Callaloo #1 to #7
Prelude
This year I will
celebrate the 40th anniversary of Callaloo,
based on the fact that the date on the first issue was December 1976. On the other hand, Charles H. Rowell's
"Editor's Note" in Issue #2 (February , 1978) indicates "CALLALOO
first appeared in January, 1977...."(3).
For the sake of scholarly exactness, one should accord greater
credibility to Rowell's assertion and not begin the anniversary celebration
until January 2017. If I prematurely celebrate, I prematurely celebrate. Until the latter part of 2015, I only had
Issue #1 through Issue #4 in my library.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed my extensive collection of Callaloo, Hoo-Doo, OBSIDIAN, African American
Review and its earlier iterations, and the cassette-magazine Black Box. Thanks to the generosity of the New Orleans novelist Michael A. Zell and
Crescent City Books, I acquired Callaloo
#5, #6, and #7. My celebration is
informed by a sense of urgency spiced with paranoia. In addition, my rejoicing is accompanied by a
need to create a bit of what people have taken to calling
"back-story," which I assume is information that hitherto has not
been made public.
Founded in 1974 by Alvin Aubert , OBSIDIAN like Nkombo, which was established by Tom Dent and Kalamu ya Salaam in December
1968, stood in a prototypical relationship to Callaloo, not in format but in being marked by a multi-layered
Black South aesthetic. At one time or
another, Dent, Aubert, Rowell, and I talked frequently about the distribution of creative
expressions. We were friends in a sense that
is difficult to communicate in 2016.
We were not "friends" in the dubious way the social network of
Facebook juggles the word. It is more accurate to say we were comrades,
our personalities and understanding of literary and cultural work having been
forged on the anvil of segregation in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
All of us were
products of the gendered geographies of race, region, and literature so
eloquently discussed by Thadious Davis in
Southscapes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), and we
believed African American literature and
art were not artifacts designed for
museums and archives. For us, cultural
expressions were processes and products
for serving the aesthetic (perceptional) needs of people who may or may not
have possessed academic yearnings
or have given allegiance, in the words of George Kent, to "traditional high ground humanism." Read Kent's remarks in Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture ( Chicago: Third World Press, 1972). Our
universalism was concrete not
abstract. It was that spirit which led
Rowell, Dent, and me to conceptualize Callaloo
during our Southern Black Cultural Alliance debates in Birmingham in the summer
of 1975. Some weeks ago, Kalamu ya Salaam asked me to explain why after Callaloo moved from Southern University
(Baton Rouge) to the University of Kentucky, Dent and I were rusticated and had
insignificant roles in the subsequent
growth of Callaloo after
1979. An explanation can be made by
remembering clashes of value and noting
a few changes Rowell orchestrated in the first seven issues of Callaloo.
Text
Remembering from April 2016 back to December 1976 exposes
the subjectivity of explaining a few things that occurred between December
1976 and October 1979. Calendar dates are necessary for making a chronology,
but they reveal little about cycles of clock time and much
less about the psychology of time, which
is a virtual Louisiana swamp. When the
dates are juxtaposed with one-sentence assertions of what a magazine is, the
subtle differences in wording do suggest
changing intentions:
#1 (December 1976) ---CALLALOO is a non-profit, tri-annual
journal devoted to the creative and critical writings, arts, culture and life
of the Black South.
#2 (February 1978) --CALLALOO is a non-profit, tri-annual
journal devoted largely to the
creative and critical writings, visual
arts, culture and life of the Black South. ["Largely" delimits the
scope of devotion, and "visual" excludes forms of art that might
depend on sound , taste, touch, or smell.]
#3 (May 1978) --
CALLALOO is a non-profit, tri-annual (February, May, and October) journal devoted largely to the creative
and critical writings, visual arts, culture and life of the Black South. [ The
addition of months makes "tri-annual" more specific.]
#4 ( October 1978) ---CALLALOO is a non-profit, tri-annual
(February, May, and October) journal devoted largely to the creative and
critical writings, visual arts, culture and life of the Black South.
#5 (February 1979) ---The wording is identical with that of
October 1978.
#6 (May 1979) --The wording is identical with that of
October 1978.
#7 (October 1979)--The wording is identical with that of
October 1978.
When the simple chronology is inspected from other angles,
it spills the beans.
It must be noticed that the mailing address for #1 was P. O.
Box 9677, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70813 and for #2-#7, it was Department of
English, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506. The change of location included a change in
the editorial hierarchy. Dent, Rowell, and Ward were Coeditors for #1. Dent and I did not fail to note that P. O. Box
9677 was not associated with the Department of English at Southern University
(Baton Rouge), nor did we fail to
note that with #2, Rowell made a refined distinction between Managing Editors for the Lower South (Darrell K. Ardison and
Johnnie M. Arrington ) and those for the Upper
South (Chester Grundy and Robert Hemenway). I can't speak for Dent. His papers in the Amistad Research Center at
Tulane University have to do so. I did
not exactly like the lower /upper distinction, because it reminded me of White
South aristocracy rather than Black South democracy.
Fourteen months
later, Rowell is Editor-in-Chief and
Dent and Ward are Editors. Kentucky made him upper; Louisiana and Mississippi ensured that Dent and I would be lower and that we would know our place
in the evolving scheme of things. The
editorial structure remains intact for #3-#5.
Rowell resumed the title Editor with #6, and Dent and Ward are assigned to the
category "Contributing and Advisory Editors," which is below the
categories "Assistants to the Editor" and "Managing
Editors." If the discriminating
language of the academic world means anything, it is important that fateful
naming or discrimination occurred between
Callaloo #2 and Callaloo #7:
#2 --Editor-in-Chief, Editors, Associate Editors, Managing Editors, Editorial Assistants
(Lolita Burns, Harry P. Styles II and Michael Tourjee ), Contributing and
Advisory Editors
#3 ---Editor-in-Chief, Editors, Associate editors, Managing
Editors, Editorial Assistants ( Jonas Chaney, Bernie Lovely, Styles and Tourjee
), Contributing and Advisory Editors
#4 and #5 --Editor-in Chief, Editors, Associate Editors, Assistant Editor, Managing Editors,
Editorial Assistants, Contributing and Advisory Editors [Lillie Lolita Burns
was elevated from editorial assistant to Assistant Editor]
#6 and #7 --Editor,
Assistants to the Editor, Managing
Editors, Contributing and Advisory Editors [The hierarchy is streamlined. Rowell
no longer needs to proclaim that
he has "in-chief" status. The Assistant Editor is replaced by Assistants to the Editor, and Associate
Editors (Mercedese Broussard, Paulette S. Johnson, Oneada S. Madison, and
Sondra O'Neale --who was added only for #5) disappear.]
The prototype for future issues (1980 to 2016) was firmly
established with Callaloo #7. Truth be told, rustication or being dismissed had
some virtues. Dent and I were still in
the good company of such Callaloo contributing editors as Alvin
Aubert, Melvin Dixon, Ernest Gaines, Gloria Wade Gayles, Stephen Henderson,
George Kent, Pinkie Gordon Lane, James Alan McPherson, Arthenia Bates Millican,
Sondra O'Neale, Huel D. Perkins, Horace Porter, Lorenzo Thomas, Electa Wiley
and Al Young. After 1979, Dent had more
time to pursue his Black South oral history and making connections among
artists and writers from Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, and Central America and to
write the very fine book Southern Journey. I had more time to attend to the Black South
education of my students at Tougaloo College, to invest energy in the Project
on the History of Black Writing and research on Richard Wright, Lance Jeffers,
Ishmael Reed and other writers, and to remain faithful to Black Arts Movement imperatives until the present. My 2016 celebration is a
bit removed from what Callaloo is in the 21st century, namely
"a journal devoted to creative works by and critical studies of black
writers worldwide" that also publishes
visual art and "studies of life and culture in the black
world." My celebrating is still
attached to Tom Dent's assertion in Callaloo
#1 ------
Though CALLALOO will
not be limited to Black Southerners, it will be an organ of expression for new
Black Southern writers and other artists.
CALLALOO will also give news of the new Black community theaters and
cultural groups in the South, the existence of which is hardly known to the
larger Black artistic community. (page v)
I can't remember and don't
have an urgent reason to remember
in what year Dent and I were totally erased from Callaloo. I do have more to
say about Callaloo #1-#7, but I'll do
the saying in a book rather than in a blog.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. April 25, 2016
