African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader

By Gene Andrew Jarrett

Fiction by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Octavia E. Butler, and others that isn’t focused on race—with original introductions by leading scholars.
 
It is widely accepted that the canon of African American literature has racial realism at its core: African American protagonists, social settings, cultural symbols, and racial-political discourse. As a result, writings that are not preoccupied with race have long been invisible—unpublished, out of print, absent from libraries, rarely discussed among scholars, and omitted from anthologies.
 
However, some of our most celebrated African American authors—from Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison—have resisted this canonical rule, even at the cost of critical dismissal and commercial failure. African American Literature Beyond Race revives this remarkable literary corpus, presenting sixteen short stories, novelettes, and excerpts of novels—from the postbellum nineteenth century to the late twentieth century—that demonstrate this act of literary defiance. Each selection is paired with an original introduction by one of today’s leading scholars of African American literature.
 
By casting African Americans in minor roles and marking the protagonists as racially white, neutral, or ambiguous, these works of fiction explore the thematic complexities of human identity, relations, and culture. At the same time, they force us to confront the basic question, “What is African American literature?”
 
Includes fiction by: James Baldwin • Octavia E. Butler • Samuel R. Delany • Paul Laurence Dunbar • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper • Chester B. Himes • Zora Neale Hurston • Nella Larsen • Toni Morrison • Ann Petry • Wallace Thurman • Jean Toomer • Frank J. Webb • Richard Wright • and Frank Yerby
 
Critical Introductions by: Hazel V. Carby • John Charles • Gerald Early • Hazel Arnett Ervin • Matthew Guterl • Mae G. Henderson • George B. Hutchinson • Gene Jarrett • Carla L. Peterson • Amritjit Singh • Werner Sollors • and Jeffrey Allen Tucker
 
“[The] essays are succinct, interesting, [and] informative.” —Journal of African American Studies

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9780814743423

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African American Literature beyond Race

African American Literature

beyond Race

An Alternative Reader

EDITED BY

Gene Andrew Jarrett

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.edu

© 2006 by New York University

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

African American literature beyond race : an alternative reader /

edited by Gene Andrew Jarrett.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-4287-7 (acid-free paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8147-4287-4 (acid-free paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-4288-4 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8147-4288-2 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

1. American fiction—African American authors.

2. AfricanAmericans—Fiction. I. Jarrett, Gene Andrew, 1975-

PS647.A35A346 2005

813.008’0896073—dc22 2005031091

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,

and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In Memory of

Grandmother

Sarah Jarrett

March 6, 1920-April 3, 2005

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Not Necessarily Race Matter

Gene Andrew Jarrett

PART I Postbellum Period, 1865-1900

1 FRANK J. WEBB

Introduction: Werner Sollors

TWO WOLVES AND A LAMB: AN ORIGINAL TALE (1870)

2 FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER

Introduction: Carla L. Peterson

SOWING AND REAPING (1876–77)

Chapter 1 [Setting Out in Life]*

Chapter 2 The Decision

Chapter 4 [Every Man Has His Price]

Chapter 6 [The Verge of a Precipice]

Chapter 7 [The Engagement]

Chapter 8 [Sowing and Reaping]

Chapter 9 [Belle Gordon]

Chapter 10 [A Drunkard’s Wife]

3 PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

Introduction: Gene Andrew Jarrett

THE UNCALLED (1898)

Chapter 10 [The Seminary]

Chapter 11 [The Sermon]

Chapter 12 [The Ordination]

PART II: Between the World Wars, 1919-1940

4 NELLA LARSEN

Introduction: George B. Hutchinson

THE WRONG MAN (1926)

FREEDOM (1926)

5 JEAN TOOMER

Introduction: Matthew Guterl

YORK BEACH (1928)

Chapter 1 [The Perfect Place]

Chapter 2 [Individuality]

6 WALLACE THURMAN

Introduction: Amritjit Singh

THE INTERNE (1932)

Chapter 2 [Flanagan Hall]

Chapter 3 [Touring the Hospital]

Chapter 9 [The Fire]

Chapter 12 [Carl’s Problems]

PART III: After World War II, 1945-1960

7 FRANK YERBY

Introduction: Gene Andrew Jarrett

THE FOXES OF HARROW (1946)

Chapter 1 [New Orleans]

8 ANN PETRY

Introduction: Hazel Arnett Ervin

COUNTRY PLACE (1947)

Chapter 1 [Lennox, Connecticut]

Chapter 7 [A Discovery]

Chapter 8 [Mearns Gramby]

Chapter 25 [The Will]

9 ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Introduction: Hazel V. Carby

SERAPH ON THE SUWANEE (1948)

Chapter 1 [The Secret Life of Arvay]

10 CHESTER B. HIMES

Introduction: John Charles

YESTERDAY WILL MAKE YOU CRY (1952)

Book 2: Flood of Tears

Chapter 9 [Memories]

Book 3: Shall Become the Same at Last

Chapter 1 [A Riot]

11 RICHARD WRIGHT

Introduction: Gerald Early

SAVAGE HOLIDAY (1954)

Part One: Anxiety

12 JAMES BALDWIN

Introduction: Mae G. Henderson

GIOVANNI’S ROOM (1956)

Chapter 1 [The Flight]

PART IV: Contemporary Period after 1965

13 SAMUEL R. DELANY

Introduction: Jeffrey Allen Tucker

TIME CONSIDERED AS A HELIX OF SEMI-PRECIOUS STONES (1968)

14 TONI MORRISON

Introduction: Gene Andrew Jarrett

RECITATIF (1983)

15 OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

Introduction: Jeffrey Allen Tucker

BLOODCHILD (1984)

Select Bibliography

About the Contributors

Index

* Bracketed ([ ]) chapter titles are editorially provided to indicate a central theme; otherwise, chapter titles belong to the story’s original printed version. [Editor.]

Acknowledgments

The production of this anthology would have been impossible without the support of several colleagues, friends, and family members.

First I must specifically thank the scholars who agreed to contribute one or more headnotes for the primary texts. Werner Sollors approached me unexpectedly—but nonetheless at the perfect time!—about the importance of including Frank J. Webb. At an early stage of the project, Carla Peterson and I talked regularly in passing, during office hours, and over lunches at the University of Maryland about the idea of the anthology. She offered useful advice at times when the project seemed dead in the water. George Hutchinson first told me about the magazine stories of Nella Larsen, and he volunteered to take valuable time away from writing his biography of her in order to contribute to the anthology. Matthew Guterl and I played phone and e-mail tag over one summer as we came to mutual agreement about which of Jean Toomer’s post-Cane stories would best fit the book.

A substantial portion of what I know today about methodological critique first came when, as an exchange graduate student at Yale University, I took Hazel V. Carby’s course about theorizing racial formation in the United States. It thrills me to know that my career came full circle and that I had the opportunity to work with Hazel directly on Zora Neale Hurston. The anthology attracted the interest of Amritjit Singh early and enabled us to work together for the first time, during which his vast knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance and Wallace Thurman deepened the project in ways that I cannot begin to articulate here. John Charles kindly offered to write about more than just Chester B. Himes, and our interaction during this project helped set the basis for a long-term intellectual relationship in which we will try to edit the first collection of essays on Frank Yerby. Hazel Arnett Ervin agreed to contribute a headnote on Ann Petry at a very late stage in the game and at a hectic moment for both of us. Gerald Early expressed his support for the project, although we did not have the chance to talk at length about his remarkable essay on Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday. Mae G. Henderson embraced the idea of the anthology from the very beginning, although my first e-mail to her must have come out of the blue and, admittedly, probably without the best contextualization.

Finally, Jeffrey Allen Tucker and I talked for hours day and night, on more than one occasion, about the implications of the project for African American literary studies. He also put me in contact with Samuel R. Delany, with whom I had a long and fruitful conversation about his work and about the goal of the anthology. Without Jeffrey and the other contributors, who represent an array of academic generations, professional accomplishments, and scholarly backgrounds, this anthology could not have achieved its goal of exemplifying the extent and diversity of intellectual interest in how and why African Americans have considered writing literature beyond race.

I must also express my gratitude to NYU Press, especially Eric Zinner and Emily Park. Eric was open-minded, thoughtful, and a guiding editorial force throughout the process, from the moment I submitted a proposal to the moment I put the final touches on the manuscript. Emily served as a wonderful and necessary interlocutor when things on my side began to get unwieldy and complex and I needed immediate advice on how to complete certain tasks.

I thank all the literary agencies and estates representing the primary authors of this book. In expeditious ways they responded to my inquiries about copyright law, permissions paperwork, and discounts on fees, even while I was still learning the ropes about permissions requests and negotiations. The staff at the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress and the Beinecke Library at Yale University assisted me as I was trying to locate the copyright information for some of the more obscure primary texts.

The University of Maryland, College Park, awarded me a Graduate Research Board grant to cover part of the fees associated with securing the copyright of several of the primary texts. Certain faculty members there deserve mention for their support. Aside from Carla Peterson, mentioned above, I thank Mary Helen Washington, Charles Caramello, Robert Levine, Sangeeta Ray, Kandice Chuh, Zita Nunes, Ralph Bauer, Sheila Jelen, and Matthew Kirschenbaum, as well as Betty Fern, Isabella Moulton, Irene Sanchez, and Alka Soni in the main English department office. Scholars at other institutions helped me in direct or indirect ways, especially Henry Louis Gates Jr., Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Richard Yarborough, Nancy Armstrong, Leonard Tennenhouse, Alan Wald, Xiomara Santamarina, Madhu Dubey, Kenneth W. Warren, Yogita Goyal, Frank Christianson, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips.

Finally, I must thank my family—the Jarrett and Boynton families—for providing the spiritual strength to complete this project, to overcome moments when my courage was shaken, my obstacles seemingly too many, and my energy low. Above all, I must thank my wife, Reneé, for believing in my vision even before I could articulate it clearly and confidently, and for advising me to milk original ideas until the very end. The new wonder of my life, my daughter Nyla, thankfully cared little about this anthology and cared more that I was okay. And I must thank my grandmother, Sarah Jarrett, who unfortunately passed away in April 2005. Her life and legacy constantly remind me to keep everyone and everything in proper perspective.

Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to print the following:

Chapter 1 from The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby. Copyright © 1946 by Frank Yerby. Reprinted by permission of William Morris Agency, Inc. on behalf of the author’s estate.

Chapters 1, 7, 8, and 25 from Country Place by Ann Petry. Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author. Copyright © 1947 by Ann Petry, renewed in 1975 by Ann Petry.

Chapter 1 from Seraph on the Suwanee by Zora Neale Hurston. Copyright© 1948 by Zora Neale Hurston; renewed © 1976 by Everett E. Hurston Sr. Foreword copyright © 1991 by Hazel V. Carby. Afterword, Selected Bibliography, and Chronology copyright © 1990 by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Books 2 and 3 from Yesterday Will Make You Cry by Chester B. Himes. Copyright © 1998 by Lesley Himes. Reprinted with permission of the Roslyn Targ Agency, Inc.

Afterword toRichard Wright’s Savage Holiday by Gerald Early. Copyright © 1994. Reprinted by permission of the University Press of Mississippi.

Chapter 1 from Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. Copyright © 1956 by James Baldwin. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones by Samuel R. Delany. Copyright © 1969, 1971, 1981, 1988, 1991 by Samuel R. Delany. Reprinted by permission of the author and Henry Morrison, Inc.

Recitatif by Toni Morrison. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc. Copyright © 1983 by Toni Morrison.

Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler. Copyright © 1996 by Octavia E. Butler. Used by permission of Writers House LLC.

Introduction

Not Necessarily Race Matter

In The Value of Race Literature (1895), an address delivered at the First Congress of Colored Women of the United States, Victoria Earle Matthews describes the generational importance of anthologizing Race Literature, or what we now call African American literature:

The lesson to be drawn from this cursory glance at what I may call the past, present and future of our Race Literature apart from its value as first beginnings, not only to us as a people but literature in general, is that unless earnest and systematic effort be made to procure and preserve for transmission to our successors, the records, books and various publications already produced by us, not only will the sturdy pioneers who paved the way and laid the foundation for our Race Literature be robbed of their just due, but an irretrievable wrong will be inflicted upon the generations that shall come after us. By Race Literature, we mean all the writings emanating from a distinct class—not necessarily race matter; but a general collection of what has been written by the men and women of that Race: History, Biographies, Scientific Treatises, Sermons, Addresses, Novels, Poems, Books of Travel, miscellaneous essays and the contributions to magazines and newspapers. (My italics)¹

In the century after this address, anthologies of African American literature have met Matthews’s challenge, reprinting an assortment and abundance of black-authored fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.² But such textual abundance and generic range, however welcome and necessary, belie the fundamental tendency of anthology editors to ignore Matthews’s assertion, italicized in the passage above, that Race Literature is not necessarily race matter, but a general collection of what has been written by the men and women of that Race. Put another way, the thematic content of literary texts does not necessarily or explicitly have to inscribe specific ideas about racial progress. Rather, the mere fact that African American literature even exists, that African Americans over the centuries have demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the idea and act of literary writing, is enough to signify racial progress. African American literature should be appreciated in all its forms; it should be read because it both instructs and delights us, breaks the rules of the world we live in, and enables us to grapple the complexities of humanity. Just as literary art in general is the very thing humanity can least afford to do without, African American literature should be defined in the broadest way possible.³

African American Literature beyond Race argues that anthologies too often ignore the generalist premise of The Value of Race Literature, allowing race to over determine the idea of African American literature. Anthologies give the impression that African American literature must feature African American protagonists alongside certain historical themes, cultural geographies, political discourses, or subjectivities defined by race. And these texts are authentic when their authors are identifiable as African American, regardless of whether these authors desire to be characterized in this way. These protocols contribute to the idea that the canon, or the best, of African American literature only portrays the realities of black life, or practices what I call racial realism. But this is not entirely true.

Of course, anthology editors, who mostly dictate what we call canon formation or tradition building, reserve the right to select entries based on certain aesthetic, discursive, and thematic priorities, as well as on certain unavoidable restrictions such as book length and cost. But there is an ideological consistency in the exclusion of unconventional or anomalous texts from African American literary anthologies. This consistency results from what John Guillory has called a relationship between a politics of representation in the canon and a democratic representational politics in the U.S. academy.⁴ In terms of African American literature, the promotion of certain images and tropes through the canon belongs to a longstanding and anxious practice in African American letters—dating back to black intellectual critiques of blackface minstrelsy—to control representations of the race as much as possible, to shield them from stereotypes and other kinds of racist contamination. While understandable and on countless occasions necessary for African American societal advancement, this cultural preoccupation with racial representation perpetuated the belief that the best and most useful African American literature depicts the race. This idea obscures the ironic fact that some of our most celebrated African American authors had written remarkable, even beautiful, literature resisting prevailing conventions of racial representation, despite the cost of critical dismissal and commercial failure.

African American Literature beyond Race exploits this irony by presenting literary works that mark such moments of literary defiance. An alternative to the conventional anthology, it presents intriguing works by canonical African American authors that, over the course of their publications, consistently became noncanonical. With the help of preeminent and emerging scholars who introduce and examine special cases of anomalous African American fiction, this anthology seeks to explain how race, representation, authenticity, genre, canon, and tradition factored—and still factor—into the way scholars read, anthologies organize, instructors teach, and students learn African American literature. From here we can best determine what it means for African American authors to write literature beyond race.

The Terminology and Politics of African American Literature

To say that the term African American literature signifies literature by, about, and/or for African Americans is not simply to utter a definition. In American intellectual society and culture, it is a determination of the way authors think about and write the literature, the way publishers classify and distribute it, the way bookstores receive and sell it, the way libraries catalog and shelve it, the way readers locate and retrieve it, the way teachers, scholars, and anthologists use it, the way students learn from it—in short, the way we know it.

In Where ‘Separate but Equal’ Still Rules (May 8, 2000), an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, Ward Connerly, the chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute and advocate against racial preferences, urges bookstores to resist classifying and judging the content of a book solely by the author’s skin color. Connerly complains of bookstore racial profiling against books he and other African American authors have written:

The shelving of their books in a special section [called African-American Interest] deprives black authors or race authors of significant sales opportunities, putting them at a competitive disadvantage compared with authors whose books are not ghettoized. But the economic harm pales in contrast to the intellectual and cultural damage caused by the bookstores’ version of racial profiling. They have fallen into the trap of thinking that a writer’s skin color is a reliable guide to judging the contents of his or her books. My book, like those by other writers who happen to be black, is meant for readers of any race interested in the subjects and controversies I address. By relying on a blatant stereotype—that blacks are the only ones interested in the history, culture, and politics of black people—the bookstores marginalize some writers and limit their ability to reach out to a broader audience and to share common bonds and values.⁵

Quoting Connerly at length does not endorse his legal and political mission to enforce color-blind policies in U.S. education and other institutions of society and culture. But Connerly’s frustration with what can be termed an essentialist reification of race is convincing and should be taken seriously for its literary implications. His concern with the way race can operate as a metonym of literature at the price of ideology, to rephrase the words of Katya Gibel Azoulay,⁶ focuses on the theoretical gap between the bookstore’s labeling of his work as African American Interest and his identification of his own work.

Over the past century anthologies of African American literature have indoctrinated generations of readers into taking this theoretical gap for granted. According to a recent academic forum on anthologies, such collections represent the collective project, ongoing since the late sixties, of expanding the canon and curriculum of American literature, especially in response to the activism and scholarship of feminists and people of color. These collections aim to teach students about the ethnic diversity of American culture.⁷ This project, however, tends to presume and promote an authentic version of ethnic literature, in which literary representations of ethnicity must correlate with the ethnicity of the author(s). Such a progressive rearticulation of American literature has implicitly created a deviant class of writers whose works defy the literary protocols of ethnic authenticity and realism.⁸ African American literature is no exception: the margins within this tradition are produced by the same rationale of ethnic authenticity and realism used to justify moving this tradition as a whole from the margins to the center of larger American literature.

Leveling this theoretical criticism against the categories of African American literature and ethnic literature in general does not intend to erase them. Just as political climates once warranted—and still warrant—the institution of African American Studies as a self-contained department rather than as one program among many ethnic others under the rubric of American Studies, African American literature should be anthologized as an institution, as part of the multi-ethnicization of American literature as Anglo American, African American, Latin American, Asian American, and so forth. The anthologization of African American literature appropriately affirms a collective resistance to co-optation and/or disenfranchisement by a hegemonic order of racism, particularly a (sub)conscious belief in white supremacy that has historically resulted in the marginality of African American writers in anthologies of American literature. Yet the effort of African American anthologization, however admirable, has resorted to problematic essentialist paradigms of canon and tradition that prioritize the authenticity of African American literature without recognizing the various and frequent ways in which African American writers themselves were working beyond this paradigm. This anthology represents one step toward minimizing the neglect of such experimental African American literature.

Hence the title and even the mere structure of African American Literature beyond Race are loaded with political meanings. The word beyond does not necessarily assert an optimistic belief that we can advance beyond race in our world. To do so would be naïve; it would ignore the persistence and predominance of racism, which continues to cripple African Americans at the most fundamental social, educational, economic, and political levels. And to do so would ignore the historic and continuing role of African American literature in indicting racism.

For this book, the paradigm of African American literature moving beyond race has in mind the keynote lecture Toni Morrison delivered at the Race Matters conference, held at Princeton University in April 1994, which she reprinted three years later as Home. Morrison describes her ideas about African American literature in terms of a tradition that is at once race-specific, free of racial hierarchy, and a celebration of American cultural nationality: "I have never lived, nor have any of us, in a world in which race did not matter. Such a world, one free of racial hierarchy, is usually imagined or described as dreamscape—Edenesque, utopian, so remote are the possibilities of its achievement. […] I prefer to think of a-world-in-which-race-does-not-matter as something other than a theme park, or a failed and always-failing dream, or as the father’s house of many rooms. I am thinking of it as home."⁹ Morrison’s imagination of "a-world-in-which-race-does-not-matter does not perpetuate a historical denial about race matters," but actually attends to their historical realities and complexities and to how they bear upon contemporary humanity. Morrison’s novels and essays have always asserted the significance of race, but she has also been concerned with the tendency of race to overdetermine and thus reduce the complexity of human identity, relations, and culture, especially as portrayed in African American literature.

In Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature (1989), Morrison has interrogated the assumptions and definition of African American literature: The question of what constitutes the art of a black writer, for whom that modifier is more search than fact, has some urgency. In other words, other than melanin and subject matter, what, in fact, may make me a black writer? Other than my own ethnicity—what is going on in my work that makes me believe it is demonstrably inseparable from a cultural specificity that is Afro-American?¹⁰ Neither Morrison nor this anthology discounts the truth that, in some way, race matters to us all. We should confront that truth, embracing the political significance of canons or traditions of African American literature. However, we should also acknowledge and contribute to that large and ongoing conversation stimulated by the fundamental question, What is African American literature?¹¹

In order to argue that African American Literature beyond Race urges an indictment of the canon of African American literature to address anomalous texts, I previously employed the word anomalous to signify taxonomic counternormativity. As Bruce Lincoln notes: [A]n anomaly may both pose danger to and be exposed to danger from the taxonomic order in which it is anomalous, just as deviants are considered outlaws when the legitimacy of legal systems is affirmed, but rebels when such systems are judged illegitimate.¹² The late Claudia Tate had applied this concept to African American literature. Anomalous texts are indisputably marginal in African-American literary history, she argued, primarily because they resist, to varying degrees, the race and gender paradigms that we spontaneously impose on black textuality.¹³ Anomalous texts consistently unsettle the traditional notion of a distinct African American literature by usually (but not always) casting African Americans in minor roles, while marking the protagonists as racially white, neutral, or ambiguous.¹⁴ However, the issue of authorial intention—or the reason why certain authors characterized race in certain literary ways—cannot be so easily theorized or generalized, since each author and his/her text must be analyzed on an individual, case-by-case basis. This book hopes to achieve this sort of analytic specificity, providing the extra attention that the selected authors and their texts so necessarily deserve, but an attention that they have been routinely denied.

This anthology reprints sixteen interesting works of fiction (short stories, novelettes, and excerpts of novels) dating back to the postbellum nineteenth century. For ease of organization, the literary works appear in chronological order and according to coincidental historical markers (e.g., national or global wars). This structure resists the cultural and intellectual contexts, also known as movements, that have characterized previous anthologies of African American literature: namely, the New Negro movement that lasted from the postbellum nineteenth century until well into the postwar 1940s; the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; the modernism, social realism, and naturalism that spanned the 1930s to the 1950s; the Black Arts Movement that overlapped the 1960s and 1970s; and the contemporary period that witnessed the crystallizations of Black feminism or womanism, postmodernism, and science fiction in African American literature. The recurrence of these categories in literary scholarship, anthologies, and curricula has afforded a convenient and popular set of concepts, discourses, and associations that certainly tempts one into referring almost exclusively to movements wherever African American literary history is concerned. But such convenience and popularity should not distract us from acknowledging and addressing, as this very anthology does, the problematic anxieties, assumptions, agendas, stereotypes, and contradictions that underwrote intellectual or academic constructions of movements.

This does not mean that African American Literature beyond Race encourages the historicist neglect of movements. Indeed, it maintains that we must always remain mindful of not only why and how certain movements were conceived and articulated in the first place, but also the present role they serve in our reading and writing of history. However, as Hazel V. Carby notes in Reconstructing Black Womanhood, movements like the Harlem Renaissance are not necessarily unique, intellectually cohesive and homogeneous, but rather comprise shift[s] in concerns of the intellectuals and discontinuities surrounding issues of representation.¹⁵ For example, what does it mean that Nella Larsen published two still relatively obscure stories, The Wrong Man and Freedom, in 1926, around the cultural climax of the Harlem Renaissance? Or that Samuel R. Delany published a piece of science fiction, Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones, in 1968, at the height of the Black Arts Movement? To what extent should other contemporaneous events and phenomena factor into interpretations of Larsen’s and Delany’s stories? Ultimately, how can the information gleaned from these questions account for the discontinuities surrounding issues of representation, both within literature and of authorship, intrinsic to movements? African American Literature beyond Race, while straightforward chronologically, recognizes, exploits, but remains critical of the major role of anthologies in our understanding of African American literary history.

Primary Texts and Analytic Contexts

Although mostly well-written and provocative, the primary texts chosen for African American Literature beyond Race are marginal in commercial and/or scholarly circles. Half are out of print (Dunbar, Toomer, Larsen, Thurman, Petry, Yerby) or only recently reprinted (Webb and Harper). Most of the texts have enjoyed at least one reprint since their initial publication, but nonetheless all sixteen selections remain understudied, if studied at all, in literary scholarship. According to a recent (2004) international bibliography prepared by the Modern Language Association, these primary texts constitute the central subject matter of less than 2 percent of all the dissertations, articles, chapters in edited collections, and books published on their authors since 1963.¹⁶ It is no surprise that over the past century, African American literary anthologies, often edited by scholars, have perpetuated this discrepancy.¹⁷ By reprinting the noncanonical fiction of canonical African American authors, this anthology overcomes this problem by illuminating certain personal, professional, and ideological aspects of the primary authors long overshadowed by their canonical reputations.

Only two authors do not yet belong to the canonical category—Frank J. Webb and Frank Yerby. However, since the former is arguably a progenitor of the anomalous tradition and the latter is certainly the most prolific contributor to it, both authors deserve attention in our study of African American literary history. For example, Yerby’s marginality is especially remarkable, if unfortunate. His status as the most prolific and commercially successful African American novelist in history forces us, perhaps more than any other writer, to confront the aesthetic and racial-political principles of African American canon formation over the past half century. Although his death on November 29, 1991, sparked interest in his life and work in media and scholarly circles, this discussion was brief and spawned little scholarship. More often biographical than literary-critical, the handful of Yerby studies that did emerge has yet to compel the production of a book-length analysis of the author’s life and legacy. This anthology provides an ideal context to (re)introduce Yerby to readers and to address some of the issues of authorship, racial identity, literary aesthetics, and audience that have surrounded his work and African American literature in general.

Accordingly, this volume raises questions about the long-standing aesthetic devaluation of popular fiction in academic literary studies, reflected by the critical elitism persisting in the smaller field of African American literary studies.¹⁸ According to Susanne B. Dietzel, [t]he field of popular fiction is a relatively unexplored terrain in African American as well as American literary history and criticism. She goes on to say that [i]n the fields of literary criticism and the teaching of African American literature, for example, scholars and critics alike have restricted their efforts to reviewing, promoting, and canonizing only those texts that fit the prevailing aesthetic and literary standards. As a consequence, a rigid division exists between high and low, or elite and mass culture, and by extension between popular fiction and canonical fiction.¹⁹ African American literary demonstration or disregard of racial realism, I would add, has further influenced how and why these standards continue to exist. Dispensing with critical elitism is a prerequisite to the open-minded and intellectually responsible recovery and study of anomalous African American literature.

African American Literature beyond Race features only fiction, though a history of anomalous African American poetry certainly exists, which I will briefly discuss here. African American poetry, while still understudied with respect to the novel and other genres of fiction, contributes significant insight to hermeneutic and taxonomic inquiry. In the past, scholars have consistently described African American poetry about African American life in terms of form and content, whereby form signifies rhyme schemes, meter, diction, and syntax, while content means thematic narrative and tropes. Within these descriptions a negative and/or dismissive tone has surrounded African American poetry not about African American life.

One of the first such instances in modern African American literary criticism appears in Margaret Walker’s New Poets (1950). The essay employs the name new poetry to designate African American poetic departures from World War II–era racial protest.²⁰ Pointing to the poetry of Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Bruce McWright, Walker argues that race is rather used as a point of departure toward a global point of view than as the central theme of one obsessed by race, reminding us that there are other factors in the writing of poetry that are equally as important as perspective.²¹ She goes on to say that new poets focus our attention on craftsmanship with their return to an emphasis on form. The new poetry has universal appeal coupled with another definite mark of neoclassicism, the return to form. They show an emphasis placed on technique rather than subject matter, and a moving toward intellectual themes of psychological and philosophical implications which border on obscurantism.²²

Walker’s statement presents several problems that contemporary readers of African American poetry not about race must overcome in order to take this literature seriously. First, it is debatable whether "emphasis placed on technique rather than subject matter" (my italics) is possible. Poetry is almost always so self-reflexive that form and content are more cooperative than conflictive, more conjoined than disjoined, in literary expression. Form should not be pitted against content; rather, form encodes content, and vice versa. Form operates in itself as a layer of content, and content as an embodiment of formal concerns.²³ Secondly, if we take Walker’s argument at face value, one could argue that neoclassical poetry dates as far back as the late eighteenth century. Joan Sherman has focused on neoclassical African American writers ranging from Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton to such postbellum nineteenth-century writers as Islay Walden, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, Eloise Thompson, George Marion McClellan, and Timothy Thomas Fortune. (I would add Paul Laurence Dunbar to this list.) As Sherman puts it, these authors show a decided bias for neoclassical decorum, heightened poetic diction, and technical virtuosity. They are integrationist, at times explicitly, more often through conscious adherence to such white themes, techniques, and ethical attitudes, whereby white refers to American and British Romantic poetry.²⁴ Finally, Walker’s use of the word obscurantism to describe new poetry, which implies that form can occlude content within a poem, inscribes what would become a long-held discrepancy in value between complex meters and race matters in African Americanist discourse. Antiformalist discourse has coincided with the expression of anxiety over the political irresponsibility of nonracial poems and their authors.²⁵

The legacy of Dunbar has suffered from this critical discourse. The scholarly characterization of Dunbar as split in literary personality, torn between imitating in nonracial ways the formal styles of white Romantic poets and selling out to a racist market for blackface minstrel stereotypes, has reduced him to racial-political irresponsibility, when in fact his negotiations of the literary marketplace were much more complex. This anthology features Dunbar’s fiction, in which his productivity equaled his poetic output, as well as the fiction of other African American authors, in order to clarify the dilemmas of creativity and audience they all faced. If only initially to start small, to avoid the unwieldy format that could easily result from providing multiple literary genres the scholarly attention and textual space they so deserve, this book anticipates future collections reprinting and introducing anomalous African American fiction, poetry, and drama that of necessity must go unmentioned or subordinated in African American Literature beyond Race.

Headnotes and Methodology

In order to make the selected literature accessible to a broad range of readers, this book employs headnotes written by a scholar of African American literature, often someone with specific expertise in the text, the author in question, or both. All the headnotes address questions raised by the context, text, and implications of the selected literary work. Contextual questions include: What is the significance of the literary work in terms of the author’s career? How well known or obscure is the literary work in critical and commercial circles, and why? Textual questions include: What is the nature of racial representation in the work? Is the racial identity of the characters explicitly or implicitly marked as racially white, neutral, or ambiguous? How does this fact make the work necessarily revealing or significant? What is the significance of the literary work in terms of such themes as society, culture, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or class? What are the literary merits of the work—that is, is it one of the author’s weaker or stronger works, and in what sense? Finally, questions regarding the implications include: How does this work affect our sense of what constitutes the tradition or canon of African American literature? Would this work be useful for African American literary studies, either in the classroom or in specialized scholarship? The authority and expertise of the headnotes should assist teachers in knowing how to interpret the literature and relate it to students. Notable for their range in methodological style and their consistently high level of critical sophistication, the headnotes are rigorous enough to appeal to scholars hoping to place these literary works in their proper contexts.

As mentioned before, generalizing why the canonical authors wrote the noncanonical texts chosen for this volume is risky, because the nature and historical circumstances of each text vary. However, certain broad and overlapping themes do recur, enabling us to connect, albeit provisionally, the motivations of these authors to one another, and the issues they faced within larger African American literary history. Several authors, such as Webb, Dunbar, Hurston, Thurman, Petry, and Baldwin, sought to demonstrate their expertise in depicting the complexities of humanity, contrary to the expectations of critics, the marketing industry, or their own racial communities. Certain authors tried to describe and resolve certain human problems that transcended racial lines: Harper focused on the national issue of temperance, Larsen on female sexuality, Wright on pathology, and Baldwin on homosexuality. For certain authors, including Webb, Dunbar, Himes, and Baldwin, the texts were profoundly autobiographical, allowing them to tackle issues influencing their personal lives. For these and other authors, the texts represented their ideological resistance to arbiters or movements of African American literature. In particular, Dunbar conflicted with William Dean Howells’s influential interpretation of black dialect literature, Toomer with Alain Locke’s Harlem Renaissance, and Yerby with Wright’s radical (proletarian, Marxist, and communist) brand of racial realism. Some authors embraced certain philosophies of literary aesthetics, race, or culture that fueled their skepticism over the traditional properties and implications of African American literature. In this case, Toomer was concerned with the Gurdjieff movement, Wright with psychoanalysis, Yerby with individualism, Morrison with postmodern hermeneutics, and Delany and Butler with science fiction. Finally, certain authors, such as Hurston, Himes, Yerby, and Butler, were quite public about the commercial rewards they hoped to reap by writing African American literature beyond race.

Grasping the anomalous texts of African American literature, moreover, strengthens the grasp of the canon itself. For example, Webb’s Two Wolves and a Lamb not only deepens and complicates the portrayal of evil but also recalls the literary intertextuality, the culinary themes, the French phraseology, and the topography found in his earlier novel, The Garies and Their Friends (1857). Harper’s Sowing and Reaping revises the sentimental plot of courtship and marriage in her well-known short story, The Two Offers (1859), while rearticulating the temperance discourse of its publisher, The Christian Recorder. The modernist strategies and themes discernible in Larsen’s two stories, The Wrong Man and Freedom, reverberate in her two canonical novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). The mysticism and philosophies of Gurdjieff had influenced Toomer’s production of Cane (1923)—and African American culture in Harlem, too—as much as it had allegedly impacted the more obscure literary works he published subsequently, including York Beach. The tropes of vernacular authenticity (dialect) and the chauvinistic resemblance between the male protagonists of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Seraph on the Suwanee encourage deeper comparative readings of the two novels. Both The Street (1946) and Country Place enabled Petry to contest postwar conventions of the public behavior and domestic role of women, while forcing us to realize the complexities of working-class women’s lives, black and white. And by the time Recitatif appeared in print, Morrison had already released novels—The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973)—in which the relationships between women grow in resolve and spirituality in spite of or because of the absence, violence, or abuse attributable to their parents, particularly their fathers. The headnotes further explicate these ideas, and support the contention that anomalous texts could be central to interpretations of the more famous texts and contexts of African American literature.

As a whole, this anthology should contribute to and advance beyond the ongoing and lively methodological conversations about the discursive roles of blackness and whiteness in African American literary and cultural studies. Shelley Fisher Fishkin has identified the trend represented by over one hundred books and articles, published in a multitude of disciplines in American studies since the late 1980s, complicating monolithic notions of blackness and/or interrogating the privilege and power often naturally and namelessly accorded to whiteness. The first years of the last decade of the twentieth century, Fishkin writes, may have brought the withering away of simplistic essentialist notions of racial identity as well as increasingly sophisticated understandings of how power relations built on antiquated, discredited assumptions of racial difference sustain and perpetuate themselves.²⁶ At the turn of the twenty-first century, the intellectual and interdisciplinary fields of what I call Blackness Studies and what have been called Whiteness Studies and Critical White Studies continue this intellectual approach to race.

Blackness Studies, first of all, has concentrated on the cultural logic of racial representation, or how the black race has been portrayed in American culture. It has explored the historic assignation of racial essentialism and authenticity to African American authorship and culture, challenged the notion of an African American literary tradition built according to racial iconography, pinpointed the ideological lines stratifying African American communities, and developed new frameworks for theorizing African American intellectualism and culture.²⁷ In the wake of these developments, African American Literature beyond Race illuminates the historical contingency and ideological genealogy of blackness—or how ideas about race and representation have cooperated in African American intellectualism and culture—and thereby accounts for how these ideas have determined the reading and writing of African American literature. Following in the methodological footsteps of Blackness Studies, this anthology unsettles conventional ideas about black texts and, by implication, what constitutes African American literature. In a more sophisticated way, it forces us to pay attention to the implicit historical contingencies and ideological genealogy of racial authenticity. It also urges us to account for the way realism, in particular, tends to arbitrate critical classifications, interpretations, and aesthetic judgments of African American literature in terms of race.

This anthology also possesses a special relationship with Whiteness Studies. This academic field suggests that Whiteness is neither a raceless subjectivity, as Peter MacLaren puts it in a different context, nor an invisible norm for how dominant culture measures its own civility.²⁸ Rather, it is a construct whose racial politics become visible when examined in terms of the enormous impact of Anglo-Saxon diasporas on mostly Western conceptions and articulations of race, culture, nation, universality, and normativity.²⁹ Accordingly, certain scholars have focused on African American literary typologies, ethnologies, and themes of whiteness.³⁰ African American Literature beyond Race suggests that anomalous works can comment on or depict whiteness in ways that warrant further critical study. But this anthology also advances beyond African Americanist applications of Whiteness Studies to account for certain subtleties in the concept of anomalies. Valuable as they are, these applications (aside from Claudia Tate’s) are not designed to account for certain nuances in the text and context of African American writers who elect not to comply with historically specific conventions of racial realism. Literary avoidance or disruption of these conventions, for example, does not automatically or necessarily mean the acceptance and depiction of whiteness. Such texts do not necessarily or always employ race as the primary human marker.

This distinction between anomalous African American literature and African American literature featuring white characters furthers what Fishkin, in another essay, has called transgressive African American literature. Transgressive texts violate critical and commercial norms demanding that black fiction writers are expected to focus on African-American life in the United States as seen through the eyes of black characters, and that black novelists are expected to focus on issues of race and racism and are considered suspect when they do not.³¹ Indeed, African American literature has almost always been defined in terms of racial pragmatism, that is, the degree to which it is grounded, accounting for and even shaping the material circumstances of the racial-political world. This kind of literature is not necessarily protest, a popular but reductive descriptor that had gained traction especially in 1949, when James Baldwin pinned it to Richard Wright’s first novel, and has remained in use ever since in studies of African American literature.³² Instead, this kind of literature focuses more generally on the politics of racialism, or the role of racial ideology in determining power relations between and among individuals, groups, and institutions. In the process—and perhaps this is where protest comes in—literature can also seek to represent, engage, rearticulate, and/or transform racialism, or the way people have essentialized what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called the heritable characteristics (biology) and distinctive behavioral traits and tendencies (culture) constitutive of racial identification, particularly of the African Diaspora.³³ As a consequence, racialist approaches to African American literature have often assumed that African Americans possess the utmost experiential authority in talking about African America, that their literature serves as an authoritative expression of their views on race and racism, and that the persons, places, and things imagined in this literature automatically earn racially authentic status. For Fishkin, African American literature disrupting such long-standing connections of race to realism tends to be, as often as not, ignored—that is, out of print and out of favor.³⁴

But what do we make of the way Toni Morrison’s postmodern hermeneutic 1998 novel, Paradise, defies the conventional readings of American literature by complicating both blackness and whiteness in literary characterization? Fishkin quotes Morrison’s explanation of the racial ambiguity in this novel, which refuses to disclose conclusively the racial identities of the female main characters, just as she has refused to do so in her 1983 short story, Recitatif: The tradition in writing is that if you don’t mention a character’s race, he’s white. Any deviation from that, you have to say. What I wanted to do was not to erase race, but force readers either to care about it or see if it disturbs them that they don’t know.³⁵ The character is white not because of the presence of racial markers but because of their absence. The lack of racial information—or the underdetermination of race—has been just as successful in defining whiteness as the excess of racial information—or the overdetermination of race—has been in defining blackness. Into that void of identification constitutive of whiteness, Morrison hypothesizes, readers often project their natural imagination of universal humanity as white humanity.

Despite this interpretive tendency, however, racially unmarked or ambiguous characters in African American literature are not necessarily white. The reader’s racial identification of characters does not always or necessarily match the writer’s intended portrayal of them. Remaining mindful of the potential disagreement between the intentions of the (black) author and the impressions of the reader helps us to examine works such as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s first novel, The Uncalled, whose protagonist is not definitively black or white. As a result of this ambiguity we must interpret the novel in terms that extend beyond the racial identities of characters, and we must think about how Dunbar is transgressing or violating the norms of genre, which comprise certain historically relative principles of form and theme. Indeed, when Dunbar wrote The Uncalled without the conventional—that is, minstrel—stereotype of an African American, he experimented with other kinds of identification (e.g., cultural regionalism and socioeconomic class) to signify human difference and to tell a profoundly spiritual story. This anthology provides such readings of genre in order to illuminate those extra layers of meaning that enhance our understanding of the aesthetic and political complexities of African American literature.

The Classroom

African American Literature beyond Race should be useful for courses taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. An introductory course on African American literature should assign the book in order to contest or question the principles of the course’s central anthology, which in most cases would be The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Creative and open-minded literature instructors all know that literary anthologies attempt foremost to be representative, and inevitably they tend to be exclusionary. It is incumbent on instructors, then, to complement anthologies with texts that cover unrepresented topics, genres, or historical moments, with the hope of diversifying curricula and broadening students’ understanding of literature. This anthology similarly aims to diversify and enhance the teaching and learning of African American literature. The book should provide important perspectives and critical discourses on race, nation, and culture hitherto unimaginable in traditionally conceived courses on African American literature. The predominance of canonical African American authors allows instructors to continue to use canonicity as the primary context for educating students. Yet the selection of the noncanonical fiction of these authors also allows instructors to probe, along with their students, the politics, pragmatics, and implications of the African American canon.

A more advanced undergraduate course on African American literature—such as an honors, junior, or senior seminar focusing on a particular theme, genre, or movement—would also find the anthology useful. The scholarly headnotes should assist the instructor in discussing not only issues of canonicity and tradition but also what these issues imply about the methods we tend to employ in our approaches to literary texts. For example, the color line has served as an essentialist trope of human difference between blacks and whites, but how and why has it also served as a trope of taxonomic difference between African American literature and (Anglo-) American literature? Fishkin has suggested—correctly, I believe—that the color line dictates the primary texts and pedagogy of literature courses. The segregationist mentality among scholars, teachers, and students persists.³⁶

African American Literature beyond Race attends not only to such interracial segregation but also to a smaller, though no less significant, intraracial segregation of canonical African American literature (i.e., expressive of racial realism and representative of racial authenticity) from anomalous African American literature (those black-authored texts that disrupt these paradigms of expression and representation). While undergraduates in an entry-level literature course, with no prior background in African American literature, should be capable of interpreting the texts of this anthology, those in an advanced level course should, in addition, achieve more sophisticated readings of these texts and begin to explore their historical implications.

Graduate courses, to conclude, should encourage a meta-analytic step before or after interpreting and historicizing the texts within this anthology: interpreting and historicizing the very paradigms of the collection. In any case, students should be encouraged to revise information about African American writers of whom they know a lot, unearth information about writers of whom they know little, and explain why they must do so in each case.

African American Literature beyond Race is a practical pedagogic tool for covering many authors and texts, canonical and noncanonical, within a short period of time, and for presenting information in a clear, accessible, and convenient way for experts and nonexperts alike. Of course, more than one book-length collection and study will be required to implement the revisionist demarcation of the literary territories from which anomalous primary texts and their authors have been barred not simply on pragmatic and aesthetic grounds but also on racial-political ones. Hopefully, subsequent scholarship on African American literature will sustain the intellectual excitement anticipated and required for anomalies to be taken seriously in African American literary studies.

Gene Andrew Jarrett, University of Maryland

Part I

Postbellum Period, 1865–1900

Chapter 1

Frank J. Webb (1828–1894)

Frank Johnson Webb is best known as the Philadelphian of color who published The Garies and Their Friends with George Routledge & Co. in London in 1857, one of only four African American novels published before the Civil War, and easily the best of the four. Dedicated to Lady Noel Byron, and armed with prefaces by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Lord Brougham, The Garies and Their Friends was well received in England and sold two thousand copies of the regular edition as well as twelve thousand copies in Routledge’s cheap series. It was reviewed in the Sunday Times, the Athenæum, and the National Review. In the United States, however, no extended contemporary comments on the novel have been found. Written in the tradition of the urban mystery fiction in the wake of Eugene Sue’s Les mystères de Paris (1843), Webb’s novel offers a vivid and grimly prophetic exposé of racism, prejudice, segregation, mob violence, and political corruption in the Northern City of Brotherly Love, a city Webb knew only too well.

The Garies and Their Friends is also a domestic tale of interrelated families some of whose members cross the all-important color line; a rare, and possibly the first, representation of a successful free black businessman as one of the central characters; the first African American novel about the theme of racial passing; and possibly also the first American novel about a legally married interracial couple. It is thus surprising that Webb has remained absent from most anthologies of African American literature.

Frank J. Webb was born in Philadelphia on March 21, 1828, the son of a Virginian father and a Pennsylvanian mother. He may have worked in a clothing store and in the printing trade, and he participated in the activities of the Banneker Institute, a colored debating society. In 1845 he married Mary E., whose full maiden name is unknown but may have been Espartero. Webb later wrote that his wife had been born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the daughter of a runaway African slave woman from Virginia and a Spanish gentleman of wealth whose efforts to purchase the freedom of Mary’s mother had been unsuccessful but who continued, until Mary was six or seven, to support her and her mother lavishly. Both Frank and Mary were very well educated, were seventeen years old when they married, and were classified as Mulattoes in the 1850 Census.

In 1855, after Webb’s business failed, Mary, who had studied oratory and had become an excellent reader of poetry and drama, began to give public reading tours in cities along the East Coast from Philadelphia to Boston and Salem, attracting the attention of listeners like Charlotte Forten, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cooper Nell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Stowe wrote The Christian Slave, an adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), expressly for Mary’s readings. Mary’s further repertoire included scenes from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, excerpts from Monk Lewis, and most especially Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha which, as Webb reported, Mary "read whilst arrayed