Australia Henderson lecture, "The Black Southern Novelist's Views of the South," at the University of Iowa, April 22, 1974
Speaker 1: The following was recorded April 22, 1974, as part of the Black Kaleidoscope for Cultural Series at the University of Iowa. The Black Southern Novelist View of the South is the subject of this address by Australia Henderson, a Doctoral candidate in Afro-American Studies at the University of Iowa. Introducing Ms. Henderson is Darwin Turner, a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Iowa.
Darwin Turner: Our speaker for this evening is Australia Henderson, who is a Doctoral candidate in American Civilization and Afro-American Studies at this University. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, and educated through public schools of Texas, she received a Bachelor's in English from Fisk University, a Masters from Ohio University, has taught in Mississippi, which almost completed her tour of the South. Then moved to Michigan to teach in the public schools there, and for three years taught at Florida A&M University before coming here to resume her education.
Darwin Turner: She holds many scholarships and is presently working through the benefit of a scholarship, National Fellowships Fund. Australia Henderson will talk this evening on Southern Black Writers' Views of the South, a topic related to her Doctoral dissertation. Australia Henderson.
Australia Hende...: Thank you, Dr. Turner. When I expressed to some of my classmates my reluctance to stand up and give a speech, one of them competently clapped me on the back and said, "Oh, don't you worry, girl. When Dr. Turner finishes dressing you up with an introduction, you won't mind getting up here." I hope that does the trick.
Australia Hende...: Tonight, I want to take you on a brief literary journey through the South to explore the views of a Black novelist who was born there and who has lived there for a period of his formative or mature years. I would like to cover three areas: One, a definition of the South. Two, a general examination of some Black Southern novelists' views in the novels published during the period from 1954 to 1972. And three, a very brief examination of one novelist's work.
Australia Hende...: Alice Walker, who is one of the very few Black Southern writers who still resides in the South, offers a testimonial to the importance of her life in the South as it shapes her fiction and poetry. Like a number of the novelists to be discussed here, Miss Walker, as literary interpreter of the South, finds an abundance of valuable material for literary development. She says, and I quote, "My mother tells of an incident that happened to her in the '30s during the Depression. She and my father lived in a small Georgia town and had half dozen children. They were sharecroppers and food, especially flour, was almost impossible to obtain. To get flour, which was distributed by the Red Cross, one had to submit vouchers signed by a local official. On the day my mother was to go to town for flour, she received large boxes of clothes from one of my aunts, who was living in the North.
Australia Hende...: "The clothes were in good condition, though well-worn, and my mother needed a dress. So she immediately put on one of those from the box and wore it into town. When she reached the distribution center and presented her voucher, she was confronted by a white woman who looked her up and down in marked anger and envy. 'What'd you come here for,' the woman said. 'For some flour,' my mother said, showing her voucher. 'Humph,' said the woman, looking at her more closely, with an unconcealed fury. 'Anybody dressed up as good as that, you don't need to come here begging for food.' 'I ain't begging,' my mother said. 'The government is giving away flour to those that need it and I need it. I wouldn't be here if I didn't. And these clothes I'm wearing was given to me.' But the woman had already turned to the next person in line, saying over her shoulder to the white man who was behind the counter with her, 'The gaul of niggers coming in here dressed better than me.'
Australia Hende...: "This thought seemed to make her angrier still. And my mother, pulling the three small children with her and crying from humiliation, walked sadly back to the street. 'What did you and daddy do for food that winter?' I asked mother. 'Well, she said, 'Aunt Mandy Akins lived down the road from us and she got plenty of flour. We had a good stand of corn, so we had plenty of meal. Aunt Mandy would swap me a bucket of flour for a bucket of meal. And we got by all right.' Then she added thoughtfully, 'And that old woman that turned me off so short, got down so bad in the end that she was walking on two sticks.' And I knew she was thinking, though she never said it, here I am today. My eight children healthy and grown, and three of them in college. And me with hardly a sick day for years. Aint Jesus wonderful."
Australia Hende...: It is this kind of ingredient which a Black Southern author uses to tell about the South, to explain what it is like there and why and how Blacks live and survive there. Now, if this were not such a highly academic setting, I could say that South for Black Americans is any geographical area South of Canada. But, since Dr. Turner's in here, and since the occasion calls for it, I'll be more academically explicit.
Australia Hende...: My definition of the South involves not only a geographical area, but also the area's history, politics, and culture, as it relates to Black Americans. The former Confederate States are commonly identified as the deep South. However, I am including as South the border States of Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Kansas, and Missouri, and the State of Oklahoma. Although it is the seat for the legalization of racial oppression, I would be hard pressed in proving that Washington D.C. is Southern, so I'm leaving that out.
Australia Hende...: The States that I have named above have not only participated in the trade and maintenance of slaves, but they also instituted laws which supported the political, social, and economic oppression of Blacks during the post Civil War period. Denied privileges accorded other Americans, Southern Blacks who lived in the above-named areas, developed a separate set of traditions particular or peculiar to their past and present lives.
Australia Hende...: There is no unanimity in the Black Southern novelists' presentations of the South. Their views have altered where their own private experiences and with America's progression or regression in granting rights to Blacks. For Southern novelists like William Wells Brown and Sutton Griggs, who lived during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the South was a slave-ocracy, a place from which the slave made plans to escape. Or, a place where the freedmen, in his decision to remain South, must organize social, economic, and political defenses with other Blacks for protection against whites.
Australia Hende...: Preferring to present the oral tradition and music of Southern Blacks, rather than protesting against racial injustice, Southern writers James Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston depict Southern folk culture in their novels. In the climate of the American writers' interest in the masses during the 1930s and 1940s, Southern writers like George Wylie Henderson, George Lee, and Waters Turpin explore the living conditions and lifestyles of Black sharecroppers.
Australia Hende...: Now, the styles of contemporary Black Southern novelists, such as John Killens, Herbert Simmons, Hal Bennett, or Ernest Gaines, is both rural agrarian and urban industrial, with the descendants of slaves and slave owners carrying the burden of the South's history in their family relationships. It is this contemporary group of writers who concern me here. A chronological ordering of these writers would probably simplify matters of presentation. I'm dividing them into four groups.
Australia Hende...: The first group are novelists who began publishing before 1954, but whose careers extend into the '50s and '60s. The second group are novelists who began publishing in the '50s and '60s, and who were affected both by the legal gains made in the movement towards integration, and by the more forceful confrontation between Blacks and whites during the sit-ins and freedom riots. The third group of novelists are kissing cousins to the Black Southern novelists. These kissing cousins, I know some of Du Bois fans aren't going to like that term. These kissing cousins can only be called Southern in the sense that they resided in the South for a significant period of time, and recorded their experiences in fictional form. The fourth group of novelists began publishing in the late sixties and early seventies.
Australia Hende...: Now for the first group. Although the chronological grouping of these novelists serves an external convenience of design, the first group of novelists, because of their knowledge about each other, offer more than just this convenience. The Supreme Court decision of May 17th, 1954, or Black Monday as it is known in the South, did not mark the beginning of literary careers for Waters Turpin, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Chester Himes, and Frank Yerby. These novelists all had literary ties with each other, and with the periods prior to the '50s. The publication dates of their first significant works range from 1937 to 1946.
Australia Hende...: Wright, Walker, Himes, and Yerby began publishing poems and short fiction during the Depression with the aid of the Federal Writers Project. These novelists were aware of each other's talents during the '30s and '40s and, in individual instances, tried to support each other. Wright, Walker, and Yerby were affiliated with the Chicago branch of the Federal Writers Project during the '30s. Wright reviewed the first novels of Waters Turpin and Chester Himes. And he later loaned Chester Himes $500. With Wright as a chief organizer, a group of Black writers, called the Soft Side Writers Group of Chicago, held periodic meetings beginning 1936. Miss Walker was also a member of this group. The group's literary quarterly, entitled New Challenge, was organized by Wright and supported by Miss Walker, who obtained subscriptions for its publication.
Australia Hende...: Let's start with Turpin. All three of Turpin's novels begin in the South. His first novel entitled, These Low Grounds, which was published in 1937, and his last, The Rootless, published in 1957, are set in Turpin's birthplace, the Eastern shore of Maryland. His second novel, published in 1939, blends the South with the North in its presentation of Mississippi, Chicago, and the Eastern shore of Maryland. Turpin's South is that of the Black farmer, the Black migrant laborer who supports the oyster and crab industries of the Eastern shore. The northward bound Southern Black, who seeks a new existence. And finally, the white plantation owner, who was enslaved by the laws he has made to enslave others.
Australia Hende...: As Turpin sketches the lives of poor Black families and wealthy whites in his three novels, his view of the South becomes a complex three-part division in which he protests the unequal and often brutal conditions of the Southern Black while he simultaneously praises the physical and spiritual endurance of Blacks, and then condemns them for the acquiescence to establish codes of behavior, and for their failure to take by force the freedoms which are naturally theirs. Turpin feels that Blacks can succeed anywhere in America.
Australia Hende...: Richard Wright does not express this certainty. Perhaps more than any novelist in this first group, Wright's experiences in the South shaped not only his view of it, but of America as well. His relationship to the South is somewhat paradoxical. The South from which Wright felt alienated is the touchstone of his creativity. It is from the South that he drew the sources for his fiction. Yet, he viewed it as a cultural wasteland for Blacks. However, we know from Wright himself why he felt that the South stifled the Black personality. Born in 1908, near Natchez, Mississippi, Wright experienced the South's severest forms of poverty, family disorganization, prejudice, and inadequate education. The blight and joylessness of Wright's Southern experiences pervade all of his fiction.
Australia Hende...: Although the Long Dream, published in 1958, is Wright's only novel about the South, his view of the South is recorded in earlier works of the '30s and '40s, such as Uncle Tom's Children, Black Boy, and the Southern stories in Eight Men. Collectively, these works support Wright's thesis that the South is the Black man's psychological desert. It is a very expansiveness of this desert, which ironically limits the possibility of mental growth. There is nothing in the topography of this desert to help the Black man define who he is. There are no landmarks to point the direction he should take for self definition. The Black man who attempts to journey out of the desert towards self definition, must accept the inevitability of death or violence from Southern whites whose power rests on the continued existence of this desert. One possibility for the Black man's growth and development is escape or flight, not only from the South, but from America as well.
Australia Hende...: Margaret Walker would be an object of envy for women's liberation groups. She has managed a career and a family of four children with equal success. She completed her BA degree at Northwestern, and the MA and PhD at the University of Iowa. She has also received a number of literary awards. Miss Walker, born in Birmingham, Alabama, lives and teaches in Jackson, Mississippi. She's a joy to watch in the classroom and as a lecturer. When she walks in, the sparks fly. The men do, too.
Australia Hende...: Her first publication, For My People, published in 1942. It's a collection of poems which trace the progress of Black Americans from rural folk ways, religious practices, and exhausting labor in the South, through oppressive conditions in the urban North, to a racial awakening where Blacks will rise and take control of their own destinies. In the sense that it records the progress of the Black American from one period of struggle to the next, Miss Walker's novel, Jubilee, published in 1966, is similar to For My People. The novel set in Georgia traces a life of Miss Walker's great grandmother, who lived as a slave on the plantation owned by her father, John Dutton, and who survived the Civil War and reconstruction to make a new life for herself and family.
Australia Hende...: Jubilee has had the misfortune of being called the Negro Gone With The Wind. However, anyone who examines Jubilee will sigh with relief that the analogy is a poor one. To Miss Mitchell's nostalgic gone-are-the-days presentation of Blacks in Gone With The Wind is Miss Walker's multi-leveled examination of both the devoted slave and the dissatisfied one. Miss Mitchell presents the Ku Klux Klan as righteous lords saving the South from corrupted freedmen. On the other hand, Miss Walker shows that the social controls used against freedmen were brutal, reducing the freedmen to another form of peonage.
Australia Hende...: In her presentation of Vyry, the heroine of Jubilee, Miss Walker sees the South as a source of the history for Blacks in America. It is the South's history, its slavery, Civil War, and reconstruction, through which the ancestors of the majority of Black Americans have moved and survived. As she records the life of her ancestors so that quote, "Her children may know something of their heritage," Miss Walker also records the history of many Black Americans.
Australia Hende...: Unlike Margaret Walker's great grandmother, who was able to separate herself from her white past, Chester Himes's heroine in his novel, The Third Generation, is unable to do so. Himes's mother is the model for Mrs. Taylor, a woman who sees herself as part of a Southern nobility. For Himes, the South's insistence on preserving false notions of ancestral nobility has found its parallel in a Black woman whose belief in her racial ties with whites shatters her family's life. Although Mrs. Taylor's parents had had only a small amount of Negro blood, they were both slaves. However, Mrs. Taylor took comfort in the fact that she was more white than Black and buttressed her feelings of superiority by lying about her parents' origins. She then pass the lies onto her children who were representatives of the third generation of her family. In her treatment of her husband, Mrs. Taylor becomes an example of whites who equate color with inferiority. She berates Mr. Taylor about his Blackness and tries to turn the sons against him for the same reason.
Australia Hende...: As the Taylor's moved from one area of the South to another, Himes presents an accurate picture of the Black college and the living conditions of the Black farmer in Mississippi during World War 1. Although Himes protests racial oppression in the South, he does not condemn it for Mrs. Taylor's beliefs. Mrs. Taylor is both a victim and a perpetrator of a system which fosters racial superiority. Himes chooses then to focus on the psychological disruptions, which the system engenders in a Black, Southern family. Himes, born in Jefferson City, Missouri, now lives in Spain. Although he has written 16 novels, only The Third Generation takes place in the South.
Australia Hende...: Never judge a book by its cover when reading Frank Yerby. Of the 26 novels he has published, 13 are about the South. Book covers on these 13 may read like covers of true confession magazines. The Vixens powerful novel of hot blooded men and passionate women. However one does not have to search too far beneath the adventures and sexual entanglements of white characters to find Yerby's criticism of Southern life and values. The South that Yerby pictures in Benton's Row, which is one of the 13, is found in all of its Southern novels. It is, quotes Yerby, "A region about which more lies have been told solemnly and believed than any other comparable section on earth."
Australia Hende...: Each novel hammers away at the fact that one, the South is not peopled with descendants of English Lords and bejeweled ladies, but with traps, drunks and debtors, the dregs of Europe's population. Two, the South was not filled with well-built mansions facing manicured lawns, but with ill conceived, poorly built leaky structures, which were impossible to keep warm or cool. Three, New Orleans during the antebellum period was not an architect's dream, but a pig sty plagued by yellow fever, uncollected garbage and poor sewage. Four, slavery was damaging to both the plantation owner, the slave and the yeoman farmer. It forced the owner into debt and ulcers, the slave into barbarity and the farmer into supporting a system which ensured his ruin.
Australia Hende...: Remove the frills, and one will find that what Yerby is saying about the South in these 13 novels reveals his devotion to historical truth. Remove the frills and one will find that Yerby's attack on slavery and on the idiocy of the supremacy of color is not far removed from what other Southern Black novelists are saying here about the South. Yerby, now an expatriate in Spain, was born and educated in the South and North. Like Wright in Himes, Yerby felt that better opportunities for Black writers could be found not only outside the South, but totally outside America.
Australia Hende...: The second group of writers, John Killens, Herbert Simmons, Gordon Parks, Junius Edwards, and Ernest Gaines began their publishing careers in the decade from 1954 to 1964, during the height of racial, political, educational, and social upheaval, which began in the South and spread to other parts of the nation. The Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in public schools was quickly followed by bus boycotts to desegregate public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama and Tallahassee, Florida. The 1960s began with the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and extended throughout the South. Freedom rides, the civil rights bill of 1964 and voter registration drives in the South followed in rapid succession.
Australia Hende...: One can see in each of these novelists, the beginning influences of the trend towards integration in the fifties. And the more forceful tactics used by Black youth in the sixties. John Killens' Sippi, Ernest Gaines' The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman, are examples of novels which use the civil rights movement as a force, which shapes the lives of the characters. Killens, born and raised in Macon, Georgia and educated in both the South and North, has written five novels, three of which take place in the South.
Australia Hende...: The South which Killens presents in Young Blood and Sippi, is one in which the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers try to gain economic and political rights by joining with other Blacks and whites against Southern whites who were in control. Slaves, Killens third novel, was made into a movie with the same title. In this novel, a slave learns that faithfulness to a master does not define him as a man. Manhood is achieved with his efforts to join other slaves in an escape. For Killens, the South's violence and cruelty against Blacks is so pervasive that the possibility of economic, social and political fraternity between Blacks and whites is almost impossible. Both Young Blood and Sippi tell the story of a boy growing into manhood in the South.
Australia Hende...: Corner Boy and Man Walking On Eggshells by Herbert Simmons, are novels about youth growing into man who had also. Corner Boy, Simmons' first novel, is set in the urban North, while Man Walking On Eggshells takes place in Simmons' birthplace, St. Louis, Missouri. Simmons, educated in St. Louis and at the University of Iowa, displays his interest in jazz in the novel. Before he wrote Man Walking On Eggshells, Simmons produced shows using jazz and poetry readings. In a similar fashion, Raymond Douglas, the protagonist of Man Walking On Eggshells, plays a jazz accompaniment to the reading of original poetry. Early in the novel, Raymond must decide whether being a trumpet player is more important to him than what his parents want him to be. The South which Simmons presents is the world of a Black musician. His efforts at success, his desire to tell the history of Black Americans through his music, his fame and his failures.
Australia Hende...: Like Herbert Simmons, a name, which I think everybody in the audience knows, Gordon Parks is a native of Fort Scott, Kansas. And he exhibits talent in areas other than writing. Parks is a photographer, a movie director, as well as a musician. His only novel, The Learning Tree, was made into a movie, which he produced and directed. Like the Southern novels of Killens and Simmons, The Learning Tree is about an adolescent growing into manhood. The Kansas Black community that Parks presents exists on the borderline between Northern and Southern values and laws. Violence in suspicion between whites and Blacks exist. However, Blacks are accorded educational and political rights. Parks seems to view the small Kansas town as one in which prejudice can be overcome with one's acceptance of the fact that good and evil have no relationship to racial characteristics.
Australia Hende...: Little is known about Junius Edwards, except that he was born and raised in Alexandria, Louisiana. His only novel, If We Must Die, is an indictment against the political restrictions placed on Southern Blacks during the fifties. Edwards expresses the ironic position of the Black American soldier who has fought in the Korean War, but is unable to register to vote in the South. The title of the novel, taken from the title of Claude McKay's poem is itself ironic. McKay's poem urges Blacks to heroically resist racial oppression. Edwards illustrates that the Black soldier, trained as a fighter, has defended America and by implication Southern laws, which in turn render him unarmed and defenseless.
Australia Hende...: Ernest Gaines is also a native of Louisiana. He worked on the plantation where he was born until he moved to California at age 15. Gaines' three novels, Catherine Carmier, Of Love And Dust, and The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman, and his collection of short stories, Bloodline, all have Louisiana settings. Gaines is currently working on a fourth novel about the South, entitled The House And The Field. Unlike Edwards' open protest of Southern inequalities, Gaines' presentation of rural Black folk on plantations centers on their strengths and weaknesses and their relationships with each other and with the whites who are in control.
Australia Hende...: Gaines admits that when he read Southern white writers, he was looking for his people, the Black peasants of Louisiana plantations. Instead, he says, he found only caricatures of human beings. His search ended with the Russian writers descriptions of peasant life, which seemed closer to the reality of Black peasant life. In Gaines' South, the plantation community is in transition from an old order inherited from slavery to a new order influenced by younger Blacks who have left the plantation and are working to achieve some measure of political equality. Gaines questions both orders within the Black, rural community, as youthful Blacks confront older Blacks on the question of religion and equality. Although Gaines does not say that the new social order will be more conducive to a humane self-determined life in the South, the strength of the old people like Miss jane Pittman are clearly responsible for the spirit of protest in the younger generation of Blacks.
Australia Hende...: The third group of novelists, the ones who do not quite qualify as Southern novelists, were sufficiently influenced by their experiences in the South, that they wrote novels which were often set in the Southern town where they resided. With the exception of W.E.B. Du Bois, the publication of their first significant works range from 1951 to 1969. W.E.B. Du Bois, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, came South to Fisk University and later taught at Atlanta University. Du Bois' novels, The Quest Of The Silver Fleece and The Black Flame Trilogy contained his mandate for change in the South. For Du Bois, the South's potential lies in its ability to foster unity first among Blacks, and then among Black and white farmers. Implied throughout these novels is the fact that interracial unity among Black and white agrarians will not only improve conditions for Southern Blacks, but will also raise the living standards of poor whites.
Australia Hende...: Although Mary Elizabeth Vroman was born in Buffalo, New York and raised in the West Indies, she attended college and taught school in Alabama. Alabama is also the setting for her novel Esther. Here, Ms. Vroman focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of the Black woman in the South. According to Ms. Vroman, the nature of life in the South for the Black woman is of such that she can easily fall sexual prey to both Black men and white men. In the novel, The Heroin, Esther wants to make a career of nursing. Her desire is momentarily frustrated by a wealthy white youth who rapes her and a Black minister who tries to steal her inheritance.
Australia Hende...: Like Ms. Vroman, Austin Anderson was raised outside the United States. Anderson was born in Panama, but attended public schools and colleges in North Carolina. Anderson's novel, All God's Children reveals his interest in the role of the slave as fugitive, as civil war soldier, and as freedman. In a very slave narrative like fashion, the protagonist of All God's Children, October Pruitt explains the quality of his life as a slave, the circumstances which influenced him to escape from slavery, the action he took to execute this escape and the problems involved in being free.
Australia Hende...: Julian Mayfield's novel, The Grand Parade, focuses on the aftermath of the 1954 Supreme Court decision and the efforts of Black and white politicians to promote school integration for personal gain. Mayfield, unlike Du Bois, Vroman and Anderson was born in the South. He was born in Greer, South Carolina. But after he and his parents moved to Washington, DC, he never returned south for any significant period of time. Mayfield's position on the South is similar to that of Gordon Parks. Mayfield's parallel development of Black and white characters seems to illustrate the idea that goodness or evilness is part of life and is not determined by one's color.
Australia Hende...: William Mahoney is the only author of this group who began his publishing career in the late sixties with a novel entitled Black Jacob. Although Mahoney was born in New Jersey and educated at Howard University, he spent over 10 years in the South working with the civil rights movement. Black Jacob was written as a result of Mahoney's experiences in the movement and in voter registration drives. The novel records the efforts of Black youth in Mississippi to encourage Blacks to vote. Mahoney gives an accurate view of the confusion, the disease and the poverty of Blacks who lived in tent city, an encampment erected by youth for Blacks who were evicted by white landowners for attempting to register as voters. And tent cities across the South did actually exist. The assassination of the protagonist, Jacob, at the end of the novel points out Mahoney's skepticism about the improvements which the Southern civil rights movement could offer Blacks. Mahoney implies that one possible hope for Blacks is to move North.
Australia Hende...: By the time that the fourth group of writers began their first significant publications, Blacks had become disillusioned about the promise of federal laws to grant opportunities in education, politics, and jobs. Nonviolent ideology began to change to the ideology of Black power and Black cultural nationalism. Interestingly enough, Black Southern writers, like Hal Bennett, Sarah Wright, Robert Deane Pharr, Alice Walker, and Nolan Davis do not concentrate specifically on the changing trends in Black American thought. Hal Bennett and Alice Walker treat the Black movement in the last section of their novels. However, in the spirit of Black arts literature, which advocates open confrontation between Blacks and whites, [Dennis Jackson], devotes his entire novel to the idea of a violent retaliation by Blacks against Southern whites.
Australia Hende...: Hal Bennett's novels, A Wilderness Of Vines, The Black Wine, and Lord Of Dark Places, all began in Virginia, which is Bennett's native state. According to Bennett, what is true for the Southern rural community of Burnside, Virginia is true for all of America. Blacks and whites, if not equal in life are equal in their madness. The whites, the perpetuators of prejudice, the Blacks, the victims of prejudice, both live in their refuge of unreality and a madness, which is America.
Australia Hende...: I had to smile when I think about Hal Bennett. He's a strange dude. Pick up his novels and Eagles carry away children and... Children drop cats into vats of empty mud. And it's all kinds of horror and so much for Bennett.
Australia Hende...: Dennis Jackson is a native of Louisiana currently living in Atlanta and he himself is the protagonist of his novel, The Black Commandos. The protagonists, Mr. Jackson, forms a secret organization whose purpose is much more radical than the Black organization in Sutton Griggs' novel, Imperium in Imperio. The organization trains Black men to fight and experiments with destructive devices, such as a pink gas which causes its victims to immediately fall asleep. The organization of commandos used their training to kill Southern whites who are responsible for killing Blacks. What Jackson envisions is a new South where Blacks can live without fear of whites and where whites, with the help of the commandos, will no longer assume that the murder and oppression of Blacks will remain unavenged.
Australia Hende...: The scene of Sarah Wright's novel, This Child's Gonna Live is the same as that of Walter Turpin's works, The Eastern Shore of Maryland. Ms. Wright's heroine, Mariah Upshur struggles during the depression to keep her children alive. Ms. Wright concentrates on the life and folkways of Blacks, who live in the neck of the eastern shore. As she sketches the history of the Black and white families, Ms. Wright also shows their interracial ties with each other because whites own the land, which formerly belonged to their Black relatives. The master slave relationship which whites try to perpetuate becomes unbalanced and ineffectual. Miss Wright shows the strengths and weaknesses of her heroine, who despite the pressures from whites, from poverty and from the death of her child manages to keep the rest of her children alive.
Australia Hende...: Virginia born Robert Deane Pharr has had his first novel, The Book of Numbers made into a movie. Fortunately the movie does not totally destroy Pharr's effort in showing the ingeniousness of two Black protagonists, Blue boy and Dave, who set up a successful numbers racket in El Dorado, Arkansas during the depression. While one is aware of the white southern world, which surrounds the Black community of El Dorado. One is more aware of Pharrs insight into the operation of the numbers racket and into the caustic wit of Blue boy who's training comes from the streets and whose aim is to beat the white man system. Pharr's examination of Black sporting life can be contrasted with McKay's, Home to Harlem, whose protagonist, Jake, takes little time from his pleasurable wanderings to reflect about life. Ray in Home to Harlem, Jake's opposite is more inclined towards self-reflection than towards self-enjoyment. Both protagonists, in The Book of Numbers possess Jake's sense of flare and adventure, but they also feel the need to reflect on the reality of the Black man's life in America, whether he's rich or poor.
Australia Hende...: Although she participated in the sit-ins and during her college years at Spelman in Atlanta. Alice Walker like Pharr focuses on the depression years in her novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. However, the novel ends with Grange Copeland's observance of civil rights agitation in his small Georgia town. The Third Life of Grange Copeland presents the lives of a family of sharecroppers whose bleak existence causes intrafamilial violence and death. Ms. Walker shows that Blacks who live in the South, may be embittered by its pressures like Copeland's son Brownfield, or they may find the personal strength to transform the bitterness into love, like Grange Copeland himself. Ms. Walker has recently written a collection of short stories entitled, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. A number of these stories also take place in the South.
Australia Hende...: Nolan Davis completes the survey. Nolan Davis is a good example of the declining interest of publishing companies in publishing works by Black authors. Davis's novel, Six Black Horses was published in 1971. By 1972, the novel was out of print and had all but disappeared from sight. Recognizing the scarcity of the novel, the libraries, which do have a copy require that the reader not remove it from the library nor touch it while reading it. Davis's experiences as an apprentice and mortuary science enables him to explore the world of the Black mortician in Kansas City, Missouri, which is also Davis's birthplace. Like Pharr he presents the inner world of a Black business rather than the surrounding white world. The names of Davis's protagonists, Lawrence Xavier Jordan, Southwall Lovingood, perfectly suit the humor and pathos involved in the Black undertaking business. Southwall Lovingood, A prominent undertaker is a quivering 300 pounds of bourbon, ham hocks, and greens. It is his world of funeral services of the competition of snatching bodies, which Davis reveals.
Australia Hende...: Collectively these novelists express a number of views about the south. For Margaret Walker, Alston Anderson, Ernest Gaines, the Southern past of slavery is important because it is the foundation of the Black American experience. In their own way Gaines and Anderson have made use of the slave narrative technique, which is part of the Afro-American literary tradition. The most explicit condemnation of the South, it's values, it's depression, it's violence comes from W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Frank Yerby, Junius Edwards, Julian Mayfield, William Mahoney and Dennis Jackson. Wright and Yerby's condemnation extends to the whole of America. Hal Bennett too, extends the madness of Blacks and whites who live in the mythical Burnside, Virginia, to all of America.
Australia Hende...: Walter Turpin presents a more positive picture of the South. If Blacks and whites can unite against depression, there is hope for change in the South. Turpin not only has faith, that the generations of Blacks are strong enough to withstand the violence of the South, but he also feels that the principles of American democracy ensure the rights of these Blacks who are willing to fight for them.
Australia Hende...: Unlike Turpin, Mary Elizabeth Vroman, Sarah Wright, Alice Walker and Ernest Gaines, exhibit more faith in the individual's capacity to change, rather than the Southern system itself. Both Ms. Walker and Gaines explore the idea that the death of a character allows the best of what he has created to live on. Gaines, unlike Dennis Jackson does not offer solutions to promote change in the South. He refrains from judging whether or not the quality of life for Southern Blacks will improve with the changing present. Chester Himes, John Killens, Herbert Simon feel that self-knowledge and self-direction is necessary, if the individual or the Black family is to withstand the pressures of living in the South. If the individual does not know who or what he is, as in the case of Heinz's female character, then it is likely that he will be defeated by both his own inadequacies and by the Southern system as well.
Australia Hende...: Now, what I've done up to now is give you a brief survey of novelists and their views of the South. What I want to concentrate briefly on is John Killens, Youngblood to examine the ingredients which a novelists uses to develop his view of the South. Youngblood reflects many of the ideas expressed in the works of the novelists discussed here. It reflects Turpin's interest in the development of a generation of a Black family. It reflects the interests of Wright, Himes, Simons, Parks and Bennet, in how a Black boy grows to manhood in the South. It has Gaines and Alice Walker's reverence for the strength of older Southern Blacks. Youngblood is a family chronicle, it's plot as simple, Laurie Lee and Joe Youngblood grow up in different sections of Georgia. They meet, marry, have two children, Jenny Lee and Robert, Robbie, who grow up under the close eye of both parents.
Australia Hende...: While defending his rights at a job, Joe Youngblood is murdered by his white paymaster. The three remaining Youngbloods bury him and prepare to go on living. The simplicity of the plot does not disclose Killens penetration into the whole of Black life in the mill town of Crossroads, Georgia as Blacks grapple with the question, "How do you live in a white man's world?" Laurie Lee's method of living in a white man's world was inherited from her ex-slave grandmother, Big Mama. When a white man attempts to rape her at age 11, Laurie tearfully informs Big Mama who advises her to quote "Get mad, but to refrain from crying." Big Mama later defends Laurie's right to get mad. When Lori hits her white employer, Mrs. Tucker in the stomach. Mrs. Tucker demands that Lori, 12, address Rebecca Tucker, eight, as Ms. Rebecca.
Australia Hende...: Laurie lashing out with information about Mr. Tucker's advances towards her, refuses. Mrs. Tucker strikes her with a broom. As Laurie's mother whips her in the woodshed, Big Mama breaks the door down, attacking her daughter with the words, "Stop whipping that child. Ain't nothing wrong. She just should've killed that evil old bitch." To stand up and fight to never let whites walk over you. Is the credo that Laurie and Joe Youngblood pass on to their children. Laurie's husband, Joe, did not grow up under the protective shelter of a Big Mama, nor did he attend school through the 10th grade and become a teacher as Lori did. Maybe I should footnote this, in many Southern schools in the first half of the 20th century, like the one where I went, you were only allowed Blacks that is, Black children were only allowed to attend up through the 10th grade. And those Blacks who had made it to that point in some towns were allowed to teach.
Australia Hende...: Joe left home at age 11 and worked at odd jobs until he was 16. A Black man from Detroit tells him of the opportunities available in the North, in the promise land up the country. In the mass migration North, too many Blacks like Joe have the same idea. He is forced off the train at Wayman, Tennessee by armed whites hired by plantation owners who are looking for laborers for plantations deserted by migrating Blacks. Joe was worked and beaten until he escapes. Deciding not to join the army because quote, "He had no democracy to make the world safe for" he returns and settles in Crossroads, Georgia. There are three areas where Blacks live in the mill town of Crossroads. Monroe Terrace, where teachers, shopkeepers and hotel waiters live. Pleasant Grove, inhabited by mill workers like the Youngbloods and Rockingham Quarters, inhabited by the jobless or by those to whom work was not consistently available. The Youngbloods felt privileged to have a two room house which had running water and a toilet attached to the side of the house.
Australia Hende...: The dwellers in Rockingham Quarters lived in shacks and were lucky to have outhouse privies. Action blends with descriptions of living conditions of the Youngbloods. There is little selectivity, all variety in Laurie Lee's menu for she has to feed a family on less than $40 a month. For Jenny Lee and Rob, there was also little pleasure in eating a steady diet of meat grease and grits for breakfast and fat back and hoppin' John, somebody told me those were beans, for dinner. Occasionally. Jenny Lee revolts, forced by Laurie Lee to eat her breakfast. Jenny in mounting anger stuffs her mouth until she gags and vomits. Laurie Lee's cries of, "Stop" simply urges the child to continue her stuffing, her gagging and vomiting. Killens concentrates heavily on Rob's growth from boyhood to manhood, his relationships with his teachers, his peers, and with his mother. Killens emphasizes the importance of Black music and the oral tradition to Blacks in crossroads, Georgia.
Australia Hende...: It had been the practice of the Black school children to present a program of Negro spirituals to the whites of the town. In the past, the program was a nostalgic journey down memory lane for whites recalling the continued Blacks, working and singing in the fields. However, for the Black children, it was a farce. With Rob's help, Richard Miles Rob's teacher plans a program of spirituals explaining the historical conditions under which the spirituals were born. Rob is the narrator, he says, "The Negro spirituals were tones, loud, long, and deep, reading the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest of anguish, every tone with a testimony against slavery and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains." Rob's teacher then also teaches him how to live in a white man's world. Scenes of Rob's camaraderie with friends like Fat Gus Mackey are part of his growth demand who had also, in one school scene, Gus requests the seat next to Rob so that he could share Rob speller.
Australia Hende...: Rob doesn't like the idea because he knows Gus will not let him pay attention. Ms. Josephine, the teacher says, "Alright Gus, make sure you behave yourself. We're glad you're taking an interest in your lessons for once. Aren't we Robert." Robert grunts. As soon as Gus sat down, he looked in the book and spoke out of the side of his mouth like one of those cowboys in a picture show, "Boy, you show is one ugly boy child. Tell me one thing, is ugly got the mug on you?" Rob pretended to ignore him. He'd heard this ugly routine many, many times before. Rob thought to himself, "If I'm ugly, what in the hell are you?" "One thing sure" Gus says, "You are not going to die no natural death. You just going to ugly away. Going around telling people you nine years old. Ain't no way in hell you could get that big and ugly nine little years."
Australia Hende...: And of course it goes on and thanks to Gus, Rob is the one who has to stay after school. Rob, however, meets a greater test with his mother. For Laurie, no period in Rob's life is too early for him to learn that he must fend for himself or be physically and psychically annihilated by a Southern way of life, whose definition of manhood and womanhood does not conclude Blacks. She urges him to fight just as she was taught to fight. She defends his right to protect himself from anyone, including whites. A neighbor, old Ms. Sarah, scolds Rob for fighting a white boy who had thrown a rock at him. Laurie Lee tells her, "I can't help what you say. I'm never going to tell my children white folks is better than they are, because it's a lie. And I know it. And by God, you know it too."
Australia Hende...: The irony of Southern justice and the contradictions in teaching Rob self-assertiveness, and self-love come to the surface in Lauries relationship with her son. Rob is jailed for trying to prevent Jenny Lee from being raped by a group of white school boys. Inside the courthouse over whose doors, the caption "Justice for all" is imprinted. A group of policemen, force Laurie to whip Rob for fighting whites, or have him sent to reform school. With her dress spattered with Rob's blood, Laurie and Rob leave the courthouse. She approaches George Cross jr. Harvard graduate, owner of Crossmills inc. who tells her that the courthouse is not his, that it belongs to all the people, and that Rob will get over the beating. With a general smile he looks at his watch and hurries to an appointment.
Australia Hende...: As Rob grows to manhood, he learns that the contradictions in Southern life must be overcome by his willingness to value the principle of his existence over and above the consequences, which the Southern past has taught him to fear. As he sits during his father's funeral, Rob having unionized his fellow hotel workers knows that he will take up the banner of his father's favorite Negro spiritual, "Walk together children."
Australia Hende...: This then is the literary world of the Black Southern author. His examination of the South is an avenue through which he explores the heritage and the experiences which have shaped his life. I like to conclude with Margaret Walker's words, "My novel is a canvas on which I paint my vision of my world." Thank you.
Darwin Turner: We do have a couple of minutes if there are any questions directed towards [inaudible].
Australia Hende...: Yes, you there.
Speaker 3: [inaudible] might have a question. Is the image of white people in Black writing extended into an image of white people in America as a whole, or does it remain just a Southern white?
Australia Hende...: In some instances, as in the novel that I did sort of briefly reviewed with you, like Killens 'Youngblood. It extends to the whole of America. In some instances, it does not.
Darwin Turner: Could you explain again, why of all the possibilities that you had, you would see Youngblood as a work that on which you might focus as a kind of central presentation?
Australia Hende...: I knew that question was coming, and I have an answer for you, Dr. Turner. When I thought of the possibility that it might be asked, my first response was something like this, I'm in between chapters one and two of dissertation and Youngblood, and Yerby, Wright, and Himes is about as far as I've gotten. However, I think that, as I've said in the talk, that it's a book that is extensive enough that it includes many of the kinds of ideas that the Southern writers that I mentioned talk about. The idea of the reverence for older Blacks who are able to pass their wisdom down to the generations that follow them. [inaudible].
Darwin Turner: A question that perhaps isn't fair but has intrigued me, especially as whites talk about the South, if one might talk about Southern Black novelists, can one also talk about northern Black novelists? Do you see a dichotomy between the two worlds?
Australia Hende...: I feel dichotomy between the worlds in that despite the fact that the two groups of novelists live in a world which supposedly is more liberal than any other, the Southern Black novelist has the tendency to see the South like Richard Wright does, as an extension or what is included in the South, its narrowness of existence for Blacks. That kind of thought extends itself into the north, and northern writers, of course, have pretty much the same view about America in general.
Darwin Turner: I guess what I'm getting at is, again, drawing a parallel with the whites who talk about Southern literature. Is there a unifying principle to Southern culture that does not seem equally applied in life in the north or the west? Is there something unique about this region?
Australia Hende...: Yes. I would say from my exploration to the literature by Black Southern novelists that the tendency towards a simple place, if I can be that day, the idea of a kind of emotional cycle tied to a particular area of land, not for the land itself, but for the whole history of that land as it deals with the fact that the person's parents, grandparents were born near that, that the background has been a played existence and the person who's worked itself up to that, but a kind of emotional psychical attachment to an area which you don't find, it seems to me, in literature of other areas.
Speaker 4: I didn't hear you say anything about hunting and fishing culture. Seems to be this often a very common theme in Southern [inaudible] novels. There's a great deal of this in white, Southern writing. In the sense of almost all neolithic, masculine, overcome a great force [crosstalk]. I don't mean just [inaudible] of fishing, something more elemental than that. [inaudible].
Australia Hende...: This is probably being more facetious than it is You're thinking of the whole idea of manhood and what some characters do in order to achieve manhood, the whole initiation kind of thing. Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is a short serve by Richard Wright called 'Almost a Man' where the protagonists, a 17 year old boy wants to be a man, he's Black, of course, and he attaches himself to a gun. This supposedly is part of the whole American thing of weaponry versus manhood.
Australia Hende...: Anyway, Wright sort of turns the boy's attachment to the gun almost into the fact that because the boy is Black and because he's living in the setting that he is, even this reaching out for this kind of image to attain manhood does not work for him. But the closest I can come to fishing and hunting may be Waters Turpin two novels, These Low Grounds, and O Canaan!, but in both of those, the fishing that is done for the crab and the oyster industry, is done not for leisure, but for economic reasons. Yes.
Speaker 7: With the exception of Du Bois is in the process of a transcendent liberalism. Are there any other Black writers who have been able to transcend viewing the relationship [inaudible] the South and the dichotomy of the Black and white [inaudible] out of their relationship and how [inaudible] the view of the South, according to economic category, or past relationship instead of the view Black against white has been the main thing shaping history of Blacks in the South?
Australia Hende...: [inaudible]. Robert, as I've reviewed there are novelists like [inaudible] himself who, in his first novel, advocate with a possible unity between Black and those whites, who can see beyond the whole system of a thought to join and to perform some kind of economic, political unity, However, in his second novel SIPI he reverses the whole thing by saying that Southern whites who are observers of the whole civil rights movement and who are afraid of, let's say, having this whole superiority kind of thing removed, do not want to participate, do not want to be a part, therefore Blacks must organize among themselves.
Speaker 7: This might [inaudible]. It's about Gage [inaudible] but I'm not able to one thing when it comes to Gage, and that is that, if Paul was a character in this book that what is the opinion of and acceptance of that whole system and the character generally [inaudible], "This is the way it ends, this is the way it has been, and it's been passed on from one generation to the next and [inaudible] there's nothing you can do about it." So you accept the system [inaudible]. I guess my question is whether this is just Gage working as an artist trying to make [inaudible].
Australia Hende...: Gage enjoys finagling with three things, the past, the present, and the future. And the tension between the three is he sees it, even though such that no writer, especially himself, should be able to make judgments about whether one is an improvement over the other, or whether there are as many bad things in the past as there are a bad things in the present. It's the kind of tension that he works with.
Speaker 6: One of the criticisms raised against Richard Wright and other expatriate Black writers, is that once they have removed themselves from this country, that their work seemed to be much weaker. Your argument simply is that there's a correspondence between the distance from the source of the materials, there's a corresponding weakness in the works. Do you find any justification for this type of criticism on the part of Southern Black writers and their treatment of their materials as they have left the South or left the country?
Australia Hende...: I can think of a number of Black Southern writers like Pharr and Sarah Wright, who of course live in New York. But at the same time, I can think of Margaret Walker, Alice Walker, and Dennis Jackson, and Earnest Gaines himself who continually, Earnest Gaines that is, who continually make visits back to the South and to Alice Walker and Margaret Walker who live in Jackson, Mississippi. It's really hard for me to evaluate from the writers that I have just named, whether or not their work has strengthened or become weaker because they no longer live in the South. Certainly this is not for Gaines. And Sarah Wright, who grew up in eastern shore of New Orleans has only written one novel. So it's hard to judge. Of course, critics say that Richard Wright who wrote The Long Dream in Paris, got some of his landmarks confused when he was writing along [inaudible]. I don't know. It's hard to say. Yeah.
Speaker 8: [inaudible] Richard Wright. Clemson classifies Wright as a middle class, because his mother was a teacher [inaudible]. Despite the fact that [inaudible] father had [inaudible] and Michelle Cobb seems to agree that if we be some of a class that Richard Wright would be [inaudible] new class. Does that view of Wright change your perception of his perception of the South in any way?
Australia Hende...: I never saw Wright as middle class. I have problems even with talking about classes and economics levels when dealing with Blacks. But no, I wouldn't.
Darwin Turner: Are these novels [inaudible] associated with the Black Arts Movement?
Australia Hende...: No. Interestingly enough, as I mentioned earlier, writers like Alex Walker, Sarah Wright, Robert Deane Pharr, are more interested in a kind of individual approach. Separate from especially the idea of open confrontation between Black and whites. Dennis Jackson seems to be the only person that I've been able to come up where he seems closer to the Black Arts Movement than the others that I [inaudible].
Speaker 9: Well, do you know enough about their backgrounds to know? And how of an influence is [inaudible] opinion at all by white Southern writers? [inaudible]. Are you against them [inaudible]?
Australia Hende...: To answer your first question is, some of these writers are like ghosts. It's awfully hard to find information concerning them. So I would be perhaps not leading you correctly if I said that they were not influenced by Southern writers. Now, Gaines in particular, has come out in interviews and said that he of course has read, white Southern writers, but since he did not find any instances where Southern writers were giving adequate development to Black characters, he moved on to Russian writers. So there may be, I don't know.
Speaker 9: Well, a question for [inaudible]. I know that there are people who are writing right now in the South, [inaudible], almost all of them [inaudible]. It's as if they're living in an all white world except for just one or two exceptions. These people dealing with whites other than [inaudible].
Australia Hende...: Now, you're talking about a before?
Speaker 9: Right.
Australia Hende...: Of the ones that I named, it's interesting that they, like white writers, would rather present their views of their own world. Now that's not necessarily true for Killens, who Doug and Youngblood tried to present a white family, at least one of the white children in his family, and the person who questioned his whole position as being a person who does not like Blacks. And then there's this, I shouldn't say this after criticizing somebody for comparing Gone with the Wind with Do Believe, but there is almost this sort of Huck Finn kind of comparison where in a section of Youngblood, the white boy who witnesses the cruelty of his own family does try to establish a relationship with a Black boy of his own age, and they talk, and later on, are very instrumental in organizing and unionizing some of the Blacks and whites in this area.
Darwin Turner: I'd like to thank Australia Henderson for our presentation this evening. And thank you for attending. May I call your attention to the two final presentations of Black Kaleidoscope for this academic year. Black Genesis group will perform Friday and Saturday of this week. Is that still in the old armory. Anyway, there will be-
Australia Hende...: Where? It's next week? Speak out loud.
Darwin Turner: [inaudible]. I am having something good to tell you, but I know that was a change. It's listed on his schedule as the 26th, but it to be Friday and Saturday of next week. And is that in McBride or the armory?
Speaker 6: In McBride.
Darwin Turner: I'm McBride. And Wednesday, May 1, at 7:30 in this room, there'll be a lecture on African writers by Mr. [Modica]. Thank you for coming this evening.
Speaker 6: Dr. Turner.
Darwin Turner: Yes.
Speaker 6: [inaudible] this coming Sunday at eight o'clock [inaudible].
Darwin Turner: Thank you for that information. One other announcement that may be of interest to people in this room there will be in the museum, a display of African art beginning May 1, and extending from that point on [inaudible]. Again, thank you for coming.