Presented by Heather Martin, MLIS, MA, at the African American Studies Program book fair for Black History Month (University of Alabama at Birmingham)

1. Connections in Community: African American Authors and the Reading Public
Heather Martin
February 6, 2007
Feel free to complete this poem if you know it:
“What you looking at me for?
I didn’t come to stay . . .”
[WAIT FOR RESPONSE]
“I just come to tell you, it’s Easter Day.”
These opening words from Maya Angelou’s 1970 autobiography I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings vividly recall one of my first personal connections to African American
literature. I remember sitting in study hall in my middle school library in Kershaw, South
Carolina, reading these words and thinking, “Hey, I know this.” I knew the words as
what the toddlers (or older kids if they needed something at the last minute) said for their
Easter Day speech. Of course, being a precocious youngster that I was, I never resorted
to such short recitations. Fortunately, I didn’t experience Angelou’s Easter Day
predicament as a girl: standing at the front of the church, forgetting an Easter speech,
suffering the giggling of other children, and then running out of the church in
embarrassment. But I knew the setting well, and was thrilled to find it in those first few
pages of a library book.
Tonight, I’d like to explore briefly some examples of connections of African
American literature and authors to the reading community. By reading community, I’m
not focusing on the community of literary scholars, critics, or even reviewers. Although

2. the authors I’ll discuss have been well-received by all these groups, my focus is more on
the connections that African American authors and their works have made and continue
to make with the general reading public. As I explore some of these connections, not
necessarily in chronological order, I hope you’ll consider your own ties to Black authors
and literature and share them with group at the end of my talk.
In the title of the first volume of her autobiography, Maya Angelou herself
acknowledges the connection and influence of an African American author who preceded
her. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” a quote from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem
“Sympathy,” not only represents Angelou’s early struggles as a child and teenager, it also
recalls the veneration of African American authors by her community, the Black
community, in Stamps, Arkansas. Angelou writes of herself as a young girl:
“During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William
Shakespeare. . . . I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he
had been dead so long it couldn’t matter to anyone any more.
Bailey [Angelou’s brother] and I decided to memorize a scene from the
Merchant of Venice, but we realized that Momma would question us about the
author and we’d have to tell her that Shakespeare was white, and it wouldn’t
matter to her whether he was dead or not. So we chose ‘The Creation’ by James
Weldon Johnson instead.” (16)
Here we see one type of African American literary connection: the bond between
African American writers and the African American community from generation to
generation. As one of the first Black writers to gain international acclaim Paul Laurence

3. Dunbar was and continues to be in many Black communities, a standard of excellence in
African American literature.
However, Dunbar and other African American authors’ links to the reading public
extend beyond immediate connections of racial pride and culture in the United States.
“What happens to a dream deferred?”
Does it dry up
Like a raisin the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For many people, including myself, Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem” was one
of the earliest introductions to literary analysis in elementary school or middle school.
However, Hughes’s popularity and influence crosses international boundaries. He is one
of our most widely translated 20th century authors. In the Black American Literature
Forum article, “The Shared Vision of Langston Hughes and Black Hispanic Writers,”
Richard Jackson writes of Hughes’ popularity among readers and other authors in
Mexico, Spain, Uruguay, Colombia, and Cuba. This influence stemmed not only from

4. Hughes’s travels to Mexico, Spain, and the Caribbean, but from his “common heritage of
slavery, racism, and oppression” shared with these authors (89). Hughes also translated
the works of Spanish-speaking authors outside the United States, most notably Federico
Garcia Lorca, Nicolas Guillen, and Gabriela Mistral.
In addition to traveling to Paris as detailed in his autobiography The Big Sea,
Hughes’s connections to the French include translations of works by author Jacques
Roumain. Perhaps Hughes foreshadows his influence on the French and people of other
nationalities when he writes in The Big Sea, “I think it was de Maupassant who made me
really want to be a writer and write stories about Negroes, so true that people in far away
lands would read them--even after I was dead.”
My first reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in my junior or senior high
school culminated in an assignment to create a ten-question exam on the novel. I can’t
remember the questions I created, and I vaguely remember doing well grade-wise on the
assignment. However, looking back after studying the novel in college and graduate
school, I can’t imagine what insights I may have had as a high school junior or senior.
I first read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple on my own while still in high school,
although I did not study the novel in a classroom setting until college. In addition to
celebrating the strength of the female characters, and ultimately the importance of all
family, the novel establishes a connection between Blacks in the United States and
Africa. [READ PAGE 171] Of course Walker’s novel created another type of
connection in the reading community, a connection mired in controversy. Criticism of
the novel, and later the film adaptation, focused on what was seen as an uneven and

5. unfair portrayal of male characters. I think this controversy illustrates the power of
literature to spark debate and open discussion in the African American community.
Now on to an author with what some might call a less obvious connection to
community. Let’s play six degrees, well three degrees of separation. Langston Hughes –
Lorraine Hansberry – Adrienne Kennedy. I previously referenced Hughes’s poem
“Harlem” with its description of a dream deferred as drying up “like a raisin in the sun.”
A Raisin in the Sun, of course, is the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s Tony-nominated play,
and --this last connection is mine as made in my master’s thesis-- playwrights Lorraine
Hansberry and Adrienne Kennedy faced criticism of their work as not being
representative of the African American experience. Some of you might say, well you
made up that last part, so it’s cheating. Others of you are thinking, “Who’s Adrienne
Kennedy?”
Adrienne Kennedy is an African American playwright whose use of surrealism to
depict the complexities of African American individuals established her as a unique
figure in avant-garde theater in New York. In Kennedy’s play, Funnyhouse of a Negro
(first performed in 1964), Sarah, a young Black woman living in New York City,
constructs an isolated world of her own in her apartment. In this world, she is tormented
by historical and familial figures who voice her feelings of inadequacy and her search for
identity. The Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria, Jesus, and Patrice Lumumba are all
part of Sarah’s psychological identity and are manifested as characters on stage during
the play. Kennedy describes each of these figures as one of Sarah’s “selves.” Sarah and
these manifestations of herself inhabit a funnyhouse where images are distorted as in a
funnyhouse mirror. That’s right, folks, it’s a real, warm fuzzy drama.

6. So what’s the connection to Hansberry and community here? Well, here’s a
teaser. I think both playwrights recognized the needs of Blacks as individuals while
communicating the concerns of the African-American community as a whole. In one
example, both Kennedy and Hansberry address the lure of Africa in Black Americans
search for identity. In Funnyhouse of a Negro, Sarah’s father goes to Africa to find his
beginnings or “Genesis” and to lift the race. In A Raisin in the Sun, Asagi recalls how
Beneatha first approached him at college: “Mr. Asagai—I want very much to talk with
you. About Africa. You see, Mr. Asagai, I am looking for my identity!” I encourage
you to read Kennedy’s play to explore these connections and judge for yourself.
Octavia Butler connected the worlds of fantasy, the supernatural, and science
fiction to the experiences of the African American community in her works. In Kindred
(1979), Dana, an African American woman in her twenties is unexpectedly transported
through time to a plantation in the antebellum South. In this novel, surviving the
brutalities of slavery takes on new meaning as Dana must work to protect Rufus, who she
initially saves from drowning as boy and must protect into manhood to ensure that he
stays alive to father a female ancestor of Dana’s. These time jumps happen multiple
time, and each time Dana cannot be sure of the year she will be transported back into
slavery. During one of her returns to the present (1976), she contemplates the impact of
her ordeal:
“I had been home to 1976 , to this house, and it hadn’t felt that homelike. It
didn’t now. For one thing, Kevin and I had lived here together for only two days.
The fact that I’d had eight extra days here alone didn’t really help. The time, the
year, was right, but the house just wasn’t familiar enough. I felt as though I were

7. losing my place here in my own time. Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger
reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was
greater, the pain was worse . . . Rufus’s time demanded things of me that had
never been demanded before, and it could easily kill me if I did not meet its
demands. That was a stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and
luxuries of this house, of now, could not touch.
Colson Whitehead, one of the younger contemporary African American authors,
uses the legend of John Henry to connect past and present in his novel John Henry Days
(2001). In this novel, Whitehead juxtaposes a retelling of the John Henry legend with a
modern day story of J. Sutter, a cynical African American freelance journalist covering
the John Henry Days Festival in the small town of Talcott, West Virginia. The
townspeople and its leaders strive to capitalize on the John Henry legend, initially, J.
takes part in the commercialization in his reporting. Another African American
character, Pamela, must decide about selling her father’s collection of John Henry
memorabilia. While in town for the John Henry Days Festival, she examines a statue of
John Henry in the town [READ PAGE 262 FIRST PARAGRAPH].
Combining folklore, satire, and negative commentary on commercialization,
Whitehead’s novel compares and contrasts the stresses of John Henry the legendary folk
hero’s battle against the steam engine with the modern day choices that J. Sutter and
other characters must face in an increasingly technological society.

8. Thus far, I’ve touched on only a few authors, genres, and types of relationships
between African American authors and the reading public. I’ve also played it relatively
safe and avoided some of the current controversies, but what’s the fun in that?
You may have noticed I did not mention any children’s literature titles. That’s
not because I didn’t read children’s books when younger, but because I really wasn’t
exposed to African American children’s authors until after high school. Of course, today
there is a concerted effort in many public schools to include books by African American
authors, but not without controversy. Witness the controversy over the book Nappy Hair
by African American author Carolivia Herron. Books written for teenagers/young adults
tackle contemporary issues head-on. One example is Angela Johnson’s The First Part
Last, a novel which tells the story of an African American teenager who struggles as a
single teenage father. Angela Johnson was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, by the way.
Then there are popular titles by authors such as Terry McMillan and Eric Jerome
Dickey that created a surge in reading and book buying among African Americans.
Some of these titles I refer to as “catalogue” novels because of a nearly across-the-board
focus on detailing the possessions of the characters. But don’t get me wrong, I have fun
reading them.
Urban or Hip Hop Fiction has made new and, again, controversial, connections
among African American readers. One of the initial controversies is what to call the
genre.
With the increasing rise in popularity and mainstream acceptance of
comics/graphic novels (my newest personal fascination) as literature, where are the
African American authors and artists in this genre and what are their connections to the

9. reading public? I’m sure many people are familiar with the Boondocks comics by Aaron
McGruder. But have you heard of Kyle Baker, who has collaborated with McGruder
(Birth of a Nation) and is an award-winning cartoonist and graphic novelist in his own
right (Nat Turner).
Time will tell whether or not these newer authors and categories of African
American literature will establish long-lasting generational connections in the African
American and global community.
Well, I hope that I’ve inspired, incited, or nudged you (take your pick) to recall
works by African American authors that have made an impact on you and with which
you have a personal connection. Now, it’s your turn to share these works. We’ll note
these titles on Power Point during the discussion. I’ll compile them and will send the list
via e-mail to anyone who requests it. A sign-up sheet is available near the book display.

10. Works Cited
Jackson, Richard. “The Shared Vision of Langston Hughes and Black Hispanic Writers.”
Black American Literature Forum, vol. 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1981), pp. 89-92.