Q: One of your
specialties is Black literature. How/why did you choose this area
to specialize in?
- A: I had both personal reasons and what I like to think are practical
business reasons. The civil rights movement was very active when I
was a college student, and in the years right after that, and while I was
only involved in very minor ways (participating in a tutoring program,
etc.) it was something I believed in, and I began to read and buy books
related to blacks in America. In fact, this was one of the common
areas of interest between me and my first husband (now deceased), who was
black and working as a part-time lecturer in black studies when I met
him. Since we had two daughters, I continued to buy books in this
area, so that they would have them available.
When I started as a bookseller back in 1993, I was planning on
selling books mostly by catalogues and at shows, and so within the
overall area of modern first editions, I decided to focus on women
authors and African American writers, two areas I both liked and felt
were somewhat neglected, since historically most booksellers and book
collectors in the U.S. have been white males. I also felt that since I was
more knowledgeable about these areas than many booksellers, it gave me a
little bit of an advantage that would offset my newness in the
business.
Q: Which Black authors do you consider the best overall and
why?
- A: In terms of sheer literary elegance, I would have to say Ralph
Ellison and the best of W. E. B. DuBois's writings are extremely
powerful. I think we all know the list of classic African American
authors, ranging from Frederick Douglass to Hurston to Wright and to
Baldwin, so I am not going to select a 'best' from among them.
I am not even going to try and select some favorites because so
often it is a question of which writer affects you the most on a
particular day or in a particular mood. I will mention a few who I
think don't get the recognition they deserve: Percival Everett (who has
written many novels over about 20 years, with a new, very funny one out
just this year), Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones (her personal tragedies made
her name better known for a while, but I think she is still not read
enough), James Alan McPherson (he won the Pulitzer prize for one
collection of short stories, but I wish he would write more), Sherley
Anne Williams, George Lamming (from the Caribbean) I could go
on and on and on another day, my list might be completely
different. Many of the African American writers whom I like are
poets, rather than novelists.
Q: Do you think Black authors have a unique perspective because of
being Black, or is that irrelevant? If they do have a unique
perspective, do you think they're writing things that non-Blacks can
relate to, or are their experience foreign to most other races/ethnic
groups? I guess what I'm asking is whether most Black literature is
based on a past of poverty and oppression that any struggling ethnic
group can relate to, or is it unique to American Blacks?
- A: To the extent that some (not most) African American literature is
based on a past of poverty and oppression, I think it speaks to all
groups who have struggled against these - however, the black experience
in the U.S. is unique in many ways: the length of their history in the U.S.
going back to the 17th century, the fact that they were brought to the
U.S. unwillingly as slaves, and also that the form of slavery to which
these Africans were subjected in the west was in many ways the worst the
world has ever known (the only one which considered slaves as chattels,
of no more significance than ownership of cattle).
The other important thing to realize in looking at African American
literature is that in many ways it is part of a world literature or
a trans-Atlantic literature. The term "diaspora" is used
to indicate the spread of those of African descent to most parts of the
western world. So my own personal perspective has been broadening
to include Afro-Caribbean writers (many of whom left the Caribbean and
went to England, France, Canada and the U.S.), Afro-Brazilian, and
African writers. In fact, if you are talking about a writer from
Puerto Rico or Cuba who has come to the United States, is that writer a
Latin American or an African American or both?
One other point: the best literature is universal - Thus Grapes of Wrath
speaks to all readers, not just migrant farm workers, and I think so does
Wright's Native Son, and Baldwin's Go Tell It on a Mountain and Zorah
Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine, to give just a few
examples.
Q: Do most Black authors only write about Black characters?
I'm curious about this, as Caucasian authors seem to write about all
nationalities and racial and ethnic groups (although perhaps not with the
authority that an author from a particular country or racial or ethnic
group brings to writing), and most of the admittedly few current Black
authors I've read seem to stick to Black characters and Black
situations.
- A. I guess I am partly curious about why you say that white writers
seem to write about all nationalities and ethnic groups. Certainly
one sees this in children's literature where in the past the writers were
almost exclusively white, but the children were often from different
countries, or little black children. But I think in serious
literature it is much less common for a white writer to have the
protagonist of the work be of another race. Again, in the past,
some Southerners wrote novels in dialect, but these were intended to
confirm white readers in their belief that Negroes were simple,
child-like, happy folks, or untrustworthy and shifty or whatever.
I don't want to say that there aren't any exceptions, because of
course, there are but they are precisely that, exceptions: To give
just one very modern example, Susan Straight is a white woman who set her
first few books exclusively within the black community but she was
married to a black man and living within that community at the time
and her books stand out precisely because they are uncommon.
Some other interesting exceptions occurred during the Harlem
Renaissance when you had a white woman like Nancy Cunard create the
massive anthology "Negro" or Marc Connelly write a play like "Green
Pastures" Langston Hughes referred to this phenomenon rather
uncomplimentarily in one of his poems, but the fact remains that the
Harlem Renaissance was a time in which it was "popular" to be
black. Similarly, during the Civil Rights era and the Black Power
movement, there was a certain allure to the whole scene which led to many
writers who were not black featuring black protagonists.
However, it is true that most white writers have, in a sense, more
freedom to write totally outside their own culture or their own
experiences. They have been given this freedom by society, where
they are not expected to "uphold the race" and by publishers.
However, one of the ongoing issues for many black writers is not just
expressing themselves creatively but also how much of an obligation do
they have to work to correct injustice through their writing.
Should they always be thinking of the white reader who might read their
books and find his/her stereotypes confirmed if they described a black
man as brutal or unfaithful (a criticism leveled against Alice Walker and
Gayl Jones, for example)?
Richard Wright, whose books focused on the daily injustices blacks faced
in America, felt that Zora Neale Hurston was wrong in writing her novels
about a self-contained black world. I just got a copy of Bronze,
the second collection of poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson, a minor
Harlem Renaissance writer. Her first collection was criticized
because it dealt with the "heart" and not race, so this was her book of
poems on race (although still infused by the heart), and in her last
book, she again ignored race.
An interesting example is Charles Perry: his first and only
published novel Portrait of a Young Man Drowning, was based on his own
experience of juvenile gangsters in his Brooklyn neighborhood, but it
features almost exclusively white characters - a decision made, according
to Perry's daughter, out of a fear that issues of race could cloud the
humanity of the characters. Did this make it harder for him to get
published?
Just two more very different examples: Many people still do not realize
that Frank Yerby was a black man. His earlier books did not have a
picture of him on the dustjacket, and almost all of his books are
historical fiction, adventure novels, and so on, set almost exclusively
within a white world. When Charles Chesnutt published his first
book, even though it used dialect, it was thought that he was
white. In fact, he was light skinned enough that he could have
easily passed for white, but instead his novels became increasing more
"political" and less popular. What had been considered his
last novel, The Colonel's Dream, was published while he was still
relatively young, and only a few years after his first, and sold
poorly. In fact, a recently found later novel of his has just
been published, and this is the story of a man who grows up thinking he
is black, and discovers that he is white (does this count as a black
writer writing a novel with a white protagonist?)
So African American authors have both pressure from others in their
communities to write about black people for many different reasons and
from publishers who find it easier to keep writers in a 'box', a desire
to overcome the prejudices and injustices they have faced, a dramatic
history to write about is it surprising that they
mostly write about black characters?
Q: Do you believe it is harder, today, for a Black author to find a
publisher? To be marketed as a mainstream author by
publishers? Or do their works command a smaller audience which
discourages publishers from pushing their work?
- A: Most African American writers would be considered 'mid-list'
writers. I think that all mid-list writers are having problems now
in finding publishers, but yes, this situation is probably exacerbated
for black authors. I recently went to a signing by Mary Monroe, who
just published her second novel more than 10 years after her first
one and the reason was that she could not find a publisher. I
can give several other examples of women who have had good critical
reviews, or even won prizes for their books, but they wind up with no
publisher for a while.
Marketing is, of course, another issue and it is one that
becomes very obvious in some bookstores where African American writers
are for the most part put in a separate section of the store. In a
way, this increases the 'ghettoization' of black authors, by implying
that only black readers will be interested in their books. Writers
like Toni Morrison obviously have broken out of this, but I think this
trend is increasing.
Q: What genres seem to attract the most Black authors? Does
their being Black usually have an effect on these choices?
- A: African Americans write in all genres aside from straight
"literature" there are many black writers in mysteries, romance, science
fiction, juvenile and children's literature. Perhaps the genres
where they are relatively under-represented are science fiction and
Western fiction.
Q: Am I mistaken that most of the currently popular Black
literature authors are women? If that is true, what is your
thinking on why?
- A: If by popular you are referring to those who appear on the
best seller lists consistently like Bebe Moore Campbell or Terry
MacMillan or even Toni Morrison, then it might seem so. Remember
most book buyers in the U.S. are women, and one of the things that
Campbell and MacMillan seem to have done is to write novels about black
women facing emotional/family/romantic/financial problems in a way that
has more to do with being middle class American than specifically African
American so that makes their novels popular enough that they will
hit the best seller list. I don't pay attention to the best
seller lists all that much but I will agree that there do not seem
to be any African American male writers who approach the popularity of
Clancy, King, Koontz, etc.
However, when looking at literature overall, there are many popular
African American writers who are men. With some exceptions,
popularity usually means that a book is less challenging, so I am not
sure that is an important goal.
Q: Are most Black literature authors (as opposed to
autobiographical, nonfiction, or politically related writing) from the
U.S.? If so, why?
- A: Well, I dealt with this a little above, but no, most of them are
not from the United States. Africa and the Caribbean have both
produced Nobel Prize winning authors (to use just one yardstick)
the Caribbean especially has produced a large number of interesting
authors, both in the past with such writers as Aime Cesaire and currently
with not just "giants" of literature like Derek Walcott, but
also with many interesting younger writers, such as Jamaica Kincaid and
Edwidge Danticat and Caryl Phillips (and remember, not all black
literature is written in English - much of it is in French and some in
Spanish.) Many writers move between countries - in other
words, lots of Caribbean writers go to Canada or England or the U.S., and
back again.
Q: Do you think that popular Black authors are helped a lot by
the publicity Oprah gives their work? What other venues or people
are helping Black authors?
- A: I can't really give a complete list of authors Oprah has selected,
but it seems to me that her effect has been much more dramatic on some of
the white woman writers she has selected: specifically, I am thinking of
her first selection, Jane Hamilton, who was very little known until that
happened.
In a sense, Oprah is much more conservative in selecting African
Writers: many have already won recognition. Toni Morrison was
already a Nobel Laureate, Ernest Gaines had won the National Book Award,
Crosby books were already all best sellers, etc. I might be missing
someone but offhand I cannot think of an unknown young African American
fiction writer who she selected.
Q: I've had some Black customers who only collect works by Black
authors. Do you find this prevalent?
- A: Most collectors have to limit their collection - African
American collectors are no exception. Certainly, many of them
collect primarily in certain periods (Harlem Renaissance, or modern
literature or late
19th
century), but I have had African American collectors who only collect
mysteries, one who was a serious Anne Rice collector, others who collect
children's books.
And many of the collectors whom I have dealt with who collect
African American authors are not themselves African American.
Q. What percentage
of your sales are books by Blacks?
- A: I actually looked this up because I wasn't sure and I was
surprised to see that African American books are approximately 15% of the
books which we have catalogued and represent about 15% of our sales (in
terms of numbers of books). The only difference is that the average
sales price is somewhat higher than our overall average, and this
reflects the fact that I will put more energy into "buying" in this area.
I would like to see a higher percentage of our books in this area,
actually, but finding really good quality books is becoming more and more
challenging.
Interview by Shirley Bryant.
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Long considered to be the first novel to be published in the US by
an African American women writer, "Iola Leroy" by Frances E. W.
Harper, first published in Philadelphia in 1892, remains an important
landmark in black literature, even though modern scholarship has
discovered earlier novels.
1829 bill from an estate sale listing the slaves sold at auction.
Documents like this are a vivid testament to the inhumanity of
slavery.
Zorah Neale Hurston's first book in a slightly battered, but still
vivid and attractive, and very scarce, dustjacket with art by Miguel
Covarrubias.
Two books by women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Shown is an
uncommon inscription by Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Fauset in a
first edition of her novel "Plum Bun" and a copy of Georgia Douglas
Johnson's second book of poetry, "Bronze."
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