Charles H. Nilon lecture in contemporary black fiction at the University of Iowa, May 15, 1970

Speaker 1: The Broadcasting Service of the University of Iowa, in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the University presents a series of lectures by Black specialists as material for the University course, Afro-American Literature. The lecture for this week is Charles H. Nilon, Professor of English at the University of Colorado, speaking on Contemporary Black Fiction. Charles H. Nilo...: Good afternoon. I think that if one wanted to give a title to the things I intend to talk about today, that he might call that title 'Being a Man.' The Black writers of fiction, who have written in the decade of the '60s and in the decades before that have, each in their several ways, been concerned about the process of making Black men men. Charles H. Nilo...: The difficulty of that process, I suggested several days ago, is suggested in a quotation from W.E.B. Du Bois that is a part of the essays in The Souls of Black Folk. I'd like to read that quotation as Du Bois said it, and then to go on from there. Charles H. Nilo...: "The negro is sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world. A world which yields him no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself, through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on and amused contempt and pity. Charles H. Nilo...: One ever feels his twoness. An American, a negro. Two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. Charles H. Nilo...: The history of the American negro is the history of this strife, this longing to attain self conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging, he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has much to tell the world and Africa. He would not bleach his negro soul in a flood of white Americanism while he knows that the negro blood has a message for the world. Charles H. Nilo...: He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face." Charles H. Nilo...: Now, that passage was written in 1903. And in a way, I think it's crucial in understanding what the writers of Contemporary Black Fiction are concerned about. The contemporary novelists say, often, the same kind of thing. Charles H. Nilo...: In the novel that I talked about several days ago, the Cecil Brown novel, The Life and Loves of Mr Jiveass Nigger, there's a paragraph about the character George Washington that suggests, not so explicitly, the same kind of concern. Charles H. Nilo...: "And the worst of all, his father wanted George to become a lawyer, or a doctor. And George knew he wanted this, so that when George was five or six and went to visit him in prison, George said to him, "I think I'll be a lawyer or doctor or something like that." Charles H. Nilo...: His father's thin black face yielded a white set of teeth, but George Washington became no lawyer or doctor. Nothing like that. No, he became a hustler. A jiveass. A jazz player who could never quite get the kind of versatility to match the humming in his head. A well read hanger on, a poet without the appropriate metaphors." Charles H. Nilo...: In one of John Williams's novels, a novel called Sissie, he talks about this same difficulty. In this particular novel, The central character has had considerable emotional difficulty, matching his problems with earning a living and trying to keep a family together. Charles H. Nilo...: And when he is on the psychiatrist's couch, he talks about the business of being a man. He says, "At every bend in the road, there's been it. This problem of being a man. For me and my family, all the way down the line, like weather effects birds, as currents of warm air affect fish. Charles H. Nilo...: Do you think my parents would have been at each other's throats if there had been room for my father to behave nominally like a man? Do you think he enjoyed letting his wife bring home the bacon? And further, would my mother have been my mother if they had allowed my grandfather to live his life as a man instead of a Black man down there in Mississippi?" Charles H. Nilo...: Sissie's son makes it clear on the analyst's couch that his mother destroyed his father and caused his sister and him to hate his father, and her, as they worked to achieve the success she wanted them to have, as they worked to attempt to become persons as she felt they ought to work. Charles H. Nilo...: The materials that I want to talk about today are two kinds. First, I'd like to finish talking about Le Roi Jones... That's where I stopped yesterday... In a somewhat more detailed analysis of the work, The System of Dante's Hell, and then to talk about several short stories by reasonably typical writers of short fiction. Two of the writers of short stories are also novelists, but I'll begin with the Le Roi Jones material, and then go from that to the stories. Charles H. Nilo...: In some ways, The System of Dante's Hell is a rather typical novel for the group of novels that I talked about yesterday, the experimental novels. It's typical, not so much in the particular form that it has, but in the sense that many of the novels that I spoke of as experimental are efforts on the part of their writers to use as much of what is contemporary in the world of fiction, in the world of avant garde fiction, as they can. Charles H. Nilo...: Whenever the particular technical aspects of these devices, of this fiction, or aspects that lend themselves to saying the kinds of things that I've suggested they are concerned about saying, to handle the details of autobiography and history and to, as I suggested, tell it as it is, to delineate the process of being a man. Charles H. Nilo...: In the Jones work, the compass is sufficiently large to include not only the novels that I've talked about in this particular period, but those of Wright and Ellison and Baldwin as well, who are just outside the period. Charles H. Nilo...: The duality that Du Bois describes nurtures a knowledge of hell, an intimacy with guilt and fear, a knowledge of evil and the depravity of man. The visions of hell and its many rooms, however, are visions of a man and the irrepressible human spirit. They are visions in which men who are denied claims to goodness, as it is traditionally defined, must somehow find that which is good, and men who recognize the ugliness must find beauty in themselves. Charles H. Nilo...: The world that Jones creates, the world which is patterned from Dante's Nine Circles, is adjacent to [Ganay's] world. Ganay's characters strive for excellence and virtue, and must find and define these in a context of evil. Charles H. Nilo...: As a note to his outline of the System of Dante's Hell, Jones describes heresy as the greatest of the sins, unlike Dante, and puts his heretics in the deepest part of hell. "It is heresy," he says, "Against one's own sources, running in terror from one's deepest responses and insights, the denial of feeling that I see as basest evil." Charles H. Nilo...: What Jones describes, I suppose, as heresy, is equivalent to those factors which deny the individual manhood. Jones's heresy is essentially a product of Du Bois' dualism. His novel is autobiographical, a careful examination of the direction of his life, an evaluation of the conflicting pulls of integration and separation on him. Charles H. Nilo...: In the last chapter of his novel, Jones defines hell as, "The flame of social dichotomy, split open down the center, which is the early legacy of the Black man, unfocused on Blackness. The dichotomy of what is seen and taught and desired, opposed to what is felt." Charles H. Nilo...: Finally, Jones says, "God is simply a white man, a white idea, in this society, unless we have made some other image which is stronger, and can deliver us from the salvation of our enemies." Charles H. Nilo...: Now, I suppose that Jones is talking about the kind of thing that Cecil Brown is concerned about in the desire of George Washington's father to have him become a doctor or a lawyer, or Sissie, the mother in John A. Williams' novel, coercing her children into patterns which she felt were the necessary patterns for their success. Charles H. Nilo...: In a somewhat Jungian way, the novel is a history of the race, or an outlining of that history. It represents the Black man's quest for the American dream, the struggle from the lower class to the middle class pretensions, and the emptiness of the quest. Charles H. Nilo...: The things that are given up or ignored and not valued along the way from one class to another are related to the heresy that Jones says is the greatest sin. The quest for middle class status, Jones says, is against one's sources, responses and insights. It requires a denial of feeling, or a respecting of the feelings that one has, and is therefore evil. Charles H. Nilo...: In this novel, the ghetto is described, the gangs, sex, religion. The total world the lower class urban person, is revealed impressionistically. I suggested yesterday that Jones does this, largely through a recording of sense impressions. Charles H. Nilo...: Jones says in the section called Sound and Image, which is the first section of the novel, that it is his intention to have a reader know what the experiences in the past have been through a sort of recreation of them, in a sensory way, that the reader is able to pick up through his own perceptions. Charles H. Nilo...: Jones suggests that the achievement of middle class norms, which is described in the remainder in the second section of the novel, is empty and is a kind of hell. This second section of the novel is a narrative, almost in a conventional sense. It's fragmentary in its style. It is fast moving and coherent, although it ends in a sequence that is close to fantasy. Charles H. Nilo...: The controlling generalization in this second part is made in the section called The Christians, a part of the ninth ditch in which the makers of discord are placed. Here, when the author/narrator, in a situation of danger, recognizes the quality of the moment, he defines his whole experience, and in a sense, the experience of the Black man in America. Charles H. Nilo...: He says, "Sure, I was frightened, but there was not a goddamn thing to do. In this conception of the entire world of technology, we trace everything back to man, and finally demand an ethic suitable to the world of technology, if indeed we wish to carry things that far." Charles H. Nilo...: Jones's language may not be direct, but I think that, perhaps with some obliqueness, he's saying roughly what George Washington was saying at the end of Cecil Brown's novel, that the problem which faces Black men and all men is a problem which man has made, and is a problem which men must solve for themselves. Charles H. Nilo...: And Jones, like Cecil Brown, is saying that the man has a very himself the resources to solve the problem, in spite of the technology, which has been a part of the instrumentality, I suppose, that is made the problem. Charles H. Nilo...: Jones's view of the Black problem includes, or at least tries to, the whole of American life. The world of technology mentioned in the quotation suggests that Jones is aware of the complexity of American life and of the extent to which this life can be summarized in the label, the technological society. Charles H. Nilo...: The Black problem at crisis, as it is now, is a part of this technological world. The word technology has the force of this novel that materialism has as a cause in the novels of William Faulkner, and suggests the relationship between the past and present in our history that is suggested in Faulkner's work. Charles H. Nilo...: This comparison with Faulkner is helpful in understanding the dilemma of the Black man whose effort has been, in a sense, to escape his past. The critical rejection of integration and of middle class status in Jones's work can be understood in the sense that Faulkner regards time and history as a continuum. Charles H. Nilo...: Jones feels that the middle class Black person has stepped out of history, or tried to, and by doing this, rejected the possibilities of becoming a person. The errors in the Black man's stance and the errors in the white man's stance are manmade and can be corrected. Charles H. Nilo...: Jones's hell provides an optimism, if not a beatific vision. The fantastic events of the last section of the novel lead to the rational statements at its end, in which hell is judged to be useful because, in a way, it brings man to his senses. Man has made the errors, and Jones tells us in the quotation above that man can provide an ethic suitable to the world of technology. Charles H. Nilo...: The kind of statement that Jones is able to make through his novel, particularly as that statement relates to the rather precise idea of making men, or of being a man, is picked up very nicely in the short stories that I would like to talk about. These stories are in many ways typical, I think, of the short stories that have been written during the '60s. And as I suggested, most of them are the product of writers who have written longer fiction for us. Charles H. Nilo...: One can see, I think, by reading the short stories... Those, for example, that I suggested on the little sheet about the lectures, that I believe was passed out earlier... One can see through reading stories such as those that the problem of finding, in a sense, in a small work, a kind of model of what goes in the large work, is to some extent simplified. Because I think each one of these is, in a small way, a replica of certain of the novels that we've worked with. Charles H. Nilo...: The first of the stories that I'd like to talk about is by Ernest J. Gaines, who is perhaps better known as a novelist. During the '60s he has written four novels, a novel called Bloodline, one called Of Love and Dust, one called Catherine Carmier, and the first of the novels in this period was called Barren Summer. Charles H. Nilo...: The story that I'm concerned about is a story called Train Whistle Guitar. It's a story told from the point of view of a boy who lives in a small Alabama town, close to the line of Mississippi. A boy who, with a friend, becomes involved in this process of being a man, who engages in a kind of growth process, kind of knowledge, and who, although we may not say is initiated, at least becomes aware of the rite of initiation, and is prepared to be involved in the ritual. Charles H. Nilo...: The story is told in terms of sights and sounds, and fairly commonplace, in terms of color. When we first meet the boy who tells the story, he talks, at the outset, about his friend. He says, "Little Buddy's color was sky blue." And in the second story, he talks about color in relation to manhood. "Steel blue," he says, "Was a man's color. Sky blue had to do with the color of the sky, with the color of birds, with the color of objects proper for realization and use by a child. Steel blue had to do with guns, the color of the steel that guns is made of, with railroad tracks, with trains, with guitar strings, and was a man's color." Charles H. Nilo...: He introduces his friend, Little Buddy, and he introduces the model that Little Buddy and he accept of manhood. That's Luzana Cholly. Luzana Cholly is a huge man. He is a legendary figure. He's a kind of local Paul Bunyan. And it's the ambition of these two little boys to be like him. Charles H. Nilo...: Now, for him, the narrator finds various ways of defining quality, of defining the person. He's regarded as a nigger, but in the proper sense. The sense in which a Black person may speak of another person as being a nigger with a sense of praise and a certain sense of pride, with a sense of respect. Charles H. Nilo...: These two boys in the story understand the distinctions in how this word is spoken. And as the narrator thinks about Louisiana Charlie as a nigger, he recognizes that what he's thinking is not what he understands, or what is meant when he gets in fights with white boys, and they call him Nigger. He recognizes the difference in the way the word is said, and also in the consequences of the word. He says that when white boys get in fights with him and other Black boys, they call him Nigger, their faces become red in a certain kind of way, and then they go off and get other groups of white boys, and they bring them back beat up the Black boys. Charles H. Nilo...: This is, in a sense, a kind of functional definition. And the process in this story is, I suppose, a sort of functional definition. The two boys spend a great deal of time together. And they talk about what they hear when they listen to their parents and to their friends. They compare their experiences and discover what these experiences mean. And they relate all of these experiences somehow to that appropriate time when they can be like Louisiana Charlie. Charles H. Nilo...: They try to swear the way he does, they go through the gestures of physical movement that he makes. They have begun to walk, actually, in the same loose, nonchalant fashion that he walks in. And they have a kind of respect for trains, because Louisiana Charlie has traveled about the world riding freights. And they try to say the things they say in the phrases that he uses when he has things to say. Charles H. Nilo...: And one spring, when the day is a proper blue for boys, and when they are aware of the swamp land and of the spring animals, and they decide not to go to school. They plan to make the trip that is necessary for one to make to become a man like Louisiana Charlie. Without their parents discovering it, they put on their brogans, a kind of shoe, they put on their corduroy trousers and they put on their jeans over these. They put on two shirts, they get their baseball caps, and each one takes his favorite baseball glove. And they prepare a lunch, and they get a blanket, and they tie it across their shoulder so that their hands will be free, and they go out to wait for the freight train. They know what time it's due. Charles H. Nilo...: They are not patient while they wait. They keep looking down the track for it. And finally, it comes. They have practiced how one gets on a freight train when it's moving, and they get into a gondola car, and they know that when they've gone about four miles down the road, the train will stop. And they plan, at that point, to get out of the gondola car, and to get into an open freight car, that they can move the doors back and forth and close them. Charles H. Nilo...: They're a bit startled inside the gondola car, because once they're inside, the world looks different. They can only see what's above them. They begin to move, and they know, in a literal sense, where they are and how far they've gone, but it seems that they've gone miles and miles in the step they've taken. Charles H. Nilo...: The train stops fairly suddenly, and they know what their next move is. To get into the boxcar. And just as they're about to get out of a gondola car, Louisiana Charlie appears, and he takes each one of them out of the car and sets them down beside it. And well, they are terrified. They thought that they might have a chance to travel with him. They knew he was going to leave again. They'd heard him say this. But he doesn't let them travel with him. He takes them over to the swamp. He doesn't take that train. They head to the swamp, and he sits down and he talks with him. Charles H. Nilo...: And he tells him, "You don't want to be what I am. You have to be more than I am. You have to be strong in the way that white folks are strong." They don't quite understand this because he represents for them the totality of manhood. But he explains this to them, and they don't know quite what to say about it. They are afraid to go back to school. They're playing hooky. They're afraid to go back home because it will be discovered that they went away from home. Charles H. Nilo...: But at the end of the story, you have the sense of the need for the quest of manhood. Louisiana Charlie represents manhood for the boys, but they discovered what they had thought is manhood, Louisiana Charlie doesn't think of as manhood. But finally, they're willing to accept whatever the consequences of their action are up to that time, because it means that the man, as they recognized him, has at least taken the time to talk to them. And so they've been close to him, they've touched him and been touched by him. And then so when he goes away to get on the train. They want to know when he'll be back. And this is roughly the way the story ends. Charles H. Nilo...: The second of the stories that I'm concerned about, want to say something about, is a story called The Sky is Gray. I guess I said that Train Whistle Guitar was written by Ernest J. Gaines, and it isn't. It's written by Albert Murray. The Sky is Gray as written by Ernest J. Gaines. Charles H. Nilo...: In the Sky is Gray we have, again, this process of becoming a man talked about. It's in part a story that allows us to see the effort that a mother makes to train her boy... Her oldest boy. He's eight years old. He has a younger brother and a younger sister... To train her boy to become a man, or to know what it means to become a man. Charles H. Nilo...: The mother, the three children, and aunt, live in a house together. The mother's husband is away in the army. They live in a semi rural Louisiana town. The process of becoming a man is illustrated in the effort that is made to get the boy to a dentist's to have a painful tooth extracted. The tooth has been hurting the boy for about a month, but his mother says that he is the man in the house, and his mother doesn't encourage him to cry. Charles H. Nilo...: There are times, because he likes her and admires her, that he wants to stand close to her and touch her, but he knows she doesn't like that. And so he has borne his pain without talking about it, except he's told his brother. The pain is usually there at night and he sometimes doesn't sleep well at night. And he doesn't quite know how she's done it, but he knows his aunt knows that he has the pain too, but they have not spoken about it. And finally, he knows that his mother knows that he has the pain, but he doesn't say anything about it. He says, "We don't have any money to have it pulled with." Charles H. Nilo...: And so for a month or so he he bears the pain of the tooth, and he says nothing about it. And then one morning when he gets up and his mother gets him out of bed, she is counting the little money that she has and she counts to $3. They have to go into town by bus. It will cost 50 cents for her and 25 cents for him. Pulling the tooth will cost $1 and a half. And it will take at least all the morning. And she will have to try to get back in time to work in the field in the afternoon. Charles H. Nilo...: The boy is aware of what's happening. And at this point, he feels he can speak about it, and so he tells her it doesn't hurt, but she pays that no attention, and so they get ready to go out. Charles H. Nilo...: The work she has to do in the field is helping to clear the ground so that it can be ready to to cultivate when the spring comes. It's still winter. And she has dressed herself and the boy as warmly as she can dress them, and they go out together and stand by the road where the bus will come past. Charles H. Nilo...: And the boy says to his mother when they get there, "Going be coming in a few minutes. Coming around the bend down there, full speed." And this is his only comment, and the two of them stand there until the bus is in sight. And the boy is impatient to be on his way, and he keeps looking down the road. Charles H. Nilo...: The author does not remind us of the tune, Look Down, Look Down that Lonesome Road. But in a sense, he suggests the idea of this tune. The boy is looking down the road waiting for the bus to come. It doesn't come immediately. While he looks, he thinks about himself. It's cold. He'd like to stand close to his mother, but he remembers that she says he's the man. And he thinks about other things. He remembers that he is scared of the dark but he pretends that he isn't. Charles H. Nilo...: And he remembers his mother forcing him to to kill the trapped redbird. Food is difficult for them to get. And he had made a trap and had trapped two redbirds. And he liked the redbirds. They were pretty. And his mother, after he'd played with them... She allowed him to do that for a time... Said, "Now kill them." And he didn't want to do that. And his brother and sister and his aunt were there, and the mother said, "Kill them." And he didn't want to. Charles H. Nilo...: And she goes outside and gets a heavy switch, and she comes back and she strikes him across the back and she says, "Kill them." And finally, he tries to kill one and he fails to. And she takes that one and kills it and then she tells him to kill the other. And he doesn't want to, and she begins to beat him, and she beats him after he kills the bird. Charles H. Nilo...: And he thinks about this while they stand at the bus. And as he stands there beside her in the cold, waiting for the bus, he realizes that she has done this to make a man of him, that if she were to disappear and his aunt were to disappear, he would have to be the man. He would have to feed the family, the brother and the sister. Charles H. Nilo...: The bus comes. They get on the bus, they go to the dentist office. And the dentist office is what dentist offices are. Children who see the dentist are not always very happy. And the child who is in front of him, ahead of him in the schedule, sees the dentist, and it's painful and the child is noisy. And he thinks again about what it means to be a man. Charles H. Nilo...: The room is filled with Black people who have come to see the dentist and there are some white people who've come to see the dentist. The receptionist comes out finally and says, "The doctor won't see any more people until 1:30." The boy's mother gets up and speaks to her, but she's inflexible. Charles H. Nilo...: And so she closes the waiting room. The people who are there go out. It's sleeting outside, and the boy and his mother walk for a while, looking in windows, and he gets very cold. And so they go into a hardware store, and they walk past a stove, and his mother stops him at the stove and she goes back and asks the salesman where the ax handles are. Charles H. Nilo...: And she goes back and she takes each ax handle, and she gives it a sort of hefting in her hand and tests it for its weight. She puts one down and then she'll come back and pick it up and try it again and then she'll try another. Charles H. Nilo...: And finally, she looks over at the boy, and she takes the last ax handle, tests it, comes by, puts it down as though she couldn't find one that suited her purpose, and comes by and picks the boy up and they go out of the store. She's given him a chance to get warm, but she doesn't say that's what she's doing and he realizes he can't do anything about it either, because since he's a man, he can't admit that he's cold. Charles H. Nilo...: And so they walk, and there's no place really for them to go in this town, unless they go on the side of town where Black people are, and there, there's a place, a café, but they don't really have money to spend for food, but the boy is hungry. And she's asked him if he's hungry he said no, but they go to this restaurant and she buys three of the penny cakes for him, and a glass of milk, and gets a cup of coffee for herself, and he stands by the stove until he gets warm. Charles H. Nilo...: And a man comes and asks her to dance, and she's afraid not to dance with him, and so she dances with him. But when he becomes offensive, she strikes him and knocks him back against the record vendor. And then she's about to leave. The proprietor tells her she can stay but she won't stay any longer. And so the boy and his mother leave. And it's very cold, and he realizes that in a short while he's going to be cold again. Charles H. Nilo...: He turns his little thin collar up around his throat, but his mother makes him turn it down. She says, "You're not a bum. You're a man." And so he turns his collar down and they walk. And they pass on their way, almost back to the dentist office, an old lady, tiny, who says to them, "Have you had something to eat?" She keeps a store, and they get some food there. Charles H. Nilo...: But she won't food to them until the little boy has done some work for it. She tells him, "You have to work for it." So she takes him out back of a little store and has him move some garbage cans. He realizes that the cans are not filled, that they are empty, but she makes him move them from the front of the store to the back of the store. Charles H. Nilo...: She protects, in a way, his self respect, and his mother's, and eventually gives them some food. And the mother has decided that she will buy some meat to take back with her. And the lady gives her more meat than 25 cents will buy, and the mother won't take. And finally the lady cuts the meat and gives it back to her. Charles H. Nilo...: And then they start down the road. And again, the boy begins to be cold. They have an appointment with a dentist this time. And he puts up his collar, and the mother says, again, "You're not a bum." She says, "You're a man." So he turns the collar down. Charles H. Nilo...: In the third story that I'd like to talk about, a story called Cry For Me by William Melvin Kelley, we are again concerned with the making of men, with the desire to be men. In a way, this story, like the other two stories, is concerned with defining the process by which men become men. Charles H. Nilo...: One of the interesting things about William Melvin Kelley, I think, is that although in a novel, like a different drama, he provides an example of a fairly separatist pattern of action. The Black people leave the town where the white people are. In this work, and in most of Kelley's work, he shows a kind of concern about men, Black and white. Charles H. Nilo...: And in most of hiss novels, he does not define all white men as bad... Any white man, I suppose, as necessarily bad persons. The old man who sat in the wheelchair, looking at the things happening in a different drama, comments about the quality of white men. And in his comment we can judge that he has, in a sense, withdrawn from the active scene because of the ugliness of that scene. Charles H. Nilo...: There is a little boy in that story who's called Mr Wilson. Mr Wilson and his father are a part of the group who form the chorus that I spoke of the other day. And they're different from the other people who are there. When they eat lunch, Mr Wilson and his father talk to each other. And Mr Wilson's father tells him how he must speak to Tucker Caliban, what he must call Tucker. And Mr Wilson, the little boy, thinks of Tucker as being his friend. And the little boy is the only person that Tucker responds to when he's about to leave. Charles H. Nilo...: Mr Wilson sees Tucker and his family walking down the road, and he says to his father, "I've got to find out where they're going, if they're going to come back." And he runs down the road and he catches Tucker and his coat, and he says, "Mr Caliban, where are you going, are you going to come back? Why are you going?" And he doesn't understand what Tucker Caliban says to him, but he does have a sense that Tucker answers him, and that there is no tension between them, but in a sense, they or a person speaking to person. Charles H. Nilo...: And fairly often, I think, in the work that William Melvin Kelley does, there are situations which work out in such a way that people speak to people without regard for color. And this is a kind of thing that happens in this particular story, the story that's called Cry for Me. Charles H. Nilo...: In the first paragraph of that story, Kelley refers to a big voice crying in the wilderness. And you have echoed, "Prepare ye, prepare ye, the way of the Lord," and the other things go along with that. Charles H. Nilo...: The story is rather simply told. It's a rather stark story. Carlyle and his father live in the Bronx. They, at the beginning of the story, go down to the railroad station because Carlyle's father's brother is coming to New York from the South. Charles H. Nilo...: And Carlyle doesn't know his uncle. He's never seen his uncle, and is rather overwhelmed at his uncle's size. The uncle is a huge, fairly awkward person, and he's carrying the suitcases, and he comes up, and he's so happy to see his brother but he just knocks him down in the process. Charles H. Nilo...: And this, Carlyle finds rather remarkable. And then he begins to to enjoy watching his uncle. His father gets his uncle a construction job, and they work together. The uncle comes home from construction work and he sits down and watches television until one o'clock every night and goes to bed. This is the sort of cycle and his life. Charles H. Nilo...: And from time to time, on weekends, Carlyle takes his uncle around to see the sights of the town. And he's showed him just about everything you can show him. And so one day he says to his uncle, "Have you ever seen a queer?" And his uncle doesn't know what he's talking about apparently, and then he explains what he means, and his uncle has some understanding then. And he takes him over to the village so that he can see a queer. Charles H. Nilo...: And he gets to the village and they are walking around. The uncle hasn't much interest in seeing queers, but he looks up and his uncle isn't there. And he looks to find out where he is, and he sees his uncle rushing back, and he goes into a little club. Charles H. Nilo...: In the club, there is a musician, a Black musician, performing intimately. He has a guitar and he has a microphone. His shirt is open down to his navel, his trousers are tight. And Carlyle wonders at first, "Well, did he come in here just to see another queer?" Charles H. Nilo...: But pretty soon the man who is sitting there begins to perform again. And he announces the song that he's going to sing as a genuine folk song. He gives the name of the person who collects it, and he insists that he will give an authentic presentation of it. And Carlyle watches his uncle and notices a certain tension in him and a certain sense of irritation. Charles H. Nilo...: And the performer begins to perform, and Carlyle's uncle stops him. And his uncle says, "Don't sing my song that way." And the performer, who is professional and expert, says, "What do you mean your song?" And Carlyle says, "Well, I wrote that song. I wrote it in a certain year. It oughtn't be sung that way." Charles H. Nilo...: And the professional steps back and says, "Well after all, who are you to say anything about this song? It was collected by..." And he names the person. And he said, "I've listened to the tapes and this is the way it sounds." And Carlyle's uncle takes his guitar away from him. And there's a kind of unrest in the room. Charles H. Nilo...: The manager comes forward. And the entertainer who has had to give up his guitar begins to ask questions, and Carlyle's uncle describes the man who came into the field where he had been working, and had heard him sing, and who had actually taped the song when he'd done it. And apparently, the professional is convinced that this must be the man that he's had in mind as the collector. Charles H. Nilo...: And so the uncle takes the place on the platform, and he begins to play and to sing. And Kelley describes the reaction of the audience. He describes the voice as not being really musical except that it was on pitch. And he describes the playing. The uncle was not content to begin with one guitar, but he gets two guitars and produces a massive chord. And there is a certain kind of impact upon the audience. There's a certain kind of bringing together all of the people there. Charles H. Nilo...: And they stay until very early in the morning, and they leave. And after that's done, the uncle goes back and begins to work on a construction job. And then the boy begins to get phone calls. The manager is trying to find his uncle. And so the uncle is brought downtown to play. Charles H. Nilo...: And when the uncle goes downtown, they can't get in the restaurant. There's a huge crowd of people outside. And at first they are frightened. They're trying to get through, and they don't know what the crowd is there for. But when they are able to get inside, they see that there is a little note which had appeared in The New York Times about the singing. Charles H. Nilo...: And so the uncle performs, and the uncle makes a movie, and the uncle is scheduled for Carnegie Hall concert. The story is principally about that concert. The uncle sits on the stage. He begins quietly with one guitar and singing. Carlyle aids in the concert by bringing out the second guitar. Charles H. Nilo...: And about the time the second guitar is brought out, in the dress circle there, in Carnegie Hall, there is a Black family. A man and a woman and their three children, and they obviously are people who ordinarily don't go to Carnegie Hall. Charles H. Nilo...: And in the pause between the numbers, the man in the audience says, "Are you who I think you are?" And he gets up and comes up to the edge of the stage and has a look, and says, "Well, yes you must be. You must be Bedlow." He said, "You know, the last time I heard you play was the night that I thought my wife and I weren't going to get along well any longer. We were about separate. And after hearing you play at that dance, we've gotten along well ever since then. Let me introduce my children," he says. And then he names off his children, who have the kinds of names you might expect him to have. They're all named for distinguished men, distinguished Black man in this instance. Charles H. Nilo...: And then Bedlow says, "Well, since you're here, why don't you come up on the stage and sit with me while I play?" And so the family comes up on the stage and they sit. And then he begins to play. And as he begins to play, one of the little boys on the stage gets up and begins to dance. And then all the children begin to dance. And then Carlyle comes out and begins to dance. And pretty soon the people in the audience begin to dance. Some of them come on the stage and they began to dance too. Charles H. Nilo...: And I'll read a few paragraphs from the end of the story. "Colored people was teaching white people to dance and white folks was dancing with colored folks, and all the seats was empty. And people was coming on stage to dance. Then the other singers backstage come out and started the back up Uncle Wallace. And we was all dancing, all of us. And all over the noise and the laughing, you could hear uncle Wallace with his two guitars. You could hear him over the whole thing. Charles H. Nilo...: Then the air changed. You could feel it. It wasn't just air anymore. It started to getting sweet tasting, like perfume. And the people started to run down the aisles toward the stage, and everybody on the stage started to dance in towards Uncle Wallace. And everybody, everybody in the whole place, was sobbing and crying and tears was pouring down their cheeks and smearing their makeup and making their eyes red and big. Charles H. Nilo...: I could hear Uncle Wallace singing louder than ever. The people was rushing toward him. They was all crying and smiling too, like people busting into a trance, trying to get near enough to touch him, grab his hand and shake it and hug him and kiss him, even. Charles H. Nilo...: And then the singing stopped. I pushed my way through the crowd up to his chair. The first thing I seen was his two guitars all tore up and smashed, and the strings busted. Uncle Wallace was sitting in his chair slumped over, his face in his lap. And this was real strange. He looked like an old punctured Black balloon. Deflated and old. There wasn't a mark on him, but he was dead all right. Charles H. Nilo...: Mr [Berger] called in the whole bunch of doctors but they just stood around shaking their heads. They couldn't figure out how he died. One of them said, "There isn't nothing wrong with him, except he's dead." Charles H. Nilo...: Now I know this will sound lame to you, but I don't think anything killed him except maybe, at that second, he'd done everything that he ever wanted to do. He'd taken all them people and sung to them, and made them forget who they was and what they come from, and remember only that they was people. So he'd seen all he wanted to see and there was no use getting on with it. I mean, he'd made it. He got it over." Charles H. Nilo...: I think this is, in a way, the crucial paragraph in the story, and it is the distinctive thing, I think, that we find in William Melvin Kelley's work. The concern is like that of Gaines and like that of Jones, to define the process by which men are made. But here, it is not exclusively a concern with the Black person. It's a concern with making men of all men, white men and Black men. And it's achieved, somehow, through the musical gesture. Charles H. Nilo...: And here in the story, you have the author using the folk materials. The guitarist is described as a voice crying in the wilderness, so that you have the echo behind that, I suppose, not only of the spirituals, in a rather not clearly defined way, but you have back of that, the western tradition of Judeo Christian culture here too. Not a juxtaposing of these two things, and any tense relationship, since many of the spirituals are adaptations of this particular kind of thing. The Uncle Wallace Bedlow represents, in a sense, the voice crying in the wilderness. And you get the response to that. People preparing a way of their God. A voice knowing somehow what to cry. Charles H. Nilo...: The use of the blues idiom, the use of a jazz idiom, works here a kind of miracle for us when the matters of race fall off and people dance together, crying in happiness. And this is an achievement, not only in what it does for other people but it is the achievement for Wallace. Wallace becomes, in the power he exercises over other people, a man. Charles H. Nilo...: And I suppose you might say that, as you have seen in the other two stories, that what Wallace does at this moment is, in a sense, a fulfilling of the kinds of things that the children that you see in the other two stories aspire, in some way or another, to fulfill. Charles H. Nilo...: You see also, I think, in this particular paragraph, the satisfying, of the Du Bois dualism, or the destroying of the dualism. Because here you have the merging of the two groups in a whole, and in a joyful whole, the narrator in the story is not content simply to say what has happened as he does in the paragraph that I read last, but he tries to define it in sensuous terms and in terms that are perhaps somewhat more relevant to himself. Charles H. Nilo...: So he says, "It's kind of like that girl I was telling you about. The one who promises you some tail and when you got it, you were sorry, because then you still had it to look forward to. Charles H. Nilo...: Well, I think it's like that. Getting tail and coming out of a house, and there ain't nothing but pussycats and garbage cans on the street. And it's lonely and late, and you wished you hadn't done it. But shrug and say to yourself, "Hell man, you did. And that's it. And there ain't nothing to do but leave, because it's finished." Charles H. Nilo...: But when there's something else, you're walking along, and all at once, you smile, and maybe even laugh, and you say, "Man, that was some good tail." And it's a nice memory to walk home with." Charles H. Nilo...: So that you put the boy back into a kind of adolescent character by having him try to assess what he's witnessed in the death of the person by this particular thing. The title of the story, I think, becomes appropriate here. The title of the story is Cry for Me. Charles H. Nilo...: The writers in this series that I have been talking about the last several days, are writers, as I've said earlier this afternoon, who are largely concerned with the process of making men. And each of them, in his own way, engages in an attempt to define that process or to describe some aspect of it. Charles H. Nilo...: And each of them is, I think, content to have one find whatever way is a good way for him to be a man. I think that one could stop talking about this altogether, as I shall now, by saying that they would be in agreement with the [Thoreau] passage that William Melvin Kelley uses to select a title from for a different drama. Charles H. Nilo...: That passage is, "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it's because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away." Charles H. Nilo...: I don't know whether you have questions you'd like to ask or not. I think I suggested earlier, before one or two of us came, that Mr. Corrigan would like to say something to you. I should like to say thank you for having provided me someone to talk to in the last five days. Are there some questions you'd like to bring up? Robert Corrigan: I think of those of you who are here, or who are registered in the course and want to take the final examination [inaudible] Speaker 1: That was Charles H. Nilon, Professor of English at the University of Colorado, with today's lecture. This series of programs is presented by the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the University as material for the course, Afro-American Literature. Today's presentation originated as a live broadcast at 1:30 PM, May 15th, 1970, from Shambaugh Auditorium, and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.