Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 1

Gumbo.

A Celebration of African American Writing.

E. Lynn Harris.

Acknowledgments.

From Marita Golden:.

Clyde McElvene, my friend and fellow cultural worker, without whom the Hurston/Wright Foundation would not exist.

E. Lynn Harris for the zeal, dedication, and generosity with which he has supported the Hurston/Wright Foundation and for suggesting this anthology.

Janet Hill, for her energy, intelligence, and vision; and for making this big project more fun than I suspected it could be.

From E. Lynn Harris:.

Thanks to Marita Golden and Clyde McElvene for their friendship and leadership of the Hurston/Wright Foundation and for allowing me to be a part of their mission.

Janet Hill, for her leadership-and for proving to me time and time again that she is among the best editors and people in the business.

All of the writers who didn't think twice when we asked them to contribute a story for free. This couldn't have happened without you.

About the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

Since 1990, the Hurston/Wright Foundation has been in the forefront of developing programs that support the national community of Black writers. The Hurston/Wright Award, the country's only national award for college writers of African descent has recognized over thirty emerging writers, six of whose books have been published by leading national imprints.

Hurston/Wright Writers' Week is the country's only multi-genre summer writers' workshop for Black writers, held on the campus of Howard University. Over five hundred writers have attended Hurston/Wright Writers' Week, and three alumni of the workshop have had books published. The Hurston/Wright Foundation also offers cla.s.ses in creative writing for high school students in Washington, D.C.

The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award is a new national award for published Black writers, presented by the Hurston/Wright Foundation in partnership with Borders Books and Music. Three winners in the categories of Fiction, Debut Fiction, and Nonfiction will receive, respectively, $10,000 for the winner and $5,000 each for two finalists.

The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award is the only award to published Black writers presented by a panel of their peers, and honors the works of Black writers who represent the tradition of excellence and innovation established by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright.

For more information on the Hurston/Wright Foundation you may visit our Web site at www.hurston-wright.org Or email us at Our address is P.O. Box 77287 Washington, D.C. 20013; our phone is 301-422-0152.

Note from E. Lynn Harris.

Early in my career I started supporting the Hurston Wright Foundation because I believed in their mission. The Foundation was addressing a need that was missing by providing workshops and programs for writers of color. Judging from the outstanding collection we've been able to gather in the form of Gumbo, I'm happy that other writers feel the same way and want to show the same support. Black authors are at a very critical point right now in proving to mainstream publishers that African American literature is viable not only in the sense of temporary renaissance, but now and forever.

Imprints such as Harlem Moon will give voice to those writers perfecting their craft and will allow them to share their words with many hungry readers.

Gumbo includes a broad spectrum of current writers-from those who have established popular followings, to those writing with a literary or social slant, as well as some unpublished authors who may become the stars of tomorrow. Some of you will reacquaint yourself with old friends in the form of stories you've loved that were previously published but you'll also be able to meet some new friends and be introduced to authors who have been waiting for the chance to meet you.

By buying and supporting this collection, you'll ensure that there will always be entertaining, heartfelt and poignant stories by a wide range of writers who will always tell the stories of people of color.

Thank you so much for your support.

Warmest regards,

E. Lynn Harris.

Note from Marita Golden.

Our mission is to tell the truth at whatever cost.

RICHARD WRIGHT.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow d.a.m.ned up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON.

The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation was started with $750 and a dream. The money was mine. The dream belonged to every writer, everywhere, and it was the desire for recognition, support, and community. The African American writer has, of necessity, been visionary and witness, a channel for an individual sense of story even while recognizing that for Black people in America, writing is fighting. The most important and crucial lesson I have learned from other writers about the lonely, difficult, rewarding-beyond-measure, dangerous, amazing, misunderstood endeavor we undertake is the lesson of courage. Courage not only in the face of a society and a world that often seeks to silence the complexity and beauty of the experience of African people, but courage in the face of the fear and narrow-mindedness and orthodoxy that bedevils our own community. Writing is fighting. But it is also building and loving and confirming and creating. It's a job. A lifestyle. An honorable and even sacred way of living in the world.

Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright exemplify all the contradictions, all the peaks and valleys of the writer's life. They made their lives their epitaph, and their spirits remain vivid, combustible, energizing, and inspiring, continually altering the world. The more I learn about the life of Richard Wright, every time I read or teach his autobiography, Black Boy, I am rendered nearly mute with admiration for his guts, his bravery, and the powerful things that words became when he used them. Every time I read Their Eyes Were Watching G.o.d, or just think about how Zora Neale Hurston strode through her life as though it was a gift not only for her but one she was bound to share, I know that I can face today and tomorrow. The world doesn't create many writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. The African American community in America did, and I wanted to show that to the world.

It was 1990, and I was a faculty member in the MFA Graduate Creative Writing Program at George Mason University. Like many MFA programs, ours received few applications from Black students. Nevertheless, when I founded the Hurston/Wright Foundation, naturally I hoped that some of the winners of the Hurston/Wright Award for Black college fiction writers would apply to and enroll in the program at George Mason, where the foundation was housed (in my office) for the first four years.

I was watching with enormous pride and excitement what can only be called the third major wave of literary activity after the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, and wanted to encourage emerging Black writers. I'd had a little success with a novel, Long Distance Life, and I wanted to "give back." So with $750 I underwrote the first Hurston/Wright Award. With a cadre of several other "true believers" the foundation was incorporated, and we set about changing the American literary landscape.

Because we wanted to give as much encouragement as possible, after the first year, we decided to choose three winners, not one. The support of HarperCollins, publishers of Wright and Hurston, made this possible. In addition, from the very first award, the winners were invited to receive their prize at a ceremony at which they were recognized and honored by established writers. I wanted to create a ritual, a ceremony in which young Black writers were acknowledged and embraced by their peers, their elders, their fellow writers, on behalf of the Black community and the larger society. And so Nikki Giovanni, Maxine Clair, David Bradley, Colson Whitehead, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Gloria Naylor and others have spoken words of praise and encouragement to the winners. I wanted to model encouragement of activities that still gets short shrift in many pockets of our community-reading and writing. I wanted people to believe that it is as exciting for a young person to grow up to be a writer as it is for them to grow up to be Michael Jordan, or Mary J. Blige. I wanted to say to young Black writers that there was a group of people who believed in them, who would always "have their back." The prize winners check went into their bank account, but I hope the meaning and significance, the import of the awards ceremony, went straight to their hearts.

I will never forget how my father raised me on stories of Hannibal, Frederick Dougla.s.s, Sojourner Truth, and Cleopatra. These stories introduced me to larger-than-life heroes and heroines and, listening to my father, I subconsciously learned the tenets of good storytelling. My mother simply told me when I was fourteen that one day I was going to write books. And because I was an obedient child, I did. My parents were my first literary mentors. When I moved to New York City in the early seventies, Sidney Offit, who taught the first fiction cla.s.s I ever took; poets Audre Lorde and June Jordan; novelist Paule Marshall, all gave me the charge to continue writing and to believe in myself. To this day I remember how much their words meant to me. The belief and support of this unofficial coalition shaped my sense of what was expected of me. I was to write, to fulfill my gifts. I was also expected to pa.s.s on the sense of possibility that I had received to others.

I named the award and foundation for Hurston and Wright to bring together the spirits of two major American writers who simply couldn't stand each other's work. Wright thought that Hurston's stories of rural Black life, drenched in folklore, humor, and emotional resilience, offered up characters who were buffoonish and played into the worst White stereotypes of Black life. Hurston felt that Wright, in his blistering condemnation of American racism, created Black characters devoid of humanity, dignity, and pride.

Of course the tragedy of this particular literary spat is that only through a close and complete reading of both of these geniuses of the American South do we get a clear picture of the African American experience and how it speaks to universal humanity.

When I started the foundation, the bitter gender-based cultural battles over feminism and The Color Purple, movie and book, while past, still cast a pall over the Black writing community and echoed the ego/cultural battles of Hurston and Wright. Somehow we had survived this cultural/literary Battle of the Bulge, the kind that plagues intellectual/artistic communities.

Because of the significance of the foundation and the new award, I felt its name had to symbolize the best writing we'd created and invite Black male and female writers to "sit down together." As an inheritor of the literary legacy of Hurston and Wright, I felt myself "called" to unite them, to join their legacies and their artistic boldness. As an inheritor and protector of their legacy it was my job, to perhaps be even bolder that they had been able to be. So I linked them. A legacy is a contract that obligates the recipient to rise to meet the best that the legacy symbolizes. Hurston and Wright were not saints. But they were major literary voices of the twentieth century. They were both rebels, opinionated individualists who gloried in re-creating themselves, and who at various times during their long careers were castigated, marginalized, and rejected as often by Blacks as by Whites. Maybe they had not been able to see that they were bound inextricably by all this, but I could.

I have been a literary and cultural activist for more than thirty years. Nonetheless, the growth of the Hurston/Wright Foundation into a major literary inst.i.tution, I have to admit, caught me by surprise. This development was, of course, planned, hoped for, even prayed for; yet I still don't think anyone is ever really prepared for their dreams to come true. I also was not prepared for how much the hard work and long hours of working with others to build this foundation would enrich and positively transform my life. It has been enormously gratifying to see the foundation receive the kind of wide-ranging and diverse support that has kept us not just afloat but growing. Virginia Commonwealth University provided an office, and administrative and financial support for seven years. Publishers HarperCollins, Ballantine, and Doubleday recognized the significance of our mission. The National Endowment for the Arts, visionary and major support from Borders Books and Music and many corporations have made our work possible.

The national writing community bought into the idea of the foundation and supported it from day one. One of the most satisfying aspects of the work that I do is to work with other writers and to see how many of us are dedicated to cultural work. Terry McMillan, John Grisham, Connie Briscoe, John Edgar Wideman, Gloria Naylor, and many others have made the foundation possible. And it was E. Lynn Harris, the hardest-working man in the book world and one of the most generous, who suggested this anthology and who has been extraordinarily generous with time, spirit, and treasure.

The most daunting challenge I faced in the twelve years of the foundation's growth was how to balance my need and my call to write with my need and my call to build this inst.i.tution. Fortunately there were so many role models for me to follow-the philanthropy of Gwendolyn Brooks; the fierce, nation-building/nation-time work of Amiri Baraka and Toni Cade Bambara; my friends Susan Shreve and Alan Cheuse, who worked with the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and who provided helpful advice about how the build the Hurston/Wright Foundation. I looked to these writers and others and saw that it could be done. In fact, the twelve years of the Hurston/Wright Foundation have been years of consistent and satisfying creativity for me. I have been charged, energized, renewed, and inspired by this work.

Gumbo arrives at an auspicious moment. Never before have more Black writers been read by more people, not just in America but around the world. And don't believe the old frequently flaunted notion that "n.o.body but Blacks" read books by Black authors. Black writers are raising Cain, moving mountains, rewriting the script, redefining notions of character, story, place, literature.

Who can forget the summer of 1998, when Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker were on the national bestseller lists simultaneously? Black and White folks put them there. The works of scores of living Black writers are being taught in universities and colleges across the country, despite the a.s.sault on Affirmative Action and multiculturalism. Black writers are in the canon and ain't going nowhere. Several years ago, as part of a United States Information Agency tour of Turkey, I lectured at several universities there about contemporary African American writers. The interest among students and faculty was pa.s.sionate. One faculty member had shared photocopies of Their Eyes Were Watching G.o.d with her students because the book was unavailable in the country. The Turkish people loved Hurston because in her wise, enduring rural folk they saw themselves. Paule Marshall told me of a Richard Wright Society in j.a.pan, made up of scholars devoted to a study of Wright's work. We are a community that has traditionally created stories that speak to and nourish the world, and we still are.

Never before have Black writers mastered as many genres-literary fiction, (winning major awards from Pulitzer to n.o.bel), commercial fiction (making major money and racking up major sales figures), extending and enlarging science fiction, mystery, detective writing, wiping out the borders that separate genre and literary fiction altogether (a la Walter Mosley). In some quarters there is much hand-wringing about the "commercialization" of Black literature. And some have even charged that popular, clearly commercial fiction by Black writers is a threat to the future of Black writing. I think the only threat to the future of Black writing is a Black community that fails to understand and rejoice in the fact that it has a story that the world cannot get enough of, a Black community that fails to honor and read its literary writers as well as its commercial writers, a Black community content to let others define its story and establish the prevailing standards by which it will be judged. A Black writer getting a six-figure contract puts more money into our community. At least that's how I do the math.

Gumbo presents an enticing overview of where we are now. Gumbo is an African-inspired dish, and an African-inspired way of speaking. The stories in this anthology will nourish you and introduce you to a hearty stew of Black writers speaking a New World African language that mixes it all up and that calls on all of our traditions and creates some new ones.

Hurston/Wright Award winners David Anthony Durham, Tayari Jones, Nelly Rosario, Ravi Howard, Erica Doyle, Faith Adiele, Genaro Ky Ly Smith, Amy DuBois Barnet, and William Henry Lewis, whose stories you will read on these pages, are all carrying on and extending the tradition established by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. Gumbo is also filled with many other writers, some of whom you may meet for the first time in these pages, who are working in that same tradition. But for me the significance of Gumbo is that it brings together a tasty, spicy sampling of all the stories we are writing now. It resonates with the sound of our longing from whatever vantage point we live out the African American and African diasporic experience. Gumbo is a literary rent party. And like the rent parties of old, everybody here had to pay to get in. This time, however, the currency was a story. And so the narratives in Gumbo are boogying in the middle of the living room floor with an audience circling them, egging them on; they are locked in the upstairs bathroom doing the nasty; sitting on the porch plotting the future of race; in the kitchen, eating jerk chicken and black-eyed peas; on the porch falling in love. And who's here? Danzy Senna, Eric Jerome d.i.c.key, Van Whitfield, Tananarive Due, Edward P. Jones, and a whole lot more, including some surprise guests who brought totally new jams with them. What kinda party is this? The kind we've needed to have for a long time.

If you are reading this book you are attending the party. If you bought this book you are an investor in the future of Black writing, and the stories are your immediate dividend. The strong, a.s.sured future of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, down the line, will be, in the words of the G.o.dfather of soul, "The Big Payback." But for now, come on in. Let me have your coat. If you've got to smoke you have to do it outside. The bar is over there. Food's in the den.

Richard and Zora?

They're around here somewhere. I just saw them . . .

The Dew Breaker.

BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT.

Anne was talking about miracles right before they reached the cemetery. She was telling her husband and daughter about a case she'd recently heard reported on a religious cable access program about a twelve-year-old Lebanese girl who cried crystal tears.

From the front pa.s.senger seat, the daughter had just blurted out "Ouch!," one of those non sequiturs Anne would rather not hear come out of her grown child's mouth, but that her daughter sometimes used as a short cut for more precise reactions to anything that was not easily comprehensible. It was either "Ouch!," "Cool," "Okay," or "Whatever," a meaningless chorus her daughter had been drawing from since she was fourteen years old.

Anne was thinking of scolding her daughter, of telling her now that she was grown up she should talk more like a woman, weigh her words carefully so that, even though she was an "artiste," others might take her seriously-but she held back, imagining her daughter's reaction to her lecture might be, "Okay, whatever, Manman, go on with your story."

Her husband, who was always useful in helping her elaborate on her miraculous tales, and who also disapproved of their daughter's sometimes limited use of language, said in Creole, "If crystal was coming out of her eyes, I would think she would be crying blood."

"That's what's extraordinary," Anne replied. "The crystal pieces were as sharp as knives, but they did not hurt her."

"How big were these pieces?" the husband asked, keeping his eyes on the road. He slowed the car down a bit as they entered the ramp leading to the Jackie Robinson Parkway.

Anne took one last look at the surrounding buildings before the car plunged into the parkway. They were lit more brightly than usual with Christmas trees, and Chanukah and Kwanzaa candles in some of the windows. Anne tried to keep these visions of illuminated pines, electric candles, and giant cardboard Santas in her mind, as they entered the parkway.

She hated driving through the parkway's curvy narrow lanes, even as a pa.s.senger, and would have never put herself through the ride, on Christmas Eve of all times, had it not been so important to her to go to her daughter's apartment in New Roch.e.l.le and convince her to attend Christmas Eve Ma.s.s with them, something the daughter was probably doing out of guilt because her mother and father had shown up at her front door. While in college, her daughter had declared herself an atheist. Between her daughter, who chose not to believe in G.o.d, and her husband, who went to the Brooklyn Museum every week to worship, it seemed, at the foot of Ancient Egyptian statues, she felt outnumbered by pagans.

Anne was just about to tell her husband and daughter that the crystal pieces that had fallen out of the Lebanese girl's eyes were as big as ten-carat diamonds-she had imagined her daughter retorting, "I bet her family wished she cried ten-carat diamonds"-and that as crystal slid out of her eyes, the girl had visions of a man on a white horse telling her he was a messenger of G.o.d, when they reached the cemetery.

Every time she pa.s.sed a cemetery, Anne always held her breath. When she was a girl, Anne had gone swimming with her two-year-old brother on a beach in Jacmel and he had disappeared beneath the waves. Ever since then she'd convinced herself that her brother was walking the Earth looking for his grave, and whenever she went by a cemetery, any cemetery, she imagined him there, his tiny wet body bent over the tombstones, his ash-colored eyes surveying the letters, trying to find his name.

The cemetery was on both sides of them now, the headstones glistening in the limited light, each of them swaying, it seemed-perhaps because the car was moving so fast-like white sheets left out overnight to dry.

She held her breath the way she imagined her brother did before the weight of the sea collapsed his small lungs and he was forced to surrender to the water, sinking into a world of starfish, sea turtles, weeds, and sharks. She had gone nowhere near the sea since her brother had disappeared, her heart racing even when she happened upon images of waves on television.

Who would put a busy thoroughfare in the middle of a cemetery, she wondered, forcing the living and their noisy cars to always be trespa.s.sing on the dead? It didn't make sense, but perhaps the parkway's architects had been thinking beyond the daily needs of the living to the fact that now and then the dead might enjoy hearing sounds of life going on at high speed around them. If this were so, she thought, then why should the living be spared the dead's own signs of existence? Of shadows swaying in the breeze, of the laughter and cries of lost children, of the whispers of lovers, m.u.f.fled as though in dreams.

"We're way past the cemetery now," she heard her daughter say.

Anne had closed her eyes without realizing it. Her daughter knew she reacted strangely to cemeteries but Anne had never told her why, since her daughter had concluded early in life that this, like many incomprehensible things her parents did, was connected to "some bizarre event that happened in Haiti, right?," mysterious customs the daughter had never shown the least interest in.

"I'm glad Papa doesn't have your issues with cemeteries," the daughter was saying, "otherwise we'd be in the cemetery ourselves by now."

The daughter pulled out a cigarette, which the father objected to with the wave of a hand. "When you get out of the car," he said.

"Whatever," the daughter replied, putting the loose cigarette back in its pack. She turned her face to the bare trees lining her side of the parkway and said, "Okay, Manman, tell us about another miracle."

Anne had lost her two brothers, her only siblings, one to the sea, and the other, a grown man, to her husband, who had killed him in prison. That's the miracle she wanted to tell her daughter about on this Christmas Eve night, the miracle of her daughter being alive, but once again she could think of no reason to make herself do it. What was the use of disturbing her child's peace, of inciting her husband's constant sense of guilt?

She was not an adherent to the all-revealing culture here. What harm could it do her daughter not to know any of this? About the young brother who had drowned? About the older brother, a Protestant preacher, who had been tortured to death, but not before leaving three circular bite marks on the face of the man who would soon after become her husband? So rather than entertain thoughts of sharing, or clarifying these events, for she was worried that if the daughter ever found out about them she might think her an accomplice in both deaths, she told them about another miracle.

This one concerned a twenty-one-year-old Filipino man who had seen an image of the Madonna in a white rose petal.

She thought her daughter would say "Cool" or something equally meaningless, but the daughter actually asked, "How come these people are all foreigners?"

"Because Americans don't have much faith," the father replied.

"Faith is the evidence of things unseen," Anne concurred. "Here you see everything."

"h.e.l.lo?" the daughter said as if calling them from some great distance on the telephone. "Maybe people here are more practical, so if I see a woman's face in a rose, I'd think somebody drew it there. But there where people see everything, even things they're not supposed to see-or if you see it, Manman-you think it's a miracle. Here we can make miracles happen. There, in Haiti, the Philippines, or wherever, people are always looking for miracles. I don't believe in those things. Maybe if they happened in a different place, I'd believe anyway, even if they happened here, I wouldn't believe them."

"Why not?" Anne's husband asked.

"Because it's like I told you, here we could make them happen, but there, in the Philippines, or wherever, they might not have the means."

"You could use vegetable dye to paint a face on a rose petal," Anne's husband said. "You don't need technology for that. So how do you know they don't have the means?"

"Because Manman is saying it is a miracle."

Anne hated it when her daughter dissected the miracles, coming up with critiques to explain them away.

"Let me add that I don't think Americans are faithless," the daughter said. "It reads 'In G.o.d We Trust' on the money, doesn't it? Besides here we are going to this Ma.s.s thing and I know we're not the only ones doing that."

They were coming out of the Jackie Robinson Parkway and turning onto Jamaica Avenue. Anne tried to bring her thoughts back to the Ma.s.s.

When her daughter was a girl, before going to the Christmas Eve Ma.s.s, they would walk around their Brooklyn neighborhood to look at the holiday lights. Their community a.s.sociations were engaged in fierce compet.i.tion, awarding a prize to the block with the most nativity scenes, lawn sculptures, wreaths, and banners.

Anne, her husband, and daughter would walk or drive around to see these holiday decorations because their house had none. Each year, Anne suspected that their neighbors detested her family because their house had been the only nonornamented home on the block, had perhaps been the cause of their section only receiving an honorable mention yet again.

She and her husband had put up no decorations, fearing, irrationally perhaps, that lit ornaments and tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs would bring too much attention to them. Instead, as they would later discover, their lack of partic.i.p.ation made them stand out. But by then they had settled into their routine and could not bring themselves to change it.

When her daughter was still living at home the only things Anne ever did to acknowledge the season-aside from attending the Christmas Eve Ma.s.s-were to put a handful of shredded brown paper under her daughter's bed and hang a sprig of mistletoe over her bedroom doorway. The frayed paper-put there without her daughter's knowledge-was a subst.i.tute for the hay that had been part of the Baby Jesus' first bed. The mistletoe was acquired from the Christmas tree vendor who parked himself across the street from her beauty shop each year, because she'd once heard someone on a Christmas television special say that mistletoe was considered a sacred plant, one with all sorts of reconciliatory qualities. So much so that if two enemy warriors found themselves beneath it they would lay down their weapons and embrace one another.

By not offering each other or their daughter any presents at Christmas, Anne and her husband had tried to encourage her to be thankful for what she already had-family, a roof over her head-rather than count on what she would, or could, receive on Christmas morning. Their daughter had learned this lesson so well that aside from the drive from block to block to criticize the brightest houses, Christmas disinterested her.