Writing About Blackness in Its Fullness
The sin and shame of racism are constants in the South, but so too is the fact of full humanity in Black form.
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As I approach the end of my book tour, I find myself returning to the process of writing South to America. I’ve been in the South, seen my people along the way, and retrod ground I walked while working on it. I’m also rereading books I had consulted. One, The South Today, is a 1965 collection of essays by Black and white Southerners edited by Willie Morris. They reflect on home: going home and changes to their homes, in light of the civil-rights movement.
One essay, “Why I Returned,” is by noted Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps. Like many identified as part of the Renaissance, Bontemps was a Southerner by birth. In the essay, he describes his family’s migration from Louisiana to California. And he puzzles a bit about his father and uncle, diametrically opposed in so many ways—his father was bourgeois and respectable; his uncle Buddy held fast to folk ways and a good time—but who shared a feeling that if it weren’t for the “trouble” of the South, they would both return “home.” He asks, “What was it that made the South, excusing what Buddy called the conditions, so appealing for them?”
He finds his answer to this question when he accepts a job at Oakwood College in the home of my grandparents (and cousins), Huntsville, Alabama. He took the job in the throes of the Depression. People suffered. Bontemps invoked Charles Dickens to describe the scene:
It was the best of times and the worst of times to run to that state for refuge. Best, because the summer air was so lade with honeysuckle and spiraea it almost drugged the senses at night … The men and boys rediscovered woods and swamps and streams with which their ancestors had been intimate a century earlier … the living critters still abounded. They were as wild and numerous as anybody had ever dreamed … I made friends with these people and went with them on possum hunts and was astonished to learn how much game they could bring home without gunpowder … Such carryings on amused them while it delighted their palates. It also took their minds off the hard times and they were ready for church when Sunday came. I followed them there too … The long-metter singing was from another world. The shouting was ecstasy itself. At a Primitive Baptist foot washing I saw a woman who rose from her seat and skimmed from the front of the church to the back, her wet feet lightly touching the tops of the pews, her eyes upward … she could have astounded me no more had she walked on water. The members fluttered and wailed, rocked the church with their singing, accepted the miracle for what it was.
I like to think the church he visited was my grandmother’s church, Indian Creek Baptist (first called African Baptist Church). It was one of a handful of Primitive Baptist churches in Huntsville at the time, and it has had fewer than 10 pastors since it was founded in 1869. Primitive Baptists are old-school foot-washing people who take primitive to mean “original,” not “undeveloped.” I like to think my grandmother was there that day with Arna Bontemps. I like to think that, though she converted to Catholicism, her majesty as a person, which I benefited directly from, was nurtured in that place where one of my writing forefathers was transformed. And even more, I like to think that years later, when my mother took a class with Arna Bontemps as a graduate student at Yale, that he recognized in her the legacy of transcendent beauty in Alabama.
Bontemps left Oakwood and Alabama. He was pushed out because of his activism related to the Scottsboro boys, youth falsely accused of raping two white women, whose plight became an international cause. He went on to Chicago, which he found harrowingly violent and no less segregated, before settling in Nashville to teach at Fisk University. Perhaps he saw my grandmother there, too, where she attended the illustrious Pearl High School. Jim Crow existed in Nashville and its legacy is apparent in gentrification and high incarceration rates for its Black natives. It is also a place where the celebrated Fisk University still exists.
Here’s my point: So often it seems that in writing about race today both the academic and the public arenas demand stories of absolutes. Only the debasement, only the ugliness. What this literary tradition that includes people like Bontemps has afforded me is a tradition of writing about Blackness in its fullness, even in the worst of times. The literary tradition matches the cultural one. The sin and shame of racism are assumed as constants, but so too is the fact of full humanity in Black form.
In the words of Black journalist Louis Lomax, from the essay “A Georgia Boy Goes Home”:
One can go home again if he remembers and accepts the land of his birth for what it was, if he understands what it has become and why. The homecoming is more complete if one admits that he and his land have shaped each other, that from it springs much of both his weakness and his strength. Only as I walked down River Street toward the place I was born did I realize how much of a child of this land I am: its mud squished through my toes as I romped on unpaved streets and alleys; its puritanical somnolence settled over my childhood dreams …
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