I am preoccupied with the spiritual survival, the survival whole of my people. But beyond that, I am committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women. In The Third Life of Grange Copeland, ostensibly about a man and his son, it is the women and how they are treated that colors everything. In my new book, In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women, thirteen women--mad, raging, loving, resentful, hateful, strong, ugly, weak, pitiful, and magnificent--try to live with the loyalty to black men that characterizes all of their lives. For me, black women are the most fascinating creations in the world.
Next to them, I place the old people--male and female--who persist in their beauty in spite of everything. How do they do this, knowing what they do? Having lived what they have lived? It is a mystery, and so it lures me into their lives. My grandfather, at eighty-five, never been out of Georgia, looks at me with the glad eyes of a three-year-old. The pressures on his life have been unspeakable. How can he look at me in this way? "Your eyes are widely open flowers. Only their centers are darkly clenchedTo conceal Mysteries That lure me to a keener blooming Than I know. And promise a secret I must have." All of my "love poems" apply to old, young, man, woman, child, and growing things....
It is possible that white male writers are more conscious of their own evil (which, after all, has been documented for several centuries--in words and in the ruin of the land, the earth) than black male writers, who, along with black and white women, have seen themselves as the recipients of that evil and therefore on the side of Christ, of the oppressed, of the innocent.
The white women writers that I admire--Kate Chopin, the Brontes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Doris Lessing--are well aware of their own oppression and search incessantly for a kind of salvation. Their characters can always envision a solution, an evolution to higher consciousness on the part of society, even when society itself cannot. Even when society is in the process of killing them for their vision. Generally, too, they are more tolerant of mystery than is Ahab, who wishes to dominate, rather than be on equal terms with, the whale.
If there is one thing African-Americans and Native Americans have retained of their African and ancient American heritage, it is probably the belief that everything is inhabited by spirit. This belief encourages knowledge perceived intuitively. It does not surprise me, personally, that scientists now are discovering that trees, plants, flowers, have feelings ... emotions, that they shrink when yelled at; that they faint when an evil person is about who might hurt them.
One thing I try to have in my life and my fiction is an awareness of and openness to mystery, which, to me, is deeper than any politics, race, or geographical location. In the poems I read, a sense of mystery, a deepening of it, is what I look for--because that is what I respond to. I have been influenced--especially in the poems in Once--by Zen epigrams and Japanese haiku. I think my respect for short forms comes from this. I was delighted to learn that in three or four lines a poet can express mystery, evoke beauty and pleasure, paint a picture--and not dissect or analyze in any way. The insects, the fish, the birds, and the apple blossoms in haiku are still whole. They have not been turned into something else. They are allowed their own majesty, instead of being used to emphasize the majesty of people; usually the majesty of the poets writing.
I believe in change: change personal, and change in society. I have experienced a revolution (unfinished, without question, but one whose new order is everywhere on view) in the South. And I grew up--until I refused to go--in the Methodist church, which taught me that Paul will sometimes change on the way to Damascus, and that Moses--that beloved old man--went through so many changes he made God mad. So Grange Copeland was expected to change. He was fortunate enough to be touched by love of something beyond himself. Brownfield did not change, because he was not prepared to give his life for anything, or to anything. He was the kind of man who could never understand Jesus (or Che or King or Malcolm or Medgar) except as the white man's tool. He could find nothing of value within himself and he did not have the courage to imagine a life without the existence of white people to act as a foil. To become what he hated was his inevitable destiny.
A bit more about the "Southern Revolution." When I left Eatonton, Georgia, to go off to Spelman College in Atlanta (where I stayed, uneasily, for two and a half years), I deliberately sat in the front section of the Greyhound bus. A white woman complained to the driver. He--big and red and ugly--ordered me to move. I moved. But in those seconds of moving, everything changed. I was eager to bring an end to the South that permitted my humiliation. During my sophomore year I stood on the grass in front of Trevor-Arnett Library at Atlanta University and I listened to the young leaders of SNCC. John Lewis was there, and so was Julian Bond, thin, well starched and ironed in light-colored jeans; he looked (with his cropped hair that still tried to curl) like a poet (which he was). Everyone was beautiful, because everyone (and I now think of Ruby Doris Robinson, who has since died) was conquering fear by holding the hands of the persons next to them. In those days, in Atlanta, springtime turned the air green. I've never known this to happen in any other place I've been--not even in Uganda, where green, on hills, plants, trees, begins to dominate the imagination. It was as if the air turned into a kind of water--and the short walk from Spelman to Morehouse was like walking through a green sea. Then, of course, the cherry trees--cut down, now, I think--that were always blooming away while we--young and bursting with fear and determination to change our world--thought, beyond our fervid singing, of death. It was not surprising, considering the intertwined thoughts of beauty and death, that the majority of the people in and around SNCC at that time were lovers of Camus.
Random memories of that period: Myself, moving like someone headed for the guillotine, with (as my marching mate) a beautiful girl who spoke French and came to Spelman from Tuskegee, Alabama ("Chic Freedom's Reflection" in Once), whose sense of style was unfaltering, in the worst of circumstances. She was the only really black-skinned girl at Spelman who would turn up dressed in stark white from head to toe--because she knew, instinctively, that white made an already beautiful black girl look like the answer to everybody's prayer. Myself, marching about in front of a restaurant, seeing--inside--the tables set up with clean napkins and glasses of water, the owner standing in front of us barring the door, a Jewish man who went mad on the spot, and fell to the floor. Myself, dressed in a pink faille dress, with my African roommate, my first real girl friend, walking up the broad white steps of a broad white church. And men (white) in blue suits and bow ties materializing on the steps above with ax handles in their hands ("The Welcome Table" in In Love & Trouble). We turned and left. It was a bright, sunny day. Myself, sitting on a porch in Liberty County, Georgia, at night, after picketing the jailhouse (where a local black schoolteacher was held) and holding in my arms the bleeding head of a little girl--where is she now?--maybe eight or ten years old, but small, who had been cut by a broken bottle wielded by one of the mob in front of us. In this memory there is a white girl I grew to respect because she never flinched and never closed her eyes, no matter what the mob--where are they now?--threw. Later, in New York, she tried to get me to experiment with LSD with her and the only reason I never did was because on the night we planned to try it I had a bad cold. I believe the reason she never closed her eyes was because she couldn't believe what she was seeing. We tried to keep in touch--but, because I had never had very much (not even a house that didn't leak), I was always conscious of the need to be secure; because she came from an eleven-room house in the suburbs of Philadelphia and, I assume, never had worried about material security, our deepest feelings began to miss each other. I identified her as someone who could afford to play poor for a while (her poverty interrupted occasionally by trips abroad), and she probably identified me as one of those inflexible black women black men constantly complain about: the kind who interrupt light-hearted romance by saying, "Yes, well... but what are the children going to eat?"
T
he point is that less than ten years after all these things I walk about Georgia (and Mississippi) eating, sleeping, loving, singing, burying the dead--the way men and women are supposed to do in a place that is the only "home" they've ever known. There is only one "For Coloreds" sign left in Eatonton, and it is on a black man's barbershop. He is merely outdated. Booster, if you read this, change your sign!
I see the work that I have done already as a foundation. That being so, I suppose I knew when I started The Third Life of Grange Copeland that it would have to cover several generations, and over half a century of growth and upheaval. It begins around 1900 and ends in the sixties. But my first draft (which was never used, not even one line, in the final version) began with Ruth as a Civil Rights lawyer in Georgia going to rescue her father, Brownfield Copeland, from a drunken accident, and to have a confrontation with him. In that version she is married--also to a lawyer--and they are both committed to insuring freedom for black people in the South. In Georgia, specifically. There was lots of love-making and courage in that version. But it was too recent, too superficial--everything seemed a product of the immediate present. And I believe nothing ever is.
So, I brought in the grandfather. Because all along I wanted to explore the relationship between parents and children, specifically between daughters and their fathers (this is most interesting, I've always felt; for example, in "The Child Who Favored Daughter" in In Love & Trouble, the father cuts off the breasts of his daughter because she falls in love with a white boy; why this, unless there is sexual jealousy?), and I wanted to learn, myself, how it happens that the hatred a child can have for a parent becomes inflexible. And I wanted to explore the relationship between men and women, and why women are always condemned tor doing what men do as an expression of their masculinity. Why are women so easily "tramps" and "traitors" when men are heroes for engaging in the same activity? Why do women stand for this?
My new novel will be about several women who came of age during the sixties and were active (or not active) in the Movement in the South. I am exploring their backgrounds, familial and sibling connections, their marriages, affairs, and political persuasions, as they grow toward a fuller realization (and recognition) of themselves.
Since I put together my course on black women writers, which was taught first at Wellesley College and later at the University of Massachusetts, I have felt the need for real critical and biographical work on these writers. As a beginning, I am writing a long personal essay on my own discovery of these writers (designed, primarily, for lectures), and hope soon to visit the birthplace and home of Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville, Florida. I am so involved with my own writing that I don't think there will be time for me to attempt the long, scholarly involvement that all these writers require. I am hopeful, however, that as their books are reissued and used in classrooms across the country, someone will do this. If no one does (or if no one does it to my satisfaction), I feel it is my duty (such is the fervor of love) to do it myself.
I read all of the Russian writers I could find in my sophomore year in college. I read them as if they were a delicious cake. I couldn't get enough: Tolstoy, especially his short stories, and the novels The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection, which taught me the importance of diving through politics and social forecasts to dig into the essential spirit of individual persons, because otherwise characters, no matter what political or current social issue they stand for, will not live), and Dostoevsky, who found his truths where everyone else seemed afraid to look, and Turgenev, Gorky, and Gogol, who made me think that Russia must have something floating about in the air that writers breathe from the time they are born. The only thing that began to bother me, many years later, was that I could find almost nothing written by a Russian woman writer.
Unless poetry has mystery, many meanings, and some ambiguities (necessary for mystery) I am not interested in it. Outside of Basho and Shiki and other Japanese haiku poets, I read and was impressed by the poetry of Li Po, the Chinese poet, Emily Dickinson, E. E. Cummings (deeply), and Robert Graves, especially his poems in Man Does, Woman Is--which is surely a male-chauvinist title, but I did not think about that then. I liked Graves because he took it as given that passionate love between man and woman does not necessarily last forever. He enjoyed the moment, and didn't bother about the future, My poem "The Man in the Yellow Terry" is very much influenced by Graves.
I also loved Ovid and Catullus. During the whole period of discovering haiku and the sensual poems of Ovid, the poems of E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams, my feet did not touch the ground. I ate, I slept, I studied other things (like European history) without ever doing more than giving it serious thought. It could not change me from one moment to the next, as poetry could.
I wish I had been familiar with the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks when I was in college. I stumbled upon them later. If there was ever a born poet, I think it is Brooks. Her natural way of looking at anything, of commenting on anything, comes out as a vision, in language that is peculiar to her. It is clear that she is a poet from the way your whole spiritual past begins to float around in your throat when you are reading, just as it is clear from the first line of Cane that Jean Toomer is a poet, blessed with a soul that is surprised by nothing. It is not unusual to weep when reading Brooks, just as when reading Toomer's "Song of the Sun" it is not unusual to comprehend--in a flash--what a dozen books on black people's history fail to illuminate. I have embarrassed my classes occasionally by standing in front of them in tears as Toomer's poem about "some genius from the South" flew through my body like a swarm of golden butterflies on their way toward a destructive sun. Like Du Bois, Toomer was capable of comprehending the black soul. It is not "soul" that can become a cliche, but something to be illuminated rather than explained.
The poetry of Arna Bontemps has strange effects on me too. He is a great poet, even if he is not recognized as such until after his death. Or is never acknowledged. The passion and compassion in his poem "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" shook the room I was sitting in the first time I read it. The ceiling began to revolve and a breeze--all the way from Alabama--blew through the room. A tide of spiritual good health tingled the bottoms of my toes. I changed. Became someone the same, but different. I understood, at last, what the transference of energy was.
It is impossible to list all of the influences on one's work. How can you even remember the indelible impression upon you of a certain look on your mother's face? But random influences are the following.
Music, which is the art I most envy.
Then there's travel--which really made me love the world, its vastness, and variety. How moved I was to know that there is no center of the universe. Entebbe, Uganda, or Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, exist no matter what we are doing here. Some writers--Camara Laye, and the man who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)--have illumined this fact brilliantly in their fiction. Which brings me to African writers I hope to be influenced by: Okot p'Bitek has written my favorite modern poem, "Song of Lawino." I am crazy about The Concubine by Elechi Ahmadi (a perfect story, I think), The Radiance of the King, by Camara Laye, and Maru, by Bessie Head. These writers do not seem afraid of fantasy, of myth and mystery. Their work deepens one's comprehension of life by going beyond the bounds of realism. They are like musicians: at one with their cultures and their historical subconscious.
Flannery O'Connor has also influenced my work. To me, she is the best of the white Southern writers, including Faulkner. For one thing, she practiced economy. She also knew that the question of race was really only the first question on a long list. This is hard for just about everybody to accept, we've been trying to answer it for so long.
I did not read Cane until 1967, but it has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately; could not possibly exist without it. Cane and Their Eyes Were Watching God are probably my favorite books by black American writers. Jean Toomer has a very feminine sensibility (or, phrased another way, he is both fe
minine and masculine in his perceptions), unlike most black male writers. He loved women.
Like Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston was never afraid to let her characters be themselves, funny talk and all. She was incapable of being embarrassed by anything black people did, and so was able to write about everything with freedom and fluency. My feeling is that Zora Neale Hurston is probably one of the most misunderstood, least appreciated writers of this century. Which is a pity. She is great. A writer of courage, and incredible humor, with poetry in every line.
When I started teaching my course in black women writers at Wellesley (the first one, I think, ever), I was worried that Zora's use of black English of the twenties would throw some of the students off. It didn't. They loved it. They said it was like reading Thomas Hardy, only better. In that same course I taught Nella Larsen, Frances Watkins Harper (poetry and novel), Dorothy West, Ann Petry, Paule Marshall, among others. Also Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf--not because they were black, obviously, but because they were women and wrote, as the black women did, on the condition of humankind from the perspective of women. It is interesting to read Woolf's A Room of One's Own while reading the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, to read Larsen's Quicksand along with The Awakening. The deep-throated voice of Sojourner Truth tends to drift across the room while you're reading. If you're not a feminist already, you become one.