Reading List

So I'm trying to read from the Harlem Renaissance and post-HR African American Lit, because apparently this is the literature that most touches me:

(books not at the school library have been omitted)

Cane- Jean Toomer

The novel is structured as a series of vignettes revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States. The vignettes alternate in structure between narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue. As a result, the novel has been classified as a composite novel or as a short story cycle. Though some characters and situations recur between vignettes, the vignettes are mostly freestanding, tied to the other vignettes thematically and contextually more than through specific plot details.

Excerpt (Harvest Song)

Harvest Song

I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown. All my oats are cradled.
But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them.
And I hunger.

I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it.
I have been in the fields all day. My throat is dry.
I hunger.

My eyes are caked with dust of oatfields at harvest-time.
I am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack'd fields of other harvesters.

It would be good to see them . . crook'd, split, and iron-ring'd handles of the scythes. It would be good to see them, dust-caked and blind. I hunger.

(Dusk is a strange fear'd sheath their blades are dull'd in.)
My throat is dry. And should I call, a cracked grain like the oats...eoho--

I fear to call. What should they hear me, and offer me their grain, oats, or wheat, or corn? I have been in the fields all day. I fear I could not taste it. I fear knowledge of my hunger.

My ears are caked with dust of oatfields at harvest-time.
I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose throats are also dry.

It would be good to hear their songs . . reapers of the sweet-stalk'd cane, cutters of the corn...even though their throats cracked and the strangeness of their voices deafened me.

I hunger. My throat is dry. Now that the sun has set and I am chilled, I fear to call. (Eoho, my brothers!)

I am a reaper. (Eoho!) All my oats are cradled.
But I am too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger.
I crack a grain. It has no taste to it.
My throat is dry...

O my brothers, I beat my palms, still soft, against the stubble of my harvesting. (You beat your soft palms, too.) My pain is sweet. Sweeter than the oats or wheat or corn. It will not bring me knowledge of my hunger.


Go Tell it on the Mountain- James Baldwin

First published in 1953 when James Baldwin was nearly 30, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a young man's novel, as tightly coiled as a new spring, yet tempered by a maturing man's confidence and empathy. It's not a long book, and its action spans but a single day--yet the author packs in enough emotion, detail, and intimate revelation to make his story feel like a mid-20th-century epic. Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression. John's parents, praying beside him, both wrestle with the ghosts of their sinful pasts--Gabriel, a preacher of towering hypocrisy, fathered an illegitimate child during his first marriage down South and refused to recognize his doomed bastard son; Elizabeth fell in love with a charming, free-spirited young man, followed him to New York, became pregnant with his son, and lost him before she could reveal her condition.

Baldwin lays down the terrible symmetries of these two blighted lives as the ironic context for John's dark night of the soul. When day dawns, John believes himself saved, but his creator makes it clear that this salvation arises as much from blindness as revelation: "He was filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered."

Quote

"John and his father stared at each other, struck dumb and still and with something come to life between them - while the Holy Ghost spoke. Gabriel had never seen such a look on John's face before; Satan, at that moment, stared out of John's eyes while the Spirit spoke; and yet John's staring eyes to-nigh reminded Gabriel of other eyes; of his mother's eyes when she beat him, of Florence's eyes when she mocked him, of Deborah's eyes when she prayed for him, of Esther's eyes and Royal's eyes, and Elizabeth's eyes to-night before Roy cursed him, and of Roy's eyes when Roy said: 'You black bastard.' And John did not drop his eyes, but seemed to want to stare for ever into the bottom of Gabriel's soul". (p. 174)


Dark Laughter- Sherwood Anderson

Dark Laughter was Sherwood Anderson's 1925 novel which took up much the same theme as his 1923 novel Many Marriages, though he read James Joyce's Ulysses in between. The influence of Ulysses is clear in Dark Laughter. While Winesburg, Ohio is Anderson's best known work today, Dark Laughter was the only bestseller of Anderson's lifetime. It has been out of print since the early 1960s and most contemporary critics consider the novel a failure (among them Kim Townsend, the author of the most recent biography of Anderson, published in 1985)--a failure due, in large part, to what many today consider racist and sexist language and themes.

Quicksand- Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen's first novel tells the story of Helga Crane, a fictional character loosely based Larsen's own early life. Crane is the lovely and refined daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father who abandons Helga and her mother soon after Helga is born. Unable to feel comfortable with any of her white-skinned relatives, Helga lives in various places in America and visits Denmark in search of people among whom she feels at home.

Her travels bring her in contact with many of the communities Larsen herself knew. The reader meets Helga, a first year teacher in "Naxos," a Southern Negro boarding school based on Tuskegee University, where she finds herself dissatisfied with the complacent philosophy of those around her. She criticizes a sermon by a white preacher who advocates that blacks ought to sensibly segregate themselves into black schools, that striving for social equality would lead blacks to become avaricious. Helga abruptly quits her teaching and moves to Chicago, where her white uncle, now married to a bigoted woman, shuns her, then to Harlem, where she finds a refined but often hypocritical black middle class obsessed with the "race problem." Taking her uncle's legacy and advice, she visits her aunt in Copenhagen, where she is treated as a highly desirable racial exotic; realizing that she deeply misses seeing Negro people, she returns to NYC. During a near mental breakdown, Helga happens onto a store-front revival and a charismatic religious experience. After seducing and marrying the preacher who converts her, she moves with him to the poor deep South, where she is disillusioned by the people's blind adherence to religion. In each of her moves, Helga Crane fails to find fulfillment. She is looking for much more than simply how to synthesize her own mixed ancestry--she expresses complex feelings about what she and her friends see as genetic differences between races.

The novel also tells the tale of Helga's search for a marriage partner: as it opens, she has become engaged to marry for social benefits a prestigious Southern Negro man she does not really love; in Denmark she turns down the proposal of a famous white Danish artist for similar reasons; by the final chapters she has seduced and married a stereotypical black Southern preacher. The novel's close is deeply pessimistic, as Helga Crane sees what she hoped would be sexual fulfillment and success of her altruistic ideas of "uplifting" the poor southern blacks she lives among,turn into an endless chain of pregnancies and suffering. It is not her skin color after all that is the obstacle to her happiness.

Helga is a complex character, and the novelist is up to expressing much complexity. The decline of her life after she moves south, however, is less well-expressed. The book is well worth reading for a glimpse of how the Washington and DuBois conflict may have affected real people in the early part of the 20th century.

Banjo- Claude McKay

Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known on the 1920s Marseilles waterfront as “Banjo,” prowls the rough waterfront bistros with his drifter friends, drinking, looking for women, playing music, fighting, loving, and talking - about their homes in Africa, the West Indies, or the american South and about being black.

Invisible Man- Ralph Ellison

nvisible Man is narrated in the first person by the protagonist, an unnamed African American man who considers himself socially invisible. His character may have been inspired by Ellison's own life. The narrator may be conscious of his audience, writing as a way to make himself visible to mainstream culture; the book is structured as if it were the narrator's autobiography although it begins in the middle of his life.

In the Prologue, Ellison's narrator tells readers, “I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century.” In this secret place, the narrator creates surroundings that are symbolically illuminated with 1,369 lights. He says, “My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway." The protagonist explains that light is an intellectual necessity for him since "the truth is the light and light is the truth." From this underground perspective, the narrator attempts to make sense out of his life, experiences, and position in American society.

"I am an invisible man." (p. 3) (first line)

Raisin in the Sun in "Black Theatre" (Lorraine Hansberry)

The play is about the Younger Family, as they dream of leaving behind the crowded, run-down Chicago apartment where they have lived since Ruth and Walter were married. The father, Walter, had big dreams of making a fortune by investing in a liquor store but foolishly gives his money to a con-artist. His sister, Beneatha, a college student, tries to find her identity and embraces the Back-to-Africa philosophy of a Nigerian friend, Joseph Asagai. Lena, mother of Beneatha and Walter, shares her daughter-in-law Ruth's dreams of buying a house, and does so with money from her late husband's insurance policy. However, the house is in an all-white neighborhood, where racist future neighbors send one of their members, a man named Karl Lindner, to try to buy them out and prevent the neighborhood's integration. Walter Lee, having been swindled, initially contemplates taking the money, but ultimately refuses to be intimidated or bought out.

"Girl, I do believe you are the first person in the history of the entire human race to successfully brainwash yourself." Act 2, Scene 3, pg. 98

The Bluest Eye- Toni Morrison

Pecola is a Jamaican girl who is raped by her father, and whose child from the rape dies in infancy.

Pecola's parents' history is examined throughout the novel, showing who they are in three main parts: her father Cholly's background, her mother Pauline's past life, and the couple's conflicted marriage. Cholly was deserted by both his parents, and was rebuked when he tried to contact his father. His son seems to do the same thing later on, running away repeatedly.
In the afterword, Morrison explains that she is attempting to humanize all the characters that attack Pecola or cause her to be the way she is; that it is not a matter where one person can be pointed out as being the cause of all this pain.

Ideas of beauty, particularly those that relate to racial characteristics, are a major theme in this book. The title refers to Pecola's wish that her eyes would turn blue. Claudia is given a white baby doll to play with and is constantly told how lovely it is. Insults to the appearance are often given in racial terms. A light-skinned schoolmate is favored by the teachers.

There is a contrast between the world shown in the cinema, the one in which Pauline is a servant, the WASP society, and the existence the main characters live in. Most chapters' titles are extracts from a Dick and Jane reading book, presenting a happy white family. This family is contrasted with Pecola's existence.


Roots- Alex Haley

Brought up on the stories of his elderly female relatives -- including his Grandmother Cynthia, who was emancipated from slavery with her family in 1865 -- Alex Haley purported to have traced his family history back to "the African", Kunta Kinte, captured by slave traders in 1767. For generations, each of Kunta's enslaved descendants passed down an oral history of Kunta's experiences as a free man in Gambia, along with the African words he taught them. Haley researched African village customs, slave-trading and the history of Blacks in America -- including a visit to the griot (oral historian) of his ancestor's African village -- to produce this colorful rendering of his family's history from the mid-eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth century which led him back to his heartland, Africa.


This does not mean I endorse Sydney Poitier's autobiography. Don't read it. I used to like him v.v I'll add descriptions later. Peace!