Soul-Stirring Scholarship: On Black Folks and Their Souls

Man... When I tell you reading continues to be FUNdamental...

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: Make a [man] black and bid him sing.
-Countee Cullen

When William Edward Burghardt DuBois was born in 1868 no one knew he would become the influential, world-shifting African American he would someday become. Look at the history of Albany State University if you need to see the tangible evidence of the impact of W.E.B. DuBois. #HeresAHint: The founder of Albany State University read The Souls of Black Folk and their motto is: Potential Realized. But I mean, WEB was a reader and readers do fundamental things. Commercial Break: Read a book, read a book, read a muhfuggin book

A little background: The Souls of Black Folk, which is available as an e-text is the first look into African American sociology. Commercial Break: Notice I posted a link to the e-text of the book, if you still don't read it, it's your own fault. WEB was a traveling scholar having been educated at Fisk and then becoming a sort of cultural anthropologist, similar to Zora Neale Hurston, who traveled around the country collecting African American folk stories, WEB was well-versed with the South. He was able to speak to the hearts and mind of the people and open their eyes to the possibilities available if only they would "manifest destiny" (169) and strive for the fulfillment of purpose. When WEB speaks, people listen. And each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk made my ears perk and my brain stand at attention.

From the outset, the reader sees that TSOBF was written in response to a problem. The Negro Problem. DuBois relays that white men have asked him:

How does it feel to be a problem? 


I needed to immediately know what his response was. You see, as a new-fangled Negro, I would have been taken aback by the question and rendered unable to formulate a scholarly answer. My answer would have gone something like this:

#ComeAgainSayWhat A problem? Como se dice? No lo siento. Who in the HeyYa you callin' a problem? Ya mammy is the problem... But I digress...

Anyway, WEB was diplomatic. His motivation for writing the fourteen chapters of this text was to answer that very question. Not only does he understand the question, he overstands it. He gives the reader more than they need, he gives the reader what they want (even if the reader didn't know he or she needed it).

And he has the nerve to be epigrammatic, or "quotable" as well. WEB says succinctly:

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor man in the land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships


And I know exactly where he is coming from. I know how it feels to not have money when all of your friends are going out to dinner. I know how to feels to go to someone else's house and hoping they cooked... Yeah, poverty is the bottom of hardships...

WEB is a teacher and he not only gives the origin of the Freedmen's Bureau but he evaluates the department without bias or slant. Only a true scholar is able to separate what he feels from what needs to be relayed to his audience. He treads the line with unmatched skill. Even in his popular "criticism" of Booker T. Washington, he is not angry or venomous, he is just honest, not even brutally. If you are unaware of the crux of the controversy between WEB DuBois and Booker T. Washington, read this poem by Dudley Randall:

Booker T and W.E.B.

(I thought about posting the poem but it's a little over four stanzas and this is my blog, not Dudley Randall's)

But this poem sums up their disagreement. W.E.B. wanted newly freed African Americans to fight for equality and Booker T wanted black Americans to "cast down their buckets." Essentially. And W.E.B. even prefaces his criticism by saying:

Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,--criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, or leaders by those led,--this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society.


So you see, he wasn't trying to be a problem, he was attempting to proffer a solution. I mean, if your enemy offers you exactly what you have demanded, you haven't demanded enough. Frederick Douglass said it best:

Power concedes nothing without a demand...


And white America was much too willing to concede what BTDubbs "demanded."

This is all W.E.B. asked of America:

1. The right to vote
2. Civic equality
3. The education of youth according to ability

Nothing spectacular, nothing impossible, solely improbable. And African Americans continue to struggle with all of the above... 

I found it striking that many of the issues black America struggles with today, were the struggles of 1903. Fathers walking out on marriages, low voter turnout, preoccupation with the appearance of wealth were all issues W.E.B. mentions. Interestingly, or disappointingly, you choose, these issues are still of import to African American people... #TheMoreThingsChange #TheMoreTheyStayTheSame

He speaks about religion, the promise of the Negro people, the educated Negro, and the miseducated Negro also. 

He closes the text with this statement:

Would America have been America without her Negro people?

And through the fourteen chapters, two introductions, one foreword, one backward, one bibliography, and one glossary, he safely proves it would not. 

*From the BlackGirlWhoReads: This blog was never intended to give a synopsis of any text, but rather a sweeping overview and scholarly insight*

In short, just read the book... I mean, dang, I posted the link... Oh and grab a highlighter or a pen and post-its or pieces of writing paper... You will take notes and mark pages... 

Real Women Wear Red

Alice Walker said, 

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.” 

Edwidge Danticat appears to make a similar statement about the color red in her collection of short stories Krik? Krak!.  Red is one of the most vibrant colors on the spectrum of light and there is an implicit boldness when one wears or sees the color red. 

In Krik? Krak!, the female protagonists of each story must learn how to survive with broken hearts, broken homes, and broken histories.

Through seemingly unrelated, yet interrelated short stories, nine stories total, the author explores several themes; motherhood, abandonment, imprisonment, and death which all figure heavily in the text. However, even through their painful shame of corrupt military occupancy, as Henley writes about in “Invictus,” their heads are “bloody yet unbowed” (line 8), because they have hope. Even the text says,

hope is the bigger weapon of all to use against us. people will believe anything.

Yes, there is despair, but the people never give up hope. And we know: 

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 

See, writers like Danticat, and Toni Morrison, use the supernatural world to explain the natural. During the military occupation, the murders were so senseless and so numerous that there had to be a reason. Killing a woman because another woman’s child died made no logical sense, so it had to be a result of the woman dealing in witchcraft. A pregnant woman being able to outrun Dominican soldiers was impossible so she had to have flown across the river. There is a literary advantage inherent in magical realism because the author can explain the unexplainable with the supernatural.

In "Nineteen Thirty-Seven," the reader is taken through the narrator's initiation and evaluation process. As she is evaluating the woman she encounters, the woman is evaluating her. She says, 

If she were really from the river [where the Parsley massacre occurred in 1937], she would know. She would know all the things that my mother had said to the sun as we sat with our hands dipped in the water, questioning each other, making up codes and disciplines by which we could always know who the other daughters of the river were:

Who are you? I asked her.

I am a child of that place," she answered. I come from that long trail of blood.

Where are you going?

I am walking into the dawn.

Who are you? 

I am the first daughter of the first star.

Where do you drink when you are thirsty?

I drink the tears from the Madonna's eyes.

And if not there?

I drink the dew.

And if you can't find the dew?

I drink from the rain before it falls.

If you can't drink there?

I drink from the turtle's hide.

How did you find your way to me?

By the light of the Mermaid's comb.

Where does your mother come from?

Thunderbolts, lightning, and all things that soar.

Who are you?

I am the flame and the spark by which my mother lived.

Where do you come from?

I come from the puddle of that river.

Speak to me.

You hear my mother who speaks through me. She is the shadow that follows my shadow. The flame at the tip of my candle. The ripple in the stream where I was my face. Yes. I will eat my tongue if ever I whisper that name, the name of that place across the river that took my mother away from me. 

I know then that she had been with us. 

Edwidge Danticat makes it her personal responsibility to find and give a voice to every woman who lost hers during the occupation. Using a backdrop of magically real and a beautiful city named Ville Rose, Danticat utilizes the strongest color in the red to symbolize the strength of the women to died during the worst massacre in the history of Haiti. She gives these mortal women a gift no army could plunder, immortality through the written word.

This book is about the triumph of the human spirit. How the belief that you can overcome leads to overcoming. Krik? Krik! is encouragement for anyone who believes the road is too rough, the finish line too far: There will be a tomorrow... and your future is looking better than your past.

An Ode to Jazz

Why did this post topic take so long???

Listen to Toni Morrison talk about her motivation for writing and you will know why I have to write. If you have never heard her, here she is: The Write to Live (my title). Toni Morrison is the preeminent literary scholar. She writes about whatever she feels, however she feels she should write it. She takes normal, everyday topics and makes them literary masterpieces. Have you ever thought about what slavery was like before the image of slave was automatically a black person? Read A Mercy. Do you have a best friend who slept with your husband? Well, Morrison wrote about this issue in Sula. Have you ever heard of pedophilia? Morrison not only writes about this but it isn't even a crime in the Love. What about black girls with blonde hair and blue eyes? In The Bluest Eye, Morrison explores the psychological reasoning behind black girls wanting to be white. And in Jazz, my personal Morrison favorite, she looks at how music and feeling are intertwined.

Ahh Jazz, my beloved Jazz. Maybe because I love music, I love Jazz. The texts starts off a little complicated with the opening line,

"Sth, I know this woman"

First of all, what the heck is "Sth?" And who is "that woman?" Both of these questions made me immediately put the text down and go back on Facebook... Where I wanted to be anyway. Commercial break: Why the heck is Facebook so entertaining? All you do is look at pictures and statuses. Legal stalking, that's why. Anyway, the text was a required read for class so I had to pick the book back up. One thing the venerable Emma Waters-Dawson taught was that Toni Morrison tells you everything you need to know on the first page of the text. By the end of the first page you knew that "this woman" lived with a flock of birds and she attempted to slice open the face of a dead woman. Yes, a dead woman. I continued reading to find out why the dead woman needed to be [re]killed. It appears the woman had slept with "this woman's" husband and the husband had fallen into "spooky" love with the woman. And there begins the saga on Lenox Avenue. 

Jazz changed my intellectual life. Toni Morrison weaves a story about love, music, and the city up in a little ball that draws you in and doesn't let go. You envision the passion and promise inherent in a school get-together while simultaneously feeling the pain of Dorcas, a young woman, as she is dissed and dismissed by young men at the party. Ordinary topic, extraordinary depiction.

Morrison makes the reader suspend disbelief even though the text isn't magically realistic. Morrison makes you use and embrace your imagination. Nothing is as it seems. Everyone has a backstory. Everyone has a motivation. Violet Trace, the protagonist, was essentially an orphan, as was her husband Joe. Joe never had anything to call his own so he chose a young girl to fill his void. The young girl's parents were killed in a fire so she was used to being upended by life. So when she is sent to live with her aunt, she takes it as just the circumstance of her life. When her aunt's husband leaves her because of her prudishness, she tries to iron the wrinkles out of the world by becoming a seamstress. But this straitlaced woman because friends with the emotionally unstable Violet because they complement each other. Each has something the other needs. Where Alice is sane, Violet has been given over to insanity but they still understand each other. Commercial break: I have a friend who I never agree with, on anything, but there's no one who understands me better. #UsuallyIDon'tDoThis but shout-out to TOH.

Morrison makes you understand the un-understandable. She makes insanity common. She makes the unreal natural. Jazz is a just another one of her literary masterpieces. Yes, Morrison is difficult. Yes, her texts are complicated. Yes, her novels need to be read three times: Once to see what the text is about, Twice to understand what the text is about, and Thrice to interpret what the text is about. But each time is worth it and you will be a better person for it. So go ahead, pick it up. You'll probably put it down but pick it back up. And then pick it up again.

Call it: A Lesson Learned

Life is all about lessons and learning... The oft-quoted cliche even says, "You live and you learn." Ernest Gaines writes a book about life lessons. If you have read The Five People You Meet in Heaven, you understand a little about the lessons we learn through life, and most importantly, through death. Mitch Albom's text discusses the life-changers and game-shifters one encounters walking the Earth. Who are some of the people who would put on a list of the five people you would meet if you made it to Heaven? In Gaines' text, we meet Grant Wiggins who would put a man named Jefferson [no last name], who has been convicted of a murder he did not commit, at the top of his list. Jefferson was a victim of the classic #wrongplacewrongtime syndrome that affects black men every day in this country. His biggest crime was that he was uneducated and coupled with his ethnicity, he was condemned before he sat before the jury.Commercial break: Note I did not say a jury of his peers, this is simply a jury, no peers present. After he is convicted, his lawyer pleas for his life. His lawyer's uses this statement as his argument:

"What justice would there be to take his life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this."


Not only was Jefferson not entitled to a jury made up of his peers but he is being compared to a hog. Jefferson is an adult black male and he is being compared, by his lawyer no less, to a farm animal. I am sure my reader is familiar with the legacy of chattel slavery in America which debased African slaves to being no better than livestock. Commercial break: Do you wonder why dating auctions are frowned upon in the African American community? This is why. Jefferson's aunt is present when the comparison is made and she cannot accept her godson being no better than a farm animal. She asks her friend, Tante Lou, to ask her nephew, Grant, to make a man out of her godchild. And this is how both men are taught a lesson before they die.

Jefferson accepts his condemnation and awaits his electrocution. Grant Wiggins feels that having to make Jefferson a man is a death sentence for him. Grant wants to escape Louisiana but the woman he loves is in Baton Rouge. He wants her to escape with him but she has obligations. She is married and also a schoolteacher, so Grant is biding his time waiting on the day she will be free to run away with him. Until then, he will teach Jefferson. Initially he has no use for Jefferson and Jefferson has no use for him. Grant is a teacher at the black school and Jefferson was one of his former students. Now instead of teaching Jefferson how to become a productive citizen, he has to teach him how to become a man.

The problem comes when the reader realizes Grant is not a man himself. And there is no way Grant can teach Jefferson something he doesn't know. But Grant and Jefferson forge a special relationship. Jefferson teaches Grant just as much, if not more, than Grant teaches him. Both men learn valuable lessons through their interaction with each other. Jefferson learns how strong the power of love is. Grant learns how important purpose is.

Through each other, both boys become men. And they learn that the best lessons are taught through experience and not education.

A Must Read: Stand For Nothing, Fall For Anything

A Gathering of Old Men

Ernest Gaines' text was a thriller. Not in the Michael Jackson (we had him) sense but in the page-turning, will the [half-dead] black men shoot anybody, will the black men shoot themselves, will the sheriff go home sense. Out of the four-books-in-four-days books, this has to be my personal favorite, aside from Mama Day and The Miseducation of the Negro but that's neither here nor there. Maybe all three texts are a tie, I don't know. Suffice this all to say, I really, really liked this book. I liked it better than A Lesson Before Dying but that text was also interesting. The protagonist just seemed a little spoiled and out of touch but that also is neither here nor there. 

Anyway...

So A Lesson Before Dying is about 15-20 black men who [finally] take a stand against the oppression, suppression, and depression they had been dealing with for the [overwhelming] majority of their lives. Living in rural Louisiana, a part of the deep[est] South, racial disharmony is par for the course. Black people in general are used to the manifestation of Caucasian fear. This [past] fear is exhibited in the unfounded near phobia of black culture and black Americans. This [past] fear is the foundational reason white people don't want to live, work, or associate with black people. 

Commercial break *Opinions expressed belong solely to anyone but the author, and do not represent the views of other Members or Management * 

Anyway, of course white people no longer feel this way except in the case of white flight but this used to be the case in America. So the men finally stand up. The old men gather at the behest of one white woman named Candy. *insert low-class white trash joke* Candy is the daughter of the owner of the plantation and she believes it is her responsibility to take care of the men of the plantation. For the men to stand up, they have to stand up to the white men who are [literally] gunning for them as well as the white woman who coddles them. 

The story is narrated by each of the men who decides to stand up. The men recount stories of when they decided to lie down instead of standing up against the racism that was so familiar. One of the stories is reminiscent of the superhuman strength typically seen in Toni Morrison novels where folks go flying off buildings and such, but again that's neither here nor there. Here's an excerpt:

How can a man beat a machine. No way. Well, my brother did. With them two little mules, he beat that tractor the derrick. Them two little mules did all they could, like my brother did. They knowed it was the end if they couldn't make it. They could hear the machine like everybody else could hear the machine, and they knowed they had to pull, pull, pull if they wanted to keep going. My brother and the mules, the mules and my brother. So they pulled for him and pulled for him and pulled for him, sweating, slipping, falling, but pulling for him. Slobber running from their mouths, the bit cutting their lips, the slobber and blood mixing and falling to the ground, yet they pulled, pulled, pulled in all that mud for him. And yes, they did win. They won. But they wasn't supposed to win. How can flesh and blood and nigger win against white man and machine? 

So they beat him.

That is just one of the stories the men who finally stood up tells. And there are more stories and more emotions and more tears but dammit they stand. They stand even though they don't want to. They stand even though they don't know how to. They stand. They stand when their legs hurt. They stand when they can't even see where their feet are planted. They stand. They stand for themselves. They stand for their wives. They stand for their children. And they continue to stand. And when the text closes, the men continue to stand. 

UnConquered Women: Mama Day

Gloria Naylor is the author of "The Women of Brewster Place," "The Men of Brewster Place," "Linden Hills," "Bailey's Cafe," and "Mama Day."

Mama Day puts me in the mind of a Sunday afternoon with the sun sitting in the middle of the sky radiating not too much but just enough heat to keep the legs warm and the iced tea cool. Mama Day is perfection. The writing is easy, breezy, and the island is beautiful. Willows Island has remained unconquered by anyone or anything. So have the women.

The protagonist, Mama Day, is African American motherhood, personified. She doesn't take any mess, doles out love and punishment simultaneously and keeps a firm hand on her kinfolk. Now Mama Day has no children of her own but she is the great-aunt of Ophelia, who is pet named Cocoa, after her father leaves and her mother dies. Between Mama Day and Abigail, Cocoa gets all the rearing she needs and a little more.

There's even a legend about Cocoa's great grandmother, Sapphira, who drove a [white] man to not only die but sign away his island to his slaves when he did. And normally, slaves can't own land. But Willow Springs is anything but normal.

This book deals with the African American tradition as it relates to herbal medicine, roots, and "doctoring" with no license. Mama Day is a healer and a seer. She is gifted in the arts of the other world and knows how to separate BS from the truth. She is quintessentially all that "Mother" is.

One of the women in the text has a husband  partner who can't stay at home. Apparently his [new] girlfriend, Ruby, has used black magic roots to make the man be with her. When the ex-woman, Frances comes to see Mama Day to see what she can do about his leaving, Mama Day gives her advice only a wise woman would proffer.

Mama Says:

A man don't leave you unless he wants to go, Frances. And if he's made up his mind to go, there ain't nothing you, me, or anybody else can do about it.


Mind you, she completely ignores Ruby having used roots to make the man desire her. Mama chalks it up to a man only doing what a man wants to do. Mama Day makes simply quotable statements like this throughout the text and I was marking pages as I read so I can remember what Mama said.

On relationships, Mama Says:


A real lady never has to get mad-- if she knows how to get even. 


I want to be like Mama, cool-headed and cool-handed, never allowing life to ruffle me.

Mama Day reminds me of a cross between Tar Baby and Krik Krak. In Tar Baby, Jadine is a spoiled model from a very small and very traditional island. She is raised by her aunt and uncle where Cocoa is raised by her grandmother and great aunt. In Tar Baby and Mama Day, both girls move to New York, this is also where Krik Krak comes in. There is one narrative called, "New York Day Women," and there is a line in the text where Dr. Buzzard mentions "day women" to George. Also, Krik Krak takes place on the Haitian side of Hispaniola. All three texts center on women and their relationships on and off their respective islands.

Each woman is unconquered as a result of the strength of the women in her legacy. Moms, grandmothers, and aunts all come together to shape the women against the oppressive effects of American society. In Tar Baby though, Jadine learns everything she knows from her aunt but she still has the same spirit.

Mama Day is a great comparison text to read before or after Tar Baby since the texts are very similar and who doesn't love an UNconquered woman?

America- MisEducating Negroes For Over 400 Years

The Miseducation of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson is a perennial achievement in educational and racial discourse. This text was written in 1933, 96 years after the first Historically Black College or University (Cheyney University) was founded. Woodson is upset and he wants the reader to understand why. He uses the word "traducer" frequently in the text and I admit I had to use the dictionary on my Mac to define the word. Traducer means "one who speaks badly of [someone] as a means of ruining their reputation" and in the context of the text, he uses "traducer" to refer to our 2520  Caucasian counterparts. He wants the reader to understand that everyone who attempts to save you does not have salvation in mind. The educational system in America is solely incapable of creating an educational foundation, nothing more. Higher education is one's ability to find knowledge outside of the textbook.

The text is 18 chapters and 197 pages long, excluding the appendix, bibliography, and introductions. Each chapter spans a little over/under ten pages and deals with a different issue of the educational system including "The Educated Negro Leaves the Masses" and "The Study of the Negro." As I stated, Woodson is upset, or rather he is perturbed. He is an ABM (Angry Black Man) with several "bones to pick" (Mama-ism). He points out the problems in higher education, leadership, and racial division. What Woodson wants the reader to know is education does not equal alienation. He implores the educated to return to their communities and uplift the people. W.E.B. DuBois' talented tenth is Woodson's target audience. He wants readers to understand the importance of community in the salvation of the black race.

Woodson is by no means limited in the scope of the text as he drops knowledge like "Africans first domesticated the sheep, goat, and cow, developed the idea of trial by jury, produced the first stringed instruments, and gave the world its greatest boon in the discovery of iron" (21).

I did not learn these facts until I read this book and that is a damn  shame. But who counts on history books to learn history?

Not only does Woodson drop knowledge, he also drops admonishments. In the chapter Service Rather Than Leadership Woodson says,

"The race needs workers, not leaders" (italics mine).

In the next chapter, "Hirelings in Public Servants' Places" he goes into more detail saying,

The servant of the people, unlike the leader, is not on a high horse elevated above the people and trying to carry them to some designated point to which he would like to go for his own advantage. The servant of the people is down among them, living as they are, doing what they do, and enjoying what they enjoy. He may be better informed than some of the members of the group; it may be that he has had some experience they have not had, but in spite of this advantage he should have more humility than those whom he serves, for we are told that 'Whosoever is the greatest among you, let him be your servant' (131).

Woodson speaks as if the reader is sitting at his feet with an open cup for him to pour his wisdom into. By the close of the text said cup would be running over. I mean, this is the same man who coined the oft-quoted quote:

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his "proper place" and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told; In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one out for his own special benefit. His education makes it necessary. 


When Woodson says, "The Negro needs to become RADICAL," I take it as a call to arms, a call to action. Education is the only means of freeing the slave. Without independent education, man will continue to be reliant on those who hold the educational reins.

Carter Godwin Woodson is a giant man who has broadened his shoulders for generations of African American children to stand on. And I am thankful for him and his contributions to African American scholarship.