[Matthew
Teutsch is a scholar of American, African American, and Southern
literature, and Rhetoric and Composition. He blogs at Interminable Rambling,
as well as the AAIHS’s Black
Perspectives site, and is a prolific
Tweeter.]
I’m one of those people that typically remembers when and
where I first pick up a book or record. I used to recall with fondness the time
and place I got a CD. Remember those? I could tell you where I was the first
time I heard Radiohead’s Kid A (in
the car at a bank teller window with one of those cassette adaptors for a
portable CD player). The same goes for most books that I read too. Typically, I
stumble upon these books not knowing what to expect. At other times, I have
some idea about what I’m in store for before I even begin to read the first
page. I want to take you on a journey into the past where I will tell you about
some of the books and authors I’ve read that I think need to be picked up, read
and reexamined. My research focuses on African American literature, so this
list consists of five African American works that we need to reconsider.
Arna Bontmemps’ The Old South (1973)
Even though I’m from Louisiana, I had never read any work by
Bontemps until I graduated with my PhD. I had a professor who actually left
Bontemps’ novel Black
Thunder (1936) in my mailbox as he was decluttering his office. I read
Bontemps’ narrative of Gabriel Proser’s failed slave rebellion then picked up
his novel about the Hattian Revolution, Drums
at Dusk (1939), from the library, and found God Sends Sunday (1931) in a Barnes & Noble in Columbus, OH,
during a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute on Paul
Laurence Dunbar (more on him later). All of Bontemps’ work needs to be read,
including his nonfiction. However, I would suggest that we begin by looking at
his collection of short stories The Old
South, a book that appeared the same year he passed away. The book collects
stories about the South and the African American experience, layered with
folklore, religion, pain, suffering, and joy. His most well-known story, “A
Summer Tragedy” appears alongside stories such as “Heathen
at Home” and “Mr.
Kelso’s Lion,” two pieces that explore white liberalism and white
supremacy. Along with these stories, the collection includes Bontemps’ essay “Why
I Returned (A Personal Essay),” a piece that needs to be read and
considered in relation to works by authors such as Ernest J. Gaines and Alice
Walker who write about returning to the South, and even in relation to authors
like Richard Wright who write about leaving it. Unfortunately, The Old South is
no longer in print, so the only option to get a copy is to either find one in
the library or order one online. I got lucky by purchasing a copy for under
$5.00. My goal is to get The Old South back in print so more people can study
his short stories along with his novels.
Frank Yerby Speak Now (1969)
Every time the Friends of the Library had a sale in
Lafayette, LA, I would be there ready to spend time searching through the
countless books for ones that would set on my shelf. Without fail, I would
always find first editions of Frank Yerby’s books at the sale, and I would
always buy them. Yerby wrote 33 novels, numerous short stories, and poems. Even
though he is one of the bestselling African American authors of all time, scholars
have somewhat ignored him, or he becomes a guilty pleasure. Robert Bone once
referred to Yerby as the “prince of the pulpsters.” To a certain extent, this
label fits Yerby; however, we need to look past his “costume novel” exterior
and peel back the layers that make up his works. For me, this began when I
found Speak Now in a bookstore in New
Orleans in the fall of 2015. I already had numerous books by Yerby on my shelf,
but I had never read one yet. I couldn’t pass up buying another first edition
Yerby, so I looked at the cover where an African American man and a white woman
stared back at me as revolutionaries charged towards the right of the cover in
the background. This was nothing like the “genteel” covers of his other novels.
In fact, far from being, as some have termed him, placating to his white
readers, Yerby attacks ideas of beauty, identity, interracial relationships,
and postcolonial issues in a narrative that, while at times heavy-handed,
clearly counters much of the criticism that critics and scholars lobbied
against him. He followed Speak Now up with two books about an African man named
Hwesu in The
Dahomean (1971), which takes place entirely in Africa, and in A
Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest (1979) which sees Hwesu as a slave in the Deep
South. I would suggest, if you want to read Yerby, start with Speak Now and
look back at his numerous “costume novels” such as The Foxes of Harrow (1946), The Vixens (1947), Benton’s Row (1954), and others to see the ways that Yerby confronts
whites and subverts their ideas subtly through his narratives.
Albery Allson Whitman
The Rape of Florida or Twasinta’s
Seminoles (1884)
Unlike the other works on this list, I do not recall the
exact moment I discovered Albery Allson Whitman. I do know that I found him
while working on my dissertation. His work interested me partly because he
wrote epic poems and explored the intersections between Native Americans and
African Americans during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Not A Man, and Yet A Man (1877) focuses
on the Midwest and Fort Dearborne, and The Rape of Florida
centers around the Seminole Wars. Whitman was not the only author of the period
to explore these junctions, Pauline Hopkins did as well in Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902).
What struck me about The Rape of Florida,
apart from it being about Spanish settlers, runaway slaves from Georgia, and
the Seminole, was Whitman’s decision to write the epic poem in Spenserian
stanzas. This, along with the epic nature, intrigued me, and led me to do more
research on him. James Weldon Johnson claims Whitman as the best African
American poet between Phyllis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and he
appeared in numerous
anthologies through about the 1970s when he, along with other authors such
as John Marrant and John Russwurm started to disappear as well. Like other
authors during the Nadir, we need to reexamine Whitman’s work. At this time,
the most recent book that I know of that explores Whitman in detail is Ivy
Wilson’s At The Dusk of Dawn (2009).
Whitman’s entire oeuvre is important because it provides us with a link from
earlier African American poets to Dunbar. In fact, Dunbar and Whitman both read
at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and Dunbar had a signed copy of The Rape of Florida in his library in
Dayton, Ohio.
Paul Laurence Dunbar The Fanatics (1901)
In the summer of 2015, I participated in an NEH
Summer Institute on Paul Laurence Dunbar. I applied for a couple of
reasons; one of the main reasons was because I wanted to continue my work on
Whitman, so exploring the connections between Dunbar and Whitman would be an
important aspect of that project. Before going to Ohio, I did not realize how
prolific Dunbar was during his short life. He started his own newspaper with
the Wright brothers while in high school, wrote numerous volumes of short
stories, wrote
plays, and wrote four novels. This is not including his poetry, newspaper
writings, and speeches. Most people only know a handful of poems Dunbar wrote,
the ones that appear in anthologies or collections; however, to understand the
full picture of Dunbar’s work, we need to look at everything. For me, the short
stories are fertile ground for exploration, along with the novels. Like
Yerby, three of his four novels center on white characters, while African
American characters exist in the background, and The
Love of Landry (1900) even takes place in the West, Colorado to be exact.
While interesting in their own rights, The
Fanatics presents readers with two families in Ohio that have a falling out
when the Civil War breaks out. One family is from the North and the other is
from the South. We need to consider this novel in relation to other
reconciliation novels of the period. We can even think about this novel as a
migration narrative; at one point, blacks come North to Ohio and experience
inter and intraracial oppression. As Herbert Woodward Martin, Ronald Primeau,
and Gene Andrew Jarrett say, the move and “[t]he resistance of Stothard and
many like him forecasts the modern African American ‘ghetto.’”
Attica Locke The Cutting Season (2012)
I first heard about Attica Locke when she won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence
in 2103. For me, The Cutting Season
caused me to think about the numerous ways that we examine and “preserve”
history. Considering discussions surrounding the Confederate Battle Flag in
2015 and the current conversations around the monuments in New Orleans, Locke’s
novel interrogates these sites and images of history that we continually
encounter on a day-to-day basis. Specially, Locke explores how we react to the
plantation homes that dot the Southern landscape, especially in Louisiana.
Taking place right outside of Baton Rouge, on the River Road, The Cutting Season is a mystery novel
where the past and the present collide. The narrative revolves around Caren
Gray, an African American woman who went to college but returned to Belle Vie
Plantation to manage it. Her ancestors, and those who owned her ancestors,
lived and died on the same land that she oversees now. Throughout, Locke calls
upon readers to question
the language we use to describe the past and to interrogate
the ways we remember that history. As well, Locke looks at the ways
workers, specifically migrant workers, become exploited in the present. The
woman that Caren finds murdered, Inès, is an undocumented migrant worker
who left her family so she could make money to help them survive. In many ways,
Inès’
story presents a similar narrative to that of Gaines
in his own life and in his novels. Locke’s book needs to be read within the
context of authors like Gaines, Walker, Morrison, and Sherley Anne
Williams.
There are many more underread novels and texts that I could
talk about here, but I think five is enough to get started with. Here are more
texts if you are interested in reading more works that we need to reexamine or
even begin to examine. I hope you enjoyed this list. Let me know what you think
about these books and authors on Twitter @SilasLapham.
[Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other books you’d share?]
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