Michael Hill
In the last decade, respected critics solemnly pondered whether African American literature had ended. Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) prompted such questions, and soon, these ruminations swelled conference panels, filled leading journals, and inspired reactions from all quarters of the literary profession. While today such debates have calmed considerably, the coherence – if not the legitimacy – of the tradition remains an unsettled matter. This sober truth greets any individual who would assess African American fiction in 2019. Although such news fuels pessimism, other happenings bespeak flourishing. Like the broad label “black literature,” the specific category “black fiction” may be existentially fraught. Despite such taxonomic anxiety, the publication of short and long fiction by black Americans has not slowed. Even the most cynical observer must admit that – judged solely by the volume of its producers – the field looks incredibly healthy. Alas, the twenty‐first‐century controversies surrounding black fiction have never really been about the number of writers; rather, they have involved artistic approach and aesthetic distinction. While the current chapter cannot thoroughly probe such matters, it will catalogue three interesting epochs in the post‐World War II congealing of modern black fiction writing. More precisely, this brief overview will chronicle how African American fiction accrued esteem by moving from the margin to the center of the American literary scene during the years between the end of World War II and the presidency of Donald Trump.
Historically, critics have evaluated African American fiction by evoking a binary relationship between politics and aesthetics. Surfacing classically in Robert Bone’s The Negro Novel in America (1958), this durable binary informs works as varied as Noel Schraufnagel’s From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel (1973) and Gene Jarrett’s Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (2011). The dominant rendering of the politics and aesthetics thesis posits that black writing almost organically defines itself as a political enterprise. Advocates of this theory suggest that at a crucial moment, black writers’ reliance upon this politicized impetus impedes their ability to master the aesthetic protocols of accomplished art. Since authors like Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Edward P. Jones have expertly exposed the problems with stringently dichotomizing politics and aesthetics, here I will forego a protracted rehearsal of that ground. I do, however, want to suggest that the foundational task of the black fiction writer has been deeply allied to the broader black preoccupation with civic prognostication. To say this more bluntly, from the start, African Americans have been burdened with the singular, yet profound, exercise of imagining themselves as recognized full collaborators in America’s democratic experiments. While their art, particularly their literature, serves a multiplicity of agendas, it more often than not entails taking a position on this expansive national drama. Since 1945, black fiction has played a growing role in this ritual. As its profile rises, the genre shifts from inventively indexing oppression to boldly affirming pluralistic blackness. The first steps of such change occur in the shadows of war, Jim Crow, and aesthetic lacunae.
As early as 1956, Arthur P. Davis suspected that “Negro” literature existed “between a world of dying segregation and one of a developing integration” (Davis 1956: 145). Davis’s assessment encompassed all genres, but his catholic observation elucidates the particular case of black fiction. The end of World War II, a conclusion ominously tied to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ironically signals America’s slow, yet continual turn away from sanctioning a Jim Crow society. With this development, black fiction writers extended the Federal Writers Project’s attempts to recover a black folk past and surveyed the challenges of fashioning a unified black identity in the middle of the Jet, Atomic, and Space Ages. This Janus‐like orientation acquired unique contours because it occurred after a five‐year gap produced by America’s accelerated involvement in World War II. At the end of the 1930s, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison symbolized black American writers who hotly contemplated the correct use for black vernacular culture in the face of modernistic demands. They were each in the early phases of sophisticated creative experiments tied to this issue; however, the bombing at Pearl Harbor and the expansion of America’s involvement in World War II interrupted their conversation. By the mid‐1940s, much of the momentum surrounding their deliberations had been swallowed up in the atomic gestures that formed a benediction to the war. When they returned to black fiction, their efforts bore the imprint of urbanity as a mood and a setting and form as a litmus of technical progress. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the post‐war works of Chester Himes and Ann Petry.
Himes’s first published novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), literalizes the tendency to turn black fiction into a referendum on the consequences of World War II. Dramatizing conditions in the wartime shipping business, Himes’s book explores the racial realities that formed the subtext of America’s construction of an arsenal of democracy. His accounts capture not only the complicated interracial interactions that attend the attainment of manufacturing might but also the intimate intra‐racial negotiations that testify to the consequences of embracing the possibilities of freedom. Setting his book in Los Angeles, Himes identifies another destination of blacks who participated in the Great Migration. He also playfully juxtaposes westward‐tinctured narratives of hope and irrepressible permeations of prejudice. If his first extended fiction demonstrated these realities using a single black male, then his second work, Lonely Crusade (1947), incorporates a marriage plot as it looks at the City of Angels. This engagement with the male outlook on domesticity signals the author’s simultaneous attentiveness to literary and cultural history. Through strategically placing black characters in quintessentially American narrative scenarios, Himes both limns the allure and the limits of mainstream emulation and signals that the dilemma radiates into practical and creative situations. His conclusions about these matters surface in quite distinct works of fiction that span the entire era of civic experimentation. Whether through detective fiction or household dramas, his suspicions about the foreshortened political and aesthetic possibilities for black Americans sits alongside a desperate desire to discover resources within a black community facing long odds and narrow options. Ann Petry puts these situations in an East Coast landscape.
Sandwiched between Himes’s first two books, Petry’s best‐known novel, The Street, appeared in 1946. Grounding its action in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, this work engages urbanity via women, motherhood, and work, an approach that distinguishes it from most (following Lawrence Jackson) Blues School texts. Petry’s focus on femininity is not her only innovation. She also refines Himes’s attentiveness to corrosive components within black communities. Where Himes situated his early accounts of blacks exploiting blacks within the family, Petry offers a more expansive sketch of such predatory behavior. She pays careful attention to the causes of social outcomes, and by doing so, she presents modern black life at the intersection of coercion and opportunism. Her artistry invites and frustrates categorization, and she purposely courts such paradoxes. Petry composes her first novel during an era when World War II pushed the Great Depression to the margins of the American public mind. By reducing economic hardships, the war allowed the country to define democracy in everyday freedoms like eating regularly, having secure lodgings, and treating fellow citizens decently. These definitions fueled a hopefulness regarding the nation’s future, and Petry found such hope shortsighted and premature. In particular, she felt that postwar optimism ignored the Jim Crow policies that flourished from the late nineteenth well into the twentieth century and the urban circumstances that impacted personal ambition. Anticipating debates about systemic disadvantage and individual responsibility that would rage in the late twentieth century, she depicts Lutie Johnson, a character who symbolizes the illusion of social mobility. Lutie gets married, hoping that domestic partnership will unlock the path to progress. After her husband loses his job, she sees that her own employment as a live‐in maid saves money but erodes intimacy. Here, Petry captures the double bind of black femininity. While Lutie can sustain her family through labor, the only situation that she can obtain requires abandoning her family. That abandonment eventually leads to divorce from her husband and to delinquency for her son. By commenting on matrimony and motherhood, Petry fleshes out her critiques of midcentury glibness. Her critiques presage a dialogue on public hope and private pessimism that persists throughout the classic 1950s output of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright.
Ellison, Baldwin, and Wright indisputably form a Big Three in African American fiction; nonetheless, to date, no sustained piece of criticism has grappled comprehensively with their centrality. While the current treatment cannot remedy this deficiency, it will strive to tease out a few of the plotlines associated with these writers and their Civil Rights era careers. Although Ellison and Wright used the world of radical journals to enter 1930s ruminations on race and national fate, by the start of the 1950s, they were no longer operating exclusively or even predominantly within leftist spheres. In fact, the span from 1950 to 1968 would witness Ellison, Wright, and Baldwin moving to mainstream prominence as commentators on blackness and sociopolitical possibility. Their movements would register African American liminality, yet each would be distinguished by a unique outlook. Spurred by different perceptions of race and democratic fate, Ellison, Baldwin, and Wright produced signature fictions. Their output reflected their status as writers who were respectively at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of their careers. Aside from showing variety in terms of professional experience, their fictional output in the era of civic experiments also captured their contrasting artistic priorities. Fittingly, the first ripple in 1950s black fiction originated in the integrationist fantasies of Ralph Ellison.
Ellison repeatedly suggests that black racial memory owed much to the exposure to and the imbibing of America’s democratic pluralist myths. While his essays expressed this belief by addressing the race‐inspired moral oscillations in mainstream American fiction, his attitudes also surfaced in his non‐fiction accounts of military and public service. His fiction flowed along these tributaries and showed the irreducible complexity of his reasoning. While at base his first novel, Invisible Man (1952), probes the conventional idea of black identity within the context of the rural–urban relocations epitomized by the Great Migration, Ellison’s convictions about a protean American character that is already relentlessly integrated yields a text that calls that which has not been acknowledged as if it has already been seen. His unwavering dedication to telling the tale of a never fully assented racial interrelationship ultimately marks Ellison less as an idealist and more as an adherent of fantasy. Confronting the sociological narratives that tried to count their way to a complete picture of black identity, Ellison laid hold to writing and the American creative tradition as spaces that held the greatest promise in awakening a nation from its nearsighted slumbers. His journey to this position begins with Invisible Man, and over the next four decades of his life, he embellishes the same theme, namely the belief, as Martin Luther King, Jr. would phrase it, that Americans “are tied in a single garment of human destiny” (King 1986: 290). His efforts in and after Invisible Man explain much about how post‐World War II African American fiction spearheaded the academic enshrinement of black literature in the post‐Vietnam era. While Ellison’s technically audacious fantasies contribute mightily to such stature, he has collaborators in the engineering of the ascent.
James Baldwin identifies spiritual harrowing as the signature activity of American racial reckoning. While Ellison fundamentally believes that the nation’s original sins of slavery and Native displacement can be atoned for and transcended, Baldwin presents a less sanguine perspective. His paradoxical outlook on the nation’s future first emerges in his initial novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). Structured around the conversion of 14‐year‐old John Grimes, this book presents the tangled past of multiple black families that come to a head when John seeks deliverance from his inhibiting circumstances. John’s situation marks the culmination of his tribe’s journey from the Jim Crow South to the heart of a Black Mecca, Harlem. While his life unfolds on the city streets of a neighborhood mythically associated with cultural vitality, his perception of his environment notes its inadequacy vis‐à‐vis Fifth Avenue and its inability to silence the hauntings of his family’s tempestuous past. He seems poised to be the newest “native son,” an antidote to the “invisible man,” but anticipating Toni Morrison’s observation decades later, he discovers that the past – even when it is not of his own making – will not stay past. Thus, the lives of his mother, his stepfather, and his step‐aunt permeate his own pursuit of possibility. In a structural sense, Baldwin registers this fact by interrupting John’s experience of religious salvation with the backgrounds of his elders. This interruption registers all the more evocatively since these are narratives about both blood and non‐kin relatives. Within the Grimes household, Baldwin depicts the sort of amalgam that fuels African American attempts to grapple with evanescent racial forces.
John’s biological father, Richard, kills himself. Unable to recover from a wrongful arrest, he flees the determinism that circumscribes black life even in the post‐Great Migration North. Baldwin’s accounts reflect such black male angst; however, his major contributions to African American fiction stem from his awareness of how black womanhood gets caught up in the whirlwind of racial reality. Go Tell It on the Mountain captures this in John’s mother, Elizabeth, and his step‐aunt, Florence. As Elizabeth strives to put her life back on solid footing after Richard’s suicide, she marries Gabriel Grimes, a man who brings his own bouts with moral disorientation and racial reality to bear on John’s life. Her investment in matrimony and moral uprightness echo bedrock black strategies for coping with poverty and prejudice; however, Baldwin portrays them as impotent weapons against Harlem’s dark assaults. Recalling Petry’s sketches of the sinister collection of forces that beset African Americans, Baldwin carefully paints Elizabeth and her sister‐in‐law Florence as women who strive to find male partners who can help them navigate the hazardous landscape. Both women discover that whether they stay, like Gabriel, or leave, like Florence’s husband Frank, black men are so ravaged by social affliction that their protection either leaves destructive wounds or collapses in the face of absurdity. John Grimes exists within this maelstrom, and Baldwin makes Christian salvation the apparatus whereby John seeks a pathway to progress. On the surface, John’s salvation signals a buoyant ending for Go Tell It on the Mountain. Certainly, it pushes back against the tide of prescription that his elders unleash. Despite this glimmer of hope, it also predicts Baldwin’s realization that catharsis in the country must of necessity be a temporal gesture. Americans, and especially black ones – in Baldwin’s reckoning – are always on the verge of suffering. When Richard Wright reaches the end of his career, his observations on that position change.
The 1940 publication of Native Son provided Wright’s pre‐World War II referendum on America’s interracial impasse. While he completed short and long fiction throughout the burgeoning days of the Civil Rights movement, his most important later work was The Long Dream (1958), an update on his earlier ruminations about participatory democracy. When the novel was published, Wright had been an expatriate for more than a decade. His distance from the United States and his departure from the existentialist mode of his two prior novels made The Long Dream noteworthy; however, for the purposes of this chapter, it is the book’s linking of indoctrination into racial repression and international escape that commands our attention. Like Invisible Man and Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Long Dream focuses on the coming of age of a young black male. Where Ellison gives us a more continental bildungsroman with a protagonist who begins as a teenager and ends as a college‐dropout young adult, Wright deviates from that approach and modifies Baldwin’s total focus on a day in the life of a teenager. Instead, he gives readers a longitudinal tale that follows Rex “Fishbelly” Tucker from his fifth year to his eighteenth. The Long Dream unfolds in rural Mississippi, and while that setting recalls the terrain that Wright covered in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), the novel that he published following the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision inflects the recurrence with the weight of the years that have passed. A two‐generation tale that centers on a black middle‐class father’s attempt to consolidate his social and economic advancement vis‐à‐vis the life of his son, the book also opens out to a broader allegory of African American liminality. If the prospects for racial progress are uncertain in the North, then Wright speculates on what the harvest might be for folks who do not leave the region. Rex’s experiences within the strangulating circuits of enduring Jim Crow repression suggest that notwithstanding the judicial and legislative progress that percolated, freedom for the children of the Civil Rights era might require leaving not just Dixie but also America. The irony of this situation is captured at the end of the novel when Fish, who is aboard a transatlantic flight to Europe, encounters a white passenger who recounts the tale of his father who always viewed America as “My Wonderful Romance” (1958: 379). Fish openly weighs whether the country that has absorbed his own father’s soul could ever be a welcome harbor. At the least, he concludes that if it is to be redeemed, it must occur as a contrast to another space. Thus, he ventures elsewhere seeking the “bright, bursting tyrant of living sun” that could “cast the shadow of his dream athwart the stretches of time” (1958: 384).
Ellison, Wright, and Baldwin are, to an important degree, auto‐didactic. In this regard, they are literally and figuratively emblematic of the limited possibilities proffered by a segregated world and the tenacity necessary to redeem even a portion of that possibility. By the late 1960s, when the adherents of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) take center stage, college campuses become hotbeds that nourish the movement’s writers. The discussions of racial authenticity/sincerity forcefully connect the university to the ’hood; still, the BAM group does not encounter the hurdles to university admission that dogged pre‐integration black intellectuals. As a result, they embody a dilemma of privilege and constriction that haunts the black middle class even to this day. Where university education allows Amiri Baraka, for example, to evoke Antonin Artaud as he seeks to craft drama that will liberate black communities from despair, it also means that he must confront Ellison’s veneration of traditional models of artistic accomplishment if he is to take up the mantle of the serious writer. For Baraka and a host of his peers, this confrontation is both an occasion for an intra‐communal venting and a moment of ironic affiliation with a broader, heavily conflicted climate of youthful rebellion. This confrontation results in scathing indictments of the complacency and the conformist posture of the old‐line Civil Rights establishment, and it also contains a sort of evasion where the BAM artists’ choice to express themselves in poetry and drama symbolizes a retreat from a bourgeois form and a refusal to acknowledge the disorienting realities of a newly bequeathed, yet incompletely liberated, nation. It is this thread that unites Black Arts Movement authors and the post‐Vietnam War class of fiction writers. Despite this connection, the post‐Vietnam War writers’ embrace of fiction reveals their determination to re‐engage Ellison as something more than a curmudgeonly elder and their preparation to assume the enlivening properties of swagger, a term that here means the secure capacity to articulate blackness within the context of white forms and white evaluation. Here then is the emergence of soul fiction, a complement to the comfortable musical expressions of Al Green, Etta James, Betty Wright, and Jerry Butler. The incubator of this breakthrough is the critical clamoring of the ancestors, the arrival of a class of ideal readers, and the endurance of those black and unknown strugglers who agitated for greater access.
The 1960s are often seen as a period of decline for African American fiction. Because the signature genres of the decade were poetry and drama, many commentators have observed that in terms of fictional production, at best the decade was a moment of dormancy and at worst a sphere of inconsequentiality. I have written elsewhere that this foreshortened view of the 1960s is problematic. Building on that notion of the 1960s as an “incubatory” span, I want to briefly sketch the bridge between the unruffled experimentalism of the “free love” era and the eruption into the mainstream that occurs in the three decades following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. John O. Killens exemplifies the ways in which such developments can be cloaked. While Ralph Ellison is rightly celebrated as the first black writer to win the National Book Award, Killens narrowly missed accomplishing a similar racial first when his first two novels, Youngblood (1954) and And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Killens’s inclusion among the nominees for a prestigious recognition signals both his talent and the ways that the American literary mainstream was grappling with black artistic virtuosity. When we accept that African American fiction writers like William Melvin Kelley, Margaret Walker, Ernest Gaines, Ishmael Reed, and John Edgar Wideman were doing something futile in the 1960s, then we ignore the springboard that propelled black fiction into prominent, permanent public notice. Thus, although they will not command any sustained attention in this section, I do want to suggest that the writing of these authors, along with the work of folks like Clarence Major, John A. Williams, and Frank London Brown, enabled and enhanced the advances that take place between 1968 and 1993. The most conspicuous evidence of such advancement is the career of Toni Morrison.
Morrison won major literary prizes in each of the last three decades of the twentieth century. While that accomplishment alone separates her from every other African American author, her impact on black fiction is not merely a matter of literary laurels. She redeemed the interlude after the second vogue of the Negro by showing a stylistic exuberance and a thematic expansiveness that fundamentally altered black writing. Combining several promising streams that fueled African American artistic evolution, she also enlarged the tent wherein black creativity could be exhibited. She began this enlargement through her efforts on behalf of what critics have called a renaissance in black female writing. In order to understand her in these terms, we can look at her first two novels, The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973). Notwithstanding the trail blazed by Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953), and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), black fiction in the 1960s tended to center the experiences of males. This situation acutely affected a generation of writers who were born in the first decade after World War II; however, Morrison, a child of the Great Depression, lined the hymn of missing fictions that others took up in full voice. More than merely noting the deficiency, she completed works with black female protagonists and ensembles that probed a dizzying array of circumstances. The Bluest Eye often gets read as a maturation tale that juxtaposes the experiences of 11‐year‐old Pecola Breedlove and 10‐year‐old Claudia MacTeer. Touching on Claudia’s sister Frieda and classmates like Maureen Peal, the text definitely meditates on youthful female communion; however, its sophisticated musings on interracial constraint and intra‐racial reaction fuse coteries of young actors with textured gaggles of adults. Thus, when the basic relationship between Pecola and Claudia opens up, the reader discovers an array of mothers that begins with Pauline “Polly” Breedlove and Mrs. MacTeer, characters whose ideological contrasts capture Morrison’s deft use of the Dickinsonian notion of the opposite house. The author does not content herself with this accounting. Augmenting the sketch, she includes Geraldine, a composite of black middle‐class women who flee funkiness. Geraldine’s weaponized respectability contradicts the trio of whores who regale Pecola with tales of love.
Before Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Morrison gave us a book filled with black females. This concentrated bounty not only assuaged her frustration regarding the dearth of women’s stories in black fiction but also highlighted the complex questions of class, faith, ambition, and beauty that circulated among this neglected segment of society. If The Bluest Eye probed these matters via individuals who remain fixed in their chronological and social stations, then Sula invites us to witness femininity across a multi‐decade span of unfolding. Morrison’s second novel revives the trope of female friendship that she used in her first; nevertheless, the barren empathy that typified Claudia’s relationship with Pecola gets replaced with a transformative concern. Sula and Nel are occupants of opposite houses, yet that separation binds rather than separates them. When they cause the drowning of a young boy, Chicken Little, their silence becomes a vow, a sign of their confederation against the world’s assaults on their selfhood. The young boy who has to be sacrificed to their sorority recedes from memory until the end of the novel when Sula’s grandmother, Eva, raises the question of responsibility. Bedridden, she asks Nel, who has come to visit her, whether she or Sula bears the weight for Chicken Little’s death. Although her query centers on that episode, it boomerangs through the ages, getting at the bigger issue of fidelity and loyalty. Nel harbors rage because Sula has slept with her husband Jude, and as her nuclear family disintegrates, Nel blames Sula for the disruption. While Eva – who is ailing and delirious – makes no bones about Sula’s transgressions, she inquires about how much it costs to preserve propriety and overthrow fellowship. In this stark posing of the question, Eva encapsulates Morrison’s musings on individuality, collectivity, and belonging. Her explorations of these matters vault her artistry into a sphere that lavishly depicts particularities of race, gender, and nation while also evoking eternal questions connected to human life and death. She sutures the black American fiction writer to the moral reckoning that Ellison and Baldwin imagined and that Wright feared could never quite be accessed. Her efforts ironically presaged the emergence of a writer with a much different temperament.
James Alan McPherson received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1978. He was the first African American writer to garner such recognition. Occurring in the midst of Toni Morrison’s ascendency, McPherson’s accomplishment has never been forgotten; however, it has been undervalued. This is not because of professional rivalry. When McPherson finished his second book, Railroad: Trains and People in American Culture (1976), Morrison acquired the work for Random House. She clearly admired his creative gifts. Despite this admiration, McPherson’s star never shone as brightly as Morrison’s. This situation arises from complicated social realities, yet it should not obscure first of all the kind of inter‐gender collaboration that flourished in some quarters of the black fiction world. More importantly, it should not hide the ways that McPherson fed a line of aesthetic ingenuity that provided a clear connection to the integrative energy unleashed by Ralph Ellison. In his prize‐winning collection Elbow Room (1977), McPherson probes the sorts of intercultural synergies that animated Ellison’s conception of American society. The 1970s simultaneously carried vestiges of a black nationalist separatism that held over from the Black Power heyday of the 1960s and the radical integration that would witness unprecedented participation in electoral politics. Against this oxymoronic outlook on the nation’s pluralistic democracy, Ellison himself, in essays like “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (1970), reaffirmed his fundamental contention that there is no such thing as an America without blackness. McPherson would echo this sentiment in a 1987 interview where he observed that “there is no white culture in this country” (Brothers 2017). Through his short stories, he clarified what he meant in this regard. The opening tale in Elbow Room, “Why I Like Country Music,” draws on McPherson’s belief in cultural entanglement depicting a black protagonist who allies himself with a seemingly alien musical tradition. Before the days of Colt Ford and Carrie Underwood and in the midst of a terrain ruled by soul, R&B, and disco, McPherson’s decision to link his protagonist to country music carries a contrarian, almost jarring appetite for contradiction. McPherson trades in such sly conjoining, but the deep magic of his observation centers on his investment in the ties that bind. If he, like his mentor Ellison, signals to the mainstream of the nation that blackness forms a part of the warp and woof of the national landscape, then he also reminds black folks that they must embrace their centrality within a maelstrom that also threatens to consume them. This belief in what Martin Luther King, Jr. called an “inescapable network of mutuality” (King 1986: 290) animated McPherson and another major voice of the late twentieth century.
Charles Johnson published his first novel, Faith and the Good Thing (1974), four years after the appearance of Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Devoted to what he called philosophical fiction, his career unfolded across both short and extended works, reaching a high‐water mark with his 1990 text Middle Passage. There, Johnson consolidated a trend that surfaced following the Civil Rights movement, namely the use of slavery as a literary device to explore African American identity. Where earlier writers like Margaret Walker in Jubilee (1966), Ernest Gaines in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Ishmael Reed in Flight to Canada (1984), and Sherley Anne Williams in Dessa Rose (1986) focused on the North American experiences of enslaved Africans, Johnson crafted a reverse Middle Passage narrative that took his protagonist, Rutherford Calhoun, from New Orleans to Africa. This plot arc registered Johnson’s attempt to stretch the formal capacity of the neo‐slave text. Instead of concentrating on how to resolve the deprivation of agency associated with relocating from the Motherland to the New World, he begged the question of whether a black individual’s connection to Africa was somehow severed by the conditioning of America. Beyond opening up new aesthetic ground, Johnson’s depiction raised questions about Reagan/Bush‐era black identity. In the early 1980s, Molefi Asante customized a long tradition of black nationalistic thought by proffering Afrocentricity as a critique to classical white Western systems of thought. Johnson noted this emergence of binary racial reasoning, and by way of problematizing the balkanized notion of an ur black self, he followed Ellison’s lead and posited a pliable blackness that encompassed a wide swath of perspectives. His portrayals not only troubled the identity politics that produced color‐blind reactionary reductionism but also probed African American possibility in relationships that examined multiple allegiances and avenues to insight. His work opened to an urban–rural binary that found august expression in the work of John Edgar Wideman and Ernest Gaines.
Wideman broke into public notice by becoming the first African American since Alain Locke to earn and to finish a Rhodes Scholarship. Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, he built an impressive pedigree by finishing three novels. This output ended in 1973, when Wideman became frustrated with aspects of his prose and began an eight‐year wood‐shedding period. Looking at this hiatus alone evokes fascinating comparisons to the kind of pause that occurs in the careers of black creators like Sonny Rollins. Even more interesting, Wideman’s return was marked by a dual commitment to embracing the black folk and acknowledging the vitality of black archives. His efforts in this regard surface in accounts of Homewood, the Pittsburgh neighborhood where he grew up. While Wideman had written of Homewood in his early work, his depictions in Sent for You Yesterday (1983) signal a determination to tease out how urban decay has taken once vibrant black city spaces and transformed them into sites where the rituals of black survival are rapidly receding. Wideman relocates this exploration to another Pennsylvania metropolis in his PEN‐Faulkner winning novel, Philadelphia Fire (1990). Where Johnson probes the elemental challenges of multiple expressive impulses palpating within a single black body, Wideman inscribes the particularities of post‐Civil Rights era history to weigh how the simultaneous rise of a black middle and impoverished class should be viewed in an America on the brink of the last decade of the twentieth century. His accounts bring the disappointments and the equivocations of the city into view. Ernest Gaines scans these same matters from the standpoint of rural landscapes.
Some scholars of late twentieth‐century African American fiction declare that aesthetic experiments tied to non‐linear narration and formal fracturing signal the most sophisticated creative response to the debilitating conditions of black urban modernity. If Wideman exemplifies this arm of black fiction, then Ernest Gaines epitomizes a strain of black writers who insist that venerable artistic and moral foundations still exist in the South. These efforts are most conspicuously present in A Lesson Before Dying (1993). Framed around a wrongful conviction in rural Louisiana, Gaines’s novel presents the efforts of Grant Wiggins, a young black schoolteacher, to establish a meaningful connection with Jefferson, a young black man who is on death row. Their attempts occur against the backdrop of elders who admonish the university‐educated Grant to take seriously the seemingly futile task of communing with a condemned man. By presenting Grant as an unlikely benefactor of the experience, Gaines dialogues with Wideman regarding the relationship between the black bourgeoisie and the victims of the prison industrial complex and the economic recession. He highlights how a presumption of superiority must yield to a sense of inadequacy before communal bonds can be revived. While elders teach Grant one part of this lesson, he also acquires perspective from Vivian, his love interest. These dimensions of Gaines’s novel touch upon crucial facets of black reality within the late twentieth century, namely whether class polarization and the black relationship crisis can yield to a nourishing, sustainable togetherness. His fixation on the South predicts a sphere of inquiry that will take a more prominent place in the next generation of black fiction writers, but his musings on black love return us to the kinds of creative gestures that make this moment the Age of Morrison.
Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992) exist as Morrison’s explicit engagement with both the Reconstruction era and the Roaring Twenties. Although her sketch of these moments remains oblique, the plots of these books possess one parallel element that ties them to A Lesson Before Dying: black couples. Sethe and Paul D in Beloved and Joe and Violet Trace in Jazz are poles around which history swirls. While their relationships contain devastating disruptions that push them to the brink of dissolution, these couples persist even as the world around them fundamentally transforms. This narrative energy resists a sort of Victorian investment in matrimonial bliss; however, it does recall the sustenance Hurston invested in the interactions between Janie and Tea Cake. Within the framework of black life beset by foundational assaults, Morrison posits heterosexual togetherness as an understudied palliative. This gesture partakes less of a fantastic conviction that love will conquer all and more of a prodding toward attending to what Michael G. Cooke once called “intimacy” (Cooke 1984: x). If truth demands the acknowledgment of eviscerating forces that seek to annihilate black selfhood, then a parallel realization requires that black survivalist techniques of all sorts must be considered seriously. This literal showcasing of the black couple suggests that the trouble of the day can be met more fruitfully with company. In metaphoric terms, it suggests that the last three decades of the twentieth century are not about a gendered explosion in black fiction writing but rather about a balanced cohort of sable scribes. The final trio of writers in this treatment suggest that such symmetry still has a place.
Edward P. Jones’s short story collection Lost in the City (1992) marked him as a worthy inheritor of the mantle passed from Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson to Charles Johnson. While Jones – unlike most of the writers in this section – is not a child of the new black or the post‐soul aesthetic, he forms a fascinating hinge from Civil Rights era stylists to post 9/11 and Obama‐era black writers. The tales in Lost in the City cover topics like gospel music groups, missing persons cases, and trips to the social security office. Capturing a version of black community that becomes less and less legible in the aftermath of crack, the collection both recalls the networks that fueled such togetherness and notes the new rituals that have been substituted for older lifeways. Jones thus joins Morrison and Gaines in weighing whether venerated institutions and survival tactics can continue to sustain black collectivities in a modern world. If his first book estimates these matters through the lens of twentieth‐century city life, then his second publication positions such considerations elsewhere. The Known World (2003), Jones’s sophomore effort, revisits the neo‐slave narrative form that so many black novelists used in the late twentieth century. By evoking this structure and the themes that underlie it, the writer intimates that notwithstanding the geopolitical reconfigurations caused by 9/11 and the war on terror, American blackness remains a negotiation rooted firmly in a philosophical calibration of enslavement. In the first decade of the twenty‐first century, this position touched on a welter of conversations regarding national belonging.
Jones uses enslavement to gauge the existence and the contours of African American agency. Occurring on the heels of the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, his artistic explorations connected twenty‐first‐century musings on voter suppression with longer‐standing wonderment about American attitudes toward black participation in democracy. This context for the evocation of enslavement struck multiple twenty‐first‐century artists who kept the question of experience under bondage lively in the national imaginary. In his second short story collection, Jones added another dimension to his political pondering. The Known World placed its characters within a nineteenth‐century social milieu. Returning to the impulses established in Lost in the City, All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006) – Jones’s third book – explores black individuals in a late twentieth‐century context. This chronological span crystallized the writer’s interest in offering a referendum on post‐Civil Rights era social conditions. By casting these evaluations against the backdrop of the nation’s capital, Jones updated vital conventions in black fiction. Washington, DC as a setting echoes the city‐centered locales that overrun black writing in the aftermath of World War II. Despite this similarity to earlier foci, the depictions in Jones’s stories partake of a unique civic resonance. Washington, DC stands as a potent symbol of national governance and cultural myth. In Three Days Before the Shooting (2010), the work that preoccupied him for the last four decades of his life, Ralph Ellison forcefully captured the consequences of inserting black characters into DC’s nostalgia‐laden spheres. Where Ellison grounds his explorations in themes connected to a pre‐Civil Rights era, Jones captures modern difficulties connected to drug dealing, educational inequities, and transgenerational enmity. His DC is less an area defined exclusively or even predominantly by the statuary which ennobles seminal founding fathers and nation builders; rather, it is a spot where the black folks who walk in the shadows of such monuments come into razor‐sharp focus. Jones suggests that these lives might reflect and refract the transcendent values associated with the venerated great white males of history. When their experiences are foregrounded and the white powers recede, a different kind of national identity emerges. He sympathizes with the new dimensions provided by these correctives. If his DC musings occupy a distinctly sober register, then Colson Whitehead provides a northeastern preoccupation that sprawls from the Clinton to the Obama era.
Black fiction writers between 1969 and 1993 – the subjects of the prior section of this chapter – were to a large extent forging their careers in the context of the Conservative Revolution. During the years when they were writing, Republicans held the White House (with the lone exception of Jimmy Carter from 1976 to 1980). The extent to which presidential regimes impact black creative practice should not be overstated; however, the symbolic import of which figure holds the highest elected office in the land cannot be ignored. Thus, it is noteworthy that between 1993 and 2016, the bulk of the years covered in the last section of this chapter, the Republican hold on the presidency was reversed, and Democratic control of the office is only interrupted by the two terms of George Bush from 2001 and 2009. When we consider the last generation of black authors in this study, we are to a large extent looking at folks who came of age in a time framed by the emergence of Bill Clinton, the fact of Y2K, the terrorist attacks that took place on 9/11, and the election and service of the first black president in American history. No writer’s work captures this roiling set of forces more fully than Colson Whitehead. On the one hand, echoing works likes Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) and Brent Wade’s Company Man (1992), his debut novel The Intuitionist (1999) probes how an ambitious black professional class ran into glass ceilings and assumptions of incompetence in an urban world where glimmers of opportunity were dawning after the intrepid activism of earlier generations. Lila Mae Watson, the novel’s protagonist, works as an elevator inspector. Since she is the first back female from her school of inspection to hold the position, she immediately raises questions of competence tied to contemporary issues like affirmative action and women’s liberation. Whitehead’s accounts sensitively relate how these elements reflect prejudiced social institutions; however, he always pairs his sketches of environmental conditions with an attention to how a protean individualism combats the forces arrayed against black thriving. With this aspect of his art, he provides a new outlook on the terrific span of conditions that inform modern black life. His conclusions propel us toward fascinating assessments of blackness and democratic participation.
From chronicling 1980s bourgeois accomplishments in his fourth novel, Sag Harbor (2009), to charting the emancipatory acts of nineteenth‐century black folks in his sixth novel, The Underground Railroad (2016), Whitehead resourcefully mines the collisions between individuation and collectivity that recur in African American life. He fuses these chronologically disparate fictional realms by channeling Dave Chappelle and meditating on a pair of 15‐year‐old protagonists, Benji in Sag Harbor and Cora in Underground Railroad. While each remains firmly ensconced in the particulars of their moment, both also surface as complex responses to different ends of Barack Obama’s time in the Oval Office. Touré, reviewing Sag Harbor, declared that Whitehead’s novel was a paean to “post‐blackness,” a notion of viewing racial reality less as a “dogmatic code” and more as an “open source document” (Touré 2009: BR1). If this gloss of the text exults in the afterglow of Obama’s election and celebrates choice as a determinative force in black identity, then Underground Railroad seems a fresh taking stock of how black folks’ liberty labor brushes up against a wide, intractable network of constraint. In returning to a theme, enslavement, that has preoccupied black fiction writers since the Civil Rights movement, Whitehead affirms the canonicity of this trope and redirects our conclusions about what Martin Luther King, Jr. called American mutuality. Specifically, he raises the question of whether blackness can ever be accepted as essentially and not incidentally American. By teasing out how singularity and community inflect this dilemma, Whitehead adds his voice to earlier choruses that fought to find words for this specific situation. He does so within a time span that uncannily maps vital developments in African American visions of civic belonging. Recently, his northeastern limning of these matters has been complemented by writers who recall Ernest Gaines and transport their ruminations to Dixie.
Jesmyn Ward situates her fiction in a world that exists far away from New York City. Reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, and Albert Murray, she paints a southern landscape that teems beneath the apron of modern American life. Tayari Jones, one of Ward’s contemporaries, generates fiction that meticulously documents the mores, manners, and hypocrisies of black bourgeois strivers in the New South. While Ward centers her artistic endeavors in the same part of the country, her depictions shift us from the asphalt to the mud. Her second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), vivifies the implications of this shift. Focusing on a family preparing for Hurricane Katrina, the book, through its central character Esch, illuminates black female desire, showing how it meshes with the stark realities of poverty and ambition. Ward’s attention to a black teenage mother and her dog‐fighting sibling shows her awareness of a rich black creative archive and the harvest of an art that no longer courts mainstream acclaim. When she includes an epigraph from the southern rapper Pastor Troy, she makes legible some of the heterogeneous moral arbiters concealed in twenty‐first‐century black experience. The fact that such cultural excavation yielded her two National Book Awards in a six‐year period bespeaks the watershed era that black fiction writing is experiencing. At the same moment that established authors like Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Percival Everett continue to productively embellish their careers, a new crop of writers like Martha Southgate, Victor Lavelle, and Kiese Laymon are announcing their presence on the literary scene. This concomitant mingling of elders and new jacks bespeaks a notion of community that both affirms nourishing tendencies from earlier moments but also abandons destructive ruptures that led to stasis and disjuncture. More than anything else, this sort of confederated creativity provides the most impressive bulwark against the death of African American fiction.
The politics–aesthetics binary never convincingly captured the state of black fiction. In the Age of Trump, the inadequacy of this sort of polarized position taking grows even more evident. While such shorthand fails to encompass black creative efforts, it does remind us of the national drama that parallels the African American literary project. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. once opined that black literature constituted a unique tradition, in part because nowhere else in the world had a population sought so literally to write its way to freedom. Post‐World War II black fiction reflects a panoply of perspectives on the enduring efficacy of such a project; however, most writers recognize that taking a position regarding such ambitions constitutes a crucial preamble to black artistry. As generations of authors share these positions on blackness and American democracy, a technically accomplished, racially aware literary culture surfaces. This development bears pondering. When commercial possibility expands and the aggregation of a multigenerational artistic cohort advances, the power of pluralistic blackness circulates boldly. Such circulation does not stop bitter debates across gender lines nor does it smooth every dustup between youth and experience. It does reposition the desirability of unanimity unleashing variegation as a refulgent resource within the ever‐enlarging archive of African American writing. This archive contains labyrinthine qualities, and it holds Ralph Ellison’s integrative sensibility, Toni Morrison’s poetics of the unspeakable, and Colson Whitehead’s fabulist conglomerates. Despite this protean character, African American fiction after World War II converges in one insistence. It never dissolves the creative calling from its social mission. With this verity intact, it ventures to meet the new day.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 16 (THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT AND THE RACIAL DIVIDE).