1st entry on the Black West
| Afro-American Writers in the West W HEN THE QUATTRO-CENTENNIAL of New Mexico was celebrated in 1940 the first non-Indian to explore the region, an African named Esteban de Dorantes, was ignored. In 1779, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, a man of mixed ancestry, established a trading post that is considered the founding of Chicago; although he was traditionally portrayed as European, local Indians later told visitors that the first "white man" to come to the area was black. Those two Afro-American pioneers by no means stand alone: Lewis and Clark were accompanied by a Negro slave, York, a major figure in the journey. Mountain man Jim Beckwourth was adopted by the Crows. One of the most dramatic events in frontier history was "the Exodus of 1879," which brought over twenty thousand blacks in search of opportunity to Kansas from the south. The fabled Bill Pickett is credited with perfecting bulldogging, and some rodeo aficionados consider Jesse Stahl the greatest of all bronc riders; neither is surprising when one considers that approximately five thousand black cowboys rode the cattle trails. At about the same time, the Negro troopers of the Ninth and Tenth Regiments–called "buffalo soldiers" because of their hair–comprised twenty percent of the U.S. Cavalry in the West. Blacks were continually and intimately involved in the opening of the West. In large measure, they had even more reason to migrate to "the great American desert" than did their white counterparts who, though frequently poor, did not suffer the scourge of discrimination. As diplomat and author James Weldon Johnson summed it up in 1925, "Your west is giving the Negro a better deal than any other section of the country . . . there is more opportunity for my race, and less prejudice against it in this section of the country than anywhere else in the United States" (Denver Post, June 24, 1925). There is no reason to suppose that the West's tolerance was based upon moral insight– "The black migrant to the frontier soon found he had no hiding place from traditional American attitudes," writes William Loren Katz–yet the lack of institutionalized racism, the vast tracts of open land that kept blacks from concentrating in threatening numbers, and the pragmatic willingness to accept persons for what they could do rather than where their ancestors were born all contributed to a relatively liberal atmosphere. As a result, it is no surprise to learn that on April 22, 1889, when the vast region now called Oklahoma was officially opened to settlers, not only were buffalo soldiers on duty to prevent "sooners" from jumping the gun, but an estimated ten thousand blacks raced to stake their claims. Those are, of course, only high points of Negro involvement in the American frontier, but when Ray Allen Billington's otherwise excellent Westward Expansion was published in 1967, none of its nearly one thousand pages contained references to black westerners. They were invisible frontiersmen. Black pioneers have had plenty to write about but, like westerners in general, they did not have the leisure or the training to do so during the early years of settlement. Thanks to historians such as Katz (The Black West, 1971), Sherman Savage (Blacks in the West, 1976), William H. Leckie (The Buffalo Soldiers, 1967), Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones (The Negro Cowboys, 1965), and Kenneth Wiggins Porter (The Negro on the American Frontier, 1970), their experiences have not been forgotten. As early as the end of the last century a significant black novelist emerged from the West. He was Sutton E. Griggs, a Texan who was very much a product of his time. Katz sums up the final decade of the nineteenth century this way: The 1890s–which saw the close of the frontier–was an era of immense change for black and white America. During the next twenty years in each southern state, including Texas and Oklahoma, segregation was codified. The populist movement, uniting black and white farmers against eastern exploiters, ended in bitter and bloody defeat for black hopes. The 1890s, which opened with the closing of the frontier, closed with the beginning of American imperialist expansion. . . . To justify the control of darker people abroad, white supremacy arguments again flooded the land. (pp. 299–300) From that turbulent and tense period for nonwhites emerged Griggs, who was destined to become the most widely read Negro novelist of the time in black communities. His novels have about them, despite their Victorian tone, their melodrama, and their repetition, a curiously contemporary sense. For example, black is beautiful; the hero of Unfettered (1902) is described this way: "As to color he was black, but even those prejudiced to color forgot that prejudice when they gazed upon this ebony-like Apollo." The same book's Negro heroine has eyes "so full of soul." More startling, however, is the author's militancy. He was a loyal Texan who, in Imperium in Imperio (1899), demanded that the state be ceded to blacks. The novel begins when a Negro organization gathers in Waco to urge that blacks revolt openly to achieve the state's surrender so it can be used as a refuge for blacks. It sounds like the 1960s. Born in the Lone Star State and educated at Bishop College there, Griggs wrote the first political novels by an Afro-American. While revealing miscegenation, oppression, and Jim-Crowism, the novels point out the need for an agency to protect the interests of Negroes. Because they promote the philosophy that produced the NAACP and certain government agencies of today, and because of their artistic deficiencies, the following volumes are of more interest to sociologists than to literary critics: Overshadowed (1901), The Hindered Hand (1905), Pointing the Way (1906), and the aforementioned Unfettered. Griggs is rightly considered the most neglected Negro writer of the period between the Spanish-American War and World War I. Second place goes to Oscar Micheaux of South Dakota. The novelist of the Midwest ranks no higher than his contemporary in the Southwest in establishment literary histories; he was also handicapped by not being in the South (where the black population was) or the East (where the publishers were). The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), Micheaux's first autobiographical novel, reveals the experiences of a Negro hero in the white world of the South Dakota frontier. His second novel, The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races (1915), continues a "trail blazing," autobiographical account of the Negro "pioneer" who leaves his farmlands to sell his novel in the South. The Homesteader (1917) is the last work of this period. After an absence during which he produced black movies, Micheaux reentered the writing and publishing field in 1941. After seven novels and thirty-four films, Micheaux died in 1951 in New York; unlike the heroes of his early novels, he neglected to go back to South Dakota to find happiness. Finally, one western black man born in the nineteenth century lived long enough to see his work recognized nationally. In 1933 J. Mason Brewer (1896–1975) began publishing poetry (Negrito) and folklore (in the annual volumes of the Texas Folklore Society). He told editor J. Frank Dobie "how unrepresentative the loudly-heralded Negro literature out of Harlem" was, "how fake both in psychology and language." He meant it was false to the southwestern black, but black writers in the West did not have the publishing opportunities of the Harlem Renaissance group. Brewer's black folklore collection of the period did not reach a national audience until reprinted in The Book of Negro Folklore (1958), edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, both of whom had moved from the West to Harlem. By the 1950s, Brewer's best work was being published by the University of Texas Press: The Word on the Brazos (1953) and Dog Ghosts and Other Texas Negro Folktales (1958). Several other volumes followed. When Quadrangle Books published hisanthology American Negro Folklore (1968), Brewer gained a national reputation. The San Francisco Chronicle said: "J. Mason Brewer can rank with any folklorist, regardless of skin pigmentation." Two Texas histories call him "the state's one Negro writer of importance," but he never gained the recognition of those who, like Hughes, left the West to reside in the East. Langston Hughes (1902–1967), the dean of black American letters, was born in Joplin, Missouri, and reared in Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas. From his extraordinary bibliography of multiple pages and multiple genres, a westerner would feel most at home with his first novel and many of the poems he eventually selected as his favorites. Not Without Laughter (1930) is a semi-autobiographical novel about a young man's early years in a small Kansas town. Called "Poet Laureate of the Negro people" in the fifties, Hughes chose his favorite poems from seven previous volumes in Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (1959). Although he was a world traveler and peripatetic poet, a surprising number of poems refer to the American West or contain vivid images of it. A few poems show the black migration to the West from the Deep South. In "West Texas" the speaker says, "But West Texas where the sun / Shines like the evil one / Ain't no place / For a colored / Man to stay." In "Sharecroppers" you see why: "Just a herd of Negroes / Driven to the field / Plowing,planting, hoeing, / To make the cotton yield." They are "like a mule broke to a halter." This leads to "OneWay Ticket": I pick up my life And take it on the train To Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Seattle, Oakland, Salt Lake, Any place that is North and West . . . Hughes published so much that he asked Arna Bontemps to be coeditor of The Book of Negro Folklore and The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1970, but Bontemps attained other fame alone. Not until he published Black Thunder (1936) and Drums at Dusk (1939) was there a first rate historical novel by and about Afro-Americans. The first is a fictionalized account of the abortive slave insurrection under Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, the latter about the successful insurrection under Toussaint L'Ouverture in Haiti. As a child Bontemps moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles and grew up on the outskirts of Watts, a move reflected in his latest work, The Old South (1973). Of the nine stories in this book, three excellent autobiographical ones ("Why I Returned," "The Cure," and "3 Pennies for Luck") are set in California; they are concerned with the author's family, especially an uncle who was the embodiment of Afro-American folk culture. Bontemps's early interest was poetry, some of which he published, but he never attained the status of his friend Hughes and the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917, Gwendolyn Brooks was taken to Chicago one month later; she is now one of the major poets of the United States. For Annie Allen (1949), a book of poetry, she won the Pulitzer Prize (an extraordinary event in black literature). Her eighth major volume of poetry, The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971), is the best introduction to a poet whose range is phenomenal–from polished sonnets to children's verses, poems as good as any that have appeared in Afro-American literature. Following Carl Sandburg, Brooks is now Poet Laureate of Illinois, the state that played a large part in the westward movement of blacks. She has aided and inspired a whole school of young black midwestern poets, the outstanding ones being Arkansas-born Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhuti) and his colleagues in Third World Press and Broadside Press. What Gwendolyn Brooks is to black poetry, Ralph Ellison is to the black novel. He has produced the best black novel yet to appear in American literature, though it is his only one. Invisible Man (1952) won the National Book Award when published, and thirteen years later a poll of over two hundred authors, critics, and editors selected it as "the most distinguished work published during the past twenty years." Today it is said that this novel has lifted black fiction "to the highest level of artistic accomplishment that it has yet reached." Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914, and Oklahoma is the setting of three of his best short stories. "Mister Toussan" and "That I Had Wings" were published before Invisible Man (1952), while the more complex "A Couple of Scalped Indians" was published afterwards, but they, like a dozen other uncollected magazine stories, were written during his apprenticeship days as a writer. They have in common the same protagonists, Riley and Buster, two preteen boys whose intellectual and physical adventures in an Oklahoma black community are described with the developing style, symbolism, and satire that characterize Ellison's classic novel. Before Ellison, several black writers left the West to gain fame in the East. The major satirist of the Harlem Renaissance, Wallace Thurman was born in Salt Lake City. The Blacker the Berry (1929), a study of intraracial prejudice, has a blueblack heroine who grew up in Boise, Idaho. Like the author she soon heads for Harlem. New York is a favorite setting for black novels, but a few use the West. One set mainly in the state of Washington is well known for being "a rare thing, a novel by a Negro about whites." William Attaway's Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), a compelling novel in the tradition of John Steinbeck, tells the experiences of two white vagabonds who encounter a little Chicano boy in their wanderings around New Mexico, and he becomes the moving force of the story. As in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937), a disastrous encounter with a woman sends the protagonists running. The trip from Yakima in a freezing boxcar over the Montana Rockies causes an infection in the boy's hand to grow worse and he dies. The saddened vagrants head for Kansas, leaving his body in a boxcar. Steinbeck's excellent portrayal of a black character, Crooks, is equalled by Attaway's white men "on the road." A comic western novel by a Negro about whites, A. Clayton Powell, Sr.'s Picketing Hell (1942) is a "fictitious narrative" of white Tom Tern, who becomes a powerful preacher. Born in LaJunta, Colorado, Tom has many unscrupulous adventures with a friend in his youth: "The two sublimated their sex desires to stealing, fighting, gambling, and drinking." As a preacher he no longer sublimates; he has difficulty controlling the "five or six women of the church . . . making frequent visits to the parsonage." When another preacher sweeps into tears his audience of western women, one observer states a theme of the novel: "Religious and sex emotions are so closely related that they cannot tell where one ends and the other begins." All characters are white, but there is a "curious racelessness of character," as was the case in Attaway's novel. California alone could produce a volume on black contemporary writers, mostly those who chose to live there, such as Ernest J. Gaines and Ishmael Reed. Gaines, born on a Louisiana plantation in 1933, has spent his adult years in California, where he gained wide attention with superb short stories, collected in Bloodline (1968), and three novels, including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). The television version of the latter sent readers to his earlier novels Catherine Carmier (1964) and Of Love and Dust (1967), which some critics found the best black novel of the decade. The most sensational of the contemporary California writers is Ishmael Reed. His reputation is based on two novels, The FreeLance Pallbearers (1967) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), and a book of poetry, Catechism of D Neo-American Hoodoo Church (1970). In the much-anthologized poem "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra," and in his second novel, Reed satirizes the Old West's "man's man" heroism. The novel is set in the western town of Yellow Back Radio and features a black cowboy hero, the Loup Garow Kid, in a fantastic satire of the "frontier" myth. Reed's absurd humor is directed at blacks and whites; to him, there are no heroes in the Old West or the Ghetto. Several of Reed's contemporaries in California are promising writers, but the West is seldom their chosen locale. "A peculiar avoidance of localization" is a characteristic of all black literature, according to a black critic in Texas in 1980. Al Young's novels certainly fit this pattern, as does the writing of Lorenzo Thomas. Thomas gives this reason: "The oppressed condition of the black community has remained virtually the same in all localities." One clear exception to the rule, however, is the powerful California poet Sherley Anne Williams. While she can get down with the best black poets– . . . us togetha in our own selves house in our own selves bed in the dark. The dark and ahhhhh. It be so good. Good to be beautiful to be real be for him to be more than one. It's enough. I now my man lovin the way I struts my stuff. –she has also retained a strong sense of place, her place, the rural San Joaquin Valley that has produced so many memorable poets: Gary Soto, William Everson, Larry Levis, Frank Bidart, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, among others. Her plaint in "North Country: A Dream Realized" limns the cry of other western writers: I wish I had known this land before houses infected the hills and trail bikes slashed paths across their sides; before heat shimmered on miles of concrete roads (which lead to more roads that stop just short of somewhere) . . . Says Williams, "Wherever I go, I always seem to find my way back to the Valley," a reality amply demonstrated by her poetry. Williams's "ethnic" verse, however, does demonstrate the continuity of black communities in the Old West with those in the rest of the country. There exists no western slavery or antislavery literary tradition, since those were not slave states, but in the early writings, and some of those today, the authors are consistently aware of where black settlers came from, besides Africa. It is not unusual, then, that the black literature of the West fits Thomas's two categories: one represents the black man's sense of loss, with some pessimism; the other represents his "yearning for assimilation" into the American mainstream, with some optimism. One is exemplified by the poetic allusion of Maya Angelou's title I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) and the other by Langston Hughes's title I, Too, Sing America (1927). This essay has emphasized the past, with little room for such present-day authors as playwright Ed Bullins and poet Wanda Coleman, but black writers in the West must recall the motto of J. Mason Brewer: "If we do not respect the past, the future will not respect us."The "we" refers to the young black writers of today who will realize that a new and longer essay is needed to include all of those who now contribute to the rich cultural heritage of blacks in the West. JAMES W. BYRD, East Texas State University with supplementary material provided by the editors Selected Bibliography Primary Sources Attaway, William. Let Me Breathe Thunder. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939. Brewer, J. Mason. Dog Ghosts and The Word on the Brazos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976. Brooks, Gwendolyn. The World of Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. Gaines, Ernest J. Bloodline. New York: Dial, 1968. Griggs, Sutton E. Imperium in Imperio. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1965. Micheaux, Oscar. The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. Lincoln, Nebraska: Western Book Supply Company, 1913. Reed, lshmael. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. Garden City: Doubleday, 1969. Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry. New York: Macaulay, 1929. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Secondary Sources Gloster, Hugh M. Negro Voices in American Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948. This volume of early, mature scholarship is a first choice for a reader unfamiliar with black literature. Katz, William Loren. The Black West. Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. This documentary and pictorial history uses unpublished and rare manuscripts which provide background for the casual reader or literary scholar. Savage, W. Sherman. Blacks in the West. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976. While not dealing with literature primarily, Savage gives an excellent background for understanding the black writers who stayed in the West or who left for greener pastures. Turner, Darwin T. Afro-American Writers. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970. In Iowa, Turner has become an outstanding black critic of black literature. This bibliography, though brief, is a reliable and useful introduction to the field. Whitlow, Roger. Black American Literature. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1973. This is a useful, easy-to-read critical history with a 1500-title bibliography of works written by and about black Americans. |
