Southern Question/ Deep South Answer

Given Hurston's and Wright's popularity, how do they serve as gateways to other Black Southern writers?

Your question can lead to a micro-sermon and hard critical questions: for whom do Hurston and Wright serve as gateways or windows? And do we walk through the gate or look through the window with conscious or unconscious gender adn geographical biases?

THE MICRO-SERMON

It is likely that interest in Wright and Hurston may lead to interest in Sterling D. Plumpp and Angela Jackson. But a probability is not a certainty. Wright's works may lead one to be very much interested in the works of John Edgar Wideman and Gwendolyn Brooks. The Hurston canon may direct someone to study the works of Edwidge Danticat and Colson Whitehead. Plumpp and Jackson have legitimate claims on being Black South writers; Wideman, Brooks, Whitehead, and Danticat do not. Thus, I wish to complicate your thinking about gateways and the roads taken. Individual readers/critics make choices that are not always theory-friendly. The more individual choices frustrate theoretical expectations, the better.

APPLICATION OF THE SERMON

I say unto you and other members of the congregation, observe with care which paths male and female thinkers walk after they have passed through the gateway. It may be easier to nap in a mustard seed than to hibernate in a field of corn.

Larry Brown (1951-2004)

Larry Brown/His South and Mine

 

Should America become adult enough to read Southern literature, become wise enough to call out Southern mythology for the honeycomb of prevarication that it is, and become intelligent enough to take the blood pressure of the real thing in a Southern story ----- should that improbability occur, American will value Larry Brown more than it currently does. It will value the exercise of dealing with his South, my South, and our South.

Larry Brown is a natural part of my Mississippi mindscape, that perplexing geography which has more talent per square inch than most of the United States has per square mile.  Exaggeration has a purpose.

I discovered Larry Brown in the 1980s and became very impressed with his writing in the stories collected as Facing the Music (1988) and in his novel Dirty Work (1989). I had never seen his photograph before I telephoned him to announce that he’d won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 1989 award for fiction.  I liked the modesty I heard in his voice as he thanked me for conveying the news and assured me he would attend the award ceremony in Jackson, Mississippi.  When he appeared for the ceremony, washed and dressed as appropriately as a good ole Mississippi boy who does not qualify as gentry can be, I had a not unpleasant shock of recognition.  Brown (July 9, 1951-November 24, 2004) looked like the incarnation of a Confederate soldier fresh out of a sepia daguerreotype. The man, the fireman, with whom I was speaking could accept fate for whatever it is.  Here was an ordinary man who discovered he had an extraordinary talent for writing sturdy sentences and intriguing stories.  What did it matter that he was not a person of color?  He could write. He could tell me a great deal that I needed and wanted to know about a South that lived behind thick rhetorical veils.

His ability to write did not protect him from the bitchy criticism of one Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters board member who objected to his receiving the award.  She passionately complained that Brown is not one of us. “He does not represent us.”  But that was typical.  The same woman was upset when Robert Townsend Jones won the MIAL award for photography. This woman of no-color, famous for broadcasting that Eudora Welty was one of her “closest” friends, was beneath the dignity of a response.  I ignored her and praised Brown for his noteworthy grasp of what drives humanity.  Perhaps I should have said to her “Of course, he is not like you. He is not a woman who just might have a grandmother in her bloodline who has to be hidden behind the kitchen stove.” Brown was not a pretentious barbaric Southern aristocrat. He was an uncensored truth-teller.

Larry Brown was a Mississippi male writer who was clearly influenced by William Faulkner, but he was better than Faulkner in writing about Southerners who were just plain, fractured, unprivileged people; his characters in the novels Big Bad Love (1990), Joe (1991), Father and Son (1996), Fay (2000), The Rabbit Factory ( 2003  ), the unfinished  Miracle of Catfish (2007) did not represent the full range of Southern humanity. Nor, as far as I know, did Brown ever claim he was trying to write about the whole God-damned and fantasy-enthralled violent and occasionally non-violent South. They represented with uncanny accuracy in speech and behavior the people Brown knew most intimately.  It is a mistake to say he wrote grit lit. in the tradition of Erskine Caldwell or Southern gothic literature in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor. He wrote literature as Willie Morris, Richard Wright, Ellen Douglas, and Barry Hannah did, as Charlie R. Braxton,  Alice Walker, Richard Ford, Minrose Gwin, C. Liegh McInnis, Frank X. Walker and John Grisham still write fiction and poetry.  He followed his moral compass.  His two non-fiction books On Fire (1995) and Billy Ray’s Farm (2001) tell us much about his forte: the plain sentence.

Larry Brown was a Southern writer who wrote for Americans who do not volunteer to be blind, who choose not to be suspended in the innocence of their infancy.  When we truly grow up, we may be able to use Brown’s legacy as part of the equipment we need for living.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 26, 2014

Email to Harold Ellis Clark

On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 2:51 AM, Jerry Ward <jerry.ward31@hotmail.com> wrote:

Dear Harold,

Uncle Bobby '63 makes a gripping statement about human consciousness, about our casual assumption that we know the story of civil rights struggles. Your play-in-progress challenges us to admit that we do know the story in a general, superficial way but that our understanding of the "impossible" complexity of the story is wanting; we do need the focus Uncle Bobby '63 to the local, the specific. It applies the brakes to our penchant for generalizing. How you use the brakes in some final version, however, requires you to cut away the interesting but excessive tangents and to create a riveting focus on who Uncle Bobby was and why people like him continue to be of great importance in struggles for civil and human rights. I realize that younger audiences may not know very much about the Civil Rights Movement. I am not sure that the surplus of information you try to cram into two acts makes the play an effective vehicle for communicating an effective lesson. Yes, the play is about the Civil Rights Movement and what has been dim in the telling of that story. Nevertheless, the real contribution you can make to African American drama is refocusing us on how the specific story of Uncle Bobby informs the continuing and rather general drama of our struggles.

From listening to the reading of the script, I was led to think that you are really exploring habits of the heart and what seems to remain constant in being heroic. At the same time you are (re)presenting psychic wounds from the 1960s that we hesitate to discuss. Such an effort is brave and necessary. What I sensed is missing is a sufficiently sharp focus on Bobby. You do succeed in making us aware of how attitudes about Uncle Bobby ---Zenobia almost worships him and her husband Dwight is determined to hate what he sees of himself in Bobby. There is symbiosis between the private tensions in the marriage and the more public tensions in the history of civil rights work. Cutting some of the dialogue ----especially Joseph's burden of heritage ---and ensuring what remains is always riveting the point about symbiosis might enhance the play's power. Ideas about the heroic and the tragic are very, very important in Uncle Bobby '63, and greater unity and economy of words is needed. Don't overexplain as August Wilson was wont to do. Take a lesson from Ali -- sting our consciousness rapidly. Cut the fat and make the language of the dialogue as memorable as prose poetry. Let the language stun us! Let it enthrall us into bitter recognitions.

Here are some of the notes I wrote during the reading:

1) Make the speech of characters more individual; attend more to idiomatic phrasing that distinguishes one character from another ---I need to hear more difference

2) Visualizing injuries on Zenobia's body is good ---the story of scars. The dress that is discarded is a nice symbol; so too is the bottle of wine as a fetish that says something about Zenobia

3) Baptism of urine and acid ---good correlatives for exteme white obscenity as well as the horror of war (mustard gas in WWI, atomic bombs in WWII, napalm in Viet Nam) --in relation to the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), war was more than a metaphor

4) Soul force and non-violence is a good foil for the "violence" of Dwight's homophobia. Am not sure Dwight realizes his verbal violence against Bobby is a mirror of the violence of racism

5) Do more with Bobby's having interviewed James Baldwin --make the subtext regarding tolerance and human rights stronger

6) Dwight's being raped by a cop throws issues of masculinity into the face of the audience --- a very good move --good illustration of what is criminal, psychosexual, and savage in police practice even in 2014

7) Joseph's long story about Sir Thomas Bedford and Rhode Island and Providence Plantation recalls the sordid orgins of wealth that established Brown University (a subject of recent research), but his story detracts from what is most significant about the main idea in the play ---drop or minimize this distraction

8) Who in this play is enslaved to what?

9) Use of specific place names, the black press --very good

10) References to La Marseillaise and the Arc de Triomphe are quite lost on an audience might not know "La Mareseillaise" is a bit of sculpture on the Arc de Triomphe showing the French volunteers of 1792. Perhaps a very brief monologue from Bobby about French history in his life is necessary or his singing what from the lyrics of the French national anthem is most meaningful to him

11) Use of Darlene Love's "Please Come Home" is a nice surprise for those of us who expect "Please Come Home for Christmas" ---if not for Christmas by New Year's Night.

12) Ike is a minor character but I like him because he is a drinker. The ending of the play would be so much stronger if Ike refused to leave Bobby. I am so weary of reading again and again in our literature that the black male hero dies alone. It would be a real plus, a real innovation in black theater, if Ike decided not to leave Bobby and shared Bobby's inevitable fate. That would cement a point about gay friendships, about the equality of those friendships with those of combat soldiers who die together.

Harold, I'll be using these notes --I hope they are a bit helpful ---at some later time in writing about your work. For now, I urge you to get on with cutting and polishing Uncle Bobby '63 into a play that matches the classic economy of Tom Dent's Ritual Murder.

By the way, Chakula Cha Jua wants to read the script.

All best wishes,

Jerry

Birthday Poem

Poem 71

 

Caught unaware

Gazelle borrowed my language,

Flew, leaving me grounded in gravity.

 

Farewell, I thought to think,

Damn you, drilling a grave

For finite hours on Earth.

 

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 20, 2014

John A. Williams

John A. Williams: An Observant Artist

 

John A. Williams is a great writer. 

It is easy to forget that John A. Williams is a great writer as our attention is consumed by such recent writing as Jeffery Renard Allen’s Song of the Shank, Keenan Norris’ Brother and the Dancer, and James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird.  Our memory of writing that prepared us to read these three novelists with some intelligence grows dim.  Thus, we are obligated to thank Ishmael Reed for his intervention, for his reminding us several years ago of a duty to rediscover what is good and lasting in the works of John A. Williams.  We can be led to the water. We can’t be forced to drink. So too we can be directed to the path of right reading.  We cannot be forced to journey along that path.  Mindful that Williams was writing blackly before, during, and after the ascent of the Black Arts phenomenon, we must will ourselves to discover or rediscover his literary geopolitics.

According to the symbolic gestures used in American higher education, Williams is “canonized.”  Segments of his novel The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) appear in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, a book widely used in the teaching of what is currently deemed “literary.”  Segments of his nonfiction are absent.  Literature and the literary, we do remember, are subsets of the vast field constituted by practices of literacy and cultural expression. The representation of particles of a writer’s work in an anthology is not sufficient and necessary evidence that the writer has a secure place in cultural memory; much that is included in an anthology is not actually taught in our efforts to increase cultural literacy.

It is probable that Williams’ greatness manifests itself more powerfully as a body of writing than as individual works, some of which are ostracized from the territory of the literary and the aesthetic.  To experience the force and necessity of his greatness, we have to read and interpret much more of it than any anthology can contain. We should read Williams at once inside and outside a canon.

Williams’ concise biography of Richard Wright The Most Native of Sons (1970) is an example of an observant artist at work in documenting the achievements of an ancestor.  The perceived  relationship of the biography to The Man Who Cried I Am gives us clues about how deeply invested Williams is in observing, hearing and seeing and illuminating strategies of detection. We learn from him how to see better.  He helps us to discriminate visual and cognitive acuity from what American literary commentators so casually code as anger.

The title Williams chose for his first novel was One for New York.  That choice was overruled by the publishers, who with profit in mind renamed his manuscript The Angry One (1960). American readers were manipulated into believing that Williams was a typical/stereotypical angry and bitter Negro writer climbing a racial mountain. “Angry” was a dirty code word that authorized readers to say that Williams and other black writers were “forcing us to remember all those unpleasant things our society prevented us from forgetting or refashioning as non-threatening entertainments.” Such limitation of critical vocabulary fogged appreciation of Williams’ technical prowess, his nuanced imagination.  His revenge was to become a better writer.

One of the few critics who had sympathetic understanding of what Williams was aiming for, Bernard W. Bell wrote with critical sensitivity about Williams’ fiction in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987).  He was not immune to speaking of anger and bitterness, but he was smart enough to give notice to the primal importance of how Williams used experimentation and mastery of realism’s array of techniques.  For him, Night Song (1961), Sissie (1963), The Man Who Cried I Am (l967), Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969), Captain Blackman (1972), Mothersill and the Foxes (19750, The Junior Bachelor Society (1976), and !Click Song (1982) constitute a spectrum from competent to excellent. I suspect he might have said the same for The Berhama Account (1985), Jacob’s Ladder (1987), and Clifford’s Blues (1999).  We can observe a special excellence in how Williams wove together the horrors of Dachau and the Hebraic tribulations of being a gay jazz musician in Clifford’s Blues. Only a gifted, observant artist can pull off such an achievement. Observe that this novel amplifies a long-forgotten meditation on gayness in The Man Who Cried I Am.

  Bell recognized fusion of individual and historical perspectives does not always succeed, but one would be hard put to say that Williams “failed” in his use of craft to deal with experiential diversity.  As Bell observed, Williams’ novels are “in the tradition of realism” and they “reveal a growing radical consciousness and preoccupation with form” (253).  Bell helps us to notice that Williams succeeded in rewriting Sutton Griggs into twentieth-century modernism; that he took us to the interior where art is born in struggle by alluding to Miriam Makeba’s performing the Xhosa click song in the title! Click Song; that he played with time in Captain Blackman by engaging the gravity of actual history with a brief nod to Virginia Woolf’s time-twisting in Orlando: A Biography (1928), a funny bit of androgynous writing. We might also notice that Williams fused the discipline of keen-eyed journalism with the looser discipline of fiction.

  We have scant evidence that engaging Williams’ works is a commonplace practice in African American literary histories.  His name is mentioned neither in Gene Andrew Jarrett’s Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature nor in John Ernest’s Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. He is mentioned once (page 12) in The Cambridge History of African American Literature. In a desirable future sustained engagement with the greatness of John Alfred Williams might increase. Engagement must include critical attention to his nonfiction ---- This Is My Country Too (1965), The King God Didn’t Save (1970), Flashbacks: A Twenty-Year Diary of Article Writing (1973), If I Stop I’ll Die: the Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor (1991) and Dear Chester, Dear John: Letters Between Chester Himes and John A. Williams (2008). The prospect, however, is contingent.  We have no guarantees it will actually happen. We only have the agency to make it happen.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 19, 2014

 

 

Fatherhood

Biological Fathers & Intellectual Sons

 

Sixty years after his death, I have unqualified respect for my father’s innate brilliance, his fearlessness,  the uncanny ease with which he demonstrated his talents and mastery of  practical skills in carpentry, masonry, and electricity needed to transform his father’s rundown house into a decent home for my mother and me in the 1950s. A licensed pharmacist who took pride in his knowledge of Latin and medicine, a gifted photographer, a fine tailor, and an above average farmer, my father had so many talents that all his relatives admired him as a genius.  I too knew him to be a genius.  That fact was a source of despair during my childhood, because some men of genius can be cruel and ruthless in the expectations they have for their children. Although I inherited many of his traits, I never fully measured up to his expectations. My father expressed his disappointment bluntly.  Even today, the sting of his profound criticism wounds me. I feel paralyzed as I write about him.  I have honored my father to ensure that my days will be long, but my gratitude is not love. I have made peace with the horror of being incapable of loving my father. If there is divine peace and justice in whatever dimension my father’s spirit inhabits, I shall only love him when I become a spirit and join him there.

Walking the dark paths of his destiny, my father injured many people psychologically, and he certainly authored some of his own misery by not channeling his remarkable talents wisely. He could alternate between being surprisingly kind and generous and being decidedly mean-spirited.  He was not bipolar.  He was conscious of his actions, but he could be as insensitive as a death-dispensing drone.  During the six decades I have speculated about his life, I have tried to coordinate what I know from having lived with him for fourteen years with the bits of fact and fiction that circulate in our family.  There is much about my father that I still do not know.

I do know that I made a vow not to follow his example.  I chose not to marry, not to be responsible for some patient woman’s having a bittersweet life, not to be the co-partner in giving life to children whom I might resent. As an only child, I am the final chapter in the saga of one branch of my family.  My male cousins have been heroic in being biological fathers, begetting new generations with or without benefit of clergy to continue the family’s story. I chose not to be a symbolic mirror-image of my father.  I have used my existential entitlement not to be a biological father but to assume responsibility for the young males and females I have chosen to be my intellectual sons and daughters.  Selectivity makes it possible for all of my intellectual children to exceed my expectations because they have no obligations to meet them.  Fathering minds brings a sense of fulfillment comparable to fathering bodies.

I shall die a very happy man. My intellectual children, especially my sons, have demonstrated through their creative and scholarly works how purposeful my interventions in their lives have been and continue to be.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                 June 8, 2014

Blog for BK Nation

BCALA Literary Awards

 

Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc.

BCALA Literary Awards Committee

 

Press Release                                                                                        Contact: Gladys Smiley Bell 757-727-5185

For Immediate Release                                                                                          or gladys.bell@hamptonu.edu

January 25, 2014                                                                           Press Room-Philadelphia Convention Center

 

BCALA Announces the 2014 Literary Awards Winners

 

The Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc. (BCALA) announces the winners of the 2014 BCALA Literary Awards during the Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association in Philadelphia, PA. The awards recognize excellence in adult fiction and nonfiction by African American authors published in 2013, including an award for Best Poetry and a citation for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing. The recipients will receive the awards during the 2014 Annual Conference of the American Library Association in Las Vegas, NV.

 

The winner of the 1st Novelist Award is The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat: A Novel by Edward Kelsey Moore (Alfred A. Knopf).

 

The Fiction category winner is The Good Lord Bird: A Novel by James McBride (Riverhead). The Honor Book for Fiction is The Residue Years: A Novel by Mitchell S. Jackson (Bloomsbury).

 

The winner in the Nonfiction category is Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities by Craig Steven Wilder (Bloomsbury).

 

Honor Books for Nonfiction are Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery by Deborah  Willis and Barbara Krauthamer  (Temple University Press); Kansas City Lightning: The Life and Times of Young Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch (Harper); and Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time by Adrian Miller (The University of North Carolina Press).

 

The BCALA Literary Awards Committee presents the Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation to Soul Train: The Music, Dance, and Style of a Generation by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (Harper Design).

 

The winner for BCALA’s Best Poetry Award is Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid by Nikki Giovanni (William Morrow). The Honor Book for Poetry is Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers Frank X. Walker (University of Georgia Press).

 

Members of the BCALA Literary Awards Jury are: Gladys Smiley Bell (Chair), Hampton University; Jennifer Baxmeyer, Princeton University; Tracy Crawford, Queens Library’s Langston Hughes Community Library and Cultural Center; Carolyn Garnes, Atlanta, GA; DL Grant, San Antonio Public Library; John Page, Washington, D.C.; and Apryl Price, Florida State University.

                                                                                                                         

BCALA Literary Award Seals (http://www.bcala.org/literaryaward_seals.htm) are available for purchase and may be displayed on these 2014 winners as well as all previous winner

 

Publishers interested in submitting books for the 2015 awards should contact Gladys Smiley Bell, Chair, at gladys.bell@hamptonu.edu