Best African American Fiction Read online

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION by Gerald Early, Series Editor

  INTRODUCTION by E. Lynn Harris, Guest Editor

  STORIES

  Pita Delicious by ZZ Packer

  Albino Crow by Chris Abani

  Orb Weaver by Emily Raboteau

  The Saving Work by Tiphanie Yanique

  Dance for Me by Amina Gautier

  Cell One by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  In the Blink of God's Eye by Edward P. Jones

  This Kind of Red by Helen Elaine Lee

  NOVEL EXCERPTS

  Dark Reflections by Samuel R. Delany

  The Great Negro Plot by Mat Johnson

  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

  Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas

  YOUNG ADULT FICTION

  Excerpt from Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson

  Excerpt from Harlem Summer by Walter Dean Myers

  Excerpt from Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis

  Excerpt from Up for It: A Tale of the Underground by L. F. Haines

  PERMISSIONS AND CREDITS

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  INTRODUCTION

  African Americans have a long tradition of writing fiction in the United States, which began even before the Civil War. Among the published novels were William Wells Brown's Clotel, or the President's Daughter, which came out in England in 1853; Frank Webb's The Garies and Their Friends, which appeared in 1857, also in England; Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, brought out by a Boston publishing house in 1859; and Martin R. Delany's Blake, or the Huts of America, which appeared serially in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859. (Yes, African Americans published newspapers and magazines before the Civil War, featuring occasional pieces of fiction.) One unpublished black novel has been discovered from this period: The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, written sometime between 1853 and 1861.

  Two of the published novels were about free black life in the North, which may seem surprising since ten times as many blacks were enslaved as were free, and abolition was the main subject of concern for most antebellum black writers. But uplifting the race and defeating racism were also general concerns that would mark African American fiction for many years to come.

  These early works constituted a modest, even precarious beginning, but were nonetheless quite an achievement given the circumstances. It must be remembered that before the Civil War slave states made it a crime to teach blacks to read; and often blacks in the North had comparable difficulty acquiring an education, since various combinations of law, custom, and general public sentiment conspired against it—on occasion, violently so. So few black people would have had the ability even to read a novel, let alone write one, even a bad one. Establishing a serious black literature thus required struggling against a number of political, cultural, and social factors.

  Where, moreover, was the audience for black fiction? Why would an oppressed people want or need it? And why would white people want to read a novel written by a black person, someone they believed to be socially and intellectually inferior? And if these books had no audience, why would a white publisher publish them, and how could a black publisher ever find the wherewithal to get them into print? Wasn't writing novels, even ones protesting slavery and racism, a frivolous activity? During the antebellum era and even later, many people thought of novel reading much as we now think of television watching—as a waste of time and a destroyer of the mind. More problematic still, whites commonly believed that literate blacks were more likely to cause mischief than those who couldn't read. And couldn't black fiction potentially spread ideas among the blacks that were not in the best interest of the white ruling class?

  All these objections notwithstanding, over the course of American literary history African Americans tried many times to read, write, and publish their own books as a sign of cultural independence and racial entrepreneurism. In the end, the act of writing black fiction was both quixotic and heroic. It served black and white readers alike by reminding them that black people wanted to write fiction, for its own sake and because it might empower the race. And it served the nation by reminding everyone that the creation of black literature was an act of freedom. For every new possibility that blacks fulfilled, such as the utterly preposterous one of becoming fiction writers, further possibilities opened for everyone else.

  The effort required, however, was surely daunting. So far as we know, none of the black writers mentioned above ever wrote a second novel. Not until after the Civil War would African American writers become sufficiently practiced in the craft of fiction writing to produce more than one novel or enough short stories to be collected in a volume. But those early writers, unpracticed and frequently un original as they may have been, did much to establish a tradition of black literature. While these literary ancestors did not directly influence black writers who came later, one can appreciate them for a variety of reasons, even just for persevering to get what was in their heads on paper, at a time when society was organized to ensure that they had nothing in their heads and no way of putting anything on paper. For later generations filiopiety has limits but also satisfies certain necessities of the mind and heart. As the bassist Charles Mingus once put it so succinctly, “Thank god I've got roots!”

  My hope for the Best African American Fiction series is that it will show how far African American fiction has come and, more important, how far it extends, from Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W Chesnutt to Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, from Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, from James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison to John A. Williams and Ann Petry, from Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to John Edgar Wideman and Charles Johnson, from Chester Himes to Virginia Hamilton—and then on to the remarkable writers showcased in these volumes. Writers may not be influenced by all of their ancestors, literary or otherwise, but they may find it useful to remember them, if only to pick and choose their influences.

  This annual series of African American fiction is meant to showcase both short stories and excerpts from novels, authored by both well- known writers and new names on the scene. The first volume in the series features adult fiction as well as several pieces of fiction written for adolescent or young adult audiences. My feeling is that this sort of writing gets neglected, as if it were a lesser endeavor than writing for adults. My motto for this new series is that good fiction writing is good fiction writing, no matter the audience for which it is intended.

  Each volume will highlight the work of a particular year: this volume focuses on literature published in 2007. It also includes a few pieces from 2006, which both the guest editor and I felt simply had to be included. Moreover, as these volumes continue, something may get overlooked, or one guest editor may value something that another guest editor does not. So including a couple of pieces from 2006 is meant to establish a precedent for future volumes, to give both the guest editors and me a bit of latitude.

  The Best African American Fiction anthologies are intended to accomplish three goals:

  to bring to the attention of a wide variety of readers the best fiction published by African Americans in a particular year;

  to bring to their attention some of the lesser- known sources that feature African American fiction writing; and

  to offer an organic, ongoing anthology wherein, from year to year, one may observe shifts and changes, trends and innovations, in African American fiction writing.

  This series is not trying to define or enshrine African American fiction, to establish the magisterial anthology, the definitive canon, or the quasi- Norton edition. Rather it will attempt to offer writing that has a feeling of immed
iacy, of urgency, that helps us understand the way we live now. The way we read, the way we engage with literature, is all part of a process of growth and change, mutation and divergence. Over time, by showing us how literature continually redefines itself, both gradually and quickly, these volumes will offer a historical perspective, while being historical in very important ways themselves.

  A point of clarification: What is an African American? This question has no obvious or even objective answer. For the purposes of these volumes, I choose a broad definition: an African American is any person of color from anywhere in the recognized African Diaspora who lives in the United States either temporarily or permanently, who writes in English, and who is published by an American-based publisher or in an American- based publication.

  I wish to thank guest editor E. Lynn Harris for making most of the selections for this first volume. I added a few more to round it out. Harris is the author of a number of popular novels including Just Too Good to Be True (2008) and I Say a Little Prayer (2006). It was a pleasure to work with him. I cannot think of any current fiction writer better suited to get this series off the ground. He is, as James Baldwin once aspired to be, an honest man and a good writer.

  I wish to extend gratitude and support to Keya Kraft, Jian Leng, and Barbara Liebmann for all the work they did to make this volume possible. I very much appreciate their dedication and support.

  Gerald Early

  Series Editor

  INTRODUCTION

  When I was a child growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, I had a passion for sports, especially football. I used to love watching the older kids running around on the rock- covered vacant lots, throwing the ball, and having a good time. There finally came a point when I wanted to join them, only there was one big problem. I was small in stature and not coordinated enough to handle a ball—any ball. Even at the young age of seven, it was apparent to me that as much as I loved sports, I'd never make the team. And I didn't make the team. But my enthusiasm for football continued regardless, and I became a lifelong fan of college football. A childhood passion protected.

  More important than turning me into a fan, however, not making the team led me to another adolescent love: books. With all that time and energy on my hands, I became an avid reader. It started when I was eight years old, when my mother took me to get my library card at the Little Rock Public Library on Center Street. I spent countless Saturdays at that library reading anything I could get my hands on. Sometimes hanging out there most of the day wasn't enough for me. When it came time for the library to close, I grabbed six books—the limit you were allowed to check out—to last me through the week.

  Considering the time and place of my Southern upbringing, it ought to come as no surprise that most of the books I encountered were by white authors. The libraries and schools were full of books by no one else. Not for years would I discover James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, the first book that truly spoke to me—it depicted a world I closely identified with. More than that, it suggested to me for the first time that I might become a writer, that my life as a young African American boy was a story worthy of being written. Up till then I had had no idea that books like that—or that authors like Baldwin—existed, and that sudden awareness was a revelation to me. I devoured everything I could find by him. If that weren't enough, Baldwin's work led me to other African American literary giants like Richard Wright and Maya Angelou. I felt a kinship with Dr. Angelou because she, like me, was an Arkansas native.

  Starting out, however, I didn't really care who a book's author was or what he or she looked like. No matter who wrote them, books held the power to carry me off to meet people and visit places outside my shotgun house and my hometown. Books fed my imagination in a way that movies and television never quite did. They became my refuge. I think this is fairly common among African American authors. Some of our best writers—from Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass to Langston Hughes and Alice Walker—had a youthful passion for reading that radically changed, if not literally saved (in the case of slaves), their lives. While I can't claim that reading saved my life, books nevertheless profoundly shaped me. They made my dreams bigger. They served as my stepping- stones to becoming a novelist and to living a life born of those dreams.

  I had the good fortune to burst onto the literary scene in 1994, a time when African American fiction was in vogue as never before. In the 1980s Pulitzer Prize–winning novels by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison had opened doors in the publishing industry to dozens of newcomers such as Terry McMillan and myself. Terry's blockbuster third novel Waiting to Exhale (1992) followed my own best- selling debut, Invisible Life, and together they helped to create a publishing boom in African American fiction that hasn't yet dissipated. Never again will publishing insiders be able to deny the existence of a wealth of African American writing talent and an enthusiastic audience for their work, an audience that includes but is not limited to African American readers.

  In fact, so abundant is African American writing now that I have yet to read many of those published in recent years. Once I became a full- time novelist—much to my surprise—I suddenly no longer had time to keep up with the latest books. I was too busy writing and publicizing my own work, and when I wasn't doing that, I was teaching creative writing and African American literature to college students. Somehow I'd assumed all along that I'd go on reading just as I had as a kid, eating up whatever struck my fancy. But with so many books by African American writers suddenly on the market, I easily fell behind. For black authors, of course, that hasn't always been a problem. For generations so few of us were published that it was a breeze to stay abreast of the new writing. But I'm pleased to say that writers of color are now so numerous, and they are making themselves at home in so many different genres, both literary and commercial, that it's virtually impossible to stay up to speed.

  Being asked to write the introduction for the inaugural volume of Best African American Fiction is therefore a welcome opportunity to me as a reader and an honor to me as an author. It's the perfect chance to get acquainted with some of the best new work by some of the best African American writers being published today. With this volume, whose knockout roster reads like a who's who of contemporary black fiction, it's difficult to know where to begin.

  Since I've already mentioned the Pulitzer Prizes awarded to The Color Purple and Beloved, I'll start with another Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Edward P. Jones, who won it for The Known World, a novel that electrified readers in 2003. His story “In the Blink of God's Eye” (taken from his follow- up collection All Aunt Hagar's Children) evokes the author's native Washington, D.C., at the turn of the twentieth century, with a supreme craftsman's eye for historical detail. Here we meet a newly married African American couple—the descendants of slaves—attempting to reconcile the past while establishing their future as recent arrivals in the nation's capital. Mat Johnson revisits the past as well in an excerpt from his historical novel The Great Negro Plot. (The book's harrowing story is encapsulated nicely by its subtitle: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth- Century New York.) A courtroom drama that unfolds in the wake of a slave revolt (which is rumored to have actually taken place in Manhattan), it delivers all the intrigue and suspense that the subtitle promises.

  I've been an admirer of ZZ Packer ever since Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003), so I was particularly excited to see her “Pita Delicious” chosen as one of this year's selections—its title comes from the hamburger and falafel joint where the narrator works. She is writing away her life with Gideon, her academic Jewish boyfriend, whose Ph.D. thesis, “Temporal Modes of Discourse and Ekphrasis in Elizabethan Poetry,” mystifies not only the narrator but Gideon as well. “Pita Delicious” is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking. Another featured writer whose work I've enjoyed over the years is Helen Elaine Lee, and her short story “This Kind of Red” won't disappoint fans of the novels Serpent's Gift (1994) and Water Marked (2001). Never one to shy away from diff
icult but urgent subject matter, Lee tackles domestic violence in African American relationships with so much guts, grit, and—surprisingly—poetry that her account of one woman's incarceration following the murder of her abusive husband is a marvel to read.

  One particularly refreshing element of this edition of Best African American Fiction—and there are many!—is that not all of its stories are set exclusively in the U.S. Indeed, just as African American life plays out beyond American borders, so too do two of my favorite selections. In fact, these stories set in foreign lands almost ask us to rethink what we define as African American writing. Nigeria is the setting of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's “Cell One,” a fascinating look at one family's struggle to come to terms with a troubled teen -aged son and sibling whose gang involvement lands him in jail, despite his protests that he's innocent. Through this intimate family drama, Adichie paints a disturbing portrait of the bigger issues of the random street violence and political corruption that threaten Nigerians from opposite ends of the social spectrum. In Tiphanie Yanique's “The Saving Work,” an unnamed island in the Caribbean serves as the almost dream- like backdrop for a story of interracial tensions between two families whose biracial children meet and intend to marry despite their battling white mothers. Yanique ‘s work was among a handful of other stories by writers in this collection new to me, which made this first encounter with her talent that much more enjoyable.

  Another unexpected dimension to Best African American Fiction is the inclusion of young adult material. Traditionally young adult writing has been relegated to the margins of literature as somehow not sufficiently complex to command respect. I must say that books for young readers have come a long way since I was a kid, as this anthology makes abundantly clear. I've long respected Jacqueline Woodson's gifts as a distinguished young adult writer, so it was a pleasant surprise to find the excerpt from her acclaimed novel Feathers. Here an all- black sixth-grade schoolroom circa 1971 is disrupted by the sudden appearance of Jesus Boy, a newly arrived long- haired white student who's jokingly given this nickname owing to his supposed resemblance to Jesus Christ. Here as in so much of her young adult fiction, Woodson is well versed in speaking to young adults, not as children, but as adults who happen to be young. Walter Dean Myers's Harlem Summer—a fast- paced period piece for young readers, set in 1925—concerns a sixteen-year-old saxophone musician who, in the hope of playing with jazz legend Fats Waller, gets caught up in a bootlegging operation. What would life have been like for me if books like these two had been available to me back in Little Rock! As my beloved mother would say, “Young folks don't know how good they have it.” Reading these excerpts, I'm incredibly heartened to think of all the African American youth who are now able to turn to books to see their lives—and those of their forebears—depicted with so much warmth, dignity, and humor.