Black Writing: A New Orleans Example
Seldom is the interrelated difference of black writing and
black literature a topic of conversation or a point of sustained discussion in
undergraduate and graduate courses.
Black writing in the United States of America includes the sounds and
visual combinations (graphology) which represent the contours and nuances of
African American thought; black literature is the body of work which is
squeezed from black writing, filtered and otherwise processed by scholarship
and criticism, poured into anthologies, and offered up to Culture as a consecrated wine.
Black writing is free from the rituals and niceties of wine-tasting. It is just the robust wine that it is.
In everyday life, black writing is more widely read than black
literature. It might be argued that
writing has greater practical value than literature. It tends to be reader-friendly. It rarely offers obtuse apologies for being
didactic. There is, of course, much back
and forth slippage between literature and writing. For the sake of cultivating literacy, this
phenomenon of instability is a good thing.
One instance of black writing for a local scene that can
appeal to a global audience is
Medley, Keith Weldon. Black
Life in Old New Orleans. Gretna, LA:
Pelican, 2014.
The book is informed by a more intimate, personal vision of historiography than such works as John W.
Blassingame’s Black New Orleans,
1860-1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19730 and Lawrence N.
Powell’s The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2012). Read against Blassingame’s and Powell’s use of
a full arsenal of scholarly devices to give persuasiveness and heft to their
theses, Medley’s use of scholarship is skeletal. He is not a neophyte in doing archival
research and selecting visual evidence to buttress his assertions, so one must
seek elsewhere to account for what severe readers might conclude is the book’s “thin”
discussion of cause and effect.
Aware of audience and
purpose, Medley chose not to construct a dispassionate, profound, closed
narrative of black presence in the making of New Orleans. His story-telling is
open and deliberately episodic; it puts into motion authorial call and reader
response; it evokes the shared authority that is a standard feature of oral
history. Medley does not hesitate to locate his family’s history and himself in
a meditation on space, time and place which bespeaks community.
In his first book, We as
Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson (2003), Medley demonstrated his command of “academic”
notions of what history as story should be. In the introduction for his most
recent book, Medley’s purpose and aims are transparent.
The purpose of Black Life in Old New Orleans is to
explore different eras of black New Orleans by focusing on specific
institutions, social movements, and individuals. Each chapter is self-contained. When read cover to cover, the book provides a
timeline of black New Orleans (12-13).
….
This book seeks to
highlight the history of black New Orleans and recognize those who survived and
achieved in spite of social and racial obstacles. Thus, the book is inspirational as well as
historically enlightening (13).
Medley is forthright about his populist intentions, and a
reader is not misled into believing she or he understands the history of one of
the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. A reader understands the unfinished work
of understanding the lived experiences of Africans and African Americans
between the 1790s and the 2000s in a place named Nouvelle- Orléans. Natives
of the place as well as the newly arrived ----especially those tempted to
gentrify the place in their own potentially ahistorical images ---can learn the
discipline that history demands, the discipline employed yearly by Mardi Gras
Indians in the tradition of making a new suit.
Medley’s writing is a crucial blueprint for young New Orleans citizens
who desire to grasp the painful beauty of heritage, legacies, and traditions,
and forking paths of DNA and ancestry.
Medley has written a noteworthy guide for acquiring authentic education.
His book is a godsend for older citizens who want to strengthen their command
of the art of memory and (re)membering. It is a document of importance for
local and global participants in history as an unpredictable process.
As lagniappe, Black
Life in Old New Orleans reveals that black writing and black literature are
symbiotic.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 30, 2014
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