Repeated teachings of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) require constant vigilance in terms of what one offers students. Each return to the novel invites reevaluations and reexaminations of themes, approaches, structure, or whatever else may be highlighted upon additional readings. After the rash of controversy surrounding the novel in the three or four years following its publication and after the depressing responses many of my students had to it, I decided that, whenever I taught the novel again, I would focus on whatever humor I could find in it. In classes I have taught since then, I have asked...

In James Baldwin’s fiction, homosexuality can be a quagmire or a haven. For some characters, participation in homosexual acts is the pathway to acquiring a copyright on manhood; for others, it is the road to losing that status forever. For these latter characters, homosexuality is the grand fiction they use to delude themselves about their sexual and racial identities, a clouded mirror up to which they hold some standard of themselves and find themselves wanting. Torn between what they are and what they believe they ought to be, these males lead lives devoid of sexual health and frequently devoid of...

In the 1990s, African American writers broke down more and more barriers to their creativity. This was especially true of depictions of insanity and homosexuality, against which there seemed to have been particular taboos historically. Company Man (1992), by Brent Wade, with its dual focus on mental instability and sexual “perversion,” is a striking example of this trend. Responding to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and many other works that have deemed certain characters and themes to be taboo, Wade’s novel stands in bas relief against a tradition of repression in African American literature. A brief review of that constricting...

Zora Neale Hurston published Dust Tracks on a Road in 1942. The publication was more a directive than a desire. Bertram Lippincott had used his publishing prerogative in requesting that Hurston fall in line with the prevailing “colored person tells all” syndrome that was flooding the American markets at this time. The people at Lippincott obviously knew about the Langston Hughes autobiography that had been published in 1940, and the autobiographical nature of Native Son certainly suggested that there was widespread public interest in the 1940s versions of “up from the slavery of racism and poverty,” or the inability to...

In The Street (1946), Ann Petry anticipates Toni Morrison in that her fictional world is one in which houses and apartments play as significant a role in the construction of female character and the shaping of destiny as 7 Carpenter’s Road in Sula (1974) or 124 Bluestone Road in Beloved (1987). Indeed, Petry’s architecture may be even more determining than Morrison’s, for the options available to characters center around the larger enclosure of the city of New York, of which the smaller, domestic enclosures are but a microcosmic representation. At least Morrison’s characters have sky and open spaces surrounding the...

Scholars who had come to know Raymond Andrews in the eight or ten years before his death and who were instrumental in inspiring new critical interest in his work were understandably puzzled and saddened when he committed suicide near Athens, Georgia, in the fall of 1991. His three previously published novels—Appalachee Red (1978), Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee (1980), and Baby Sweet’s (1983) had been reissued by the University of Georgia Press, and three new works, the autobiographical The Last Radio Baby: A Memoir (1990) and the novellas Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire (1991), had been published within a...

Given the fact that their encounters with the legal system have been so extensive and unpleasant, it is probably a historical truism that the majority of African American men would not find such encounters to be happy occurrences. Families shy away from talking about incarcerated sons and male relatives, and popular lore depicts girlfriends and wives selecting other partners after jail and chain gangs cause long absences. The men can survive the experiences, but some of them also can be broken by them. While folklorists and other cultural analysts who have studied prison populations have observed the communities and patterns...

When Beloved made her appearance at 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1987, Henry Dumas had been dead for nineteen years. Readers, teachers, and scholars praised Morrison’s creation of the story surrounding a ghost child’s return to her mother. Morrison’s imagination and the lyricism of her prose won accolades worldwide and culminated in her being awarded the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature. We applauded the creativity that continued to move Morrison into a class by herself. We celebrated her taking us into difficult new worlds and keeping us safe and sane after the journey. Certainly we accepted her discussion...

Various fictional works that depict parts of the American South depend for their landscape upon completely imagined territories that the authors have created out of whole cloth. Gloria Naylor has her Willow Springs, a mythical island off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia; Raymond Andrews completed three novels about Muskhogean County, Georgia, somewhere in the northeastern part of the state, near Athens; Randall Kenan has centered a novel and a collection of short stories upon Tims Creek, North Carolina; and of course William Faulkner has his Yoknapatawpha. One of the lesser known literary lights who has contributed to this...

Randall Kenan has made the tiny, imaginary town of Tims Creek, North Carolina, the site for focus in A Visitation of Spirits (1989) as well as in the short stories collected in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992). On the surface, Tims Creek is a very traditional southern community in that the primary work activities are farming, specifically tobacco farming, and otherwork connected with the land, and the primary social activities are church and visiting. The rather quiet and passive activities of the land reflect in some ways the rather quiet patterns of the people’s lives. Tims Creek, at...

In a television documentary about George Wallace, aired in 2000, several interviewees commented on the fact that Wallace was a reasonably progressive man before he first ran for public office in Alabama. Upon his first attempt to get elected, when he was beaten soundly, he realized that the way to the hearts of the good white citizens of Alabama was through their racist beliefs. He therefore transformed himself into the racist politician whom millions of people throughout Alabama and the United States grew either to love or to hate. While it is doubtful that Ralph Ellison even thought of George...

Soul Food is a movie much praised by a variety of viewers, especially African Americans. When it was released in 1997, I discovered that my reaction to it was strikingly unlike that of many of my African American friends and colleagues. They countered my objections with the admonition that I should celebrate Soul Food for the wonderful ritual of family interaction that it preserves, as well as for its diversity in presentation of African American images. That diversity includes the working class, the middle class, a creative artist, an entrepreneur, a devoted black husband and father, and a precocious black...