Fiction

By: Jacquelyn Y. McLendon

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Fiction

When the “lady in brown” in Ntozake Shange's choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1976) makes an appeal for “somebody, anybody” to “sing a black girl's song,” it is a clarion call that Mary Helen Washington's Black-Eyed Susans (1975) anticipates and Barbara Christian's Black Women Novelists (1980) answers. These groundbreaking literary scholars had begun the arduous task of recuperating numerous works of literature by black women who wrote despite tremendous odds. As a result of Washington's, Christian's, and others' pioneering efforts—not only uncovering the writers but also fostering serious consideration of their work—the silence was broken, and black women's writings could be mapped along a continuum that pointed to a long-standing tradition across wide-ranging genres.

When Christian's Black Women Novelists was published in 1980, most scholars of African American literature still believed Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892) to be the first novel published by a black woman. Shortly after the appearance of Christian's book, Henry Louis Gates Jr. announced the discovery of another black woman writer, Harriet Wilson, whose novel was published in 1859. Wilson, the author of Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, with the subtitle In a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There, replaced Harper in the distinguished position of firsts when Gates orchestrated the republication of the novel in 1983. Not only did this secure Wilson a position as the first black novelist to be published in America (William Wells Brown's Clotel had been published in 1853 in London) but also as the first African American woman to publish a novel. Early in the twenty-first century, Wilson retained this distinction despite Gates's more recent discovery of the never-published manuscript The Bondwoman's Narrative, bearing the name Hannah Crafts, which Gates believes to be, “the first novel written by a fugitive slave.” Although Gates and other distinguished scholars argued compellingly for Crafts's fugitive slave status, no conclusive evidence of her identity had surfaced early in the twenty-first century.

Our Nig belongs to the category of fiction that follows closely the author's own life experiences. Gates's extensive introduction focuses readers' attention on letters appended to the novel that attest to its autobiographical nature. The introduction offers additional facts about Wilson, uncovered by Gates's careful research. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald Pitts's introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Our Nig and the entry in this volume further clarify the many genres upon which Our Nig draws and further uncover the missing story of Wilson's parentage and the more than thirty-five years of her career after earlier scholars lost her trail.

Wilson used techniques closely associated with fiction in terms of narrative perspectives and themes, drawing on the slave narrative and a popular nineteenth-century genre, the sentimental novel. Like many slave narratives, Our Nig focuses on the particular abuses black women endured at the hands of a cruel southern mistress, and it has in common with sentimental fiction the pathos and frequent narrative moments of effusive emotion.

Wilson's depiction of the trials of her mulatta character fits, generally, another category of fiction that was popular in the nineteenth century. Sterling Brown, in “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” argued that many books that portray Negro characters do so stereotypically. In stories by white authors, the mulattoes become “tragic” because their double inheritance burdens them with a sense of divided self, caught between the white world, which rejects them, and the black world, which the mulattoes themselves reject. Thus, they die in the end or live a death-in-life existence. Wilson and other nineteenth-century black women writers such as Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline Hopkins did not follow the usual formula nor, necessarily, the conventions of miscegenation tales. Indeed, Henry Louis Gates Jr. states that, “never…was miscegenation depicted with any degree of normality before Our Nig.”

Zora Neale Hurston.  Though sometimes unappreciated in her lifetime, the work of Zora Neale Hurston, seen here in this photograph from 1935, has had a profound influence on African American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

(Library of Congress.)

view larger image

Early African American literature usually sought to revise the prevailing image of blacks as no more than chattel by demonstrating their humanity and literacy. The ultimate goal was to aid in the causes of abolition, suffrage, and in areas of social reform. Some black writers used mulatto figures because “black” characters that were racially indeterminate could be created in the image of members of the dominant race. Perhaps, then, black writers could advance social criticism through the mouths of characters that white audiences found more sympathetic. Even as slavery came to an end, the mulatto figure remained useful in the continuing struggle for racial uplift.

Literature of Racial Uplift

Frances Ellen Watson Harper was a free northern black woman who worked tirelessly for abolition, suffrage, and moral and social reform. Women's clubs and literary societies frequently depended on Harper's skill and dedication to the pursuit of racial uplift on the lecture circuit and encouraged her in her literary pursuits. Best known for her novel Iola Leroy; or Shadows Uplifted, Harper also wrote essays, speeches, newspaper articles, and poetry but always with an eye toward how she could help in the struggle against “mob violence” and “lynch-law,” to use her own words, as well as the oppression that women suffered under patriarchy. Hers and other African American women writers' notion of racial uplift did not concern itself simply with bourgeois morals and manners. To be sure, decorum and morality were important to women who, historically, had been labeled oversexed and licentious based on pseudoscientific theories about the abnormally large size of their genitalia. However, racial uplift included other significant issues such as temperance (Harper was a strong activist in the Women's Christian Temperance Union), antilynching, abolition, opposition to convict lease labor, and women's rights, among others.

Harper published her first short story, “The Two Offers,” in the Anglo-African Magazine (1859). It focused on the sometimes debilitating effects of both romantic love and marriage and challenged the idea that these were all that were necessary for a woman's happiness. The two women protagonists are generally considered to be white, an aspect of early African American writers' works of which scholars have consistently been critical. Harper and her contemporaries frequently used racially indeterminate characters, in part because they were aware, as Pauline Hopkins put it, that trying to please “white clientele” and “Negro trade” simultaneously would be professionally disastrous.

Short stories and serialized novels, many of which featured racially indeterminate characters to impart various views on Christianity, temperance, racial identity, race pride, miscegenation, and women's autonomy, were plentiful during the mid-to-late 1800s. Frances Smith Foster's discovery of Harper's additional three novels ended the general belief that Iola Leroy was Harper's only novel. The serialized Minnie's Sacrifice (1867–1868), Sowing and Reaping: A Temperance Story (1867), and Trial and Triumph (1888–1889) appeared originally in The Christian Recorder, a journal of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Clarissa Minnie Thompson, a little-known writer, published Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune (1885–1886) in weekly chapters in the black press Boston Advocate. Contemporaneous literary efforts include the novels of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, Megda (1891) and Four Girls of Cottage City (1895, 1898) as well as Amelia E. H. Johnson's Clarence and Corinne; or, God's Way (1890) and The Hazeley Family (1894). Characters who are, arguably, racially indeterminate frequently dominate these kinds of stories and novels, cautioning black “aristocrats” of the “serious dangers” that threaten the race. Further, racially indeterminate characters show race to be an arbitrary category. Blue-eyed, blonde-haired “black” characters reveal the absurdity of the widespread one-drop rule, which legally categorized those with a dual heritage as African American and therefore as less than human.

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson published Violets and Other Tales (1895), a book of short stories, poetry, and essays. Dunbar-Nelson's second collection, The Goodness of St. Roque and Other Stories (1899), focused on Creole culture. The Colored American (1900), an important monthly periodical founded in Boston, and Crisis (1910), the official journal of the NAACP, together provided major outlets for African American women's short fiction and other writings.

Pauline E. Hopkins, one of the most visible black women writers at the turn of the twentieth century, published her first short story, “The Mystery Within Us,” in the inaugural issue of the Colored American. The Colored Cooperative Publishing Company of Boston, an outgrowth of the magazine, published her first novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900). Like Harper and the others, Hopkins believed her primary goal was to “raise the stigma of degradation from [her] race.” Also like many of the other women, she drew on a number of genres—romance, domestic, sentimental, and historical fiction—to achieve her several purposes based on her belief that fiction was necessary, “as a preserver of manners and customs—religious, political, and social.” Finally, for Hopkins, writing about home and housekeeping was not at odds with her stated aims. She demonstrated how “women's work” did not preclude interest in or the capability to perform other kinds of work, that it could indeed be a vehicle for protest and activism, and that the vestiges of domestic fiction could work to synthesize what seemed to be contradictions.

Hopkins was a prolific writer, adding to her oeuvre three more novels: Hagar's Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (written under the pseudonym of Sarah A. Allen), Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, and Of One Blood; or, the Hidden Self. Serialized in the Colored American between March 1901 and November 1903, these works differ from Contending Forces primarily because of their author's use of elements of popular fiction such as dime novels and story papers, artistic decisions which affect the usual politicization of her work.

Two little-known novels that fall within the earliest years of the Harlem Renaissance but are perhaps closer in kind to nineteenth-century uplift novels are Sarah Lee Brown Fleming's Hope's Highway (1918) and Zara Wright's Black and White Tangled Threads (1920). Fleming's book unequivocally advocates integration and education as solutions to the “Negro problem.” Her book is dedicated to great black men such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, all of whom are embodied in her black hero, Thomas Brinley. Fleming does, however, make several unconventional narrative choices in that, first, there are no racially indeterminate characters and no miscegenation themes. Grace Ennery, unquestionably a white woman, replaces the conventional mulatta and shares the status of hero with Thomas Brinley. Together Grace and Thomas successfully defeat the anti-black politicians, integrate the fictional community of Santa Maria, and restore its peace and happiness. Wright's novel, on the other hand, adheres strictly to the formulas of indeterminacy and uplift narratives, followed by a sequel Kenneth, which focuses on a racially mixed man and the problems of miscegenation.

The Harlem Renaissance

During the turbulent first two decades of the twentieth century—the continuing mob violence instigated by the Ku Klux Klan, the lynching of blacks in large numbers in the South, America's entry into World War I—the black migration from South to North began. By the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of blacks, looking for better jobs and hoping for better race relations, had moved into major northern cities. As a result, post–World War I Harlem in New York became known as a city within a city—it held one of the largest settlements of blacks in any area outside the South—and the undisputed center of a complex cultural movement, with its proliferation of black intellectuals, writers, musicians, actors, and visual artists. Variously called the “race capital” and the black “cultural capital,” Harlem, according to black intellectuals such as James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke, was a place of great opportunity for blacks. Alain Locke's landmark essay “The New Negro” announced the demise of the “Old Negro,” stating that he no longer identified with the downtrodden because the “Old Negro” had shed the “chrysalis of the Negro problem.”

Although scholars often differ about what was the precise time period of the artistic flowering known as the New Negro Movement (and retrospectively as the Harlem Renaissance), many agree that its height occurred between the dawning of the Jazz Age in 1919 and the stock market crash of 1929. Because nineteenth-century writers were either unknown or, with the exception of a few, summarily dismissed as too parochial or lacking in skill, the consensus among scholars was that the Harlem Renaissance was the first real “flowering” of black literature. It was indeed a time of great creativity. Salons such as A'Lelia Walker's famous “Dark Tower” were established for young black artists. White patrons, particularly Mrs. Charles Osgood Mason (the “Godmother”) and the writer, critic, and photographer Carl Van Vechten, used their money and influence to bring young artists to the public's attention. The literati included writers such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson, Dorothy West, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and so many more. However, not long after the Renaissance ended and for decades to come, the names of black men were most commonly associated with the Harlem “school,” while women writers went virtually unnoticed.

Carl Van Vechten's controversial novel Nigger Heaven, depicting the seamier side of “Negro” life, set the trend for the type of literature of interest to white publishers and readers, while blacks debated the issue of representation—some wanting to put the proverbial “best foot forward” in depicting black characters and others more interested in more conventional folk representations. The literature that emerged was a representation of both sides of the story, although critics debated endlessly which side was more “realistic.” While the debates raged Crisis, Opportunity (the official journal of the National Urban League, 1923), and The Messenger (a militant socialist magazine, 1917) were publishing the fiction and other writings of the black literati, jokingly dubbed “niggerati” by Zora Neale Hurston.

Charles S. Johnson, the editor of Opportunity, set strict guidelines for literary submissions. However, the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! (1926), founded by Thurman, Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, Hughes, Hurston, and Aaron Douglas, sought to capture the spirit of the age, and much of the literature that went into its only published issue was exceedingly controversial.

The novels black women contributed to the period did not follow Van Vechten's contentious model, although Nella Larsen and others defended his novel's title as ironic. Harlem Renaissance women writers tended to carry on the traditions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century black women, albeit with some marked differences. The figure of most interest to writers such as Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen was the racially indeterminate female character, although “passing” possibly was much more prominent in these women's novels not so much as theme as it was rhetorical strategy. Jessie Redmond Fauset, literary editor of Crisis magazine and one of the periods so-called “midwives,” was one of the most prolific writers of the period with four novels to her credit: There Is Confusion (1922), Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (1929), The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931), and Comedy: American Style (1933). Fauset began writing novels about characters with skin light enough to pass as a way of revising novels by white writers, in particular T. S. Stribling's Birthright, that she felt did not realistically portray the behavior of educated, middle- and upper middle-class blacks. Nella Larsen's two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) also focused on white-skinned, upper middle-class blacks as a strategic way to show, as had her nineteenth-century forerunners, the arbitrary nature of race. Her novels also explored perceptions of miscegenation and the often debilitating effects of marriage and motherhood. Both Larsen's and Fauset's novels were misread for decades as testaments of the authors' admiration of whites and “white” lifestyles.

Nella Larsen wrote two novels—Quicksand (1928) and Passing—on the theme of identity; she also wrote the short story “Sanctuary.”

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

view larger image

Although Zora Neale Hurston's main character Janie in her best-known novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a light-skinned woman, with long silky hair, scholars, especially feminists, have treated her work as a total break from the work of both nineteenth-century women writers and her contemporaries Fauset and Larsen. Perhaps due to the unique combination of her talents as an anthropologist and writer, and Janie's physical attributes notwithstanding, Hurston centered her work on the folk: folk speech, folk customs, indeed, folk life. Hurston was one of the first women writers to be rescued from obscurity through efforts stemming from several sources, not the least of which was critic Robert Hemenway's Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1977). Writer Alice Walker also helped to rekindle interest in Hurston's work with her 1975 article in Ms magazine, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” Although Hurston's novels were published in the 1930s and 1940s, her first published short stories appeared in the heyday of the Renaissance.

Post Renaissance to 1965

The period between the end of the Harlem Renaissance and the beginning of the Black Arts Movement in African American Women's literary history might be considered the “quiet before the storm” as far as fiction is concerned. Many of the earlier books by women authors had gone out of print, and only a few black women were producing fiction. Notable exceptions included Ann Petry, Alice Childress, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dorothy West, Paule Marshall, and, of course, Zora Neale Hurston. Some of their fiction, with the exception of Dorothy West's novel The Living Is Easy (1948), appears to be a deliberate, in some cases radical, divergence from earlier women's fiction.

Brooks, West, Childress, Hurston, and Marshall published only one book each during this period. Brooks's Maud Martha (1953) is a series of vignettes written in language much like her poetry and held together by its use of a female protagonist. Childress's Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic (1956) is a series of sixty-two conversations between Mildred, the domestic, and her friend Marge. The Living Is Easy (1948) is West's only novel until The Wedding appeared in 1995, though there was also a collection of short stories, The Richer, the Poorer, published in 1948. Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) represents a later stage of Hurston's work—her best already having been written—and like Petry's Country Place (1947) centers on the lives of white people, the former in the South and the latter in New England. Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), like her later highly acclaimed novels, depicts the dual cultural—African American and West Indian—influence on her characters' lives. Her representation of their dual cultures was, in part, what enabled her to write so successfully against African American stereotypes without sacrificing the integrity of characterization or realism. Marshall also published a well-received collection of short stories, Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961).

Ann Petry wrote short stories, children's books, and novels—in addition to poetry and essays—but is perhaps best known for The Street (1946), which became a best seller almost as soon as it was published. Written in a naturalistic mode somewhat in the manner of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), The Street is a compelling story of a working-class black woman, separated from her husband and with a young son to support, who loses the struggle against the economic forces of her environment. Lutie Johnson's hopeless attempt to buy into the American Dream for herself and her son is, among other things, a critique of continued economic inequities for the so-called minority during the rapid economic growth following World War II. Like Country Place, Petry's subsequent novel The Narrows (1953) is set in New England and focuses on a Dartmouth-educated black bartender, Link Williams, and his affair with a wealthy white woman.

With the exception of Zora Neale Hurston, who died in 1960, the women cited above continued to write well into the later twentieth century, their fiction becoming integral to the Black Arts and Women's movements and beyond.

“Salvation Is the Issue”

Taken from the title of an essay by Toni Cade Bambara, the words “salvation is the issue” resonate throughout African American women's literary history. They are especially meaningful in the continuing fight for civil rights, the Black Arts Movement and the second-wave women's rights movement. The creative outpouring of stories and other artistic forms in the last half of the twentieth century was a crucial element in the attempt both to save lives and preserve black people's histories. Bambara's belief that the telling of stories saves lives and preserves histories recalls the philosophies of earlier writers such as Harper and Hopkins and might serve as the motto for Bambara's contemporaries just as “lifting as we climb” served nineteenth-century women.

As the Black Arts movement began to coalesce in about 1965, some of the women writing prior to that time were still publishing literature, although not always fiction. Poetry and essays were more popular genres in the mid-1960s, and many women made their first literary contributions through those means. A notable exception is Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966). Written as Walker's PhD dissertation (1965), Jubilee falls under the rubric of historical novels, focusing on slavery, illegitimacy, and physical indeterminacy.

The last few years of the 1960s and into the 1970s saw a literary market flooded with fiction by black women, some who had published before, many who were publishing notable work for the first time: Paule Marshall published her second novel, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969); Louise Meriwether's short story “Daddy Was a Number Runner” (1967) evolved into a novel that appeared three years later; Alice Walker's first novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), her collection of short fiction In Love and Trouble (1973), and her second novel Meridian (1976) all appeared within three years of each other. Walker continued to publish poetry and essays as well; Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), followed by Sula (1973), and Song of Solomon (1977); Toni Cade Bambara contributed two short story collections, her best known Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977); Gayl Jones published two novels, Corregidora (1975) and Eva's Man (1976), and a collection of short stories, White Rat (1977); the poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist Ntozake Shange published Sassafras: A Novella (1977), which she later expanded into a full-length novel, Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo (1982). At the end of the 1970s, Barbara Chase-Riboud published Sally Hemings (1979), the novel that Jacqueline Onassis encouraged her to write and the work for which she is best known.

Although in some respects, these women used their fiction to respond to the social and political issues, past and present, their common objective seems to have been an age-old one—representation. A major change in their fiction from that of their precursors was that black women were frequently the main characters and they usually were not white phenotypes. These women often had integrity, strength, wisdom, and inner beauty—as had Pilate in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977). Early critics of Morrison's book expressed concern that a man—Milkman Dead—was at the center; but later critiques showed evidence of Pilate's centrality. In fact, Milkman was indebted to more than one woman for his very life, and it was the women in his family who taught him about his past so he could be free to fly.

Issues of skin color and standards of beauty did not disappear but rather were revised, often with a vengeance. Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye exemplified the trend with its focus on a dysfunctional family, the Breedloves, and the daughter Pecola who wants blue eyes; indeed, she desires the bluest eye because she needs to escape not only what she feels is her own ugliness but also the ugliness of the world—a world in which she can be raped by her father, abandoned in favor of a white child by her mother, and despised by almost everyone in her community.

Ann Allen Shockley's novel Loving Her (1974) boldly takes up the still controversial subject of lesbian love, an example of another significant characteristic of women's literature—the centrality of women's relationships with each other as family, friends, and, sometimes, lovers.

New Directions: 1980s and Beyond

In many ways, Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple illustrates the new directions of black women's fiction in terms of its themes, characterizations, and narrative techniques. The novel's epistolary form allowed Walker to give her central character, Celie, an unquestionably authentic voice without compromising the narrative's believability or putting Celie's words in the mouth of a disembodied narrator. With her subsequent novels The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998), Walker continued to experiment with narrative technique. Both works contain several voices, By the Light being especially well rendered. Walker achieved this sense of multiple voices through the novel's global perspective and with sections narrated by those who are dead at the time the story of the novel opens. In this regard, her novel is similar to Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988), in which one of the narrative voices is George, the dead husband of Cocoa, Mama Day's grandniece. Toni Morrison's highly acclaimed Beloved (1987) also made use of similar strategies to enable multiple perspectives but no single authoritative voice. Both the dead and the living exist—an African philosophy known as “Muntu,” meaning “Man” or “Humanity”—and communicate as though to do so is an ordinary occurrence. This treatment of the supernatural and other “fantastic” occurrences as commonplace was possibly influenced by the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's theory of magic realism but most assuredly influenced by African American and West African folk beliefs and practices.

All three writers created characters that appeared in more than one of their interconnected novels. In Mama Day, George takes Cocoa to see the place where he was born, which turns out to be Bailey's Café, the setting of the novel by the same name, published four years after Mama Day. The other novels in Naylor's quintet are The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985), and The Men of Brewster Place (1998).

Morrison's use of narrative form in Jazz (1992) was an acknowledgment of a different tradition than that of Beloved. The sounds in Jazz—a ticking clock or a hand tapping a leg—tied the novel to jazz music and remind readers that while Morrison acknowledged her foremothers, as well as white writers such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, she was also engaged in constant dialogue with her male counterparts, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and others. The narrative point of view and characterization in Jazz work together so that multiple voices, past and present, tell their individual as well as collective histories, and the city itself becomes a character, as the porch does in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Of her two later novels, Paradise (1998) and Love (2003), the overtly theological Paradise was perhaps the most bold in its new direction. Morrison continued to revise the notion of utopia as articulated by Sir Thomas More, the sixteenth-century Catholic martyr, and by subsequent American writers. Both novels show that Morrison remained attentive to the past, which she insists is infinite, without losing sight of the living, existing communities with which her literature is ultimately concerned.

Ntozake Shange's Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo (1982) and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) also depend on using structures that attempt to establish a nonlinear view of the world, although for different purposes. Shange's “novel” contains everything from narrative and poetry to magic spells, recipes, and letters to tell the stories of three sisters' journeys in search of self. Dessa Rose, a neo-slave narrative, complicates the narrative technique and therefore the point of view with an approach that recalls an actual narrative, Louisa Piquet, in that much of Dessa's story is told to a white man, Nehemiah, who acts as amanuensis. The result is the white man's almost certainly distorted interpretation both of Dessa's words and of her silences. Yet, this method shows Dessa's ability to overcome obstacles, to reclaim her speech—the way black women writers have had to do—in order to survive.

Determined to write Sally Hemings's story, the poet, visual artist, and reluctant novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud not only gained wide recognition for her first novel but also went on to write its sequel, The President's Daughter (1994), the title of which is an allusion to the original subtitle of William Wells Brown's Clotel. Chase-Riboud also published Echo of Lions (1989), a historical novel based on the story of Cinque, leader of the Amistad revolt. A later novel, The Hottentot Venus (2003), tells the infamous story of Sarah Baartman, a Khoi-khoi of South Africa, whose naked body was exploited and displayed in ballrooms to freak shows all over Europe as an example of the abnormalities of the bodies of black women. Upon Baartman's death, her body parts, including her genitalia, were stored in jars and kept on the shelves of the Musee de L'homme in Paris.

A novel of more recent history was Toni Cade Bambara's Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), a grim story based on equally grim, but actual events. Published posthumously by Bambara's daughter with the help of Toni Morrison, the book was a twelve-year undertaking of researching and writing about the African American child murders in Atlanta that took place between 1979 and 1981. Bambara's mission, in part, was to try to make sense of the events from perspectives overlooked by the mainstream media.

Countless numbers of black women writers were just beginning their careers in the 1980s or 1990s, so many, in fact, that it is impossible to rehearse all their names and works in this space. One new writer worth mentioning is Edwidge Danticat, who was born in Haiti but moved to the United States when she was twelve. Author of a short story collection Krik? Krak! (1995) and Breath, Eyes, Memory: A Novel (1994), Danticat continued in the tradition of Paule Marshall and Jamaica Kincaid by bringing her readers cross-cultural fiction written in simple, elegant prose interspersed with the language of her homeland, rendering her characters more believably human. She also carried on the traditions of Morrison, Walker, Naylor, and others by invoking the myths of her own people—the Tonton Macoute, for example, a bogeyman in the fairy tales of her culture—as well as by making frequent reference to the supernatural and to communications with the dead. More important, like all of these women, Danticat told the stories of her mothers and grandmothers, one of the primary characteristics of black women's literature. Shange's unusual combination of genres in Sassafras, and Chase-Riboud's focus on making public the stories of historical figures like Hemings and Baartman are part of this enterprise, as Walker has put it, in search of our mother's gardens.

Over the years, black women writers began to make their presence felt in literary genres once largely the province of men and white women. Science fiction, for example, or the preferred broader rubric speculative fiction, is still an area explored only rarely by African Americans, women or men. Yet, Octavia Butler made dramatic inroads in this field, having published more than a dozen science fiction novels and numerous short stories. A former student of one of the most prolific and respected writers, Samuel Delaney, and heir to the work of Pauline Hopkins who wrote “visionary” novels as early as 1902, Butler succeeded in incorporating the usual concerns of African Americans with the past into her futuristic tales. One of her best-known novels, Kindred (1979), depicts the protagonist, Dana Franklin, revisiting slavery by being transported through the centuries back to antebellum times. Wild Seed (1980) also includes slavery, among other experiences. Patternmaster (1976) probes issues of class structure and gender roles.

Science fiction has always been considered “popular” fiction. To discuss popular fiction by African Americans is to discuss Terry McMillan's romances. Although in early interviews after the publication of Waiting to Exhale (1992), McMillan lamented the fact that she was compared to Danielle Steele rather than to Toni Morrison or Alice Walker, in the years since she might have become less concerned. First, the division between popular fiction and what is considered “literature” was blurred, if only slightly. Second, McMillan's novels reached mainstream audiences in a way that Morrison's and Walker's did not. Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, popular romances made into movies and lacking the controversy of The Color Purple, are the kinds of stories McMillan's audiences could relate to; the material is familiar and they clamored for it.

“New Directions” as a subtitle might be misleading because black women writers have always been going in new directions or else there would be no tradition to write about. But the need to be concerned about proscriptions that threaten to stifle creativity is all but a thing of the past. As their literary history shows, black women have long been writing their own lives instead of being written about, in other words, imagining themselves, as Toni Morrison has written. Fortunately, the privileging of the voices of black and other women of color continues, and not to the detriment or exclusion of other voices. Barbara Christian said that “Mother” means more than the woman who physically gives birth; it is also all those women who struggle to “preserve” life. These are the women black women writers have gone in search of and in the process have found their legacy in the preservation of wonderful stories. All that is left to be done is to accept the legacy and, as Toni Cade Bambara has advised, begin “passing it along in the relay.”

See also Bambara, Toni Cade; Butler, Octavia E.; Hurston, Zora Neale; Morrison, Toni; Walker, Alice; and Wilson, Harriet E.

processed xml | source xml