ON A NOVELLA BY TRELLIE JAMES JEFFERS
The space of black
writing is densely populated, its neighborhoods of poetry and non-fiction being
less comfortable than its suburbs of prose fiction or its sprawling estates of
drama. Thanks in part to new
technologies of publishing, magnitude overwhelms us and makes the choice of
what to read annoyingly difficult. Savvy readers often ignore what various
authorities tell them they should read, what they will enjoy reading, or what
they must read so as not to be out of fashion. Really smart readers navigate
the vast territory by following their uncommon commonsense tastes. They take risks and enjoy the informative
thrill of the dangerous game. Even when
the thrill is gone, they find comfort in not being nondescript members of a
herd. Those who elect to read Up and Down
the Evergreen Tree (2014) by Trellie James Jeffers can applaud themselves
for having walked through a portal of return to the source. This novella
restores confidence in the instructive power of black writing.
Although the novella as a genre is less popular than the
novel, it has the advantage of enabling readers to discern what is really there and how
the writer makes a cognitive “there” possible. Up and Down the Evergreen Tree
exposes the structures of story and storytelling as it reinvents the explicit
message of “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes in the contexts of 1967. The relatively simple story of how Jackson
Greene, a gifted Black doctor in New England, struggles to transform his Deep
South mother’s dreams into “realities” is marked by aspects of the nouveau roman. The temptation to interpret the novella
within a modernist French tradition, however, is merely an act of bad faith, a
pretentious gesture of wanting to claim for the international African Diaspora
what is located by virtue of textual specificity and narration squarely in the
domains of African American cultural and political nationalisms. For readers
who have digested post-racial and post-black and post-identity nostrums, Up and Down the Evergreen Tree may
conjure rich nightmares.
The significance
and value of the story is accessible to streetwise readers who do not genuflect
in the cathedrals of the Academy or make the sign of the cross with the holy
water of forgetting but who battle with the brutal economies of womanism and
masculinity. The meaning of the story
does, however, have a special weight for readers who have studied Claudia Tate’s
Domestic Allegories of Political Desire:
The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. “What is especially
important to observe,” Tate remarked in her groundbreaking discourse on what
was explored in late 19th century domestic novels, “is that such exploration
was not simply gratuitous escapism; it offered the recently emancipated an
occasion for exercising political self-definition in fiction at a time when the
civil rights of African Americans were constitutionally sanctioned but socially
prohibited” (7). To be sure, the sensorium of post-Reconstruction America is
not available for writers and readers in 2014, but traces of that sensorium
lurk in our contemporary mindspaces despite aesthetic arguments which pepper
and salt literary meditations. Not disposed to have commerce with nonsense,
Trellie James Jeffers offers Up and Down the Evergreen Tree as a
life-oriented intervention for a question multiethnic America finds difficult
to answer in the English language: Y tu
abuela, donde esta?
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
July 12, 2014
