Black Writing and Blues Allegory
American politics will popularize exegesis in 2015, and so
too might the publication of Toni Morrison’s eleventh novel God Help the Child. Scheduled for release in April by Alfred A.
Knopf, the novel rebroadcasts the title of a song written in 1939 by Billie
Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr., “God Bless the Child,” and recorded for the
Okeh label in May 1941. The wheels of
ideological state apparatus turn so rapidly that several commentators have
confused the two titles as they assure us that Morrison’s novel is an instant
classic. The pre-publication “leak” from
Knopf contains a tantalizing summary of plot and characters. It encourages Morrison scholars and other
critical readers to sharpen their tools and to engage the novel by way of
allegorical readings. General readers
should listen to Billie Holiday’s trauma-drenched rendition of “God Bless the Child”
as a prelude to discovering why in 2015 God really should help the child.
Adult readers, mothered and fathered by the child, will find
enlightenment in twenty-first century exercises involving the traditional four
levels of interpretation that are useful in unpacking allegories: 1)the literal
or historical, 2) the allegorical or spiritual, 3) the typological or moral,
and 4) the anagogical or mystical. The use of literacy is not an abuse of literature. To understand where I came from with such an
idea, people should read or reread Amiri Baraka’s Blues People (1963) and Ted Vincent’s Keep Cool: The Black
Activists Who Built the Jazz Age (1995).
These are two seminal works that warrant efforts to locate bridges
between black writing and black music, to understand the bridges that Morrison
builds in her fictions between American politics and the vicissitudes of
ordinary life. It would not hurt to read or reread Stephen E. Henderson’s Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black
Speech and Black Music as Poetic
References (1972), keeping in mind that poiesis
includes narrative fiction.
American politics in 2015 will popularize exegesis because
the majority of American voters have mandated that the United States of America
shall reenact the Old Testament not the New Testament. Large numbers of readers
will become aware, by choice and by accident, of the ancient properties of
literary study. As American citizens suffer the daily installments of what
their votes have written, they will be forced to acknowledge they are the “authors”
of their history, their fate. I suspect
black writing, blues allegory, and God
Help the Child will lessen the obligatory pains of political rebirth.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. January 4, 2015
PHBW BLOG
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