Coming of age – reaching the age of “maturity” or “discretion”1 – is variously a process, a moment, or a scene akin to the structural “scenes of instruction” inherent in African American narratives described by Dexter Fisher (1990).2 The discovery of American society’s racism is the major event in the protagonist’s development and in his “education.” Emphasis is placed upon being an African American in America, where ownership, belonging, and their negation, and dispossession, are central to the notion of identity. How can one own one’s destiny – be self-determined – when one does not own oneself and faces an irrevocable loss? The recognition of belonging takes place within the narrower circles of the family and of the black community, while society as a whole is often viewed as a threat, if not as the enemy. For the black adolescent, “The Man,” slang for the white man, translates the contradiction set up by racism between maturation and manhood. Indeed the characters’ acquisition of a sense of belonging and its opposite, independence, leads to various questions: What are the major events in the protagonist’s growth from individual self into social being? Who and what functions as the “educator” in the African American novel? One’s “identity” – as process/trial rather than monolithic category – is at the core of “coming of age.” What is the process of becoming of the African American “hero” or central character: self-acceptance as opposed to self-hatred or self-denial? Does the narrative depict the emergence of a stronger individual, better integrated, better self-integrated, both or neither?
Coming of age implies a progress from childhood to manhood or womanhood, a journey towards maturity. Childhood can be either the moment for a happiness never to be retrieved, an age of innocence, or a time already plagued by the torments inherent in the condition of being black in America, as if the protagonist had always already been immersed in experience. Such an opposition helps, for instance, to contrast Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930) with James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).3 Overall, the narrators are either adults who recall their youth and years of maturation, or they are adolescents. Narrative resistance often prevents the African American novelist from inventing the device of a child’s voice and gaze. When they are children, the realistic conventions of the novel fall apart. Naturalism and realism give way to a modernist text. Like Toni Morrison’s Pecola, Alice Walker’s Celie, or Sapphire’s Precious, the child narrator is caught in a schizophrenic vision, a madness of self-division from which he fails, or attempts, to be free.4 The ironic and heroic journey of John A. Williams’s Robert Youngblood (Youngblood, 1954), whose good intentions are constantly thwarted by disillusionment, offers an alternative. In spite of all, he keeps a fighting and optimistic spirit.5
The “paradise” of childhood is the scene for the advent of racial consciousness and sexuality, and such knowledge is the occasion for abrupt confrontations, rites of passage, and sensual awakenings. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Janie cannot find herself in her class picture since she is the only black child of the group.6 She literally cannot see her own self. Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree (1963) opens with a storm that destroys and kills.7 The young hero is lost and takes refuge in a barn with an older girl, Big Mabel, with whom he experiences his first sexual encounter. Normally, the protagonists learn from their elders, from the ancestors, with the recurrent figure of the grandmother on the side of strict morality and accommodation. Seldom the beneficiary of formal education, she is both educator and teacher in the cultural sense. Freedom must also be learned along with its corollary, danger. The blues woman is the symbol of such knowledge, an ambivalent or paradoxical one, made of laughter and tears, of resilience and courage in the face of domestic and racial violence, and their various interconnections. The character of the friend, the other young man, Champ, the protagonist’s friend in Al Young’s Snakes (1970) or Guitar, Milkman’s alter ego in Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1978), represents the temptation of a path that should not be taken. This wayward friend is a recurrent type, but the protagonist can also take on his features and be another Bigger Thomas (Wright, Native Son, 1940), caught in a trap of hatred, fear and violence.8
For the African American writer the narrative of coming of age in America poses the problem of inscribing that fictional moment against the tradition of slavery. The paternalism of the Peculiar Institution placed the slave in the “care” of the master: it infantilized him. “Coming of age” should signal “emancipation” from the “childhood” ascribed by the master to the slave, from servitude and its traces. The names of the protagonists bear the mark of that difficulty since the father’s name is handed over to the son. Jimboy is Langston Hughes’s father-figure in Not Without Laughter; Boy Boy, Eva’s husband and one of the male protagonists in Morrison’s Sula (1973); while “Milkman” is the anti-hero of Song of Solomon as is “Bigger” Thomas, Wright’s native son.9 Mothers and grandmothers also carry in their names the stigma of bondage. Thus, Sissie is the name of the dying mother in the eponymous novel by John A. Williams (1963).10 In Trouble the Water (1989) by Melvin Dixon, the mother has died in childbirth.11 The grandmother’s hatred must be confronted and absolved. A crazed figure, a culprit that should be shot, the father is denied his status. In sum, the protagonists’ coming of age is simultaneously contradicted by the fathers’ infantile names that they carry into maturity. For the question of lineage, the relationship to the mother and the father, and hence the depiction of the black family, is central to this process of growing up.12 The relationship to the grandmother is a key link to the construction of a self. Be it Nanny or Big Mama, these exemplary figures are the foundation, the origin of psychic development, their deaths figuring as one of the crucial moments of childhood.
The episode that marks one’s coming of age can be grafted onto the broader genre of the Bildungsroman.13 A definition of the term helps envision how it both fails and does not fail to apply to the African American novel that stands at the crossroads of the picaresque novel, the sentimental novel, and the slave narrative per se. The Bildungsroman offers the “plot” of an apprenticeship of the concurrent mutual shaping of the protagonist’s psyche and his integration into society at large. It is a question of interrogating “one of the most harmonious solutions ever offered to a dilemma coterminous with modern bourgeois civilization: the conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization.”14 Moreover, the hero’s life-story – his early years – is related to the historical time of the novel. His or her biography is played up against the background of history in the making. The emergence of a full individual takes shape against the backdrop of historical events and leads to a projection outside the realm of his family, outside the determining forces of history, or even outside temporality. In Ntozake Shange’s novel by that name, Betsey Brown’s (1985) coming of age takes place within the troubled times of desegregation.15 Alice Walker’s Meridian Hill, whose coming of age has been preempted by an early pregnancy, is born again in the Civil Rights Movement while Anne Moody’s narrative, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1970), ends with her participation in that same movement (1968).16 Conversely, Richard Wright’s Native Son insists on the racial and social determinism of his characters. The utopian thrust of the novel finds in the episode of coming of age or the novel of apprenticeship its most strident expression. Another distinction can be drawn between the Entwicklungsroman (development of a subjective individuality) and Erziehungsroman (objective process viewed by an educator), thus reopening the fusion effected by the Bildungsroman. Within the African American novel there is this distinction as well. The novel with a didactic purpose shows the positive development of the individual against the combined odds of racism, poverty, and violence, while a more open narrative allows the inner self to be analyzed, as it goes through the expected stages of development: first sexual encounter, racial encounter, choice of school, and finally departure from home.
And yet as the African American novel employs the Bildungsroman frame, it effects a critique of coming of age. The traditional European Bildungsroman describes the descent or decadence of the hero along with the cynicism inherent in bourgeois values and thus exposes the upstart, the “parvenu.” The African American variation leads to a subversion – and even a negation – of the American dream in terms of race relations. In Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), coming of age as a literary term corresponds to the gradual deconstruction of the various versions of the narrator’s identity. This voice debunks Booker T. Washington’s ideal of a school system, the dream of the Great Migration to the urban North, the hope of a political solution through the Brotherhood (the Communist party) and of a religious solution in the satire of the Nation of Islam. Keep that “nigger boy” running . . . and he will never come of age; such is the discourse of the masters/fathers, and false brothers. To know and muster the mechanisms of racism, to understand the workings of his/her oppression rather than fall prey to them is necessary for the black boy or the black girl to reach “adulthood.” Yet coming of age is often a precipitation of the stages of life, a distorted or reversed process: work and providing for the family takes the place of formal education (Richard Wright, Native Son); motherhood takes place before girlhood. As Maya Angelou notes, her rape makes her a woman before she is a girl. Paule Marshall’s Selina feels older than she should be, deprived of her childhood innocence at the end of Brown Girl, Brownstones (1953).17 Celie’s repeated rape by her stepfather robs her of her childhood and a “normal” womanhood, rendering her fit only to be a surrogate mother, one without the power or position.
What is repressed in autobiography, that wellspring of African American literature, comes back in these novels for the protagonist’s progress is, as critics remark, in novel after novel, a thinly veiled transcription of the author’s life. “Biographemes,” to use Barthes’s term, these insistent recurrent moments of the author’s singular story, respond to or echo the progress and trials of the black minority in the US.18 A case in point is the hatred of John Grimes’s father in Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. As a symbol of racist dichotomy, itself supported by the division between good and evil of religious fundamentalism, John Grimes’s conversion reads like the chaos of further alienation, false-consciousness. For Baldwin, like many authors of coming-of-age narratives, the genre permits the telling of a story of childhood and maturation within the poetic truth of creative invention. An autobiographical narrative, Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi bears in its title the centrality of the process of growing up, together with the announcement that the South is a strange land for the black adolescent, the territory of a history of suffering and survival. The imprint of the South is also the harbinger of the choice between rebellion and submissiveness for the African American hero or heroine. It becomes a crucial alternative leading to death, self- or other-inflicted, or a critical decision regarding the path of one’s life.
The term “coming of age” entails the achievement of the goal: one is finally “of age,” mature, ready to face the outside world. The novel contains the proposition of a solution to the formation of the black subject in America. Alternatively, it depicts the impossibility of such a solution, the damage wrought on these black selves by the horrors of history and racism. Such is the lesson of the murders committed by the protagonists (Native Son, Ann Petry’s The Street [1946]),19 their self-hatred (Selina’s boyfriend, Clive), or suicides (Richard, John Grimes’s mother’s lover). Narrative circularity is a means of recalling childhood events. Hurston’s novel starts with Janie coming back from burying the dead. Fulfillment and the round of cyclical time is effected when Janie is left alone at the end of the text. Phoeby has left her. Janie will plant a seed that Tea Cake has given her. John A. Williams’s Sissie retraces the journey back to the dying mother of the two protagonists, Ralph and Iris. The reader enters their consciousness as they retell their childhood experiences and try to make peace with their mother’s troubled legacy. In Ralph’s case, it is the crucial question of whose son he actually is, a secret kept by her mother. A question that resounds in numerous novels with the accents of Baldwin’s voice: “Whose son are you?” The shattered dreams of the Great Migration explain Sissie’s behavior: her love for another man, her despair. Ralph’s psychoanalysis is an incursion into these questions: the killing of a man when serving in the army, but also his relation to his mother. Coming of age can only happen at such cost. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is also circular as Milkman goes back South to recover the history of his people, to learn by heart the children’s rhyme that preserves the memory of his genealogy.
The process of coming of age is one of “coming along” (James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain). It is also one of deferral, the postponement of what can never be in this time or in this world. The hero never completes this progress. Most novels end on a note of ambivalence; action is sometimes reaction. Ellison’s Invisible Man tells the reader that he is about to come out, but the end finds him still underground, maybe speaking for the reader on the lower “frequencies.”20 Morrison’s Song of Solomon offers an open ending with a flight into the void: death leap or lyrical élan of the African American voice riding the air? Marriage does not conclude this progress. At times it is included in the hero’s progress, as in Maud Martha’s ordinary and lackluster urban life.21 More traditionally, the hero leaves his hometown for the city as in Young’s Snakes. Alternatively, the ending is postponed beyond this world, as Hughes’s ending suggests in Not Without Laughter, for the “stars beyond” of the spiritual the child hears in the city may be those of afterlife. Such projection is in keeping with an eschatological vision of history: achievement cannot take place in the here and now.
To “build” means to “rememory,” to re-member, to tell, to lay one’s story next to the other’s, as Sethe and Paul D learn to do in Morrison’s Beloved (1987).22 Like other women writers, and male writers such as John Edgar Wideman, Toni Morrison, Michele Cliff (Abeng), and Jamaica Kincaid (Annie John), show that the Bildungsroman must be the locus of voices that speak the unspeakable.23 The construction of a single self must be transmuted into the reconstruction of a collective memory through the poetics of fiction, the prodigy of invention.
Movement in the coming-of-age narrative introduces two of the major metaphors in African American literature: the journey and the veil. The hero or the heroine’s development is narrated in terms of a journey from South to North, from North back South, or a flight (to the city). The protagonist of Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which figures in the black canon as one of the finest variations on the Bildungsroman, travels South to find himself. Milkman goes through a rite of initiation in the guise of a hunt and recovers the song that recounts his family’s history. He divests himself of the false attributes of materialism to commune with Nature and sings to his aunt Pilate, as she dies after having buried her father’s bones, in another ritual of appeasement. Journeys across space coincide with psychological growth. Killing or not killing the father is the central crisis of these novels. Melvin Dixon’s Trouble the Water tells of the journey back South that helps rebuild the lineage and rekindle the self in the culture of the ancestors by the river. If displacement must be countered, homelessness probed and overcome, the heroes and heroines of the Great Migration travel back South to face the trial of memory. Jordan Henry, Dixon’s protagonist, is Milkman’s blood brother. Both men have been estranged from their roots by wealth and education. Both must return and resolve what they, or their parents, have fled. Morrison’s Jazz (1992) also shows Golden Gray, the mulatto son of the master’s daughter and the black slave, who goes back to kill the father.24 The black Bildungsroman shows that the father’s name must be known to the son: Jake to Jordan, Solomon to Macon, together with a sense of home, a reclaiming of the Southern soil or of a territory, either real or metaphoric, a paternal ground. John Edgar Wideman’s Fatheralong is the autobiographical counterpart of this lifeline that constructs the African American narrative of adulthood.25 Where are the fathers? How can one become a father? The parallel interrogation of the link between daughters and mothers is exemplified by Marshall in Selina’s brutal opposition to her mother and the final resolution of that conflict in her acknowledgment that she is, indeed, her mother’s child.
The veil as a prominent trope recurs in the narrative of adolescent experience. Lifted off or tied on more closely, the veil bespeaks the ambivalence of education; it also separates life from death, slavery from reconstruction, the ghosts from the living, oblivion from the return of the repressed. It can have a ritualized presence not to be denied. In Tina McElroy Ansa’s Baby of the Family (1989), Lena is born with a veil over her face, a caul, and the old nurse Bloom, who knows the country customs, would have performed the ritual which ensured healing, but the young mother interferes out of ignorance.26 The novel opposes the rational world of the twentieth century to the ancestral belief in the supernatural. The breach of tradition leads to the child’s confusion between the real and the surreal. She sees ghosts and conversely cannot believe in her own reality. She sleepwalks and at the end of the novel is delivered by an incident that resolves her double nature. She is freed from her secret as she catches an owl – a sure sign that there is going to be a death – in her grandmother’s house. McElroy Ansa uses the trope of the veil to tell a fable: that of a lack of identity, a “lostness,” and a direct communion with the past that is the hallmark of the novels of the period.
Male writers and female writers tackle the coming-of-age journey differently, although to become a man or a woman is equally fraught with difficulty. Diachronically, the variable of sexual difference derives from the opposition between the male and female slave narrative. From Frederick Douglass’s Narrative comes the prototypical transformation of the “slave [becoming] a man” while the female slave narrative more often critiques conventions of femininity. The confrontation between Hughes’s Not Without Laughter and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God offers an illustration of that major opposition which runs through the novel of formation. Sandy, Hughes’s young hero, experiences hardships growing up as a black man in America in a naturalistic tale interspersed with visions of black life in a small Kansas town. His grandmother’s strict upbringing contrasts with his young aunt Harriett’s blues trajectory and his father’s waywardness. His mother, Annjee, works so much that he seldom sees her; she leaves him to his grandmother’s care to join her shiftless husband North. Sandy experiences loneliness as, one by one, Aunt Hager’s daughters leave her, and as she herself eventually dies of old age. At school and with his playmates, Sandy suffers from the humiliation of Jim Crowism in Kansas: the Free Children’s Day Party is for white kids only. Yet the hurt of rejection is compensated by partaking in a collective folklore of hope and survival. Growing up means loneliness as well as communion with the natural world and its round of seasons.
Hager’s three daughters symbolize three possible responses to the condition of being black in America: Annjee, the hardworking maid who leaves with her husband and subordinates everything to love; Harriett, the fun-loving daughter who becomes a prostitute; and Tempy, who rejects her race and joins the white community, refusing Negro ways and talk. These three female characters are directions that the young boy can and cannot follow, precisely because of his sex. He finds himself for some time in the guardianship of Tempy, the one who, childless, is a champion of acculturation. Eventually, Sandy is reunited with his mother in Chicago and his aunt Harriett, now a successful cabaret singer, helps him with his education so that he can become what his grandmother wanted him to be: a champion of the black race, like Washington and Douglass.
Al Young’s narrative from the 1970s, Snakes, echoes Hughes’s Not Without Laughter in the depiction of a strong grandmother–grandson relationship. Set in Detroit, the novel tells the journey of apprenticeship through music, drugs, and sex. It deploys the choices that must be made between music and education, staying at home and going away, settling down to raise a family and furthering one’s horizon. The colorful characters, who represent modulations on a young urban black man’s destiny, include an adolescent who quotes Shakespeare, “Shakes,” Champ, who succumbs to drugs and violence, and Billy, a musician who deserts the band they had formed to go to New York.
In contrast to these works that weigh the pros and cons of adolescent development, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a hymn to experience, love, and freedom. Their Eyes is a mise en abyme of female (“womanist”) education through conversation: Janie’s story is told to Phoeby who grows “ten feet higher just from listening to her.” Janie’s strength derives from the personal choices that have led her to action as she pursues the truth of her dream: “Yo papa and yo’ mama and nobody else cant tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves” (285). The sexual experience at the core of Janie’s freedom is that of an orgasm under a pear-tree in bloom. At 40, the older Janie has undergone a transformation that saw her through three different relationships, each emblematic of a link to the black community and to a different economic system. She gradually emerges freer, with a voice of her own. Her grandmother Nanny epitomizes the extreme resilience and the lessons from the days of slavery from which Janie escapes.
Ultimately, the choice is between people and things, relationships and ownership. Janie’s first marriage to Logan Killicks is a process of alienation in a rural society, her status no better than that of one of Logan’s mules, as she works in his field to improve their livelihood. Her loveless first marriage ends when Janie meets Jody Starks, the black entrepreneur whose determination leads him to become the mayor of the all-black town he has founded. As “de Mayor’s wife,” Janie’s bourgeois status means that she must stop working in Joe’s store: “her place is in de home.” Gradually reduced to silence, Janie talks back one day and her words “kill” her husband. She then enjoys a freedom that marks a turning point in her story. A young widow, she is courted by Tea Cake, who epitomizes the free-spirited love Janie has been dreaming about all along. She finds that sense of completion in a relationship of mutual respect that she chooses in freedom. Yet her lover Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog in the flood that figures an apocalyptic moment in the novel, and Janie must kill him in self-defense. She is then acquitted by an all-white jury. The explicitness of Hurston’s treatment of Janie’s sexuality and fulfillment contrasts with Hughes’s tone; Janie is much older than Sandy, who remains an adolescent. Hughes’s is a more sober and traditional tale that nonetheless gives women a central role as life models.
As is to be expected, some of the other works of the African American canon can be described as anti-Bildungsromane. Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) belongs to that category since it retraces from the point of view of the narrator, Claudia McTeer, the gradual descent into schizophrenia of the young black protagonist Pecola Breedlove. Although much older, Ann Petry’s Lutie Johnson in The Street had paved the way for this dark vision of the self in its relation to the community. Her plight is tragic like that of the mulatto protagonists of the Harlem Renaissance tradition. In her effort to perform the integration she believes in, the suburban domestic cuts herself off from her community and eventually kills a black man at the end of the novel. She loses her self-respect and gives up her struggle, thus signing the defeat of that solution, a consequence of the interrelation of race, gender, and class in American society. In Morrison’s novel, Pecola is raped by her father and molested by other children. She is hated by her mother who prefers the young white child of the family she works for. She is also fooled by Soaphead Church, a fake preacher, into believing that he has given her the bluest eye(s)/“I” in the world. Morrison’s first novel inscribes the devastation of self-hatred into the black psyche as the deepest destruction of racism. It also denounces the community’s scapegoating of the poor black family.
How can the black child construct a self in America? Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings can be seen as a mirror and an answer to Pecola’s tragic self-alienation.27 The “I” narrator tells the explosion of the body, the disarray of the senses, the desire for death at the center of the young girl’s psychic make-up. As she grows up in the violence of the South of the 1950s, rape, fear of lack of femininity, too many journeys back and forth across the country, must gradually be countered by a determination not to let the internalization of racism, the “razor that threatens the throat,” inflict its deadly wound. Maya learns from her grandmother, from her mother, from her brother’s experiences, that she must be whole and gather the fragments, overcome self-depreciation. At the close of the book, the mother and the daughter are reunited around the newborn baby, Maya’s son. The symbolic circularity of the scene offers the reassurance that maternal and daughterly love, together with the hope of future generations, heals and teaches.
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple depicts a highly melodramatic childhood. Raped by her father, Celie gives birth to two children from this incestuous relation. Her coming of age, however, is the gradual understanding, through the help of other protagonists, Sofia, Shug Avery, and her sister, Nettie, that she can claim her own beauty, her own self. She ultimately wins back her husband’s love and starts her own business. If she is much older than might be expected, this trait is common to a lot of the heroes and heroines of the black novel. The deferral into adulthood of achievement and accomplishment is in direct relation to the weight of the burdens.
Sapphire’s Push, which explicitly cites The Color Purple, tells of the gradual awakening to literacy and to a better self-integration of Precious Jones, a young girl of sixteen raped by her father, a crack addict. She gets pregnant twice by him and her first child suffers from Down’s Syndrome. The novel piles up in one single character all the horrors of the ghetto. Precious is illiterate; she is abused by her mother, by her mother’s lover; she is obese and learns from her mother that she is HIV-positive. The language of rap and of the urban gangs slowly gives way to more “readable” English under the care of Miss Rain, Precious’s instructor in an alternative school system. Precious and her class comrades are Celie and Nettie’s sisters and the descendants of Bigger Thomas. The crude vocabulary depicts devastation, yet they teach how love and determination help these downtrodden children. Precious becomes a good mother to Mongol and to Addul; she is independent from her own mother and learns to fight the system, to recover her rights.
Beyond the traumas of the black psyche explored at length in most novels, certain works try to tackle other ways of connecting across the color line by staging black–white relationships. In these cases, the African American novel questions whether racial lines cannot and should not be crossed. Clover by Dori Sanders tells the story of a little girl who gradually learns to love her white stepmother after the accidental death of her father.28 The melodramatic tone is tempered by attempts to write the gradual acceptance of the other woman, the father’s wife, the white woman, a reverse lesson in racial tolerance. In Marita Golden’s A Woman’s Place, the three heroines present different ideological positions on various aspects of the African American experience.29 Religion and marriage are represented by Faith, who converts to Islam and changes her name to Aisha. Creativity and race are embodied by Chrystal, a published poet, who falls in love with a white man. History and place are mined when Serena goes to Africa in search of her self and roots. Marita Golden uses the voices of these young women in a polyphonic structure that recalls Morrison’s and Shange’s narratives. The voices are both unique and interwoven, each creating a singular path, yet also each entering a fruitful dialogue with the other. Forming this chorus of voices suggests that simultaneity must be thought together with difference just as the dogmatic and dramatic single plot explodes. Morrison’s Paradise (1998) epitomizes this evolution of a plurality of female voices in the attempt to probe the link between racial purity and individual destiny, between black and white racism, the community and individualism.30
Class-lines must also be crossed. Shange’s Betsey Brown (1985), based on her own life-story, is set in the black middle class. The father is a surgeon, the mother a social worker. With both parents busy and away most of the day, Betsey is a happy child who must be taught that her acts can have terrible consequences, like the firing of their first maid. She also learns, from the easygoing babysitter, the carefree gestures of love. This light narrative breaks the myth of childhood drudgery and tragedy, but it opens the way for a meditation on the difficulty of integration for black children who found themselves a minority in white colleges. It is also the tale of integration and of the black bourgeoisie. The black middle class has integrated the values of white America and the American dream of bettering oneself. Like the other narratives that depict the middle class, it interrogates class and race as it impacts black children.
Another line that contemporary black writers cross is that of homosexual desire. Baldwin’s John Grimes struggles with this feeling and Maya Angelou tells her fear of lesbianism in her autobiographical text. Sula has been read as a lesbian novel. Morrison declares that hers is a love story. It describes the strong bond that unites two young black girls through the vicissitudes of life. Nel and Sula are a strange pair, brought up in very different households. Helen, Nel’s mother, is the quintessence of a desire for integration that leads her to a dull and pathetic conformity. Eva, the grandmother and mistress of Sula’s home, is the embodiment of the ancestor: wise, self-sacrificing, cruel, and stubborn. A pariah, Sula grows up to be a creator, an explorer of the margins. She is the community’s scapegoat; she transgresses and embodies the dangerous freedom that some of Morrison’s heroes and heroines experiment with. She eventually leaves the Bottom to go to college.
Both young girls are bound by a secret: they have accidentally killed a young boy, Chicken Little, while playing with him by the river. The hole in the water that swallowed him only reopens as a return of the repressed memory of that drowning. It is also echoed earlier on by a ritual: the two girls dig a hole in which they bury “useless” bits and pieces. The sexual overtones of this initiatory rite (acknowledgement and covering-up of castration) lead to the broader question of the place of femininity and masculinity in the culture, as well as to the historical destiny. Eva adopts several young boys of different ages, the Deweys. However, through her perception, they gradually appear the same to her and have the same arrested development. Indeed, they never grow up. A morbid echo of that stunted growth, a large number of the men, the Deweys among them, die buried in the collapse of a tunnel that they had built under white authority. Push’s Precious Jones fights her homophobia and that of Louis Farrakhan’s followers when she is told that her teacher is a lesbian. The novel also features another child whose sexual preference is for women. The reader understands that the sexual abuse that Precious has undergone at the hands of her mother and her lover will leave her helpless in the construction of a positive sexual relation.
The coming-of-age episode is often the result of the writer’s use of an omniscient narrator combined with internal focalization when the reader directly enters the adolescent psyche. The use of a first-person narrator is also a powerful medium that serves to expose the torments, the dilemmas. In the case of Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, the device of the “transparent mind” describes the awareness of the protagonist from within. The coming-of- age novel reframes the autobiographical tradition of the conversion narrative and the spiritual autobiography. John’s tortured psyche is one where the father’s words resound ironically against the reality of the father’s violence, itself a reiteration of his own childhood violence. The absurdity and lack of understanding is caused by his feelings of guilt, the trip to the movie house, the hypocrisy and the irony of the Church, and John’s consciousness of his sin. Desperately asking for his father’s love, John faces rejection: the father loves the son who looks like him, Roy, and negates John, who acts as father substitute to the other children. His hatred of the whites leads the father to find refuge in the clear-cut religious precepts of salvation and damnation. The young man faces sin as the unmentionable act of masturbation; he feels that it has soiled him forever in a world where there is only good or evil. John’s conversion at the end echoes in a tragic and ironic mode the communion of the saints and the sinners envisioned by Hughes.
Selina Boyce from Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones is a complex character, access to whom is given to the reader through the use of internal focalization and omniscient narration. Selina is caught between a romantic father, who dreams of going back to Barbados, where he owns some land (he eventually commits suicide), and a mother whose ambition is to buy a house and to have one of her daughters study medicine or law or make a good marriage. Whereas Selina fights to become independent – she has a lover, she learns ballet dancing and wins an award from the Association of Barbados immigrants – the confrontation of racism at the end of the novel is a trauma that makes her decide to go back to her father’s island.
In the context of the autobiographical trace and of actual production of writing, the question of coming of age crystallizes the moment of the writer’s vocation, the childhood sources of the transposition of his or her experience into writing. The man- or woman-child bears the burden or the elective status of being the privileged witness and performer of his/her race in the realm of creative writing. A certain reflexiveness in the writing process sends the reader back to his own relationship to race and sexuality, to questioning how much he/she is part of the racial oppression denounced in the pages.
The intensity of this metafictional dimension means that coming of age is no longer limited to narration. The display of the writing and the aesthetics are alluded to in the choice of protagonists who are artists. Selina meets a failed Village artist and is described by her friends as a poetess. She is also an accomplished dancer, the star of the performance that the ballet class gives at the end of the book. Al Young’s hero in Snakes is a musician, John A. Williams’s Ralph, a playwright, and his sister Iris, a singer whose career has taken her to Europe. The narrative of Lucy by Kincaid tells more about the writing process and the subject of writing than it does about the “experience” of a young West Indian au pair in the United States.31
The Color Purple epitomizes the process of writing as the quintessential life-giving act that enables coming of age: the writing of letters coincides with the heroine’s progress. She invents and frees her own self through writing letters to God, to her sister, to the rest of the world, her letter writing coinciding ultimately with the publication of Walker’s novel. Her sister Nettie’s more conventional letters from Africa establish the distance between a “speakerly” text and its enactment of independence through creativity and a “writerly” text with its dependence on convention and formal education.32 The rendition of the voice on paper, its foregrounding, meshes with Celie’s love for another woman, the blues singer Shug Avery. Similarly, Push uses rap language – ebonics – to celebrate Precious’s recovery through writing and the incest survivors’ sessions. Precious’s barely readable first lines written on the page with a translation into English show that her perception is mediated by the trauma of not being able to write and to speak what she experiences. Violence and language are entwined; they echo each other. Vulgarity, insults, physical fights, and hatred are the only recourse for the illiterate, obese, sex-abused child, treated like a domestic by her mother. She finds pleasure in writing and gradually gains self-confidence and independence. From hatred she moves to love, from the spiral of failure to hope for improvement. Push is a narrative of redemption. The final section of the book reproduces the texts written by the children in Miss Rain’s class; they are all testimonies that coming of age can only happen through literacy and the power of the words.
The reader’s edification about the devastation of poverty and alienation, the dark face of the American dream, takes place in the same way. Precious hates the “izms” that her teacher uses and writes “REALITY” in capital letters to fight “realism” and its academic conundrums. The distance between her text and the reality of the writing of young girls’ lives can be appreciated by reading Rebecca Carroll’s Sugar in the Raw, the recorded voices of young black girls in America.33 Precious Jones contrasts with Ann Petry’s Lutie Johnson, a murderer in self-defense. Lutie’s last flashback is a memory of her white teacher wondering why they should bother to educate black people. Lutie ponders: “What possible good has it done to teach people like me how to write?”34
Coming of age is the necessary transposition of an impossible progress, the creation of a self for an African American subject against the threats of schizophrenia and annihilation. Language serves as the most potent weapon in such an endeavor against the violence of being forever stunted, impeded, erased.
1. To deal with this notion would involve going back to Locke and to the genesis of the Bildungsroman as the genre that the Enlightenment favored in its acknowledgment that judgment was established as much through sensitivity as through understanding.
2. Dexter Fisher and Robert Stepto, eds., Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1979; New York: PMLA, 1990).
3. Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter (1930; New York: Scribner, Simon and Schuster, 1969); James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1953).
4. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970); Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Washington Square Press, 1982); Sapphire, Push (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). On Morrison’s work, see Claudine Raynaud, Toni Morrison: L’Esthétique de la survie (Paris: Belin, 1996).
5. John Oliver Killens, Youngblood (1954; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).
6. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
7. Gordon Parks, The Learning Tree (New York: Fawcett, 1963).
8. Al Young, Snakes (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1970); Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977; New York: Signet Book, 1978); Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; London: Picador, 1995). See also his autobiography, Black Boy (1940; New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
9. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Bantam Books, 1973).
10. John A. Williams, Sissie (New York: Farrar Strauss and Cudahy, 1963).
11. Melvin Dixon, Trouble the Water (New York: Washington Square Press, 1989).
12. These novelistic accounts must be read against the polemics of the Moynihan Report on the black family, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965; rpt. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981).
13. On the Bildungsroman, see Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986) pp. 10–59, and The Dialogic Imagination: Fours Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Florence Bancaud-Maënen, Le Roman de formation au XVIIIème siècle en Europe (Paris: Nathan, 1998). For a book-length study of the African American and West Indian Bildungsroman, see Geta LeSeur, Ten is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995).
14. Franco Maretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), p. 15.
15. Ntozake Shange, Betsey Brown (New York: Picador, 1985).
16. Select autobiographies are included as a counterpoint, since they exemplify the process of coming of age within a contractual relationship to the reader which is referential and not fictional. Alice Walker, Meridian (1976; London: The Women’s Press, 1983); Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi: An Autobiography (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968).
17. Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959; New York: The Feminist Press, 1981).
18. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Seuil, Gallimard Cahiers du Cinéma, 1980), p. 54.
19. Ann Petry, The Street (1946; Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).
20. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; London and New York: Penguin Books, 1965).
21. Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (New York: Harper, 1953).
22. Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Picador, 1987).
23. Michelle Cliff, Abeng (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984); Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1985).
24. Toni Morrison, Jazz (London: Picador, 1992).
25. John Edgar Wideman, Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (New York: Pantheon, 1994).
26. Tina McElroy Ansa, Baby of the Family (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1989).
27. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Bantam Books, 1970).
28. Dori Sanders, Clover (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1990).
29. Marita Golden, A Woman’s Place (1986; New York: Ballantine Books, 1988).
30. Toni Morrison, Paradise (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998).
31. Jamaica Kinkaid, Lucy (London: Picador, 1990).
32. For a theory of African American literature, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
33. Rebecca Carroll, Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997).
34. Petry, The Street, p. 436.