Charles H. Nilon lecture in contemporary black fiction at the University of Iowa, May 14, 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's course, Afro-American Literature. The lecturer for this week is Charles H. Nylon Professor of English at the University of Colorado, speaking on Contemporary Black Fiction.
Charles H. Nilo...: Good afternoon, I may have begun this series of talks by suggesting that the Black writers in the '60s had served the cause of art and the present crisis. I want to continue to talk about these two surfaces and this afternoon to talk about them in the context of their relationship to certain formal matters. But also in terms of the handling of a certain kind of content within those structures that I talk about.
Charles H. Nilo...: I would like to say something about several writers. Some of them I have perhaps mentioned before Charles Wright, Ishmael Reed, LeRoi Jones, Hal Bennett, Sam Greenlee, William Melvin Kelley, whose novel, A Different Drummer, I've talked about a little bit earlier. These persons in the fiction that they have written have not been primarily I suppose, formal experimenters. But in their technical approaches to literature, there are I think, some rather interesting adaptations of material and form.
Charles H. Nilo...: A Black writer for a good number of years, was forced to do use the form acceptable to his audience, acceptable to his publisher and acceptable to, I suppose, himself. The form he used during that period was in a sense to compromise, he had to please the very largely a white book buying audience, he had to please that small part of the Black population that was able to afford books and did read them. And he had to satisfy a publisher. So that the way he wrote was perhaps very often a form of compromise.
Charles H. Nilo...: Generally, I think we can say that Black writers have had done with the compromise since they appeared to Richard Wright's, Native Son. And that, in those years since that novel appeared, Black writers have been rather free to choose forms, to say the kinds of things they wanted to say, in those forms. During the 1960s, there have emerged several writers who have engaged in what we might call formal experiments. And who, in engaging in those who have not, in a general sense, separated themselves from the mainstream of American literature. Because many of the things that are characteristic of the literature in general are found in particular ways and the writing that these persons have done.
Charles H. Nilo...: I don't mean to say that they're good novelists or bad novelist, I suggest yesterday that I think we're too close to them to say that, but I do want to say that they are not apart from the general pattern of literary techniques that we find in most contemporary writers today. And second, I want to say that they have done particular kinds of things in order to use materials that are essentially Black materials and techniques that are appropriate for the presentation of those materials.
Charles H. Nilo...: The attention to the materials of Black life is one of the things particularly noticeable in the work of most of these writers. The deserving of this attention by these materials is something which we had our attention called to early in the 1920s when James Weldon Johnson published his Anthology of Negro Verse and the introduction to that work he called attention to the body of folklore to the blues, the music, to the manner in which the Black people told stories, and suggest these to be a part of a wealth of America's cultural heritage that might be further used and further explored.
Charles H. Nilo...: And he himself and in little book of poems, God's Trombones, God's Trombones: Seven Sermons, adapted, rather freely attempts to illustrate a kind of use that might be made of these materials that had their origins in the Black community. The second kind of material, I suppose, which is not used primarily by these persons, that I'd like to say something about is their use of the materials that ordinarily the social scientists uses.
Charles H. Nilo...: I mentioned, I guess, two days ago that, someone in talking about Riesman's, The Lonely Crowd suggested that he was a social scientist using the materials that ordinarily were used by the novelist of manners. And among these writers, we find a use of materials ordinarily used by social scientists. In many ways, the novelist are talking about the same kinds of things that are talked about by Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver.
Charles H. Nilo...: And in a sense, they are saying some of the same things through their fiction, I suppose if Malcolm X said or that Cleaver says. It's rather interesting that while we don't think of Cleaver, ordinarily, I suppose as a novelist or as a writer of fiction, that he does utilize the methods of the novelist. In the Soul on Ice, that is, what he calls a parable about the Black man and the white woman, which is in its content, a piece of fiction, in that he does not insist we believe that the group of people who discuss the ideas that he wants to get across were actual people, their people that he creates, in a sense from his imagination.
Charles H. Nilo...: But he says what he wants to say about a cultural or a sociological aspect of our lives by using the method of fiction. Early in this year, he published in Ramparts magazine, two you could call them autobiographical essays, except that they move beyond the patterns of exposition which autobiography is, and made use of certain of the characteristic modes of fiction. There is, I suppose, an adaptations of the forms that the social scientists might use, in order to handle the materials that the social scientists might present, or one is aware of when he reads certain of the novels by the authors that I've mentioned earlier that their material is to a certain extent, sociology, its economics, its cultural anthropology, its physical anthropology.
Charles H. Nilo...: The work that is done sometimes is fairly close to journalism, although I suppose it is not that, it's a kind of parallel journalism. This is, I suppose, not unusual in the period in which we are now the distinction among the genres is not as clear as it was. We have here I suppose the kind of thing which Norman Mailer does when he writes about the March on the Pentagon and recognizes in one sense, that this is a journalistic effort, but on the other hand, describes the effort as a kind of novel.
Charles H. Nilo...: Several years ago, Truman Capote a spoke of his treatment of A Rather Sensational Murder as a new kind of novel. So, that I think that as the Black writers who write in the '60s write, they find various ways of handling the material, that they have to handle. The content to some extent, I suppose, determines what is appropriate in a formal sense for them to use. In a more literary way, we are particularly aware in the writing of these people of their use of language, the slang, the dialect, an effort to gain through the use of language an authentic representation of the people whose lives they are portraying.
Charles H. Nilo...: Not only are the words in a sense, right, but the rhythms, the music of the language is right. And one feels that he is in the form or he is in the presence of an authentic form. And he reads many of these things. There is a sense that these writers have listened very carefully to the people that they write about, and that they have presented and in an artistic representational way, what they hear. There is also a use of folklore, which is a part of the Black community, the folklore that has grown out of a relationships between Black people and white people, particularly out of those relationships in which Black people in the past found it necessary to be secretive and covert, and to find disguises behind which they could lead their own lives in the way in which they wanted to lead them.
Charles H. Nilo...: There is I suppose, not only this folklore, but there is a manner of speaking about it, or there is a manner of telling the tales that are told in Black communities. So, that the approach of the Black person to telling a story is something which is captured. The approach of the Black person to handling a social situation is captured. Back in 1937, Bertram Doyle, who taught sociology down at Fisk, wrote a book called, The Etiquette of Race Relations in the Deep South. And in that book, one of the things that Doyle observed was what we might call I suppose, some of the forms of social intercourse.
Charles H. Nilo...: And we find in these writers a utilizing of certain of the forms that the sociologist talks about. Doyle says, for example, that when a Black person found himself in trouble, in the deep South, that he ordinarily did not go to a lawyer or to the law. But he went to speak to a representative of that class of white persons who were spoken of, in the Black community as good white people. And he spoke to this person about his situation. He did not speak to the person ordinarily in terms of employing the law, but he was likely to say Doyle points out, "What is the custom?" And if the law were to be used, it was used after it was suggested as an appropriate detail by the white person. The white person might as a matter of fact, say, "I will take the matter to a lawyer for you."
Charles H. Nilo...: Now, if it turned out that the reference to the custom was not an adequate means of dealing with the situation, sometimes the Black person found himself rather on his own rather, in a situation in which he had to be creative. And so then, he brought into play, those aspects of his personality that were ingratiating, he smiled. He spoke about himself, perhaps in a way in which he did not esteem himself, he confessed his ignorance, his awkwardness and in a sense played upon the sympathy of the good white person to whom he was talking.
Charles H. Nilo...: The language gestures made in this kind of approach are talked about in Doyle's book. So, that etiquette and language are somehow worked together very nicely here. Black people, I suppose, have always had to have a certain kind of sensitivity to language, because actually language for them has been the means of protecting themselves or of getting into situations where they had offended persons. And they are, of course, the means by which they have extricated themselves from situations that were embarrassing.
Charles H. Nilo...: I suppose it did, thinking about the novel I talked about yesterday, but the concept of jive is related to language. Jive, actually, I suppose, is a sort of linguistic means, by which the individual is able to relate to a particular situation, as best he can, in order to seek the advantages that he wants. It includes sometimes lying, sometimes flattery, sometimes putting the best face possible on a situation. It's essentially I suppose, a creative situation. And individuals who do it well, I suppose, are creative individuals.
Charles H. Nilo...: Much of this approach to language which has become in a way traditional in the Black community is used in the writing of these people, the characteristic patterns of understatement, the characteristic patterns of overstatement, there were uses for each of these traditionally. And so, we have them appear here. The use of the music of the Black community is something which a good number of the writers that I've mentioned, employ in various ways. I think that one of the classical examples of the use of music is that, that is made by Ralph Ellison in his Invisible Man.
Charles H. Nilo...: In the prologue to that work, you remember that the narrator is underground and he is listening to a Louis Armstrong record. And at the same time he listens to the record, he is engaged in a certain kind of free association or fantasy. And he imagines an old Black slave woman who is talking about her master. And he asked her, "Well, what happened to your master?" And she says, "Well, I poisoned him." And you have the Louis Armstrong record in the background going at the same time. The Armstrong record includes a blues phrase and you can relate the blues phrase, which is a sort of parody of the song Am I Blue? Or you can sort of relate the blues phrase to not only the prologue, but in a way, to the whole development of the novel to each of the sections of the novel.
Charles H. Nilo...: The blues phrase is a sort of suitable refrain, I suppose, to be placed at the end of each of the divisions, the natural divisions of the work itself. And in a way it becomes an appropriate kind of phrase for these sections. Blues are I suppose, within their original purpose, a means whereby Black people were able to absorb to deal with the particular pain or deprivation of their lives. There is a blues that Bessie Smith sings about the flood in Mississippi when we see her in terms of the narrative of the blues, this is called Back Water Blues, a lone woman whose house has been flooded, who has no place to go, and who is waiting for a canoe to move her out of a path of the water.
Charles H. Nilo...: The emergency is in a way faced squarely it's internalized, and the statement of it somehow projects or a certain feeling of security in oneself a certain sense of composure that the individual has come to. There is no denying what has happened, that there's simply a kind of statement of it. But the transmitting of the experience into an aesthetic object into the blues is a kind of thing which has a peculiar wholesome effect for the singer of the blues.
Charles H. Nilo...: So a good number of these writers make use of blues lyrics or they try in other ways to capture the tone of the blues, the particular emotional quality of the blues, even though they may not call our attention directly to blues. I'll mention some of those, when I talk about some of the writers that I want to talk about today. Or the writers in this group that I'm concerned about today are writers who have managed to take a number of the customs, the eating habits, the diet, the modes of religious observation, that are characteristic of the Black community, and to utilize these in and giving a particular character to the writing that they do.
Charles H. Nilo...: They are in a way, I suppose a contrast to certain of the earlier writers, Miss Jessie Fauset who wrote a good number of novels, would not have used I think certain of these things in the way they use, now. I don't know that she was ashamed of them. But she, wanted to suggest that there were Black people who lived in a different way from those who approximated the white norm. And so very largely, her fiction is about the white middle class and about the... or rather the Black middle class and about the ways in which that middle class were like other middle class groups.
Charles H. Nilo...: The writers that I'm concerned about now are really not at all disturbed by any sense of shame, or embarrassment, by they rather use the soul foods, the emotional quality of the religious scenes, the language of the Black preacher, quite directly, and with a certain sense of pride in these things, because they grow out of the experience, and out of the particular, not only awareness, but out of the particular creativity of Black people. The Black writers in this group, also explore the myths about Black people, the myths that were a part of the fiction of people like Octavus Roy Cohen, or Irvin Cobb, or Roark Bradford.
Charles H. Nilo...: And so they play with the idea of Black people stealing, of the concept of Black sexuality or the concept of Black laziness, quite frankly, quite directly. And they reveal of what is true and what is not true in these particular areas. But there is no shame that keeps them steering away from these areas. In a general sense, I suppose that the gestures made by these writers in their structures, and in their use of their content are comparable to those of that group of writers that we call activist writers or perhaps Neo-realist writers.
Charles H. Nilo...: I may say something about that group of writers if there's time to do it, near the end of the lecture. They are a group of writers who might be called as they are by Mr. Harrington, secular existentialist. They are not I suppose, Christian existentialist or moral existentialist, they have not much interest in actually what we might want to call moral existentialism or they are much more concerned about the facts about the concrete. They aren't concerned really about the moral abstractions.
Charles H. Nilo...: And in spite of this, I think what you have is genuinely an existential stance in relation to their own lives and to the lives of the people that they were trade for us. The materials that they work with, and the way that they work with them, can be seen in some of their variety. If I talk for a while about the several of the writers whose names I have mentioned, Ishmael Reed, has written two novels. One of these is a novel called the Free-Lance Pallbearers. It's a satire, it is a rather fascinating work in the total pattern that it employs. It makes use of many of the devices that are traditionally used by satirists.
Charles H. Nilo...: Some of those devices I suppose that a man like Jonathan Swift might have used. The first section of the book is titled, Da Hoodoo Is Put on Bukka Doopeyduk. It's a satire which introduces in this chapter, what you might call the central character of the novel a man whose name is Bukka Doopeyduk. Bukka Doopeyduk lives in the United States. The United States is referred to as HARRY SAM. The satire includes a rather pointed observation of the president, the president, for the last 30 years according to the myth of this particular satire has spent his time in the job, he's not been properly occupied.
Charles H. Nilo...: The quality of life in the United States is described in terms of certain nonsense syllables in words. It's spoken of as being a world of O-BOP-SHE-BANG, KLANG-A-LANG-A-DING-DONG. The White House is referred to as a giant motel. This is where the president is occupied, and only statue on the lawn of the White House, there are four statues of Rutherford Birchard Hayes. And if you look at what we have created here, you begin to realize that this is not nonsense.
Charles H. Nilo...: The failure I suppose, of Reconstruction is in some ways related to the years that Rutherford B. Hayes spent in the White House, is related to the Hayes, Tilden Compromise, is related to the withdrawal of the radical Republicans from the confrontation that they had engaged in, is related to the allowing of the South to develop itself as it might have, is related in a sense to the whole change of moral frame of reference, it came at the end of the Reconstruction period.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now many people make the assumption that what we have going on now is an addressing of ourselves to the unfinished business of the Reconstruction. So Rutherford B. Hayes' statue have a symbolic value. They are related to the kinds of things that Reed is trying to say. The activity of the politicians, who are portrayed as old men who sit on the lawn of the White House, is described as, "They're blowing their noses with flags and their kissing of dead newsreels."
Charles H. Nilo...: The the central character here, Dopey is seen early in the story leaving college he leaves the Harry Sam college. He was a Nazarene apprentice there to say that he was a Nazarene apprentice, I suppose, is to say that he was an apprentice white man, that he was an apprentice, white Anglo Saxon Protestant, although he was Black, or to say a number of things of that kind, but he's got into trouble in college and so he leaves. And before he leaves, he goes to speak to the dean of the college who has been liberal and kind to him. And when he goes in to see the dean, as he opens the door, he struck in the forehead by a paper airplane, and it's the dean who is making and flying these paper airplanes.
Charles H. Nilo...: The Dean is deeply apologetic and offers him an Alka-Seltzer, he doesn't require this. And he tells the dean he's leaving and the dean is mildly regretful he says to him, "You would have been our first bacterial warfare person among the..." they call it people. But he says it might be better to go out than to stay in. The Dean is preoccupied, he is by discipline, a member of the English faculty. And he is writing a paper for an English literary quarterly. The paper is entitled The Egyptian dung-beetle in Kafka's Metamorphosis, the dean is a careful researcher.
Charles H. Nilo...: And when Doopey is about ready to go, he begins to involve himself in his research, he has a small ball of dung, and he takes his nose and he pushes it about the floor because he wants to be accurate in what he says about the beetle in Kafka's Metamorphosis. The satire here is not only about the political world, the educational world, it's about the world in which ordinary Black people live, it's about them.
Charles H. Nilo...: Doopey has decided to get married. He wants to see what life is really about. And so in order to do that, he feels he's got to provide a place to live and he's going to live in a housing project. So he goes to be interviewed for his place in the housing project. And here we have the world of social workers, the world of red tape, the world of a certain kind of liberalism expressed in it's concerns for people. And he's interviewed by one of the liberal social workers, a Jewish gentleman. And when he goes in, this gentleman feels that he must make him feel at home. He must do that by talking about the things that he will enjoy having talk about.
Charles H. Nilo...: So he says, "Sorry, I kept you waiting so long chum, but me and the missus were up late last night, caught that Sammy out of Forest Hills." This is Sammy Davis he's referring to. "Boy that Sammy sure can blow the licorice stick and tickle the ivory. I was better in the time we caught him at Eleanor Roosevelt's birthday party. He was twirling his cane kicking with his spats when suddenly a miracle happened. A helicopter landed right on the stage and out came to savior and hope of the world. He put his arms around Sammy and said, 'Sammy is my Ace boon, coon, so you guys treat him real good."
Charles H. Nilo...: You notice the use of coon in this. "Understand, well, after that something happened that will just get you in the girth. I mean, gird you in the pith. I mean, there was a dearth of boos and nothing but stormy applause after an especially pithy ditty SAM done, about how hard it was when he was in the back in the rat pack p.s. Why pennies run out of the sky, you should have seen him and then the dook come on. That dook his band raised the roof beams of the joint. 'If you don't mind,'" our young man says, "'Your honor, I'm getting married this afternoon. So if it's all right with you, I'd like to get on with the interview.'
Charles H. Nilo...: "'Getting married, how wonderful. Here, have a piece of candy.' He said pressing a chocolate into my hand. 'I don't know what to say sir. Gee, not only are you Nazarene priests...'" The social worker is a Nazarene priest, that's what he was moving to become. "'In the Civil Service kind, but the candy melts in your mouth and not on your hands.' 'Think nothing of it there Doopeyduk. Your name is Doopeyduk, ain't it? Where did that name come from kiddo the Bible or something?''No, sir, it came from a second cousin of my mother, who did time for strangling a social worker with custom made voodoo gloves.'"
Charles H. Nilo...: There's nothing gentle about the satire here, it goes right home. But it is also I think, a representation of the kind of experience which Black people have. The second of, of the novels by Ishmael Reed is called Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. It's a horrible world, it's a mad world and there's a kind of Black magic in it. In a sense it's a satire on the Old West with a Black cowboy for the hero. It's in a way though a parable about the contemporary Black struggle.
Charles H. Nilo...: The parody, which is worked out in this novel is on the annexation fight between the Union and the territory of Texas that is, in this a generalized realistic account of corruption in America today. The use of the Black idiom the way Black people talk, the kinds of conceptualization that is a part of their use of language is represented here very nicely. One of the characters says, for example, "What it's like to live in these new knighted States of Merica." The work I think that a man like Ishmael Reed does, is in form experimental. And yet the form that he chooses is suitable for saying the kinds of things that he needs to say.
Charles H. Nilo...: The novelist Charles Wright, has written two novels, one of these a very conventional, a straightforward novel called, The Messenger. This novel is I think, not in any sense, experimental. It's an effort to show us what happens to a young man who comes from rural Missouri, in New York, who wants to be a writer who gets a job as a messenger in New York, and who tries to make it from that point. It moves back and forth between his semi-rural experience and the urban experience that he's in. It's a fairly conventional novel.
Charles H. Nilo...: The novel that Charles Wright calls, The Wig does the same kind of thing. But it does it in a rather different way. The Wig, is about a man who is concerned to improve his status. And he's tried about everything he could do to do that. He at the beginning of the novel wants to enter the mainstream of American life. But every time he tries, something prevents him. And so he begins talking about his experience by saying, "I was a desperate man, quarterly, I got that crawly feeling in my wafer-thin stomach. During these fasting days, I had the temper of a Greek mountain dog, it was hard to maintain a smile. Everyone seemed to jet toward the goal of the Great Society. While I remained in the outhouse penniless without connections, pretty girls, credit card, charge accounts, Hart Schaffner & Marx suits, fine shoes, Dobbs hats, jaguars, and more pretty girls credit around my butterscotch-colored dreams. Lord, I'd work like a slave. But how to acquire an acquisition of gimmick? Mercy, something had to fall from the tree of fortune! Tom-toms were signaling to my frustrated brain, the message, I had to make it.
Charles H. Nilo...: "As a consequence I was seized with an epileptic fit early one Thursday morning. I stood in the center of my shabby though genteel, furnished room shivering and applauding vigorously. Sweet Jesus, my King James shaped head, vaulted toward the fungus covered ceiling pipes where cockroaches were doing acrobatics. The cockroaches seemed extraordinarily lively as if they too were taking part in the earth shaking revelation. Even the late March sun was soft and sweet is moonlight and the beautiful streets of Harlem, were Strangely quiet."
Charles H. Nilo...: Now as he gets out of bed, an idea strikes him. And it's an idea that's going to make a great difference in his life. He, remembers having read an ad, he remembers having been in a drugstore and judging by the ad, and judging by what he saw in the drugstore, he knows that this is going to work. He's going to buy a bottle of something which will change the color of his hair, and change the texture of it. And then he'll have it made he won't be just an ordinary Black man then. He says is he thinks about this, "Do not the auburn-haired gain a new sense of freedom as a blonde, see Miss Clairol. Who can deny the madness of a redesigned nose, see Miami Beach. The first conference of juvenile delinquents met in Riis Park. And there was absolutely no violence a resolution was passed to send Seconal zip guns airplane glue and contraceptives to the Red Chinese, see the Daily News.
Charles H. Nilo...: "The American Medical Association announced indignantly that the United States abortion and syphilis quotas are far below the world average, see Channel 2. Modern gas stations if coin operated pumps, air pumps in the ladies' room, so the under-blessed may inflate their skimpy boobs, see Dorothy Kilgallen. Undercover homosexuals sneak into the local drugstores and receive plastic though workable instruments plus bonus trade stamps, see Compliments of a newfound friend."
Charles H. Nilo...: And he begins to talk about the wonders that are available to effect transformations. He talks about those for a long time. And then he moves into the bathroom that 75 people use in his building. And carefully read the directions for applying the miracle that he is going to apply. "I took," he says, "A handful of silky smooth and began massaging my scalp. Then just to be on the safe side, I added Precautionary Oil, slick, odorless, indigenous to the Georgia swamps. Massaging deftly, I remember that old fashioned hair aids were mixed with yak dung and lye. They burned the scalp and if the stuff got in your eye, you could go blind from it. One thing was certain you combed out scabs of dried blood for a month."
Charles H. Nilo...: And he goes on talking about and thinking about what he's doing while he does it. But when it's all done, he feels that he's ready to face the world. And he goes out with his new hair in several episodes, trying to make it and somehow the hair doesn't make the difference. He tries various kinds of employment, and finally decides, "Well, if I can't get what I've been looking for, let's try what was traditional." And so he goes to a bank and he applies for a job there. And a young Black girl with blonde hair tells him that there are forms to be filled and that there are interviews to be had and that there's training to be taken.
Charles H. Nilo...: And so he goes away from there in desperation too, finally he accepts a job for a chain of restaurants. Now, this restaurant chain is a chain that serves chicken. And he becomes in a sense a chicken. He puts on a costume and he hides his blonde hair under the costume. And he walks about the streets of New York quacking and he carries a sign that says "Cock-a-doodle-doo cock-a-doodle-doo eat me, eat me, all over town. Eat me at the King of Southern Fried Chicken." The job pays $90 a week. And on Thursday his off day he may eat as much chicken as he wants. And he resolves never to eat chicken except on his off day.
Charles H. Nilo...: But he gets the job finally the pattern that he follows is a very fascinating pattern people see him and little children admire him and they say, "Can we take him home?" And some people say, "Well I'll bet you there's a Black skin under those chicken feathers." The whole experience that he has is just totally unendurable. So finally he goes to the man who is a funeral director and the barber. The man whose name is Fishback and he gets Fishback to cut his hair. "I flopped into the bat-wing chair," he says. "Poor Deb." He's thinking about the girlfriend he had and lost.
Charles H. Nilo...: "Hush, now. You'll feel better after I cut it off," the barber says. "Then one more act and you'll be happy for the rest of your life. While I was abroad I kept in touch with Madam X." Madam X is a hoodoo lady. "'Remarkable woman.' Fishback pressed an invisible button in the mirrored wall and out popped a brand-new pair of sheep shears. I closed my eyes I felt no emotion it was over. Everything, love waxed cold, The Deb was dead. 'Watch out to my ears,' I warned. 'And hurry up I'm hungry.' There were tears and Mr. Fishback's eyes as he expertly clipped The Wig in exactly one minute.'It was so beautiful,' he sniffed.' I kicked the magnificent burnished red-golden hair haloed around the wing chair. I smiled at my bald headed reflection, 'It's over, I can always do it again.' 'It was so pretty,' Mr. Fishback said. 'Nobody had hair like that except Madame X. And that was before she became a saint.'"
Charles H. Nilo...: This is roughly the way the novel ends, here you have a kind of Black humor, again a kind of satire, through which the author is able to show precisely how Black people live and in which he is able to show why they make some of the gestures that they make. The gestures are exaggerated here. But generally, the exaggeration is a means of coming at the truth of the ordinary experience.
Charles H. Nilo...: The working a way at the forms of things and this particular manner, is seen in one of William Melvin Kelley's novels. It's a novel call Dem. It's a novel which is not about Black people, in one sense. It's a novel, in which you see Black people, roughly as they are seen by white people. The principal characters in this novel are white persons, and they move about their everyday experience. And as they go about this experience, we discover that they have certain kinds of fears, fears of Black persons fears of what the Black persons may do to them. And there is a sort of inconsistency between what they fear and what they do themselves.
Charles H. Nilo...: In this particular novel, one of the characters discovers that his wife is going to have twins. And when the twins are born, he goes to the hospital to see them. And one of them is white and one is Black. At first he doesn't realize as anything unusual about his sons. Because as you look through the glass at them, there are several babies. And he promptly assigns a baby to himself that doesn't belong to him. It belongs to a Cuban gentleman who's also looking in.
Charles H. Nilo...: And as he in the Cuban, both of whom are proud fathers begin to express their pride in their offsprings. He points to the Cuban's baby and says, "Now isn't that fine boy?" And the Cuban says, "Yes, he's a fine boy." And they keep on talking. And pretty soon the Cuban says, "No, that's not your son, that's my son." And then they begin to count. And then they look at the little bracelets. And there are two boys there that have the name Pierce on their arms.
Charles H. Nilo...: And then he isn't quite sure about this, the doctor comes along and takes him aside very quiet and says, "Well, I told you that I wanted to speak to you." And the doctor explains what the phenomena may be the result of he says, "Now your wife may have had some Black person in her family, you might check that there's a way of finding out." And he said, "You know, also it's possible that you had a rather interesting in kind of fertilization. It's possible." he says, "That after she had known you, she knew some other person, and that the fertilization took place at the same time. So they the kids are born at the same time. They look reasonably alike, except one Black and one white."
Charles H. Nilo...: And the man stands for a while and listens to this and the doctor says, "Now of course that means of course that the other person who was involved was very likely a Black person." And the man says, "Yes, I guess you're right." Well, after this, you see him visit his wife and his wife's mother comes and she's there and then he goes back to the pattern of action that he's been involved in, at some time in the past, when he'd had a Black maid whose name was Opal. And when he accused Opal of stealing, and when opals boyfriend whose name was Cooley had come to the house to pick her up.
Charles H. Nilo...: And he remembers that on the night that he fired Opal that he had knocked her down because she had said she had not stolen and he'd insisted that she had stolen. And then she'd gone away with her boyfriend. And his wife had not been happy because he'd behaved that way. And so when he talks to his wife, gradually, his wife confesses that, yes, she'd been very sympathetic to Opal. And since Opal hadn't come back when the boyfriend came around again, she'd been sympathetic with him, too. And so this was sort of explained what had happened.
Charles H. Nilo...: And then the man feels, "Well, I've got to do something about this." And he gets busy to try to do something about it. His first intention, of course, is to find the man and kill him. And then he begins to say, "Well, if I do that people will know and what have you, and what have you." And so he decides then, "Well, I've got to find the man and make him take the baby." After all, he says, "Since the mother's white, he'll be glad to have the baby." This plan doesn't work out quite well for him either. But one of the interesting situations that we see him in is in the Black community looking for the man who is the father of one of his wife's children.
Charles H. Nilo...: And in a rather indirect way, here, although Kelley is primarily concerned to show how the white world regards the Black world, he lets us see the world that they are looking at, and that they are responding to. And in terms of the response they make, we can see the error, which is involved, the distortion that's involved. This man goes into the Black community, he walks downtown and he goes finally to the apartment that the woman lives in. And there are some small children, they're out in front of the building, and they're jumping rope. And they sing a little tune as they jump, and they don't stop.
Charles H. Nilo...: And he's afraid to ask them to stop. So he stands there sort of frightened of the children until they move out of his way. The play song that the children sing, is a song from the folk material of the Black community. When the children finish that song, he goes into the apartment building. And then he encounters the apartment superintendent, and he says who he's looking for, and then you have the sort of characteristic behavior on the part of the person whose there until the sufficient identification. And finally he talks with the girl that he's come to see the girl who had been the maid and the cook in his house.
Charles H. Nilo...: And after that, he begins a quest to find the man or actually, I suppose he does finally find the man. But after he's found him, he discovers that he can't go through with the plan that he's had all along for passing the child off to him. The novel that I'd like to end with and that I probably will not have time to say a great deal about. It's a novel by LeRoi Jones. It's called A System of Dante's Hell. It's written in 1963 and is, I suppose, a kind of novel that Jones would not write if he were writing now.
Charles H. Nilo...: But it is a novel which suggests certain of the uses of material, certain stylistic attempts, which I think in this case work out reasonably well. Jones calls the novel The System of Dante's Hell. And he divides the material that he includes in it into nine sections as Dante's Hell is divided. There is the section in which they are the virtuous heathen, there's a section which they're all the lascivious, the gluttonous, the avaricious and prodigal, the wrathful, the heretics. Now in Dante's hell the heretics are in the sixth level or in the sixth circle.
Charles H. Nilo...: Jones chooses to put the people in this level at the bottom he says that the heretics are the the worst centers. Dante doesn't make them the worst sinners. Jones says that the the crime which is most abominable, is heresy. And then he defines heresy for us. He says, "It is heresy against one's own sources, running in terror from one's deepest responses and insights. The denial of feeling that I see is the basest evil. He says that the Black person who tries to run away from being Black is the greatest sinner. That's actually what he's saying here.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now, the book itself is divided into two sections. One of these sections is an attempt to tell a story to narrate, through evoking a sense of sounds, and feelings through a use of sensuous perceptions. So that you don't have a jointed narrative here, you have rather a series of sense impressions. Now, in a way, this is an autobiographical novel, so that you have between its beginning and its end a description of Jones's families and he is moving from the lower class up into the middle class. And then at the end, there's a rejection of the middle class.
Charles H. Nilo...: But you might notice a paragraph from this. There is a confessional quality, there is in a sense, an evaluative quality. There is a certain kind of use of memory, and a certain kind of knowledge which is apparent here. This is from the first section, the section called, heathen. "You've done everything you said you would, everything you said you despise, a fat mine lying to itself, unmoving, like some lump in front of a window, wife, child house, city, clawing at your gentleness parts."
Charles H. Nilo...: "The room set quiet in the evening under one white bulb, he sat with a glass empty out his right hand. A cigarette burning the ugly dining room table, unanswered letters half-thumbed magazines, old books, he had re-read to remember, an empty fight against the sogginess that had already crept in through his eyes. In 10 years merely to lose one's footing on a social scale. He lived on a small street with eight trees two rooming houses at the end of the street full of Puerto Ricans, rich white Americans, between him and them, like a chronicle. He said to himself, often looking out the window or simply lying in bed listening to the walls breathe, or has the wind, whimpered under the foul air of cats leavings. Nothing more to see under the flesh but himself staring bewildered. I am myself, insert the word discuss the verb, get rid of the am, breakout, kill it rip the thing to shreds this thing if you read it will jam your face. Now say something intelligent. I've loved all about the people I can, Frank for oblique, lust is mine. The satin light floating on his words, his life tinted in the full afternoon."
Charles H. Nilo...: Well, we go on in that way. But it becomes after a time coherent and revealing. You do see a kind of struggle of a group of people from one economic status from one pattern of life to another pattern of life. And then we deal with that second pattern of life, the middle class experience of it. And in that pattern of life, we see in a sense a failure to have arrived at something which was really valid or implicit in the progress that the narrator makes from the lower class to the middle class is the loss of all that gives him vitality. And this is in a way is symbolized in his sexuality or that we discovered that the narrator becomes homosexual as a result of his absorbing the white culture. He can read Elliott and he knows about Vera Lane. And he understands certain philosophical systems.
Charles H. Nilo...: But he doesn't understand blues. And so somehow he's not as he ought to be. Now the change that comes the normalizing of the person that comes, comes as a result of military experience with another soldier when he's in the south. He goes to the Jim Crow area where Black people are forced to go for recreation and symbolically they go down into a valley like the [inaudible] that James Weldon Johnson talks about in one of his poems going down in the amour crawl he goes down into this Black community and in the world of the Black under life he and the other soldier are approached by two prostitutes.
Charles H. Nilo...: The uglier prostitute simply claims him, he's powerless in a way against it. He, goes with her and he buys drinks and he wants to leave, but she takes his hat and he's afraid of the military police and so he can't leave. And so he spends a night with her. And she gives him watermelon to eat. And she laughs at him because he doesn't perform adequately. But he does spend the night and during this time he's there something happens to him, the Blackness, everything which she represents, in a traditional way, somehow affects him some way, and is effective in having him slough off the things that he has put on artificially.
Charles H. Nilo...: And you see, in a sense, a kind of identification taking place, he identifies with her, he began to know really who he is. And so that the next day, they're begins to be between these two persons, a pattern of life that is peaceful, that is smooth, that is in him a new sense of self, and a new kind of awareness. So that Jones shows through the particular structure that he works out here using the Dante categories, or something of the descent into hell of the Black people.
Charles H. Nilo...: And also he shows I suppose, something of a beatific vision, which Dante gets a glimpse on, or the work these novelist that I've talked about is in a structural way, I suppose experimental. Their concerns are generally the same, the same as of those novelist that I've talked about on other days. They do regard themselves as engaged in a particular kind of activity. They are concerned about identity, they are concerned about the individual being able to direct his own pattern of action. Their approach to their fiction is very largely an autobiographical approach, in some instances, a historical approach in other instances, they give the impression in what they say or telling it as it is.
Speaker 1: That was Charles Nilon Professor of English at the University of Colorado with today's lecture. This series of programs on Afro-American culture 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 background material for the course Afro-American Literature. Today's program originated as a live broadcast at 1:30pm on May 14, 1970, and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the Broadcasting Service of the University of Iowa.