African American Read-In, 2015
This year, the National
African American Read-In begins on Sunday, February 1, and ends on
Saturday, February 28.
Access “2015 National African American Read-In” at http://www.ncte.org/aari/ for details.
This year marks the Margaret Walker Centennial. Many of the readings during Black History
Month, as well as the 2015 calendar year, should involve programs on Walker’s
life and works. For My People (1942), Jubilee
(1966), and This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (1989) are at the
top of the list for reading in February. From March through December , one might find pockets
of time for reading Richard Wright:
Daemonic Genius (1988), How I Wrote
Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1990), On Being Female, Black and Free (1997),
and A Poetic Equation: Conversations
Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974). Anyone who wants to enjoy communion with
Walker’s extraordinary intelligence should read “The Humanistic Tradition of
Afro-American Literature.” American
Libraries 1.9 (1970): 849-854.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of Black Boy and the 75th
anniversary of Native Son.
Non-scholars and scholars alike have given critical
attention to Wright’s masterpiece since 1945. They have applauded Black Boy; they have quarreled with
it. It has existed as a superb instance
of black writing, of American literature, and of work that people from many
nations have translated into their native languages. It will continue throughout the twenty-first
century to be a source for cautious hope as well as, to borrow wording from
Wright’s novel The Outsider, “that
baleful gift of the sense of dread.”
Black Boy is
one of Richard Wright’s major gifts to time past, present, and future. It is a gift to be treasured. It is a gift for everyday use and equipment
for living and for dealing with one’s trublems.
Black Boy is a
powerful model of how to think about one’s location in historical time and
complex environments and of how to write about one’s location with an honesty
that is at once aesthetic and didactic.
Teachers of rhetoric and composition can use the text to help adolescent
writers, in particular, to gain mastery of grammar, syntax, vocabulary, images,
and figures of speech as they struggle with the problems of narrating their
life histories. All writers, of course,
can learn valuable lessons about perspective from Richard Wright, just as visual
artists can learn about excellence in drawing from Charles White and musicians
can absorb how to use physics in the composition of sounds from John
Coltrane. All of us can learn from
Richard Wright what Chinese sages have known for several thousand years ---the
flow of dao and tian and yin and yang that gives positive meaning to our
suffering beneath the stars.
Readers have given a substantial amount of critical
attention to Native Son, a novel that
is essential for understanding how American fiction of the 20th
century so often embraced the primal ingredients of what escapes specific time and
drives change in the United States of America.
Fifteen years prior to the publication of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (1955), Richard
Wright was shining the light of disquietude upon a thankless world. The world of 1940 did not listen carefully
enough to what Wright was saying in Native
Son. Thus, thirteen years later he
issued a second communiqué in the form of The Outsider. Read in tandem, Native Son and The Outsider
provide us with the strongest clues pure fiction can deliver about why our
world seems to be swimming like a shark in butter-milk toward its Omega Point. In the post-whatsoeverness of 2015, only an
insignificant number of people will fail to hear Wright’s messages.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
January 25, 2015
