Charles H. Nilon lecture in contemporary black fiction at the University of Iowa, May 11, 1970
Speaker 1: ... 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 lecture for this week is Charles H. Nilon, Professor of English at the University of Colorado speaking on Contemporary Black Fiction.
Speaker 2: Today marks the beginning of the end of a series of lectures focusing on the Black experience as reflected in literature. Professor Nilon, as has been mentioned, comes to us from the University of Colorado. He has published a major work entitled, Faulkner and the Negro. Without further ado, it affords me a pleasure to present to you, Professor Nilon.
Charles H. Nilo...: Thank you. I want to be sufficiently informal so I'm taking my coat off because it's warm up here. The contemporary Black experience as it's recorded in fiction is not unrelated to the past. I think that most of the events that we have experienced during the 1960s and during this early portion of 1970 have represented for me a kind of continuation of something which one might call the unfinished business of the reconstruction. The reconstruction, of course, we think of most times of historical context. But I think that the failure of the reconstruction affected all of the areas of the lives of Black people and of white people too.
Charles H. Nilo...: The authors who wrote who were Black during and at the end of the reconstruction, began a kind of effort, which Black authors continue now. Although I'm primarily concerned this afternoon to talk about the three writers who wrote between 1940 and 1960. I'd like to say something at the outset about the effort of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a man that we know ordinarily as a poet, but who wrote four novels. And two of whose novels I think have some relationship to the kind of effort made in this recent period by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin.
Charles H. Nilo...: I placed on the chalkboard beside Dunbar's name, the title of one of these novels, the Sport of the Gods. And in some ways, it's I think not only a beginning of a certain kind of pattern in Black fiction, but in some ways it's almost an archetypal novel. Very briefly, the Black characters in it, we see several years after the reconstruction, trying to make it in a small southern town. There is a father who's a butler, his wife is a maid and they have two teenage kids. They are trying to be respectable, they try to save money. They've got a small bank account. They are faithful churchgoers. They are moving toward what one might call the middle class. They have pride. And they feel they're going to make it, they have confidence in themselves. They have selected as their models, what they think of is the best white people.
Charles H. Nilo...: Shortly after the novel begins, the family that employs these Black persons discovers that a large sum of money has been stolen. And immediately, although the man has worked in this family for 30 years, it's assumed that he is the only person who might have stolen it because other persons who've been present with the family have been white people, their invited guests, members of the family. And following this discovery of the loss and the accusation of the butler, there is the usual court procedure. And the butler is sentenced to 10 years hard labor. Somehow his reputation in the town is counted for little. Somehow the fact that the evidence is purely circumstantial is counted for little. And when he is imprisoned, his wife and children are no longer employed or employable, they have to go somewhere else.
Charles H. Nilo...: And so there is a quest which becomes in some ways, I suppose, typical of many of the question in Black fiction today. In much Black fiction today, you have a quest frequently originating in the south, and moving north. Sometimes there are variations of that. Sometimes the quest begins in this country and it moves to Europe, and then sometimes back to this country. But the quest is a part of it, the quest is frequently a kind of migration. And in the work of Wright, we see in a sense evidence of this, and in certainly the work of Baldwin, we see that.
Charles H. Nilo...: But getting back to the Sport of the Gods, when this Black family finds itself unable to live any longer in the self, it goes to New York. And in New York, it expects to have a new life, it expects to be able to live free of discrimination. The young man expects to be able to find decent employment, the girl and opportunity to cultivate her talent, the mother a means of bringing up her family, according to standards.
Charles H. Nilo...: The dilemma which is faced by the family though is that although they brought with them a value system, as a part of their heritage as Black people and as southerners, in a sense, it's a church-centered ethic that they have. But it allows them to distinguish, it had allowed them to distinguish good from bad, and it allowed them to function in the kind of world they lived in. It becomes essentially useless for them in this new world of theirs. They discover that it's not a means by which they're able to make choices. Their unfamiliarity with the city and what the city is significant of allows them frequently to be in doubt. They are deceived by appearances.
Charles H. Nilo...: And so, you have people who've come from one cultural adaptation into another area where another culture adaptation is necessary, who find what they brought totally inadequate, and who flounder and is sometimes overwhelmed by the new circumstances. The young man who has come with his mother and his sister is attracted to the much of the gaiety, much of the show, much of the what seems to him evidence of the freedom that's available in the north. And he takes to this with great delight, or his faith is somewhat similar I suppose to Bigger's. He has attached himself to a young lady of a theater and to alcohol. And when the young lady wants to be rid of him, he kills her and he's put in jail for life.
Charles H. Nilo...: His sister who had talent has become a part of the theatrical world. And she's become hard and she's become self-sufficient, she survives. And she moves away from her family because she has to protect herself. The mother is I suppose most pathetic because she finds it most difficult to give up her concept of what's good and what's bad. And although she's forced to do things that she might not have done had she remained in her old environment, she's never able to do these with a free conscience. And so her life is terribly uncomfortable.
Charles H. Nilo...: She assumes that her husband is not going to survive his imprisonment. He doesn't write her any longer. She needs support. And so, she enters a second marriage without a divorce. And you have in a sense, a moving from one pattern into another pattern without having something from the old pattern that sustains in the new pattern. The people in this novel that Dunbar wrote in 1902 are essentially at the sport of the gods. And the gods, in a sense, the white world that they are a part of. They cannot determine their own activity. They have no real identity. When they were in the south, they identified themselves in terms of the good white families. When they came north, they found nothing to take the place of these good white families. So they became in a way, the toys that the gods played with.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now, I think the Dunbar novel is I say in some ways, archetypal, and is written by Dunbar to call attention to some of the same kinds of things that the Black writers who wrote in the decades from 1940 down to 1960 were concerned about. The novel is politer, it's less well written. It's more careful not to offend. But essentially, I think Dunbar's concerns were the same as those of Richard Wright. With the three people that I'm primarily concerned to talk about this afternoon, there are certain things I think that they share in common as a part of their intention or a part of their concern. They want very much to show what Black experience is. And they want to show the effects of that experience. The psychological effects, the social effects.
Charles H. Nilo...: One might say that Richard Wright is concerned about showing how monsters are made. And it's rather interesting that James Baldwin said at one time that every Black man has something in common with Bigger Thomas. So that the effort to see the Black person as the Black person in the context of American society is an effort which is made in the different ways that these three authors write, and the several novels that they have written. If we ask why they do this, I think they're concerned to destroy myths. I think they are concerned to replace those myths with perhaps other myths with other images.
Charles H. Nilo...: Richard Wright wrote before he wrote Native Son, a collection of short novels, five of them in the final edition of the work called Uncle Tom's Children. And it aroused a great deal of interest. It was accepted with a great deal of enthusiasm. And people cried when they read it. And Wright said after this work was published, that he was never again going to write a book that people could cry about, and then feel good about, and then forget.
Charles H. Nilo...: I think this kind of concern is a concern that the Black writer in this period that Wright and Baldwin and Ellison wrote. They wanted to tell the truth. They didn't want sympathy. They wanted to provide knowledge, and they wanted to provide a stimulus for action. I talk about their effort almost as though it were a political or a social or an economic effort. I don't want to suggest that it was not an artistic effort. But I think that at the core of the purpose was this concern about identity, about self-determination, and a desire to have people know what the Black experience actually was.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now, if we talk about Richard Wright for a while and then go from him to Ellison and Baldwin, I think we can show a connection between the past and between the present. But we can show a connection between what I've called the unfinished business of reconstruction and the Black aesthetic, or what one might want to call I suppose Black power, because the idea of the Black aesthetic I think it's related to the idea of Black power.
Charles H. Nilo...: In Richard Wright's Native Son, we begin I think with the title, with the suggestion that there is nothing alien about Black people, but they are somehow products of American society. And that what they are, America has made them. And in the three sections of the novel, we have a chance to see I think how a Black man is made into a monster. You have the pattern which Dunbar shows, a rather typical pattern of the movement from the south to the north. And then you have the northern experience having such an impact that the resources brought from the south are inadequate to sustain that particularly impact.
Charles H. Nilo...: We don't see the Thomas family in the south, we see them after they've come to Chicago from Mississippi. We see in a sense, the the residue of their Southern life in the way they live, in the way they speak, in their religion, in their particular habits. And we recognize that living in the one room that they live in and share with rats, they are a people who are not adequate in a sense, in many ways. But that they are people, they feel they they have some confidence still in themselves. Bigger and his friends horse around as young boys horsed around at the boys club for a while. And they see a plane. And bigger says, I could fly one of those if if somebody would let me. And he'd like to. He doesn't expect to, he doesn't hope to, but the desire is still there.
Charles H. Nilo...: We see them play another game in which one of them plays the white man. In the fantasy of that play, we recognize, in a sense, something of what has happened to these boys. We recognize how their lives have been conditioned. We recognize something of the kind of pattern that they live in. And pretty soon, we get a sense of who determines the pattern and of how the pattern is kept. When Bigger finds employment with the Dalton family, we discover in Mr. Dalton, a man who is very wealthy, a man who owns the building in which Bigger and his family and other Black families live. A man who charges them $8 a week for the rat infested room in which they live. And a man who gives to Black colleges millions of dollars.
Charles H. Nilo...: A man who does not see any relationship between the world that Bigger comes from and the Black colleges to which he contributes. In fact, he doesn't have much contact with the Black world at all because while he contributes money to Black colleges, he doesn't hire the graduates of those Black colleges. In his own way, he's not a vicious man. He's courteous. And he has convinced himself that he's concerned about educating unfortunate Black people. But at the same time, he says there is an ethic which one must observe if he used to be a proper businessman. And he's very careful to observe that ethic. You see in a sense, something of the forces that create people like Bigger. And you see how Bigger responds in this world to the white people who are part of that world. You see the fear he's acquired, you see the hate he's acquired, and you see in terms of the situations that Wright develops between Bigger and the Dalton family, the fact that Bigger has been made less than human.
Charles H. Nilo...: You perhaps know the story. Bigger is hired to chauffeur. And the first evening he's with the family, the daughter asked to be driven ostensibly to the university, but she allows herself to pick up her boyfriend who was a communist. And the two of them join Bigger in the front seat of the car, much to his embarrassment. And they get him to take them to a Black restaurant. And they go and they eat with him. And he's terribly embarrassed, he's terribly conscious of the fact that he is with white people. He doesn't quite know how to behave in this situation. It's needed when he's on his side and they're on their side, and he knows he's supposed to hate, and that they're supposed to hate. It becomes a neat situation in that way.
Charles H. Nilo...: But this is different, this is embarrassing. Miss Dalton and her friend, Jan, are trying in their own way to treat bigger as though he were a human being. But they don't realize that Bigger is not human at this time, that they've made him into a monster. And you can't treat monsters the same way you treat human beings. The result of that evening is that when he drives the car home again with the young lady, she's drunk, and he has to carry her into the house and put her on her bed. And when her mother who is blind here's the footsteps in the daughter's room, it's about two o'clock in the morning, and she expresses her concern by coming into the room. Noe Bigger knows that she's blind, he knows that she can't see him. But he doesn't know that the girl may not keep quiet.
Charles H. Nilo...: And so, he puts a pillow over the girl's mouth. This is an animal reaction in a sense. Now he hasn't done anything to the girl. He may have had some sex impulses, but there's been no gesture to satisfy those. But he is so frightened by the presence of the girl's mother by the situation that he's in. Here he is, a Black man in a white girl's bedroom. The girl is totally defenseless, she's had too much to drink. And here her mother is in the room too. And it's a totally intolerable situation for him. He can't deal with it.
Charles H. Nilo...: And so in his fright, he manages to kill the girl. And then what does he do? Well, he wants to get rid of the body. And so, you have the sensational plot develop. The body is put into a trough, taken down to the basement put into the furnace and burned, the trough which he was to carry to the station the next morning for the girl was carried to the station. He writes a ransom note. There's a whole cycle of events which are irrational. And you realize in a sense that there was no real need to kill the girl except that the person who killed the girl was not human at the moment that he did that. Had not been for some time, was not allowed to be.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now, when Bigger leaves, he joins the girl with whom he has sex. This is a Black girl. And it isn't really proper to say that this is a girl that he loves because he doesn't love her. In the world that he lives in, boys have to have girls and she's his girl, but they don't love each other, they don't have time to get to know each other, to love each other. They are simply together from time to time. And at first, Bigger wants to help him. But when he's told her as much as he has to tell her, he kills her. And the irony is that he killed her after he has had sex with her. It's just sort of impersonal act, he doesn't really think about it very much. He is an animal escaping.
Charles H. Nilo...: You have in the last section of the story, the third section of it, Bigger's becoming aware of what he is and of what has made him what he is. The problem of identity I suppose is worked with in Wright's novel, much as it's worked with by people like I suppose the Roy Jones, Lawrence Neil and other people that we identify with the Black aesthetic or with the contemporary Black movement.
Charles H. Nilo...: In the last section, there are several ways in which Bigger becomes aware of who he is and what he is. One of these is in terms of his understanding of religion, and of his rejecting it. One of a rather emotionally packed scenes in the novel occurs when Bigger's family, his sister, his brother, his mother, and his two friends come down to the jail to see him. And the mother takes him in her arms and tells him that she realizes that there's no hope for him now, but that they can be together again. And she prays with him. And then she abases herself, she falls on her knees in front of Mrs. Dalton and in front of Mr. Dalton and begs them as symbols of the power structure, to please have mercy upon herself. And Bigger suffers the embarrassment that's there. The Black preacher who comes with his family, gives him a cross and tells him to put the cross on.
Charles H. Nilo...: And momentarily, there's just some faith, maybe there's something in this, and then the family goes away. And then there is a car on his hearing, and he comes out of the car on his hearing. And he's spat upon, and he's struck, and he hears people say, lynch him. And he looks out the window, and there is a cross, which is a symbol that's been given to him, and it's flaming, it's being burned. And he looks at the cross that he's wearing around his neck at that time, he looks at the cross, it's out there burning. And he recognizes that the symbols are identical. So he throws the cross away. The mythology of the cross is no longer relevant for him. And in the process of discarding it, he comes out much closer to facing the reality that he's a part of that particular time. He doesn't look forward to salvation from God, he doesn't look forward to salvation from man.
Charles H. Nilo...: In the routine of his trial, he begins to see himself and he begins to see the kinds of things that he's wanted. He begins to see what it means to be Black and what it means to be white. And he begins to realize the kind of fear he's had. And at the end of the novel, he is able to talk about his experience, to talk about his dreams. He can't do anything about them. But there is, in a sense, a sort of sloughing off of a kind of myth which he has accepted about himself. I think that a good deal of contemporary Black fiction makes us aware that myths about Black people are not only myths, which white people accept. But that tragically, many Black people have accepted these myths themselves in terms of their equality, in terms of their inferiority, in terms of their difference.
Charles H. Nilo...: And the kind of thing that Bigger is able to do in the last portion of this book is to slough off the myths and to recognize that he is a person. He can't do much about it except have the realization. But the realization provides him for the first time in his experience, a certain sense of freedom, a certain kind of awareness that he had not had before. He realizes I suppose something of the kind of freedom that Black people fought for through the political and social effort of the reconstruction.
Charles H. Nilo...: If we move from Bigger Thomas for a while and look at the characters that are created in several of the works by James Baldwin, if you want to, the portraits of John and Gabriel, in Go Tell it on the Mountain, or of Rufus Scott in another country. There are some similarities I think between what Baldwin does and what Wright does. It's quite true I think that fairly early in Baldwin's career, that Baldwin had in effect said, I want to be an artist first, and it's sort of incidental that I'm Black. I'm concerned about artistic expression and artistic truth, and I'm not really concerned about protest. It's rather ironic I think that Baldwin became during his most popular, he is the symbol I suppose of the Black man protesting. But this is beside the point that I'm concerned about.
Charles H. Nilo...: I was saying that Baldwin's characters show many of the patterns of development and patterns of realization I think and frustration that we find in Richard Wright's characters. If we talk for a while about Go Tell it on the Mountain, we we have a group of persons, a family, who come from the south into Harlem, and who bring with them in the person, I suppose of Gabriel or the evangelical minister, the strong Black figure, who is determined somehow to force himself and his family into traditional patterns of goodness. An example, I suppose, of the figure who discovers that in spite of his effort, the values that he brings in from the south do not sustain him. The kind of quest, I suppose, that is typical of the Black man's search for self and the Black man's search for self-direction is typical I think, is typified in Gabriel the minister. And in the quest of the young man, his stepson, John.
Charles H. Nilo...: In this particular novel, you see the Black family rather divorced from the white world outside it. And most of the struggles are the interpersonal struggles within the family. But the quest there is, I suppose, a similar quest to that Bigger Thomas makes. We don't want to say that the people in this novel are monsters, but they are distortions of the kinds of human beings that they might have been without the kinds of pressures that they suffer from, the rather typical pressures that the Black person suffers from and the kind of society that I think ours is.
Charles H. Nilo...: More typically, I suppose, of these patterns are those that we find represented in Rufus Scott in the first section of Baldwin's novel, Another Country. Rather significantly, when Baldwin first wrote that novel, was first writing it, he thought of calling it Another Culture, which in some way, I think becomes somewhat more explicit in terms of his purposes. He saw the problem of the Black man as being in a sense a cultural problem, a problem which in part was fixed by the fact that he was Black, and also fixed by the fact that in order to escape his Blackness, sometimes the Black man made an effort to be white, made an effort to make himself attractive in terms of his approximations of white values, of a white value system.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now, in Another Country, the people that we encounter are of rural origin. We don't see the movement from the rural south to Harlem. We see the evidence of it in Rufus Scott's family and in his sister at a particular point, and we see this family as a family. We see the evidence of the cultural roots of the family, and the use that Baldwin makes of blues, of a certain kind of folk material. We see it in a certain kind of confidence that the Black families have themselves.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now, Rufus Scott is a jazz musician who has the roots in a sense that Bigger has, who has been somewhat more fortunate perhaps than Bigger was. He is a man who has an art, he's a musician. He's a man who has a certain kind of respect for himself. And he's a man we assume who might have solved certain kinds of problems. It's rather interesting to see how in a great number of Black writers writing from the time that Wright, Ellison and Baldwin, who in many ways, convey some sense of the Black problem in terms of the relation between the sexes, when one partner is white and one partner is Black. And in this particular novel, in Another Country, in the section which Rufus Scott is centered, we see in a sense, how certain patterns, certain myths from the past, essentially destroy Rufus Scott as a person and lead to Rufus Scott's suicide.
Charles H. Nilo...: Rufus meets under rather casual but not in proper circumstances, a young white woman who is come from the south, and who will separated from her husband, and who has come north. She is a girl who has tried to get rid of the prejudices of race that she's had. She meets Rufus and she likes him, and apparently, he likes her. And they began an affair. The affair is doomed. Rufus and the girl are both destroyed in their relationship. We sense that their destruction is not entirely of their making. It's not something that the two people make. It's in a sense, an extension from the past. It's an operation of that past and the present. All of the myths about Black men and white women are somehow implicit in what we see in this particular situation.
Charles H. Nilo...: And so, although Rufus recognizes a tenderness, which approaches love for the girl, he destroys it. He's unable to keep himself from doing that. And although the girl recognizes a tenderness, which approaches love for Rufus, she somehow merits this destruction. And finally, Rufus has driven her into insanity and she's taken away to an institution. And then there occurs a certain revulsion, a certain self hate, and a certain kind of despair. Rufus realizes what he's done. And through realizing what he's done, he realizes in a sense what his own state of health is, and he's unable to live this way, and so he commits suicide. In a sense, I suppose Rufus is close to the kind of monster that is created in Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas.
Charles H. Nilo...: The best I suppose of the three novelist about whom we're concern this afternoon, as a technician, as an artist is Ralph Ellison. And I think Ellison manages in Invisible Man to include most of the themes that we find in Wright and Baldwin, and to include them both in a context that is sociologically sound, and at the same time, that is aesthetically satisfying. In a way I suppose Ellison deals with a series of paradoxes. And we begin to be aware of these fairly early in the experience of his character. It's paradoxical I suppose in a way that Black people ought to want to be human, want to be free. But as the pattern of experience doesn't lead in that direction.
Charles H. Nilo...: And you see this fairly early in the events in this novel from the point of view of the narrator, who is just finishing high school, and who is invited by the white service club to come and read his high school oration for them. He goes and finds himself a part of a group of Black boys who are there to entertain the service club. They are teased, they are taunted, they are put on a mat to fight, and pennies are dropped on the mat. And the mat's wired, and they get shocks and the men laugh. And then they fight until they hurt each other.
Charles H. Nilo...: And then while the boys are near exhausted, not carefully covered, the men bring out several striptease artists, white ladies. And you have a sense of the service club men behaving as though the boys are not human. Black men are not supposed to see white ladies without their clothes on. And if they see them, they're not supposed to respond in any erotic way to what they see. But in this service club situation in which the service club has invited this one young man to read a high school oration, they bring these two taboos together, the Black man and the white woman. Now the white women are old and the boys are boys. But there is no sense of treating the boy at any time during the evening as though he were human.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now when they've had their fun and smoked their cigars and become a little bit inebriated, they banish the ladies, and they let the boys get into their clothes again. And they ask the kid to read his paper, which they don't listen to until he makes a slip, I suppose you might say it's Freudian. There is a phrase social responsibility in his paper, and he misreads that phrase, social equality. And this they hear, and this they become concerned about, but when they discover that it was just a slip of the tongue and he meant to say socially responsible, they're perfectly satisfied again.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now, they have embarrassed this kid in every way possible. But at the end of the evening, they make him a gift of a briefcase. And they encourage him to go off to school and to cultivate his garden, and to come back and be a good man among them. It's paradoxical I say that a boy like this aspires to do anything at all. But in the development of the paradoxes in this world that Ellison creates, we see something I think very clearly of the quest for identity, and of the quest for self-determination. We see some of the effects of the kind of life that Black Americans live. And we see some of the reasons why Black Americans sometimes hate themselves, sometimes feel that they can't do, sometimes feel a considerable inferiority.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now, the pattern here is, again, the pattern from south to north, the pattern of migration. The pattern here again shows a shift in values. The young man that we see in the south has a core of values by which he lives. And he tests these in a sense when he gets in the north, and he finds that they're not very useful there. He is a part of a world, or of a community, which he doesn't understand as fully as he might. He begins to understand it when his grandfather dies. His grandfather has seemed to him to be in many ways a model person, an ideal person. His grandfather has been polite and self-effacing. The kind of person who tipped his hat to white ladies and who stepped off the sidewalk so they could pass, who always smiled, was always gracious.
Charles H. Nilo...: And when the old man died, he said some rather strange things. The family was all assembled and he said, Keep on fooling them, keep yessing them, he said. Keep smiling at them, keep on fooling them. And the boy discovers I think for the first time in the death of his grandfather, that the world that he's lived in among Black people has not been precise to the world that he thought it was because Black people have not necessarily accepted their place, but had been rather concerned about techniques of survival, techniques that would let them do the things that they wanted to do. And this is one of the first of the paradoxes that he becomes fully aware of in terms of his own family.
Charles H. Nilo...: Here is the old man who was a model Uncle Tom, but who really wasn't an Uncle Tom, he was a man who was trying to keep alive and keep his family alive. Well, he moves on to the college campus. And here you have, I think, a playing with a kind of historical situation that is fairly frequently true in Black fiction. The campus, we may suppose is intended to roughly suggest Tuskegee Institute, and the president to roughly suggest the philosophy of Booker T. Washington. And I suppose implicit in the novel is the tension which developed between Washington and W.E.B Du Bois, in terms of what were proper goals for Black people, what were proper educational ends, what strategies were the proper strategies.
Charles H. Nilo...: The book I think does not intend a disrespect for Washington, but it uses a situation which he created to develop certain ideas that Ellison is interested in developing. The boy who goes to school in Alabama picks up everything which is on the surface there at first. A concept of a kind of success that he can have, techniques for that kind of success. He absorbs in a way what we might call the American dream. And Ellison makes us aware I think of this absorption of the American dream in terms of his use of the commonplaces, of his use for example of the Emersonian idea, of certain ideas which occurred in Whitman's poetry.
Charles H. Nilo...: The boy becomes, in a sense, the eternal optimist in terms of what is possible for him in the kind of society he is. He has a certain kind of blindness. And we become aware of that blindness shortly after the boy is forced to leave the school. He commits an indiscretion, he takes one of the trustees into a section of the town where there is something which the trustees ought not to see. There is in that section of the town, a Black man who has inadvertently made his daughter pregnant, at the same time his wife is pregnant, who is in a way a shameful person from the point of view of the people on campus.
Charles H. Nilo...: We discover that the trustee who goes into that part of the town and who sees the Black man and his two women, one his daughter, is also a person who has had incestuous ideas about his daughter. He has had the self-control not to put them in practice. But his guilt is really greater because he has indulged it. What has happened to the Black tenant farmer is a kind of accident. There is no place for the daughter in this family to sleep except with her parents. And they had put her in the center of the bed between them. And what happened without the volition of the father being really involved in it.
Charles H. Nilo...: But of course, this is apparent to the reader, it's not apparent to the young man who takes the trustee into the community, it's not apparent to the president. And when the president recognizes the boy has been so stupid as to take a trustee into that part of town, he puts him off campus. And then we see him moving in this new world of the North, given his old values of getting ahead and being successful, in a sense, acquiring the American dream. And there are a series of experiences almost totally fantastic at some levels, but always experiences which make us realize somehow that here is a person discovering gradually who he is and what he is.
Charles H. Nilo...: One of the experiences that I may make reference to some time later, shows in a sense, a kind of self-acceptance. The boy moves out one morning. He's been living at an interracial rooming place but he has finally left that and he's moved out into Harlem and is living in a Black woman's home. And he feels comfortable there. And this morning, when he starts out, he's looking for employment. He passes an old man who has a vendor's case, and it's heated and he has sweet potatoes in it. And the old man is advertising his potatoes, who will buy my potatoes, who will buy my potatoes.
Charles H. Nilo...: And the boy stops and he says, "How much are they?" The man says they're 10 cents. And he says, "They're sweet, and I'll put butter on them for you." And the boy says, "Well, give me one." And the man gets one, and he splits it and puts butter inside, and he gets a bag. And the boy says, "You needn't put it in the bag, I'm going to eat it here." And the man says, "You're going to eat it here? Well, that's awfully nice," he says. And so he takes it out and gives it to the boy. He says, "If it isn't sweet, I'll give you another one." And so the boy takes his potato that's been buttered and breaks it open and he walks along the street eating it.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now just before he bought the potato, he passed a display window, a cosmetics display window. And there were wigs, and there were hair-straighteners, and there were skin bleaches. And he was terribly angry when he saw these things. He didn't like to see them. But he buys his potato and he walks off fairly content. But he's still thinking about those things he'd seen back off him. And he has an impulse to want to go back and drive his fist through the glass. And as he walks along, he says, now I wonder what my friends back on campus would say if they could see me walking along the street in New York eating a sweet potato. He's enjoying the potato. And he begins to think about this. He says, it's a peculiar thing that people are ashamed to admit that they enjoy some of the very simple things that they enjoy.
Charles H. Nilo...: And he thinks about the man who is president of the school that he's left, a the man whose name is Bledsoe. He says, I wonder what Bledsoe would say if he saw me walking along the street eating a potato. And then he thinks about Bledsoe in a kind of fantasy. He says, I wonder what would happen if Bledsoe were with some of the dignitaries, the trustees and other people who come to the school, and somebody came in with a tin of chitterlings, and brought these unwashed, uncleaned, and presented them to them. And just picked them up one by one and and they stretched out and said, "Here Bledsoe, why don't you have some chitterlings." And then he takes a sort of aggressive attitude as though the school president was there, and accuses him of being a secret chittering eater, a person guilty of a secret vise.
Charles H. Nilo...: But I think that what you you have worked out here in terms of the use of the material at this point is a way in which Ellison manages to show us something of the the growing awareness of the boy, something of his beginning to accept himself something, something of his beginning to know who he is, something of his beginning to assess the American dream in terms of its relationship to him and his relationship to it. And after this particular point in the story, the boy's awareness becomes increasingly clear. And he has I think, something of the kind of sense of who he is, that Bigger Thomas has, except that he's able to do more about it, he's not to be killed. He doesn't know precisely what to do about it, he goes underground. And I suppose the going underground means that he begins to think, and he begins to try to plan.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now, if we we stop talking about these three novelists, at least today at this point, and say, well, how is this related to to the question of the Black aesthetic or to the question to Black power? Well, I think that in these three writers who began writing right before 1940, in 1936, after he published his first story. But each of these writers who wrote sometime between 1940 and 1950. You have in a sense a sort of setting up a scene with a kind of authenticity, with a kind of honesty and a kind of frankness. Without shame in the presenting of what was the daily experience of the Black person.
Charles H. Nilo...: And what we have I think in the writers that we have today, that we call the contemporary Black riders, is a kind of extension of the sort of thing, a kind of extension of the kind of attitude, that we find in those three writers. Actually, I think, the problems of identity, the problems of self-determination, are the social basis of much of the writing that we have in this particular period. These concerns are not divorced from artistic concerns, but in a way, I suppose they determine the manner of the artistic concerns.
Charles H. Nilo...: I think you've read about Black aesthetic, you've heard it talked about. And so, I'm going to talk about very briefly. The contemporary Black writer sees what he writes as having a particular utility. Now, in this sense, he may be somewhat different from Wright and Ellison and Baldwin. Wright and Ellison and Baldwin were writing initially for general audiences, for white people as well as for Black people. Fairly often, the contemporary writer says that he's writing primarily for Black people, he doesn't object to white people reading it, he says, if they can. But his writing has a social purpose or it, excuse me, in some ways, reminiscent I suppose of the kind of writing that we sometimes called socialist realism. He wants to depict the Black experience as it is. He wants to have the Black person see himself in that experience, and he wants the experience which he presents in literary form to be useful in either producing action or creating ideas in the Black community.
Charles H. Nilo...: Now, fairly often, the person who accepts the Black aesthetic, or recognizes that he might not write in the way that he would if he were writing for a different audience. I think that Ellison's work differs in its literary sophistication, in its use of literary means from that is more directly I think related to the the ends of the Black aesthetic.
Charles H. Nilo...: Many persons in the ghetto community would have trouble reading Ellison because there is a sort of complexity and a sort of sophistication there that might baffle them. The writer tries to write in a language and in a form that can be understood by a particular audience. He not only does that, he tries to control the length of what he has to say. He is essentially didactic in what he has to say because he wants realization, he wants action as a product of the thing that he has in mind.
Charles H. Nilo...: There has been, I suppose, a good deal of talking about the purposes of the writing, or the, Lawrence Neal says in one of his essays, we cannot abdicate our culture to those who exist outside us. And then he suggests several things that he feels are consistent with the effort that ought to be made by the Black artist, the Black writer, the Black painter. The Black aesthetic demands, he says, a rejection of white middle class culture. It demands the affirmation of Black selfhood. It demands a celebration of Blackness, the destruction of things that stand in the way of selfhood is necessary for the practicer of the Black aesthetic. In a way, the Black aesthetic is a preemptive attack, a kind of guerrilla warfare, action within a sustaining mythology.
Charles H. Nilo...: Neil suggests that Black writers do not write for white people and refuse to be judged by them. I suppose that you may have read things rather similar to this. The Black aesthetic is, I suppose, related to the goals of theoreticians like Ron Karenga, who fails in a sense that in order for Black people to achieve dignity and selfhood, they must create a mythology, a mythology which will allow them to know who they are, and will sufficiently sustain them so that they can direct their own action and find a place for themselves.
Charles H. Nilo...: In a way I suppose, the Black aesthetic is related to what we might call cultural pluralism. Not necessarily to the assumption of a fixed separation, which would be permanent, but to a kind of separateness, which allows Black people to become fully aware of who they are. But at the same time, provides them the means of becoming insofar as it's necessary, a functioning part of our society, or keeping in that process, those things which belong to them in a cultural way, and utilizing those things which are a part of the society as a whole in a cultural way.
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 1:30pm May 11th, 1970, from Shambaugh Auditorium and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the Broadcasting Service of the University of Iowa.