Celebrating Black History Month

This Black History month's treasure of African-American books is an eclectic lot, with volumes celebrating every segment of the black experience. No matter what your interests, there's something in this season's selection to be found.

REVIEWS BY ROBERT FLEMING

Fiction with a difference

When Gayl Jones burst back on the literary scene in 1998 after a 20-year absence, she returned with a searing novel, The Healing, a National Book Award finalist. Her latest, Mosquito, confirms that she's here to stay with an engrossing story of Sojourner Nadine Jane Johnson, a truck driver who discovers a pregnant Mexican illegally hidden in her vehicle. This astounding novel addresses issues of immigration, multiculturalism, nationalism, and identity; Jones's dazzling array of writing techniques is worthy of our attention.


Sometimes an author can flop with a second book after a big hit (The View from Here), but that is not the case with Brian Keith Jackson's follow-up novel, Walking Through Mirrors. The new work brilliantly chronicles the emotional homecoming of a young photographer to a Louisiana town for his father's funeral, in which all the usual themes of love, loss, forgiveness, and familial secrets are efficiently reworked in lyrical, elegant prose.


Sequels are rarely as good as the original, but Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Talents tops the imaginative vision of her 1994 Nebula Award-nominated outing, Parable of the Sower. In this latest installment, the futuristic world inherited by Larkin, the daughter of Lauren Olamina (the heroine of the first book), is a liberal's nightmare; there, most of the basic freedoms are repressed. This is a wry but intelligent cautionary tale -- science fiction with both heart and soul.


The much-anticipated first novel, Among Others, from Lois Griffith, a director of New York City's noted Nuyorican Poets Cafe, has finally arrived. Lean, triumphant, and knowing, the novel offers a welcome break from the current wave of "girlfriend" fiction, with a probing examination of the racial strife of the late 1960s as seen through the eyes of Griffith's alter ego, Della. She acts as our wise Everywoman searching for love and purpose in New York City amid the turmoil of post-Camelot America.


Early publicity on Mars Hill's debut novel, The Moaner's Bench, never mentioned the stunning pictorial quality of the book's glorious narrative. With the author's uncanny ear for dialogue, the old coming-of-age formula of a black boy sent to live with deeply religious relatives in the depression-era South assumes a rich mythic quality. Anyone who has spent any time "down yonder" will feel right at home in these pages.


Nonfiction exploring tradition and history

A superbly researched recounting of the controversial 1856 Margaret Garner case, which inspired Toni Morrison's Beloved, can be found in Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child Murder from the Old South. University of Kentucky professor Steven Weisenburger, the author, explores the moral questions posed by slavery with his artfully crafted analysis of this antebellum tragedy stemming from the decision of Garner, a fugitive slave, to kill her children rather than permit them to endure the agony of bondage.


Clayborne Carson, a Stanford University professor, has done the impossible with his reconstruction of The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., compiled from the vast collection of King's writings, speeches, and interviews. With the blessing of the slain civil rights leader's family, Carson assembles a fascinating portrait of King as spokesman, husband, and father in this excellent introduction to one of the most significant figures of the 20th century.


Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee are Black America's First Family of the theater and film. In their warm, sentimental joint memoir, With Ossie and Ruby, the couple, who have been married for half a century, have written a witty primer that shows how you can have it all and not crack up in the process.


It is rare to read a biography these days that doesn't trash its subject. Mary Beth Rogers's book, Barbara Jordan: American Hero, presents Jordan, the first black woman elected to Congress from the South, as the consummate politician and Constitutional orator. Courage and commitment are the major themes in this haunting, important account of a woman who battled illness, isolation, and bigotry in her short, accomplished life.


No current book brings the oppressive life of slavery to reality like Remembering Slavery. This unique book-and-tape combination features actual interviews with former slaves gathered by such writers as John Lomax and Zora Neal Hurston as a part of a 1930s Federal Writers' Project. The text is filled with insights on daily slave life and debunks many popular myths surrounding this dismal chapter in American history.


Wisdom exudes from every page of Steven Barboza's The African American Book of Values. Barboza uses a timely collection of "classic moral stories" to revive undervalued themes of faith, love, loyalty, self-discipline, respect, and self-esteem, among others, for a community seeking to recapture lost traditions. The list of authors, artists, sages, and cultural icons sampled in the groundbreaking volume is very impressive.


Award-winning author Randall Kenan, known for his stylish short story collection, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, checks the pulse of Black America at the close of the 1990s with an extensive cross-country survey, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. The question asked was: "What does it mean to be black?" The respondents cover the spectrum of the black experience, including a former gang member, a welfare mother, a judge, a business type, and a host of others of every social stripe. Kenan asks all the right questions; even Chicago talkmeister Studs Turkel couldn't have done a better job.


Robert Fleming is a writer in New York.

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