Wesley Brown has credentials in
terms of cultural nationalism that Lee must envy. In 1965, Brown worked with the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party; he became a member of the Black Panther Party in
1968, a year marked by the publication of the landmark anthology Black Fire and a year that the
Association for the Study of Negro Life and History so richly documented ( read
In
Black America: 1968: The Year of Awakening ). Brown became a political
prisoner in 1972 for refusing to be inducted in the military and spent eighteen
months of his three-year sentence in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. We have a
conflicted romance with incarceration in America, but Brown’s excellence as a
fiction writer and dramatist and editor is to be measured both because of his
political sacrifices and despite them.
His mastery of craft is not innately wed to his ideology. Let us be clear about that. The separation of
realms is no excuse, however, for failing to honor those who teach us that art
and ethos are united.
It helps greatly to suggest that Darktown Strutters is to African American fiction what Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the
American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) is to
Euro-American critical theory. The books do the work of enlightenment. Eric Lott tells us much that we do need to
know about the centrality of race in the whole history of American
entertainment, although he carefully avoids outing who now controls the
entertainment industry in America.
Wesley Brown is exempt from having to deal with that vexed and dangerous
subject in his novel, because his objective was to liberate the languages of
minstrelsy to speak for themselves. His
superior artistry is implicated with a difference that Gayl Jones noted between
Zora Neale Hurston and Ernest Gaines in Liberating
Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) -----“Gaines
has carried us beyond Hurston’s illusion of Janie’s voice to the full value and
reality of Miss Jane’s tall-telling” (169).
We have too long denied ourselves the pleasure of Wesley
Brown’s company and denied that he is one of our national treasures, and we
have squandered much too much of our literary energy in consuming what the
Idols of the Marketplace have hoodwinked us into believing is Black. Do we have to remind ourselves that American
Kente cloth is “made in China”? One purchases the real thing in Ghana. Wesley Brown’s novels Tragic Magic, Darktown
Strutters, and Push Comes to Shove
may have been tossed under the bus by marketplace politics in twentieth-century
African American literature, but we do know they survived the accident and are
well. If it is probable that we can have a renaissance of intelligence about
what is Black and real, we will find ourselves teaching young African Americans
how to write well by reading Wesley Brown as we sing to them a memorable line
from Darktown Strutters: “Our people
pass the word more regular than we pass water”(47).
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW
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February 12, 2013
