Afro-American Writers in the West
W HEN THE QUATTRO-CENTENNIAL of New Mexico was celebrated in 1940 the first non-Indian to explore the region, an African named Esteban de Dorantes, was ignored. In 1779, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, a man of mixed ancestry, established a trading post that is considered the founding of Chicago; although he was traditionally portrayed as European, local Indians later told visitors that the first "white man" to come to the area was black.
Those two Afro-American pioneers
by no means stand alone: Lewis and Clark were accompanied by
a Negro slave, York, a major figure in the journey. Mountain
man Jim Beckwourth was adopted by the Crows. One of the most
dramatic events in frontier history was "the Exodus of 1879,"
which brought over twenty thousand blacks in search of opportunity
to Kansas from the south. The fabled Bill Pickett is credited
with perfecting bulldogging, and some rodeo aficionados consider
Jesse Stahl the greatest of all bronc riders; neither is surprising
when one considers that approximately five thousand black cowboys
rode the cattle trails. At about the same time, the Negro troopers
of the Ninth and Tenth Regiments–called "buffalo soldiers"
because of their hair–comprised twenty percent of the U.S.
Cavalry in the West.
Blacks were continually and intimately involved in the opening
of the West. In large measure, they had even more reason to migrate
to "the great American desert" than did their white counterparts
who, though frequently poor, did not suffer the scourge of discrimination.
As diplomat and author James Weldon Johnson summed it up in 1925,
"Your west is giving the Negro a better deal than any other
section of the country . . . there is more opportunity for my
race, and less prejudice against it in this section of the country
than anywhere else in the United States" (Denver Post,
June 24, 1925).
There is no reason to suppose that
the West's tolerance was based upon moral insight–"The
black migrant to the frontier soon found he had no hiding place
from traditional American attitudes," writes William Loren Katz–yet
the lack of institutionalized racism, the vast tracts of open
land that kept blacks from concentrating in threatening numbers,
and the pragmatic willingness to accept persons for what they
could do rather than where their ancestors were born all contributed
to a relatively liberal atmosphere. As a result, it is
no surprise to learn that on April 22, 1889, when the vast region
now called Oklahoma was officially opened to settlers, not only
were buffalo soldiers on duty to prevent "sooners" from
jumping the
gun, but an estimated ten thousand blacks raced to stake their
claims. Those are, of course, only high points of Negro
involvement in the American frontier, but when Ray Allen Billington's
otherwise excellent Westward Expansion was published in
1967, none of its nearly one thousand pages contained references
to black westerners. They were invisible frontiersmen.
Black pioneers have had plenty to write about but, like westerners
in general, they did not have the leisure or the training to
do so during the early years of settlement. Thanks to historians
such as Katz (The Black West,
1971), Sherman Savage (Blacks in the West, 1976), William
H. Leckie (The Buffalo Soldiers, 1967), Philip Durham
and Everett L. Jones (The Negro Cowboys, 1965), and Kenneth
Wiggins Porter (The Negro on the American Frontier, 1970),
their experiences have not been forgotten.
As early as the end of the last century a significant black novelist
emerged from the West. He was Sutton E. Griggs, a Texan who was
very much a product of his time. Katz sums up the final decade
of the nineteenth century this way:
His novels have about them, despite their Victorian tone, their
melodrama, and their repetition, a curiously contemporary sense.
For example, black is beautiful; the hero of Unfettered (1902)
is described this way: "As to color he was black, but even
those prejudiced to color forgot that prejudice when they gazed
upon this ebony-like Apollo." The same book's Negro heroine has
eyes "so full of soul." More startling, however, is the
author's militancy. He was a loyal Texan who, in Imperium
in Imperio (1899), demanded that the state be ceded to blacks.
The novel begins when a Negro organization gathers in Waco to
urge that blacks revolt openly to achieve the state's surrender so it can
be used as a refuge for blacks. It sounds like the 1960s.
Born in the Lone Star State and educated at Bishop College there,
Griggs wrote the first political novels by an Afro-American.
While revealing miscegenation, oppression, and Jim-Crowism, the
novels point out the need for an agency to protect the interests
of Negroes. Because they promote the philosophy that produced
the NAACP and certain government agencies of today, and because
of their artistic deficiencies, the following volumes are of
more interest to sociologists than to literary critics: Overshadowed
(1901), The Hindered Hand (1905), Pointing the
Way (1906), and the aforementioned Unfettered.
Griggs is rightly considered the most neglected Negro writer
of the period between the Spanish-American War and World War
I. Second place goes to Oscar Micheaux of South Dakota. The novelist
of the Midwest ranks no higher than his contemporary in the Southwest
in establishment literary histories; he was also handicapped
by not being in the South (where the black population was) or
the East (where the publishers were). The Conquest: The Story
of a Negro Pioneer (1913), Micheaux's first autobiographical
novel, reveals the experiences of a Negro hero in the white world
of the South Dakota frontier. His second novel, The Forged
Note: A Romance of the Darker Races (1915), continues a "trail
blazing," autobiographical account of the Negro "pioneer"
who leaves his farmlands to sell his novel in the South. The
Homesteader (1917) is the last work of this period. After
an absence during which he produced black movies, Micheaux reentered
the writing and publishing field in 1941. After seven novels
and thirty-four films, Micheaux died in 1951 in New York; unlike
the heroes of his early novels, he neglected to go back to South
Dakota to find happiness.
Finally, one western black man born in the nineteenth century
lived long enough to see his work recognized nationally. In 1933
J. Mason Brewer (1896–1975) began publishing poetry (Negrito)
and folklore (in the annual volumes of the Texas Folklore Society).
He told editor J. Frank Dobie "how unrepresentative the
loudly-heralded Negro literature out of Harlem" was, "how
fake both in psychology and language." He meant it was false
to the southwestern black, but black writers in the West did
not have the publishing opportunities of the Harlem Renaissance
group. Brewer's black folklore collection of the period did not
reach a national audience until reprinted in The Book of Negro
Folklore (1958), edited by Langston Hughes and Arna
Bontemps, both of whom had moved from the West to Harlem.
The 1890s–which saw the close of the frontier–was an era of immense change for
black and white America. During the next twenty years in each
southern state, including Texas and Oklahoma, segregation was
codified. The populist movement, uniting black and white farmers
against eastern exploiters, ended in bitter and bloody defeat
for black hopes. The 1890s, which opened with the closing of
the frontier, closed with the beginning of American imperialist
expansion. . . . To justify the control of darker people abroad,
white supremacy arguments again flooded the land. (pp. 299–300)
From that turbulent and tense period for nonwhites emerged Griggs,
who was destined to become the most widely read Negro novelist
of the time in black communities.
By the 1950s, Brewer's best work
was being published by the University of Texas Press: The
Word on the Brazos (1953) and Dog Ghosts and Other Texas
Negro Folktales (1958). Several other volumes followed. When
Quadrangle Books published hisanthology American Negro Folklore
(1968), Brewer gained a national reputation. The San Francisco
Chronicle said: "J. Mason Brewer can rank with any folklorist,
regardless of skin pigmentation." Two Texas histories call him
"the state's one Negro writer of importance," but he never
gained the recognition of those who, like Hughes, left the West
to reside in the East.
Langston Hughes (1902–1967), the dean of black American
letters, was born in Joplin, Missouri, and reared in Lawrence
and Topeka, Kansas. From his extraordinary bibliography of multiple
pages and multiple genres, a westerner would feel most at home
with his first novel and many of the poems he eventually selected
as his favorites. Not Without Laughter (1930) is a semi-autobiographical
novel about a young man's early years in a small Kansas town.
Called "Poet Laureate of the Negro people" in the fifties,
Hughes chose his favorite poems from seven previous volumes in
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (1959). Although he
was a world traveler and peripatetic poet, a surprising number
of poems refer to the American West or contain vivid images of
it. A few poems show the black migration to the West from the
Deep South. In "West Texas" the speaker says, "But
West Texas where the sun / Shines like the evil one / Ain't no
place / For a colored / Man to stay." In "Sharecroppers"
you see why: "Just a herd of Negroes / Driven to the field
/ Plowing,planting, hoeing, / To make the cotton yield." They
are "like a mule broke to a halter." This leads to "OneWay
Ticket":
Hughes published so much that he asked Arna
Bontemps to be coeditor of The Book of Negro Folklore and
The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1970, but Bontemps
attained other fame alone. Not until he published Black Thunder
(1936) and Drums at Dusk (1939) was there a first
rate historical novel by and about Afro-Americans. The first
is a fictionalized account of the abortive slave insurrection
under Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, the latter about the
successful insurrection under Toussaint L'Ouverture in Haiti.
As a child Bontemps moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles and grew
up on the outskirts of Watts, a move reflected in his latest
work, The Old South (1973). Of the nine stories in this
book, three excellent autobiographical ones ("Why I Returned,"
"The Cure," and "3 Pennies for Luck") are set in California;
they are concerned with the author's family, especially an uncle
who was the embodiment of Afro-American folk culture. Bontemps's early interest
was poetry, some of which he published, but he never attained
the status of his friend Hughes and the great poet Gwendolyn
Brooks.
Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917, Gwendolyn Brooks was taken to
Chicago one month later; she is now one of the major poets of
the United States. For Annie Allen (1949), a book of poetry,
she won the Pulitzer Prize (an extraordinary event in black literature).
Her eighth major volume of poetry, The World of Gwendolyn
Brooks (1971), is the best introduction to a poet whose range
is phenomenal–from polished sonnets to children's verses,
poems as good as any that have appeared in Afro-American literature.
Following Carl Sandburg, Brooks is now Poet Laureate of Illinois,
the state that played a large part in the westward movement of
blacks. She has aided and inspired a whole school of young black
midwestern poets, the outstanding ones being Arkansas-born Don
L. Lee (Haki R. Madhuti) and his colleagues in Third World Press
and Broadside Press.
What Gwendolyn Brooks is to black poetry, Ralph Ellison is to
the black novel. He has produced the best black novel yet to
appear in American literature, though it is his only one. Invisible
Man (1952) won the National Book Award when published, and
thirteen years later a poll of over two hundred authors, critics,
and editors selected it as "the most distinguished work
published during the past twenty years." Today it is said that
this novel has lifted black fiction "to the highest level
of artistic accomplishment that it has yet reached." Ellison
was born in Oklahoma City in 1914, and Oklahoma is the setting
of three of his best short stories. "Mister Toussan" and
"That I Had Wings" were published before Invisible Man (1952), while the more complex "A Couple
of Scalped Indians" was published afterwards, but they, like
a dozen other uncollected magazine stories, were written during
his apprenticeship days as a writer. They have in common the
same protagonists, Riley and Buster, two preteen boys whose intellectual
and physical adventures in an Oklahoma black community are described
with the developing style, symbolism, and satire that characterize
Ellison's classic novel.
I pick up my life
And take it on the train
To Los Angeles, Bakersfield,
Seattle, Oakland, Salt Lake,
Any place that is North and West . . .
Before Ellison, several black writers
left the West to gain fame in the East. The major satirist of
the Harlem Renaissance, Wallace Thurman was born in Salt Lake
City. The Blacker the Berry (1929), a study of intraracial
prejudice, has a blueblack heroine who grew up in Boise, Idaho.
Like the author she soon heads for Harlem. New York is a favorite
setting for black novels, but a few use the West. One set mainly
in the state of Washington is well known for being "a rare
thing, a novel by a Negro about whites." William Attaway's Let
Me Breathe Thunder (1939), a compelling novel in the tradition
of John Steinbeck, tells the experiences of two white vagabonds
who encounter a little Chicano boy in their wanderings around
New Mexico, and he becomes the moving force of the story. As
in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937), a disastrous encounter
with a woman sends the protagonists running. The trip from Yakima
in a freezing boxcar over the Montana Rockies causes an infection
in the boy's hand to grow worse and he dies. The saddened vagrants
head for Kansas, leaving his body in a boxcar. Steinbeck's excellent
portrayal of a black character, Crooks, is equalled by Attaway's
white men "on the road."
A comic western novel by a Negro about whites, A. Clayton Powell,
Sr.'s Picketing Hell (1942) is a "fictitious narrative"
of white Tom Tern, who becomes a powerful preacher. Born in LaJunta,
Colorado, Tom has many unscrupulous adventures with a
friend in his youth: "The two sublimated their sex desires
to stealing, fighting, gambling, and drinking." As a preacher
he no longer sublimates; he has difficulty controlling the "five
or six women of the church . . . making frequent visits to the
parsonage." When another preacher sweeps into tears his audience
of western women, one observer states a theme of the novel: "Religious
and sex emotions are so closely related that they cannot tell
where one ends and the other begins." All characters are white,
but there is a "curious racelessness of character," as was
the case in Attaway's novel.
California alone could produce a volume on black contemporary
writers, mostly those who chose to live there, such as Ernest
J. Gaines and Ishmael Reed. Gaines, born on a Louisiana plantation
in 1933, has spent his adult years in California, where he gained
wide attention with superb short stories, collected in Bloodline
(1968), and three novels, including The Autobiography
of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). The television version of the
latter sent readers to his earlier novels Catherine Carmier
(1964) and Of Love and Dust (1967), which some critics
found the best black novel of the decade.
The most sensational of the contemporary California writers is
Ishmael Reed. His reputation is based on two novels, The FreeLance
Pallbearers (1967) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969),
and a book of poetry, Catechism of D Neo-American Hoodoo Church
(1970). In the much-anthologized poem "I Am a Cowboy
in the Boat of Ra," and in his second novel, Reed satirizes the
Old West's "man's man" heroism. The novel is set in the
western town of Yellow Back Radio and features a black cowboy
hero, the Loup Garow Kid, in a fantastic satire of the "frontier"
myth. Reed's absurd humor is directed at blacks and whites;
to him, there are no heroes in the Old West or the Ghetto.
Several of Reed's contemporaries in California are promising
writers, but the West is seldom their chosen locale. "A
peculiar avoidance of localization" is a characteristic of all
black literature, according to a black critic in Texas in 1980.
Al Young's novels certainly fit this pattern, as does the writing of Lorenzo Thomas.
Thomas gives this reason: "The oppressed condition of the
black community has remained virtually the same in all localities."
One clear exception to the rule, however, is the powerful California
poet Sherley Anne Williams. While she can get down with
the best black poets–
–she has also retained a strong sense of place, her place,
the rural San Joaquin Valley that has produced so many memorable
poets: Gary Soto, William Everson, Larry Levis, Frank Bidart,
Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, among others.
Her plaint in "North Country: A Dream Realized" limns the
cry of other western writers:
Says Williams, "Wherever I go, I always
seem to find my way back to the Valley," a reality amply demonstrated
by her poetry.
Williams's "ethnic" verse, however, does demonstrate the
continuity of black communities in the Old West with those in
the rest of the country. There exists no western slavery or antislavery
literary tradition, since those were not slave states, but in
the early writings, and some of those today, the authors are
consistently aware of where black settlers came from, besides
Africa. It is not unusual, then, that the black literature of
the West fits Thomas's two categories: one represents the black
man's sense of loss, with some pessimism; the other represents
his "yearning for assimilation" into the American mainstream,
with some optimism. One is exemplified by the poetic allusion
of Maya Angelou's title I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970)
and the other by Langston Hughes's title I, Too, Sing America
(1927). This essay has emphasized the past, with little room
for such present-day authors as playwright Ed Bullins and poet
Wanda Coleman, but black writers in the West must recall the
motto of J. Mason Brewer: "If we do not respect the past,
the future will not respect us."The "we" refers to the young
black writers of today who will realize that a new and longer
essay is needed to include all of those who now contribute to
the rich cultural heritage of blacks in the West.
Selected Bibliography
Primary Sources
Attaway, William. Let Me Breathe Thunder. New York: Doubleday,
Doran, 1939.
Brewer, J. Mason. Dog Ghosts and The Word
on the Brazos. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1976.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. The World
of Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man.
New York: Random House, 1952.
Gaines, Ernest J. Bloodline. New York: Dial, 1968.
Griggs, Sutton E. Imperium in Imperio. New York: Arno
Press, 1969.
Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1965.
Micheaux, Oscar. The Conquest: The Story
of a Negro Pioneer. Lincoln, Nebraska: Western Book Supply Company, 1913.
Reed, lshmael. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. Garden City: Doubleday, 1969.
Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry. New York: Macaulay,
1929.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1982.
Secondary Sources
Gloster, Hugh M. Negro Voices in American Literature. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948. This volume of
early, mature scholarship is a first choice for a reader unfamiliar
with black literature.
Katz, William Loren. The Black
West. Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. This documentary
and pictorial history uses unpublished and rare manuscripts which
provide background for the casual reader or literary scholar.
Savage, W. Sherman. Blacks in the West. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1976. While not dealing with literature primarily,
Savage gives an excellent background for understanding the black
writers who stayed in the West or who left for greener pastures.
Turner, Darwin T. Afro-American
Writers. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1970. In Iowa, Turner has become an outstanding black critic
of black literature. This bibliography, though brief, is a reliable
and useful introduction to the field.
Whitlow, Roger. Black American
Literature. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1973. This is a useful,
easy-to-read critical history with a 1500-title bibliography
of works written by and about black Americans.
in our own selves bed in the dark. The
dark and ahhhhh. It be so good. Good to be
beautiful to be real be for him to be
more than one. It's enough. I
now my man lovin
the way
I
struts my stuff.
I wish I had known this land
before houses infected
the hills and trail bikes slashed paths
across their sides; before heat
shimmered on miles of concrete
roads (which lead to more roads that
stop just short of somewhere) . . .
with supplementary material provided
by the editors
© Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.