The World Has Changed (9 page)

The point is that less than ten years after all these things I walk about Georgia (and Mississippi)—eating, sleeping, loving, singing, burying the dead—the way men and women are supposed to do in a place that is the only “home” they’ve ever known. There is only one “for coloreds” sign left in Eatonton, and it is on a black man’s barbershop. He is merely outdated. Booster, if you read this,
change
your sign!

 

J.O.: I wonder how clear it was to you what you were going to do in your novel before you started. Did you know, for instance, that Grange Copeland was capable of change?

 

A.W.: I see the work that I have done already as a foundation. That being so, I suppose I knew when I started
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
that it would have to cover several generations, and nearly a century of growth and upheaval. It begins around 1900 and ends in the sixties. But my first draft (which was never used, not even one line, in the final version) began with Ruth as a civil-rights lawyer in Georgia going to rescue her father, Brownfield Copeland, from a drunken accident, and to have a confrontation with him. In that version she is married—also to a lawyer—and they are both committed to ensuring freedom for black people in the South. In Georgia, specifically. There was lots of lovemaking and courage in that version. But it was too recent, too superficial—everything seemed a product of the immediate present. And I believe nothing ever is.

So, I brought in the grandfather. Because all along I wanted to explore the relationship between parents and children: specifically between daughters and their father (this is most interesting, I’ve always felt; for example, in “The Child Who Favored Daughter” in
In Love and Trouble
, the father cuts off the breasts of his daughter because she falls in love with a white boy; why this, unless there is sexual jealousy?), and I wanted to learn, myself, how it happens that the hatred a child can have for a parent becomes inflexible.
And
I wanted to explore the relationship between men and women, and why women are always condemned for doing what men do as an expression of their masculinity.
Why are women so easily “tramps” and “traitors” when men are heroes for engaging in the same activity? Why do women stand for this?

My new novel will be about several women who came of age during the sixties and were active (or not active) in the movement in the South. I am exploring their backgrounds, familial and sibling connections, their marriages, affairs, and political persuasions, as they grow toward a fuller realization (and recognition) of themselves.

Since I put together my course on black women writers, which was taught first at Wellesley College and later at the University of Massachusetts, I have felt the need for real critical and biographical work on these writers. As a beginning, I am writing a long personal essay on my own discovery of these writers (designed, primarily, for lectures), and I hope soon to visit the birthplace and home of Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville, Florida. I am so involved with my own writing that I don’t think there will be time for me to attempt the long, scholarly involvement that all these writers require. I am hopeful, however, that as their books are reissued and used in classrooms across the country, someone will do this. If no one does (or if no one does it to my satisfaction), I feel it is my duty (such is the fervor of love) to do it myself.

 

J.O.: Have women writers, then, influenced your writing more than male? Which writers do you think have had the most direct influence upon you?

 

A.W.: I read all of the Russian writers I could find, in my sophomore year in college. I read them as if they were a delicious cake. I couldn’t get enough: Tolstoy (especially his short stories, and the novels
The Kreutzer Sonata
and
Resurrection
—which taught me the importance of diving through politics and social forecasts to dig into the essential spirit of individual persons, because otherwise, characters, no matter what political or current social issue they stand for, will not live), and Dostoyevsky, who found his truths where everyone else seemed afraid to look, and Turgenev, Gorky, and Gogol—who made me think that Russia must have something floating about in the air that writers breathe from the time they are born. The only thing that began to bother me, many years later, was that I could find almost nothing written by a Russian woman writer.

Unless poetry has mystery, many meanings, and some ambiguities
(necessary for mystery) I am not interested in it. Outside of Bashō and Issa and other Japanese haiku poets, I read and was impressed by the poetry of Li Po, the Chinese poet, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings (deeply), and Robert Graves—especially his poems in
Man Does, Woman Is
, which is surely a pure male-chauvinist title, but I did not think about that then. I liked Graves because he took it as given that passionate love between man and woman does not last forever. He enjoyed the moment and didn’t bother about the future. My poem “The Man in the Yellow Terry” is very much influenced by Graves.

I also loved Ovid and Catullus. During the whole period of discovering haiku and the sensual poems of Ovid, the poems of e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams, my feet did not touch the ground. I ate, I slept, I studied other things (like European history) without ever doing more than giving it serious thought. It could not change me from one moment to the next, as poetry could.

I wish I had been familiar with the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks when I was in college. I stumbled on them later. If there was ever a
born
poet, I think it is Brooks. Her natural way of looking at anything, of commenting on anything, comes out as a vision, in language that is peculiar to her. It is clear that she is a poet from the way your whole spiritual past begins to float around in your throat when you are reading, just as it is clear from the first line of
Cane
that Jean Toomer is a poet, blessed with a soul that is surprised by nothing. It is not unusual to weep when reading Brooks, just as when reading Toomer’s “Song of the Son” it is not unusual to comprehend—in a flash—what a dozen books on black people’s history fail to illuminate. I have embarrassed my classes occasionally by standing in front of them in tears as Toomer’s poem about “some genius from the South” flew through my body like a swarm of golden butterflies on their way toward a destructive sun. Like Du Bois, Toomer was capable of comprehending the black soul. It is not “soul” that
can
become a cliché, but rather something to be illuminated rather than explained.

The poetry of Arna Bontemps has strange effects on me too. He is a great poet, even if he is not recognized as such until after his death. Or is never acknowledged. The passion and compassion in his poem “A Black Man Talks of Reaping” shook the room I was sitting in the first time I read it. The ceiling began to revolve and a breeze—all the way from Alabama—blew through the room. A tide of spiritual good
health tingled the bottom of my toes. I changed. Became someone the same, but different. I understood, at last, what the transference of energy was.

It is impossible to list all of the influences on one’s work. How can you even remember the indelible impression upon you of a certain look on your mother’s face? But random influences are these: music, which is the art I most envy.

Then there’s travel—which really made me love the world, its vastness and variety. How moved I was to know that there is no center of the universe. Entebbe, Uganda, or Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, exist no matter what we are doing here. Some writers—Camara Laye, or the man who wrote
One Hundred Years of Solitude
[Gabriel García Márquez]—have illumined this fact brilliantly in their fiction, which brings me to African writers I
hope
to be influenced by: Okot p’tek has written my favorite modern poem, “Song of Lawino.” I am also crazy about
The Concubine
by Elechi Ahmadi (a perfect story, I think),
The Radiance of the King
, by Camara Laye, and
Maru
, by Bessie Head. These writers do not seem afraid of fantasy, of myth and mystery. Their work deepens one’s comprehension of life by going beyond the bounds of realism. They are like musicians: at one with their cultures and their historical subconscious.

Flannery O’Connor has also influenced my work. To me, she is the best of the white southern writers, including Faulkner. For one thing, she practiced economy. She also knew that the question of race was really just the first question on a long list. This is hard for just about everybody to accept, we’ve been trying to answer it for so long.

I did not read
Cane
until 1967, but it has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree.
I love it passionately
, could not possibly exist without it.
Cane
and
Their Eyes Were Watching God
are probably my favorite books by black American writers. Jean Toomer has a very feminine sensibility (or phrased another way, he is both feminine and masculine in his perceptions), unlike most black male writers. He loved women.

Like Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston was never afraid to let her characters be themselves, funny talk and all. She was incapable of being embarrassed by anything black people did and so was able to write about everything with freedom and fluency. My feeling is that Zora Neale Hurston is probably one of the most misunderstood, least appreciated
writers of this century. Which is a pity. She is great. A writer of courage, and incredible humor, with poetry in every line.

When I started teaching my course in black women writers at Wellesley (the first one, I think, ever), I was worried that Zora’s use of black English of the twenties would throw some of the students off. It didn’t. They loved it. They said it was like reading Thomas Hardy, only better. In that same course I taught Nella Larsen, Frances Watkins Harper (poetry and novel), Dorothy West, Ann Petry, Paule Marshall, etc. Also Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf—not because they were black, obviously, but because they were women and wrote, as the black women did, on the condition of humankind from the perspective of women. It is interesting to read Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own
while reading the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, to read Larsen’s
Quicksand
along with
The Awakening
. The deep-throated voice of Sojourner Truth tends to drift across the room while you’re reading. If you’re not a feminist already, you become one.

 

J.O.: Why do you think that the black woman writer has been so ignored in America? Does she have even more difficulty than the black male writer, who perhaps has just begun to gain recognition?

 

A.W.: There are two reasons why the black woman writer is not taken as seriously as the black male writer. One is that she’s a woman. Critics seem unusually ill-equipped to intelligently discuss and analyze the works of black women. Generally, they do not even make the attempt; they prefer, rather, to talk about the lives of black women writers, not about what they write. And, since black women writers are not—it would seem—very likable—until recently they were the least willing worshippers of male supremacy—comments about them tend to be cruel.

In Nathan Huggins’s very readable book,
Harlem Renaissance
, he hardly refers to Zora Neale Hurston’s work, except negatively. He quotes from Wallace Thurman’s novel,
Infants of the Spring
, at length, giving us the words of a character, “Sweetie Mae Carr,” who is allegedly based on Zora Neale Hurston. “Sweetie Mae” is a writer noted more “for her ribald wit and personal effervescence than for any actual literary work. She was a great favorite among those whites who went in for Negro prodigies.” Mr. Huggins goes on for several pages, never quoting Zora Neale Hurston herself, but rather the opinions of others about her
character. He does say that she was “a master of dialect,” but adds that “Her greatest weakness was carelessness or indifference to her art.”

Having taught Zora Neale Hurston, and of course, having read her work myself, I am stunned. Personally, I do not care if Zora Hurston was fond of her white women friends. When she was a child in Florida, working for nickels and dimes, two white women helped her escape. Perhaps this explains it. But even if it doesn’t, so what? Her work, far from being done carelessly, is done (especially in
Their Eyes Were Watching God
) almost too perfectly. She took the trouble to capture the beauty of rural black expression. She saw poetry where other writers merely saw failure to cope with English. She was so at ease with her blackness it never occurred to her that she should act one way among blacks and another among whites (as her more sophisticated black critics apparently did).

It seems to me that black writing has suffered, because even black critics have assumed that a book that deals with the relationships between members of a black family—or between a man and a woman—is less important than one that has white people as a primary antagonist. The consequence of this is that many of our books by “major” writers (always male) tell us little about the culture, history, or future, imagination, fantasies, etc. of black people, and a lot about isolated (often improbable) or limited encounters with a nonspecific white world. Where is the book, by an American black person (aside from
Cane
), that equals Elechi Ahmadi’s
The Concubine
, for example? A book that exposes the
subconscious
of a people, because the people’s dreams, imaginings, rituals, legends, etc. are known to be important, are known to contain the accumulated collective reality of the people themselves. Or, in
The Radiance of the King
, the white person is shown to be the outsider he is, because the culture he enters into in Africa
itself
expels him. Without malice, but as nature expels what does not suit. The white man is mysterious, a force to be reckoned with, but he is not glorified to such an extent that the Africans turn their attention away from themselves and their own imagination and culture. Which is what often happens with “protest literature.” The superficial becomes—for a time—the deepest reality, and replaces the still waters of the collective subconscious.