BLACK AMERICAN WRITING

WEEK 14

• Over the past century southern black literature has evolved from a relatively sparse body of writings, mainly imitative of Euro-American literary forms and thematically focused on the plight of blacks in the South, to a sophisticated literary canon whose forms and meanings coalesce to give it a distinct identity.

• Southern black poetry was basically undistinguished before the 1920s.

• Slave poet George Moses Horton and abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper were the most prominent southern black voices in antebellum poetry.

• Some poets, such as Horton, adopted standard Euro-American poetic techniques and seldom wrote about racial issues.

• Still others, like Harper, used these standard forms primarily to concentrate on issues germane to southern black life.

• Before the 1920s the South produced few black poets who had mastered the art form on a level equal to that of blacks elsewhere in the country.

• Southern blacks emerged, though, as the dominant voices in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and thereafter they remained in the vanguard of black poets in America.

• One wing of the Harlem Renaissance arts movement looked to the black South for aesthetic inspiration and artistic direction.

• Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926) and James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) drew heavily from southern black folk culture and the experiences of the black masses within and outside the South.

• Hughes tapped an essentially secular component of southern black life—its music. Grounding his poetic technique in musical forms whose origins were southern and black and which, to a large extent, had evolved from the religious orientation of southern blacks, Hughes used blues and jazz to shape the form and meaning of his poetry. Johnson tapped the sacred side of the southern black experience.

• Choosing the black folk sermon as the embodiment of a southern black worldview and as an indigenous art form, Johnson elevated folk art to the level of high art.

• Poets, novelists, and playwrights after the 1920s (blacks and whites) followed the example of Hughes, Johnson, and others of the Harlem Renaissance by deriving artistic inspiration from the social and cultural life of the black South.

• In the 1920s black poets' use of dialects became more refined as poetic form merged with content.

• Black dialect gave way to black idiom, and poets made even more extensive uses of features from the southern black oral tradition.

• Many southern black poets of the Harlem Renaissance also built their poetic canons with forms and themes not exclusively or predominantly black or southern.

• In the decades following the Harlem Renaissance, southern blacks continued to be major influences on black American poetry.

• Southerners Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, and Melvin B. Tolson were among black America's leading poets between the end of the Harlem Renaissance and the 1960s.

• A native of the District of Columbia, Sterling Brown in his Southern Road (1932) captured the spirit of the southern black folk character in the language, form, and personae of his poetry.

• Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Walker and Tolson exhibited in their poetry an intricate blending of the Euro-American and Afro-American heritages. Tolson became one of the best American poets of his time.

• As the movement toward a black aesthetic gained impetus in the 1960s, southern black writers, many of them poets, were again among the leaders.

• During the 1960s and after, the poetry of southern blacks lost many of its more obvious regional qualities and merged with the larger body of black American poetry.

• The focus shifted from the rural South to the urban North with southern settings, themes, and female personae being replaced by northern settings, themes, and male personae.

• Southern blacks wrote few plays before the 1920s. William Wells Brown's Escape, or A Leap for Freedom (1858) and Joseph S. Cotter, Sr.'s, Caleb, the Degenerate (1903), both dramatic tracts, are notable now chiefly for their historical value.

• Before the Harlem Renaissance, southern blacks wrote minstrel shows, musical comedies, and a few serious social dramas, but the significance of these works in black American theater arts is also mainly historical.

• As an outgrowth of the Renaissance, however, Langston Hughes (Mulatto, When the Jack Hollers, and Little Ham), Zora Neale Hurston (Great Day), Hal Johnson (Run, Little Children), and Arna Bontemps (St. Louis Woman) emerged as successful southern black playwrights.

• In another genre, southerners were among the earliest (if not the first) black short-fiction writers in America.

• Until well past 1900 southern black short fiction in the main was thematically about the slave experience and its aftermath and conformed largely to changes and developments in the short story as an American art form.

• William Wells Brown,Frederick Douglass, Frances W. Harper, and a few other southern blacks wrote various types of short prose fiction during the 19th Near the turn of the century Charles Waddell Chesnutt elevated southern black short fiction to the level of literary art.

• Through characterization, theme, and incident black writers of the South repudiated the romantic image of the plantation.

• Chesnutt's Uncle Julius, for instance, contradicted the white portrayal of the faithful black servant, epitomized by Page's Sam and Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus.

• The idyllic portrait of plantation life created by white writers was in stark contrast to the image Chesnutt and other blacks showed of a system infested with greed, inhumanity, deception, and cruelty.

• Southern black writers also embellished conventional short-fiction forms by adding features that reflected black life in the South.

• One such feature was the double entendre, a characteristic of narrative expression rooted especially in the secular and sacred music of the black South.

• A part of the trickster motif, it helped shape not only characterization but also plot structure, language, and meaning in the different forms of southern black short fiction.

• Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) exemplified the black writer's skillful use of double entendre.

• Between 1900 and the 1970s the novel has been the most widely read and critically acclaimed genre in southern black literature.

• The manner in which it has concerned itself with the past distinguished it from the general black American novel, the southern white novel, and the Anglo-American novel.

• The southern white novel has generally dealt with the effects of a real or an imagined past on a present generation, with characters grappling to come to terms with that past.

• Typically, the southern black novel made the physical and psychological landscapes of the past a living part of the novel; it recreated, repopulated, and critically examined the past as physical setting.

• Surprisingly, though, southern blacks produced few novels that can be strictly defined as historical novels.

• Arna Bontemps (Black Thunder, 1936), Frank Yerby (The Foxes of Harrow, 1946), Waters Turpin (The Rootless, 1957), and Margaret Walker (Jubilee, 1966) were exceptions.

• Those novels concerned with the past, particularly the slave past, used a rather distinct thematic structure.

• Characteristically, the southern black novel was structurally tripartite —usually beginning in the present, shifting to the recent or remote past, and returning to the present.

• There were frequent variations: a flight-rejection-return pattern evident in Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and in other novels in the "passing" vein; a South-North-South pattern in Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) and in a host of novels that concerned the southern black migrant in the North, from James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952); a (1913) fear-flight-fate pattern in Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941), and several novels whose settings were almost exclusively northern or whose themes were grounded in the violence of living black in America.

• For its form and its content, the southern black novel found one of its most influential prose models in the Afro-American slave narrative, which itself was essentially a southern product.

• Various features of the southern version of the black American novel have their antecedents in the genre: the concentration on generic black experiences and incidents; the tendency toward representative central characters; the emphasis on the protagonist's process of self-definition; the use of the autobiographical mode and the portrayal of an exemplary life; the analysis of society by an author (or narrator) removed from that society.

• As the southern black novel evolved, from the 19th into the 20th century, its use of narrative voice blended with other features of southern black narrative prose to produce a particularly (but not exclusively) southern point of view in the black novel.

• For more than a century southern blacks wrote numerous prose narratives, which in their variety conformed to the autobiographical mode.

• There have been the fugitive-slave narratives and the ex-slave narratives; the spiritual, social, political, and personal autobiographies; the confessionals, exemplary lives, the diary-type and journal-type autobiographies; as well as the autobiographical novel.

• At times, real-life experiences and incidents were the backdrop for fictional characters; at other times real-life characters become the nucleus around which true-to-life (fictional) experiences and incidents are presented.

• Southern black prose writers were so attracted to the autobiographical mode that in numerous prose narratives they drew a very thin line between fiction and fact.

• One group of prose narratives used the techniques of fiction—a group that includes Richard Wright's Black Boy(1945), Will Thomas's The Seeking (1953), H. Rap Brown's Die Nigger Die! (1970), and Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Roots (1976). In another group the novels (fictional autobiographies) employed nonfiction techniques—Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). Finally, in still another group there are novels such as Toomer's Caneand Ellison's Invisible Man that contain varying degrees and uses of autobiographical material.

• This tendency was evident in the polemical, propagandistic, and apologetic novels that preceded World War I; it increased and became more refined in the novels between World War I and the 1930s; it pervaded such 1930s folk novels as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and George W. Henderson's Ollie Miss (1935); it shaped themes and characterization in the social-protest novels of the 1940s; and it pervaded Ellison's Invisible Man and several other novels in the post-World War II period.

• Southern black novelists as a group have thus made wide and varied uses of the cultural traditions of their region.

• The merits of southern black literature have been widely acclaimed nationally and internationally. Ellison's Invisible Man won a National Book Award; McPherson's collection of short fiction, Elbow Room, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, as was Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple (1982). The numerous awards, prizes, and distinctions accorded to works by blacks of southern origin throughout this century testify to the place they hold within the larger world of American literature.