A symphony of varied voices
Review by Robert Fleming
The joy of reading finely crafted books stems from their ability to transport us to distant lands and worlds. One such book is Tyler Stovall's Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95, 0395683998), which uses the enchanting European capital as a cultural backdrop for an astute, thoroughly researched chronicle of blacks living the Parisian expatriate life. There have been quite a number of writings on African American writers, musicians, and intellectuals seeking a new social and political freedom on the banks of the Seine, but few have succeeded like this author's excellent effort. Stovall, a historian of French and African American Culture at the University of California at Santa Cruz, examines the consistent wave of black Americans who ventured to Paris from 1914 to today, including Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Miles Davis, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.
Overall, the impact of the book comes in Stovall's lucid, insightful commentary on the risks and rewards of that historic interaction between the transplanted blacks and their adopted city.
Social activist and jazz buff Tom Dent takes an emotional trek back in time with his Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement (William Morrow, $25, 0688140998) to his days as a youthful participant in the marches and rallies of that turbulent era. He found his life profoundly transformed by the powerful forces at odds during the fight for equal rights and access to the ballot box.
Dent's moving observations reveal a man unafraid to confront the surprising turns and twists of his experience, both past and present, along the route of his eventful 1991 pilgrimage from Greensboro, North Carolina, to the Mississippi Delta. "In undertaking this odyssey, I reversed the direction my life was expected to follow," he concludes. "Instead of leaving, I am, in a way that will unfold in more detail, returning."
The 1995 death of noted writer Toni Cade Bambara stunned the American literary world, largely because it had been 14 years of silence from the critically acclaimed author of the novel The Salt Eaters and two short story collections, Gorilla, My Love and The Seabirds Are Still Alive. This posthumously published treasury of her work, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions (Pantheon, $23, 0679442502), fills a part of that void. This book is a fitting farewell for Bambara's many fans and a magical introduction for newcomers to a masterful American writer.
Harvard scholar, writer, and editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is present everywhere in a torrent of new releases on the nation's bookshelves. Here the prolific one returns once more, with fellow editor Nellie Y. McKay, with the vast collection, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (Norton, $39.95, 0393040011). What a treasure! The editors and an able research team have assembled an engrossing survey of African American literary delights from 1746 to the present, with contributions from 120 authors.
Every morsel included in this spicy blend is nothing short of first-rate, covering all areas such as poetry, fiction, letters, drama, journals, and autobiography. Also, the editors added 11 complete selections, consisting of classics like James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Richard Wright's The Man Who Lived Underground, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, Toni Morrison's Sula, and August Wilson's Fences.
What makes this book stand out is its section, "The Vernacular Tradition," which gives readers a sample of the best in spirituals, blues, folktales, and sermons. Generation X-ers will love the rap faves stirred into the mix like Grandmaster Flash's "The Message," Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype," and Queen Latifah's "The Evil That Men Do." An instant classic.
Also new to bookstores, an updated version of Early Negro Writing: 1760-1837, selected by Dorothy Porter (Black Classic Press, $24.95, 0933121598) is available for the first time since its 1971 publication.
Invaluable to students and teachers, the book earned a fine reputation due to its rich assemblage of speeches, poems, sermons, and memoir extracts. Reprinted in a new edition by the enterprising Black Classic Press, an African American publishing company, it will again find a receptive audience despite the shortcoming of no subject index.
In contrast to the recent release of the movie, Ghosts of Mississippi, which claims to tell the tale of the Medgar Evers murder case, this inspiring memoir, Have No Fear: The Charles Evers Story (John Wiley, $24.95, 0471122513) sheds greater light on the infamous 1963 assassination of the courageous civil rights leader and surrounding events through the eyes of his brother. The other Evers, who assumed leadership of the state's NAACP chapter after the shooting, pulls no punches about his roller-coaster life or the lives of those around him in this recounting of Southern politics and history.
Robert Fleming is a journalist in New York City.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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