CQR’s Volume 33, Shedding Light on the Black Experience from Innards to Outwards
The Chicago Quarterly Review Anthology of Black American Literature, Volume 33, hit the streets in June 2021. For more information, visit http://www.chicagoquarterlyreview.com/cqr-blurb/.
Book Review-
By Tina Jenkins Bell
Being Black is not a monolithic existence. You can’t know one of us and know all of us. You can’t truly know the Black experience or any other than your own without living it, being immersed in it from innards to outwards. Yet, in the interior of the Chicago Quarterly Review’s (CQR) Anthology of Black American Literature, Volume 33, where gifted writers, poets, and artists shed their truths, open hearts and minds can empathize with the joys, struggles, accomplishments, and recursiveness of being Black in America.
Though the table of contents is divided up by genre--- fiction, nonfiction, poetry and art, the reader is met with a surprising interspersion so that you don’t know what you’re getting until you get there. Even though the purpose of the anthology is to “capture the great diversity of thought, feeling and life of Black America,” according to Managing Editor Gary Houston, I read from one story, poem, or essay to the next, glad that I could not predict the essence of the piece but also thankful for the cultural and human connections.
National Book Award-winning novelist (Middle Passage), philosopher, and guest editor Charles Johnson classified the work in six cultural episodes: collective black past, historical reimagining, group trauma, purposelessness in Blackness, cultural appropriation, and intersection of worlds, cultures, people, and circumstances. Johnson was right to do so, considering the recent isolation, death tolls, and life compromises of the pandemic, the Afghanistan-like wars going in neighborhoods populated by people of color, the poor, and the hopeless, and the political upheavals that divided family, friends, and neighbors.
I discovered the work in CQR’s Black Anthology of African American literature was like studying an impressionist art form, where understanding and perspective can be individual as well as collective. From my own prism, I developed my own categories based on the wide realm of emotions and vulnerability. For the sake of space and brevity, I’ll speak to some of Johnson’s categories and related prose.
Collective Black Past
When I began to read “Doctor King’s Queens,” an excerpt from a recently completed novel My Gingerbread Shakespeare, by Cyrus Cassells, I was quickly drawn into to the conversational and sometimes conspiratorial narrative of Duncan Thaddeus Metcalfe, the great love of fictional Harlem Renaissance poet, Maceo Hartnell Mitchell, and a celebrity in his own right, known to the press and his fans as the “Black Gable.” A baritone singer and an actor, Duncan has been asked to sing, per the request of Maceo’s sister, at the funeral of slain civil rights activist Dr. Frederick Douglas Kinnison. Before affirming his participation, Duncan decides to do a little reconnaissance. In Doc Kinnison, Duncan discovers a kindred spirit, a gay man with a colorful past and like himself, one of the many gay men recruited by Bayard Rustin to join Dr. Martin Luther King in the fight for Civil Rights. “… we were all of us battle -ready privates in Bayard’s fast-growing army; in his giant Hell no! to unjust Jim Crow.”
Reading Duncan’s tales was like “dishing tea” with a friend while also stirring in the unspoken contributions of gay black men to the civil rights movement. Duncan’s “tongue and cheek” narrative vacillates between lighthearted and serious tones, particularly when his young mullato lover and freedom fighter is murdered while teaching kids, in the Mississippi Delta, how to read.
Duncan’s insights as a gay man championing civil rights and other causes across the globe is worthy of the reader’s discovery.
Historical Reimagining
“that’s why darkies were born” by David Nicholson won my attention. In this short story, Nicholson tackles that African proverb that says, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. Nicholson allows the lions of classics, including Huckleberry Finn and Gone with the Wind, to speak their truths. Beginning with Huckleberry Finn, James reframes his story, starting with an admonition of Huck Finn for misrepresenting the actual way he spoke or the real reason they’ve joined forces. From Nicholson’s reimagining, James was a free, educated man from a family of means until he left home to travel, but before he can get to his destination, his manumission papers absconded by the law and ruled fraudulent by a judge who allows James to be sold into an institution of slavery his family had not experienced for two generations.
“I was seized, chained, and thrown rudely into the frame hut that served as a jail. In the morning, Judge Thatcher ruled my letter no proof I was free, the law recognizing only manumission papers filed with the court and certified by the legislature. I protested, cajoled, threatened even, in the end, offered bribes. It was no use. I was declared property and sold in short order. Once James, a free man, I was now Nigger Jim, diminished in name and status.” Afterwards, Jim concocts a way to reclaim his freedom by throwing in with a shiftless young man who has a raft and pole and knows his way around a river.
“that’s why darkies are born,” among other prose and poems allow formerly subdued voices to rise to the surface and tell their own stories.
Group Trauma and Suffering
In this category, two poems, “Of Walking In” by Aaron Coleman and “Brother Eric Garner” by David Henderson can be gateways to hard but necessary conversations and pose various ways to look at common social ailments, like walking while male and black and the murders of unarmed black men by the police.
With “Of Walking In,” Coleman tackles the common dilemma faced by black men who need to present the façade of living with dignity and freedom in American, even if it is an act even in the night of a pandemic.
Shout-singing their favorite pop hip hop songs
In order to perform a riddle and posture
Of freedom.
Later he writes…
But I know I felt the black weightlessness
In the practice of letting go
Of public fear and private shame
In public space. Untaken, but noticed.
Henderson’s “Brother Eric Garner” shatters the fallacy that portrays Garner a criminal. To be clear, yes, Eric Garner sold single cigarettes to people “who lacked the funds to invest in a 13-dollar pack of smokes.” But, on the day of his death, he wasn’t doing anything unlawful. In fact, according to Henderson, he was on his way to pick up groceries for his family and stopped to help the police break up a fight before they turned on him. At the end of the poem, Henderson wonders if Garner would have been lived had he fought the men in blue who unwarrantedly attacked him. This left me thinking because what I know about situations like these is that fight or flight, with the wrong officer, while retaining your life is toss-up.
Purposelessness in Blackness
A common complaint about Black Lives Matter and other social justice activism is that Blacks are always complaining about the police when they are killing each other, even though a U.S. Department of Justice statistic found that white-on-white and black-on-black homicides are similar, at around 80% and 90%. Even so, the fear, anger, sadness, and frustration of dealing with neighborhood violence hits you in the gut when you read “Off the Wall” by Tsehaye Hérbert. In this short work, Josie, a mother and teacher who wears sensible shoes, takes on the apathy of a community content to build memorials for kids who have been shot down or killed in their prime. Tired of memorials that do nothing but expand, Josie purchases several cans of spray paint from an auto shop and at her own peril, sprays over a memorial of slash marks (one for each murder) amidst a growing crowd of dissenters and supporters. Josie questions the purpose of creating one memorial after another when another child is posed to die. “I am sick and tired of the killing,” she says. “These are our kids.”
Each piece in CQR’s Anthology of Black American Literature, Volume 33 takes you on a journey that can be terrifying, disturbing, beautiful, tender, moving, or enlightening. The writing is impressionistic in that two people may read the same prose and have different insights or perspectives. To be sure, each person will walk away lifted in knowledge or empathy.
CQR’s Anthology of Black American Literature, Volume 33 is a long-time investment. My own copy is already dog-eared and populated with protruding post-it notes and marginal annotations. I will return to these essays, stories, and poems often for my own edification and that of my students because as Houston describes it: “… the Black American experience illuminates, first and foremost, the universal human experience of those who dream, strive, suffer, love, know joy and pain and laughter, and pass through the full panorama of the human condition in the past and present.