Charles H. Nilon lecture in contemporary black fiction at the University of Iowa, May 12, 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 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. Yesterday, I spoke of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin as the major Black novelist of the period from 1940 to 1960. I suggested that they show, in their novels, some relationship in theme and purpose to the kind of thing that Paul Laurence Dunbar was interested in, in purpose and in theme. Particularly, I suggested that the quest for identity and for self determination that was a part of Dunbar's effort, and the sport of the gods is central in their work that they presented the Negro character whose background and values was Southern in the urban North in quest the freedom that was aborted and the failure of the reconstruction. I also suggested that the concerns of those writers are close to the concerns of certain contemporary Black artists, primarily poets and playwrights who express their intentions in what they call the Black aesthetic. Charles H. Nilo...: I do not wish to suggest that Wright, Ellison and Baldwin in their intentions and attitudes toward their writing are identical with these contemporary writers, such writers as Lawrence Neil, LeRoi Jones, Don Lee and Ed Bullins, for example, but I do wish to say that their concerns with the myth and image of the Black man and his quest for freedom in America is a similar quest, and that there are similar themes developed in their work. Today, I wish to talk about the writing of John A. Williams, William Melvin Kelley and several other Black writers who've written primarily in the '60s and who make what I consider a characteristic use of history in their content and style. At the level of content, the novels written by these and other Black writers during the '60s may be thought of as an appendix to the civil rights movement, to the Black power movement, to cultural pluralism, and to the United States Riot Commission Report, may show a knowledge of the Black man's experience in American history, and in most of their knowledge, the novels, they present the present examined in the light of the past. Charles H. Nilo...: Most of the novelist who've written in the '60s try to make Ellison's Invisible Man known if not visible and to show why they are Bigger Thomas's and Rufus Scots. Their novels are in a descriptive sense, an ecology of the Black man in America. It can almost be said that history is repeating itself in these novels. The present racial crisis resembles the crisis of the pre-Civil war period, and the writing of this period is similar in purpose to the writing done by Black authors in that period. The Black writer is still concerned with freedom and how a Black man may be a man in America. From 1830 down to the beginning of the civil war when the abolitionists and the pro-slavery writers were most active, there were published a number of slave narratives that are in many ways similar to the autobiographies and biographies of Black persons that are being published and reissued now, and to the contemporary fiction that is biographical sometimes in its content and frequently in its method. Charles H. Nilo...: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is typical of the pre-civil war narratives. These narratives or autobiographies were in a sense models for protest novels of some white anti-slavery writers. Hildreth's Archie Moore, a novel was mistaken for a slave narrative. Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's cabin has many of the characteristics of the slave narrative, particularly if we exclude the exposition that Ms. Stowe includes, and it has given a much closer characteristic to that kind of writing when we add to it the key which Ms. Stowe prepared at the insistence of those persons who said that she was dealing in fiction and not in fact. The autobiographies of Malcolm X, Claude Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Rap Brown and others are a close counterpart of these earlier slave narratives. The materials that are used by the Black novelists during this decade are essentially the same materials that are used by the social scientists. Charles H. Nilo...: Several years ago when writing about the lonely crowd, an observer, perhaps Lionel Trilling noticed that Reesman was using the materials that another age and particularly in England were the materials of the novelist of manners and the work of the Negro novelists of the '60s, the situation is reversed. The novelist is making fiction out of the materials of a historian, the sociologists, the anthropologist, in general, the social scientist. The use of history that is made by the Black novelist is of several kinds and for several purposes. He reinterprets past events, he interprets the present, he explores the biographies of significant Black persons, he explores his own experience and he examines the general historical patterns of the Black quest in America. The Black novelist in the '60s is concerned to get the facts straight, to destroy the myth, to clarify the distortions. Charles H. Nilo...: He is a revisionist engaged in making new myths. John A. Williams, The Angry Ones is essentially an autobiographical novel, which presents in fiction the core of the personal experience that Williams describes in This Is My Country Too. This Is My Country Too is a kind of personal narrative written by Williams when he was employed by a magazine to travel across the United States and then to report on what he found, assessing the status of Black people as a result of his own impressions and his own treatment. His Night Song is a treatment of the life of the jazz musician, Charlie Parker. The Man Who Cried I Am is an examination by Williams of the present and that interpretation of the lives of such contemporary persons as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. The narrator in this novel utilizes certain knowledge that was part of William's experience. Charles H. Nilo...: The background against which the characters move is the recent past. John Kennedy's attitude toward the Black man is explored in this novel. There is an examination of the American Black man's new consciousness of Africa and of his relationship to Africa. Generally, the book looks at the current historic scene to judge what is possible for the Black man and describes the situation of price is comparable to that, which emerges through the sociopolitical analysis of Harold Cruz and the crisis of the Negro intellectual in Charles Silverman's Crisis in Black and White, and in Kellian study of the possibility of a Black revolution. William Melvin Kelley uses history as a myth on the strength of which prediction can be made. The beginning of his novel is a mythicized account of the refusal of an African King to live as a slave in America. Charles H. Nilo...: The principle events of the novel describe the experience of three generations of this African King's descendants and show the last of these reclaiming his kingly cultural heritage as he breaks with the patterns of American society and acts as he must to be a man. In a compressed form, the Black struggle for freedom is suggested, the failure of the attempt at integration is suggested, the failure of the middle-class leadership in America and the possibilities of cultural pluralism are investigated. Although I wish to talk primarily about the work of William Kelley and if there is time about Margaret Walker's Jubilee, I should like to mention several other Black novelists who in the '60s have used history and the ways that I suggest above. Gordon Parks' The Learning Tree is not an autobiography, but its relation to that literary form is evident when it's compared with A Choice of Weapons, which is Parks' autobiography. Charles H. Nilo...: LeRoi Jones' The System of Dante's Hell is autobiographical in that it traces the pattern of his social and intellectual development, his rejection of the white middle class and his discovery of selfhood. Certain of the stories entails seeing close to Jones' experience at Howard University. His collection of essays, which he calls Home, although it is certainly not a work of fiction, is a gesture at observing the growth of his political and social self. Nathan Herd who was born and raised in the Harvard Street area of Newark and who as a consequence of that experience spent 15 years in reformatories in jails provides in Howard Street, the novel, an interpretation of the life in that ghetto. I do not know that the experience is autobiographical. It does have however the quality, an historical validity that is found in Lavita. Charles H. Nilo...: It documents revealing with experiences that create the Bigger Thomas's and Rufus Scots and attacks the invisibility of the Black man. John A. Williams in This Is My Country Too tells a good deal about experiences that he has while he travels across the United States as I've suggested earlier. In this travel book, which resulted from the assignment by Holiday Magazine, he tells about people he meets, the way they respond to his education, the visit with his family, and their once integrated California neighborhood. He tells about his hopes and aspirations as a person. In a sense, the book is an autobiography as well as a travel story. The travel allows him to test the racial climate of the country and to judge whether Jim Crow is still in health or dying. William's novel, The Angry One is introspective and autobiographical in tone. Charles H. Nilo...: The first chapters is narrated drives from California with his brother as Williams drove from California to New York with his brother in This Is My Country Too. Williams is a writer who has had trouble finding suitable work. The major situation of the novel, The Angry One shows the narrator's effort to find work, his interviews with possible employers are described and the techniques for handling Negro applicants, so that evidence of prejudice is not shown or described. The narrator's experiences and responses are convincingly presented and effective reveal racial customs and patterns of segregation. There is not only an autobiographical approach, but an analytical use of Black history to provide a meaningful context for the autobiography like narrative. Quite early in the novel, Williams provides his narrator with roots, utilizes the material of the Black past. Charles H. Nilo...: He says at one point, "If you want to, you can trace us from Ivory Coast to Upper New York. You could chart our course two ways from Africa, the earliest stages across the East over the Atlantic, across the plains and mountains of the American West to New York." The narrator is not only aware of his African past, but he is also aware of his family's typical aspirations and have various parts to the American experience. Williams and Williams' narrator's families are proud of them. We learned from this is in My Country Too of the pride found in William's family for him. In the novel, the family is proud of the narrator's education. They believe that education is the solution to the Negro problem. Their attitude is a traditional one and represents the integration thrust within the Black community. In the novel, Williams' narrator realizes the perilous nature of his family's hope, but he cannot tell them that it is baseless. Charles H. Nilo...: His family believes that education will make the Black man free. In part, it is the business of the novel to show that it does not and to show the existence and the values of the Black culture. "I would cut my tongue off," the narrator says, "before I ever tell them the sheep skins they wanted in this family were not worth a damn. Not for any of us, not for me because it was only playing at a game allowing us to have it." The narrator describes the quest for middle-class values as playing a game. He is aware also of the values of the Black subculture and of the contribution of the subculture to the majority culture. In this novel, Williams shows the experience of the educated Black person who tries to be a man in New York City, his effort to secure an apartment, the variety and quality office relations with educated white people, his separate relations with Black people, the character of the separate Black world and the need to return to it periodically for sustenance. Charles H. Nilo...: The novel, however is not just a social document. It is a portrait of the narrator as a human being who tests the American dream and is forced to realize that he cannot keep it in the white community. In Night Song, Williams uses the folklore and the art of the jazz world and it's musicians. The events in this novel occur mainly in the free world or freer world of Greenwich village. The point of view character is a Black nightclub owner who has rejected his Ivy league education, his middle-class family, and his attempt at escape through an exotic Eastern religion. The central character of the story is a formerly great musician who becomes addicted to heroin. Williams illustrates a use of biography in the development of this character. His story is, in the broad outline, the story of Charlie Parker. His talent has the technical perfection and the wonderful sensuous appeal that Parker's had, and his personal life is confused as Parker's was. Charles H. Nilo...: There are white women and Black women in his life and his appetites and his passion is in large. He idealizes his music. Williams calls his character Eagle as Parker was called Bird. It is possible to describe the character as a nigger jazz man, or as a musical genius. Williams allows its audience to see the nigger jazz man, the stereotype, but he fits this character into a plot-like myth at the same time and through the introspective means of autobiography like fiction undermines the stereotype. Eagle dies in a way that is similar to Parker's death, and like the response to Parker's death when he is dead, there is a public realization of his worth as a person and as a musician. After his death, his myth overwhelms the stereotype. In Williams' most recent novel, The Man Who Cried I Am, the narrator is again, a writer whose experiences are similar to the office experiences. Charles H. Nilo...: The characters resemble people who have played significant roles in Black history in recent years. Nationalism is looked at in this novel. The role of the white radical is examined, and his relationship to the Black struggle. The quality of Black leadership is described. History and biography merge in fiction as the narrator discovers his manhood. In this particular novel, The Man Who Cried I Am, there are a good number of the things that are characteristic of the use of history in novels of this particular kind. The novel explores several themes that are characteristic themes, I suppose, as they are found in a good deal of a fiction written during this period. It explores, for example, the white woman, Black man phenomena. It explores the relationships between Blacks of different social classes. It explores the aggressive characteristics of middle-class Black women. Charles H. Nilo...: It explores the role of the Black intellectual. The title, I suppose, suggests something of the quest for identity of that particular individual as he had realized in the narrator in this particular novel. The novel explores the making of monsters and the Bigger Thomas tradition. It tries to assess, I suppose, in a general way the possibility of the American dream as something which might be realized by the Black person. The plot of the novel is, I suppose, not a carefully organized plot. It is in many ways, I suppose, a plot, which is simply a matter of following the events in the life of the narrator. In the first part of that life, we see the individual writer returned from the war trying to make himself a place among writers in New York City. We see a partial success in this. We see his acceptance by the white intellectual world. Charles H. Nilo...: We see his involvement in the world of national politics, and finally, he becomes an international person as he is sent by his magazine to cover the African scene. The movement here is not a chronological movement. It's a movement back and forth in time. The narrator who tells us about his quest, in a sense his success, is at the time of the telling near death and he's trying to make not only for the audience, but for himself a kind of assessment, a kind of evaluation. Within the context of this assessment, we get a use of contemporary history. The people who are characters here with different names represent people who have filled the roads that these characters filled. There is Richard Wright in the years of his American success, and there is Richard Wright as he is in Europe and as he is when he dies. The tension between Richard Wright and James Baldwin is shown through several contacts between these writers in Europe. Charles H. Nilo...: There is an assessment of the role that Martin Luther King played in the society, and there is an attempt to judge the significance of Malcolm X. These things are shown against the background of the '50s and '60s. The political events that were very significant events of those decades are interpreted. The political responsibility of the Kennedy administration is questioned. The possibility of social change, the possibility of achieving particular goals that the Black community had set for itself is analyzed. Essentially, from the part of view of the narrator-writer who has lived through, in some intimacy, most of the events that characterize this period. The assessment at the end, the interpretation of history, which comes at the end is not an entirely optimistic interpretation. The movement back and forth in America, the movement from America to the Italian army front, back to America, and then to Europe, back to America, and then to Africa is a series of moves that allows the character to come to some judgment about bait the status of the Black man. Charles H. Nilo...: At the point of death, he thinks about this and he realizes that it's these experiences that he must find in some way a sense of his own importance, a reason for his own existence. The existence is about to end. His total assessment is pessimistic. He asks in a way, I suppose, is there a change, is there a reform? Is there a revolution in America's attitude toward the Black man, and his answer is no. As a matter of fact, he suggests that the possibility of the destruction of the Black man is far greater than the possibility of social change, which will be a means of materializing for him those things that he needs in order to be a man. There is a sensational quality, I suppose, at the end of the novel, and yet the sensationalism, which is there is not out of tone with, out of tune with the reality of the last of the 1960s. Charles H. Nilo...: The discovery, which the narrator makes just before his death, of a genocidal plot intended to take care of Black persons if they get too far out of line is, in one sentence, a pure melodrama. In another sense, it's not too far, I suppose, from a kind of reality. The narrator discovers a plan that's called the King Alfred Plan. This plan is a plan to achieve, I suppose the desired goals of law and order, particularly with reference to Black revolution and to Black insurrection. According to the King Alfred Plan, there are camps, which are established already into which insurrectionary Blacks might be placed, and there are plans for calling into action the military and police forces of the government to do that particular kind of thing. Now, the King Alfred Plan, which is discovered by Max, the narrator is at least a possibility within the context of the McCarran Act of 1950 and of the second part of the National Security Act. Charles H. Nilo...: The intention of the author to assess the possibilities of the American dream is I think rather nicely climaxed with a proposal of a plan by which share the effort of Black people might be contained. The novel includes a good number of situations, which suggests in a way that Williams is interpreting history, but he's interpreted it in the light of a tradition, I suppose, of Black risers. There is in the Wiggins novel, as there is in many novels by Black authors in this period, a character who approximates the condition of Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas. I'd like to talk about him for a minute. His character is different from Bigger Thomas in a good number of ways. His name is Boatwright. His resources were somewhat different from Bigger's. He managed to get an MA in philosophy from Harvard, but he also in the process of getting it, managed to put himself outside reality. Charles H. Nilo...: There was no place for a Harvard MA in philosophy to go. He has the intelligence, he demonstrates the intelligence. He acquires in a sense a credential, but there's no place to use the credential. This particular character is not only a misfit in terms of office intellectual preparation. He is a homosexual. They are, I suppose, several ironies that sort of cluster around this particular person. There is no place for him in a social sense, and in any particular sense. Now, this man Boatwright appears in the novel when we are all called to notice that he has been guilty of a horrifying crime. He has not only murdered a man, a man that he apparently solicited, but he has cut out the man's heart and cut off his genitals and he has eaten these. The narrator, Max in the novel interviews him before he is to be electrocuted. Charles H. Nilo...: In the interview, we get, again a projection of a certain kind of monstrous quality, which is produced in Black life by the circumstances of American living. Boatwright is in his own way another Bigger Thomas, perhaps somewhat more horrible than Bigger because in one sense, what we call opportunity, narrowly has been larger for him, but in another sense, he is an equally wounded person or perhaps his wound is a greater wound than that Bigger Thomas suffered. Through several incidents comparable to the Boatwright incident, Williams is able to use not history in these particular instances, but experiences, which are symbolic of our typical of the American experience to assess the possibility of the achievement of the American dream and incidents and experiences, which when looked at in perspective, justify, I suppose, the rather sensational ending that the novel has. Charles H. Nilo...: The novel is, I suppose, a novel, which in the large attempts to give an impression of authenticity, to give that impression of being fact. It's a verification. I think that Williams uses the experiences of real people in order to give it this documented quality, in order to do suggest the soundness of the conclusions that he draws from the incidents and from the characterizations that he provides in the novel as a whole. Now, in the writing of William Melvin Kelley, we see a somewhat different use of history. William Melvin Kelley has written a novel called A Different Drummer. In this particular novel, he begins his story by including a quotation from Thoreau. It's a fairly familiar quotation. The sense of it is that if the narrator does not move in the same rhythm that everybody else moves in, this is probably because he is dancing to the music of a different drummer. Charles H. Nilo...: This is the source of the title. The story itself is the story of a Black man who reclaims, I suppose we might say, his heritage. He has been seen initially as a rather conventional, a rather quiet, good man in a small semi-rural community. He owns his own farm. He has a wife and a child. His relationships with the white people in the community are good. Actually, the farm he owns, he purchased from a white family for whom he had worked, a white family that had been in a way associated with his family since the time his first ancestor was brought to America from Africa. The story is in a sense, a story of his reclaiming, or of his claiming his manhood, of his breaking away from those things, which were what we might call his roots. He's picking up a tradition, which was represented in that of office African ancestor. Charles H. Nilo...: This novel begins with a story, almost a myth of an African King who was brought to America aboard ship, and who when he came off the ship carried in his arms a child, his child, we suppose. When he is seen by the people who come to the purchase slaves, he is admired by one white person, in many ways a very decent man, and this man purchases him and then makes an effort to take him home, but the slave runs away and the man goes in pursuit. You have the slave pursued until he is killed. When he is about to die, he turns the child over to the man who has as purchased him, and it's this child who is the ancestor of the central character in a different drummer. The story is told partly from the point of view of the local white persons who form kind of chorus almost. These persons sit for a part of each day on the front porch of the local store, and they comment on the events that occur in the community. The person with most prestige among them is an old man, a former military person who sits in a wheelchair. Charles H. Nilo...: He doesn't really need to sit in a wheelchair, but he says that nothing which is occurring in the world is worthy of walking to, and so he sits in the wheelchair and he is either pushed by his daughter or he moves himself with as little energy as he must use in doing that. This group of white persons observes the community around them, and they comment on it. They're not only observers, they are participants also. The phenomena, which has disturbed them is the fact that while they sat one afternoon, much as they usually sat, they observed several Black people with suitcases all moving in the same direction. They had observed before that something much more startling. They had observed that Tucker Caliban, Tucker Caliban is the name of the central character. The Black person is the central character of this novel. Charles H. Nilo...: The afternoon before that, they had observed Tucker Caliban and his wife and son moving down the road carrying a suitcase. They had also observed something far stranger than simply moving down a road. In the weeks before that, Tucker had ordered a truck load of salt, and they had watched him take the salt and spread it over his farm land. Then they had observed him cut down the tree that stood in front of his house. They observed him kill his horse and kill his cow. They observed when he brought the grandfather clock out of his house and cut that into the splinters. The grandfather clock had been a gift to Tucker's family from the white family that had owned them when they were slaves, and he was observed destroying this surprised antique. Finally, before he left to walk down the road, they watched his wife and him as they set fire to the house, walked out the gate with their suitcase and walked out on the road. Charles H. Nilo...: On the second afternoon, they observed the other Black families with suitcases walking down the road, and gradually it comes to them that all the Black people in that town are leaving. They're crowding into the railway station, into the bus stations and they're all headed to someplace outside the community, someplace in the North. Now, there is concern about this. They aren't quite sure why this is being done, and they talk among themselves. They say they're nice people. We've always got along well here. "Tucker," they say, "was a good colored, man. He was industrious, he was thrifty. He had bought that farm and his wife's an educated woman. Why do they go?" The answer to why they go is contained in another pattern. The answer to why they go is that Tucker has become concerned about seizing his manhood, not waiting for it to be given to him, not waiting for someone else to help him get it, but concerned to take it himself. Charles H. Nilo...: Now, in the other sections of the novel, we get in a sense, a portrait of a community, a portrait of community relations. What the men say in one sense is true. This is not been a bad community in terms of certain evaluations of communities. The white people here have been people generally of good conscience. The Black people here have in a sense lived in a measure of comfort, and Tucker Caliban seemed for a time satisfied with that. He worked much as his father and his grandfather and his great, great grandfather had worked. He observed the etiquette that they had observed, but gradually he isn't satisfied with that. One afternoon, his wife and he go to visit some friends of hers, and the person of that house ask her to become a member of an organization somewhat like the NAACP and Tucker refuses to give her the money to do that. Charles H. Nilo...: He says he doesn't need anybody to work for him. He will work for himself, and so you have a rejection here of some of the traditional means for achieving justice in the Black community. Tucker does not do anything explosive until after his father's death. Tucker's father has continued to work for the family that had employed Tuckers for most of their lives. One Saturday afternoon when he is finished working for the white family, he gets on a bus to go across the town to where other Black people live, and he dies on that bus. Ironically, he had set in the seat just behind the seat sign that said colored passengers. When his head falls forward in death, it falls against that side and rest there. When Tucker and his wife are called, they find his father's body still in the bus with his head resting against this side. Tucker's behavior is not unusual for a behavior in a situation of grief until we go to the funeral. Charles H. Nilo...: At the funeral, which is quiet and simple, when a contemporary of his father's gets up to say what can be said about the old man, he begins and Tucker gets up and walks out of the church. From that point, he moves according to the music of the different drama that he hears. He buys the salt, he kills the cattle, he cuts down the tree, he destroys the clock and he sets fire to the house. He seizes his own destiny and he leaves the town, and he's followed by other people in the community. Now, there is a sort of secondary plot in this story. It's the story of a Black preacher, of a Black middle class preacher, a Black man who went to school with great difficulty, who was tremendously concerned to do good for his people. He went to school at Harvard and he was a good student there. When he left Harvard, he tried in various ways to solve problems, to make situations better, to provide housing, to provide jobs. Charles H. Nilo...: He wasn't terribly successful. He even ventured into a kind of, I'll call it theology. He became a kind of a cultish minister as a means of trying to help Black people. This minister has an overwhelming sense of failure. He's burdened in the novel with several responsibilities, several representational responsibilities. He represents the effort of the talented 10th. That's the phrase that Du Bois used to deal with the problems of the Black masses. We are convinced of his earnestness, of his sincerity, and yet somehow everything he tries is inadequate. He has confidence in himself, he has confidence in white people, and he turns up in Tucker Caliban's little town because the man who employed Tucker Caliban had been with him at Harvard. He wants to speak to him. He wants to say something to him about the failure. He was an idealist. He's tried and he's failed. Charles H. Nilo...: In the afternoon when the white chorus sits on the porch of the store watching the Black persons with their suitcases moving toward the train and bus depots, this chauffeured car with the minister drives up to the store and stops, and the minister begins to ask questions. Now, the minister's heard about what Tucker is doing, so he wants to see for himself. He drives with his chauffeur to the bus station and to the railroad station. As he sees the people moving away from what has been their lives, he realizes in a sense that perhaps they are able to solve problems for themselves that he was not able to solve for them. He's a bit envious. He wishes that he'd been able to lead them to do that kind of thing. Then he leaves the station and drives back again to the store to ask other questions. By this time, the white community has become disturbed. Charles H. Nilo...: They don't like their Black persons going away, and they want to blame somebody for it. They see the preacher and they see the car and they see the people leaving, and somehow it seems to them that this uppity nigger who's driving in the chauffeured car is responsible for the disruption of our community life. They take the preacher out of the car and they take him away, and then they kill him. The old man who sits on the porch in his wheelchair becomes a kind of voice for the community, not only for the community, but a kind of voice of reason. He talks to one or two people who did not join them mob, and he says, "We'll have to be patient with them. This is perhaps the last man they'll Lynch. They don't realize," he says, "that those people are stronger than they are." This is roughly the way in which the novel ends. Charles H. Nilo...: If we ask ourselves what's being talked about here, I suppose there's several things. One of the things I think that is worked that of historical nature is the use of the idea of African heritage, the use of the idea that African heritage means courage of a certain kind, that African heritage means refusal to submit to the slavery. Caliban, Tucker Caliban is placed again in the tradition of his family and the tradition of office origins. The myth I suppose, of the African as a proper person to be made a slave off is disqualified in a story of this kind. The idea that Africa was a place in which there was no culture is questioned in terms of a frame of reference that the African king is placed in. Tucker Caliban is finding resources within himself. He is not being told by someone else what he ought to do. He does not depend upon the conventional means of achievement. Charles H. Nilo...: He uses in a sense the natural means of achievement. In a way, I suppose, indirectly, symbolically, the book comments on Black nationalism, or it comments on the particular details of cultural pluralism in a rather meaningful kind of way. The name that Tucker has is a rather interesting name, the family name. That name is Caliban. If you think about Shakespeare's Tempest, in the Tempest, I suppose it's Ariel who passed out Caliban. Here, Caliban, the Black, the unlovely becomes in a sense the virtuous and the good. While the use of history here is almost at the level of myth and while the events are presented in a context that is not totally realistic, one can see that the author here has employed a certain sense of history, a certain sense of fact, a certain sense of documentation in order to say through artistic means the kind of thing that he wants to say. Charles H. Nilo...: Now, I think that I might make a violent comment on the use of history in Black fiction. The work of these two writers that I had talked about, John A. Williams and William Melvin Kelley suggests in a way that the Black writer in the '60s and today has a tremendous awareness of what we call Black culture. He has an awareness of the experience that the Black person has had in America, and he regards himself as a kind of revisionist. As many reconstruction historians are revisionist today whose obligation it is to correct the record, to set the record straight, to provide the facts of the experience. Charles H. Nilo...: In this process of correcting the record, of setting it straight, he manages somehow to demythologize the Black man, to have the real person appear. He manages in a way to destroy the validity of some of the stereotypes, although I suppose stereotypes are always in some relation to truth. The process used by the novelist to use this history presents of course the stereotype figure, but along with the figure, we see the reasons for the stereotype's existence. The quality of writing in these novels varies. The literary resourcefulness, in a general sense I think, it is sometimes limited. The novels are certainly, I think, novels of purpose. They are not merely documents. However, they do approach a means of satisfying the needs of art, and at the same time, they meet the needs of the present crisis. 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, Tuesday, May 12th, 1970 from Shambaugh Auditorium, and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.