Practical Class 12

The U.S. Ethnic Literatures:

African American Literature in the 20th Century
1. Read the article on Afro-American Literature by Kathe Davis Finney,
arrange the information in the chart tracing the genesis of African
American literature chronologically. The first line has been done for
you as an example.
Writer Literary works and significance
Phillis Wheatley a slave poet known for her Poems on Various Subjects,
(1753?-1784) Religious and Moral (1773), the first book to be published by
an American Black.

Afro-American Literature
by Kathe Davis Finney
Although ultimately Afro-American literature will probably best be seen as an integral
part of American literature as a whole, at the present time the most important single effort
of this literature is still toward the achievement of proper recognition and appreciation of
Black life and culture, of the uniquely Black historical experience, and of Black perceptions
and talent.
Black literature has of course been shaped by the same forces that shaped American
literature in general. In genre terms it began similarly in expository and autobiographical
writing, moved to religious and political subjects, and only relatively late to fiction. It has
followed a similar trajectory of millenialist hope and subsequent frustration,
disappointment, dissillusion, and then regrouping, defining new goals as well as searching
for new paths to the old goals. But Blacks have suffered a painfully distinct version of those
forces, and most Afro-American authors have felt the differences more strongly than the
similarities. Whatever pride and hope in their country they may retain, they tend to write as
Blacks first and Americans second.
Afro-American literature is usually talked about as if it appeared out of nowhere in
the 1920s – and indeed, that may be the White perception. Roger Rosenblatt even says in
Black Fiction (1974) that the genre “runs the full course of its history within what we know
as the modern literary period.” While that may be true for fiction, Afro-American literature
more generally is almost as old as American slavery. But a great deal of the energy spent on
writing was devoted to work outside the conventional literary genres of fiction, poetry, and
drama, simply because Blacks were not part of the literary world. When their more urgent
political and social material is taken into account, then a much longer and stronger Afro-
American literary tradition emerges. Since an important part of the present Black literary
endeavor is to recover this buried past, this essay devotes more space to it than is usual in
brief surveys. The earlier authors and works are not names which need to be committed to
memory, but the reader should be aware of their existence.
The first known Afro-American poem is “Bars Fight,” a verse narrative of an Indian
raid, written by a slave girl, Lucy Terry in 1746. Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) was a much
better-known slave poet, whose actual life made a special appeal to the imagination. She was
born in Senegal, West Africa, and sold into slavery as a young girl. Brought to Boston in 1761,
she was educated by her owners and eventually earned her freedom through her poetry. She
followed the literary models of her time, and her poems are conventional and didactic. Her
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) printed in London, was the
first book to be published by an American Black.
 Earlier Jupiter Hammon (1720-1806), another educated domestic slave, had become
the first Black in America to have a poem published. His religious poem “An Evening
Thought” appeared as a broadside – also printed in London – in 1760. Though literarily
inferior to Wheatley, he was also used by abolitionists as proof of what Blacks could do given
a Christian education. Arna Bontemps, one of the best-known modern anthologists of Black
literature and himself a poet as well as a significant historian of Black literature, places these
poets in “a tradition of writers in bondage which goes back to Aesop and Terence.”
But in a period of revolution throughout Europe, the American governing groups
feared similar uprisings, and a series of laws made it illegal to educate Blacks. Black
literature therefore went “underground.” The rich African heritage of folk literature thus
remained mostly an oral tradition. That tradition is one which persists to the present day, in
inner-city ghettos as well as in isolated rural areas. It has been documented and studied by
folklorists and other scholars, and by contemporary linguists (notably George Lakoff). Music
formed an important part of this tradition and was an important expression of this people’s
poetic impulse.
The ban on Black literacy during slavery also meant that documentation of Black
experience became one of the most important functions of Black literature. The life story
was one of the two major genres of Afro-American writing before the Civil war, when Black
art was mainly, in the words of one critic, “an expression of suffering and an affirmation of
manhood in the guest for freedom.” The Narrative of William Wells Brown (1847) and
Samuel R. Ward’s The Autobiography of a Fugitive Slave (1855) were particularly
important. Both writers were widely known as anti-slavery lecturers, and both contributed
to Freedom’s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the U.S. (which began publication in New
York in 1827). Brown also wrote the first play by an American Black, The Escape, or A
Leap for Freedom (1858). By far the best and most famous pre-Civil War autobiography,
however, was The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. It was immediately
popular at its publication in 1845, and a revised edition was reissued ten years later under
the title My Bondage and My Freedom.
The other chief pre-Civil War genre in Afro-American writing was the oration, again
based on the Black tradition of oral literature, and especially of powerful pulpit preaching.
From this anti-slavery polemic emerged. David Walker’s pamphlet Appeal (1829) merely
described Black oppression without recommending action, but it was so powerful that it was
outlawed.
In 1850 The Narrative of Sojourner Truth was published, telling the life of a
fighter for Black freedom who has since become as legendary a figure as Harriet Tubman,
who became famous assisting slaves on the Underground Railroad (the system of escape
routes and refuges through which Blacks made their way secretly to the North and freedom).
By the 1850s opinion had hardened on both sides of the slavery issue. Black protest
expressed itself in many ways, including support of the Underground Railroad, lectures, and
anti-slavery resolutions. Frances E.W. Harper made her poetry famous in the 1850s by
giving remarkable public readings. Her poem “Eliza Harris” describes the heroine of Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most important novel to inflame the popular
imagination in the support of anti-slavery cause.
The events of the 1850s moved inexorably toward Civil War. In 1854 the Kansas and
Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had kept equal number of slave and
free states, further encouraging the spread of slavery. In 1857 the Supreme Court’s Dred
Scott Decision sanctioned slavery in Federal Territory. In 1859 John Brown led an armed
raid in a failed attempt to provoke a slave uprising which he hoped would then spread
throughout the South. His execution made him a martyr. When the 1860 presidential
election was won by Abraham Lincoln, the South seceded, fearing that his election would
mean abolition of slavery.
The Civil War ended in 1864. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had declared
slavery at an end, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution completed the
process of liberation two years later. However, the hopes raised by the prospects of freedom
were quickly dashed. Strict segregation was established by a series of laws, the Ku Klux Klan
flourished, and lynchings were frequent. Almost no official provisions were made for the
education of Blacks, or for their integration into the work force. Nonetheless, these years
saw the founding of major Black universities, of important Black periodicals, and of various
groups for Black advancement.
The white literature of “The Gilded Age” seemed especially irrelevant to Afro-
American concerns, whether it was popular and sentimental fiction focused on material
success, or William Dean Howells’ or Edith Wharton’s portrayals of a moneyed leisure class.
Even Henry James’ delicacy of psychological and social exploration, in its appropriate
literary medium, was a luxury few Blacks could afford.
The two outstanding Black leaders of the period were Booker T. Washington and
W.E.B. DuBois. Washington was like a real-life version of a rags-to-riches hero. His
autobiography Up from Slavery (1901), simplistic in style and substance, presents such
values as uprightness, cleanliness, and mother-love, and suggests that those virtues alone
will be properly rewarded by material wealth.
DuBois’ collection The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a deliberate reply to
Washington, expressing DuBois’ very different values and goals for Blacks. In his historical
and social essays – and one short story – DuBois presents some of the multiplicity and
complexity of Black experience and history. He repeatedly uses the metaphor of the veil to
suggest the doubleness of Black life, and both the form and rhetoric suggest the nineteenth-
century oration rather than the simple linear narrative of the life story.
Politically very powerful, Washington advocated a melioristic or conciliatory policy
for Blacks education, and especially vocational training and “moral” improvement leading
only gradually to full civil rights and the vote. DuBois was both much more militant and
more intellectually oriented, stressing the need for higher education for Blacks and
demanding immediate civil rights and the ballot as a means to education and economic
advance rather than as a reward for it.
These two men and their views marked the boundaries of the field in which the Afro-
American future was debated for years to come. DuBois may be said to have “won,” however:
Washington’s views had already begun to seem old-fashioned by the time of his death in
1915.
The essay was far more important than fiction or poetry during these years of trying
to map a plausible future and otherwise find solutions to what was known as “the Negro
Problem.” A book by that title was published in 1903, containing essays by Washington,
DuBois and other Afro-American intellectuals of the day. Scholarship developed as Blacks
investigated and documented their past in such works as William Wells Brown’s The Negro
in the American Rebellion (1867) and William Still’s valuable collection The
Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters
(1872). The most distinguished history, still valuable today, was W.E.B. DuBois’ The
Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States (1896), and his Black
Reconstruction is even finer. In a less political vein, Benjamin Brawley’s The Negro in
Literature and Art in the United States (1910) offers such careful scholarship that it is
also still useful, as is Irvine G. Penn’s The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (1891).
Biography and autobiography continued to be important, but their function shifted
somewhat to focus on Blacks of achievement and distinction. The point was to prove Black
worthiness and capabilities, as indicated, for instance, by the title of William J. Simmon’s
Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive Rising (1887). Washington’s own Up from
Slavery was the most popular autobiography and he also wrote The Life of Frederick
Douglass (1907).
What fiction there was tended to depict stereotypical characters in sentimental plots.
In these works, in the words of one critic, “simple child-like Negroes dance, make love, and
weep, talking all the while in plantation dialect.” Novels written for inspirational purposes
were equally unrealistic. Charles W. Chesnutt almost alone is still valued from the period.
His stories appeared in two collections, The Conjure Woman, and The Wife of His
Youth (both 1899), and one, “The Goophered Grapevine,” was the first Afro-American story
to appear in a major publication, when it was printed by Atlantic Monthly. He also published
three novels, all powerful, controversial, and directly addressed to the issue of race relations.
In poetry, Frances W. Harper continued to publish, and such “mockingbird” poets as
Albery A. Whitman imitated earlier traditional forms and techniques. But it was only with
the beginnings of the modernist period in the 1890s that Black poetry came into its own, in
the work of “the first professional Negro poet,” Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1908). Dunbar,
who wrote both in dialect and standard (or non-dialect) English, faced the difficulty of
balancing the constraints of being a minority poet with writing about the tragic condition of
Black people in pre-Civil Rights Era America. His poem “We Wear the Mask” explains, with
quiet protest, the irony of the Negro’s life:
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask.
A son of former slaves, he wrote dialect poems such as “When de C’on Pone’s Hot,”
and it is these which made his fame. He has been criticized or rejected later for his
sentimentalized and demeaning version of Black life and even nostalgia for the plantation,
but it can be argued that Dunber was writing within the limits established by his audience,
both Black and White, at a time when other Black American were struggling even to attain
basic civil rights. Unfortunately, Dunbar’s dialect did not capture the resonance and rhythm
of actual speech, but rather the conventionized talk of minstrel show “darkies.” Other poets
of the period tried to capture dialects more genuinely, as did James Edwin Campbell in his
Echoes from the Cabin and Elsewhere (1905). But such poetry was difficult to read
and lacked popular appeal. Other poets, such as William Stanley Braithwaite, rejected Black
subject matter and speech altogether, and wrote in standard English on traditional topics.
Success in accurately rendering Black speech had to wait.
The period between the two World Wars, was the one which saw Afro-American
literature arrive at full maturity, flowering first in what came to be called “The Harlem
Renaissance.” During the twenties the Harlem district of New York became the center of
Black music, art, and life. Harlem had historically been inhabited by a succession of
immigrant populations. During the twenties it became a “promised land” for Blacks, drawing
people from other regions of the U.S., from Latin America and the West Indies, and even
from Africa. By 1930 almost the entire area was exclusively Black. This area became the
home for one of the greatest periods of Black art and entertainment, the Harlem
Renaissance, when large number of writers, artists, and musicians lived and visited there.
Of the many fine writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, those who remain
best-known are Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Claude McKay (1891-1948), Countee Cullen
(1903-1946), and Jean Toomer (1894-1967). Langston Hughes has been compared to
Whitman and Sandburg as a “poet of the people.” His work is always concerned with the
Negro’s tragic cultural and social situation. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” he portrays the
cosmic history of the Negro as demarcated by the rivers of the continent he left (the Nile and
the Congo) and those of the continent to which he came as a slave. In other poems such as
“I, too, Sing America” Hughes puts his faith in the American ideal which he hopes will help
his people.
A contemporary of Hughes, Countee Cullen is less a social poet. Still, he is at his best
when his poems gently take up the subject of race, as in “Heritage,” in which he questions
whether the American Negro, after centuries of separation, has any affinity with Africa.
Claude McKay came from Jamaica, in the West Indies, and felt more alienated in
America than Hughes and Cullen. He lived abroad for a time, in self-imposed exile, and upon
his return he wrote the award-winning and best-selling novel Home to Harlem. Perhaps
the most ambitious single work of the Harlem Renaissance was Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923),
a mixed collection of poems, semi-dramatic sketches, and fiction, based on his brief but
affecting experience as superintendent of a rural Black school in Georgia. The book was
acclaimed as a significant contribution to the experimental fiction of the period as well as to
Afro-American literature. In 1927 James Weldon Johnson’s (1871-1938) The
Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, originally published in 1912, was reissued, and
his poems were published in God’s Trombones.
With these developments came the idea of “The New Negro,” a phrase (used as the
title of an important anthology of Black literature and art, edited by Alan Locke) which
expressed a new Black pride and sense of dignity. There were many contributing factors.
World War I had provided employment for many Blacks who had migrated from the South
to the industrial Northeast. And of course many Black soldiers fought in the war, some of
them at least in this way seeing the world beyond the U.S. Black leadership shifted from
Tuskeegee, Alabama, the center of Black education, to New York. The “Back to Africa”
movement, a Negro nationalist movement led by the charismatic Marcus Garvey, created a
greater sense of cohesion and solidarity among Blacks. The modernist interest in
anthropological studies, especially concerning primitive cultures, created a new attention to
and respect for African and Black culture. Many White writers wrote works celebrating
qualities they imagined characteristic of Black life: Eugene O’Neill (The Emperor Jones),
Carl van Vechten (Nigger Heaven), and DuBose Heyward (Porgy).
The artistic excitement of the 1920s came to an abrupt end with the stock market
crash in 1929. The Great Depression of the 1930s affected Blacks even more harshly than the
rest of the population. American writers in general turned to more political and social issues,
and Black writing seemed a natural enough part of a larger concern with social and economic
justice. However, at least one important poet first published in this decade: Sterling Brown
(b. 1901), with Southern Roads in 1932. Also a scholar of Black literature, he had long
been honored among Blacks but has only recently gained wider recognition.
The best-known novelist to begin writing in the thirties was Richard Wright (1908-
1960). In his fine autobiography Black Boy (1945) he tells of his troubled youth in the South
and his escape to Chicago. Like many American writers during the Depression, Wright
looked to Marxism in the hope of economic justice and social equality. He joined the
Communist Party and in 1937 moved to New York to become Harlem editor of the
Communist newspaper The Daily Worker. He published his first book, Uncle Tom’s
Children: Four Novellas, the next year, and Native Son in 1940. The well-known social
and literary critic Irving Howe has said, “The day Native Son appeared, American culture
was changed forever.” What he meant was that no one reading the book could continue to
accept the old excuses for the Afro-American condition: “it made impossible a repetition of
the old lies. The book was an instant success, and that success was repeated by Black Boy.
Wright became the first Black on the national bestseller list. But his own recognition only
made him more unhappy with the persistence of racism. In 1944 he left the Communist Party
and in 1947, further embittered, left America. In Europe, where he lived until his death, he
continued to write, both fiction, such as The Outsider (19S3), and essays, notably those
collected in White Man, Listen! (19S7). But there is general agreement that his later
writing does not posses the power of the early work.
The other two Black novelists who, with Wright, tower above the others are Ralph
Waldo Ellison (1914-1994) and James Baldwin (1924-1987). When Invisible Man
appeared in 1952 it had an even greater initial impact than Native Son. A panel of literary
critics in 1965 called it “the most distinguished single work” published in the U.S. in the
previous 20 years. Like Wright, Ellison moved from an academically successful boyhood in
the South to Harlem, where in fact he met Wright and was befriended and encouraged by
him. Though he also involved himself in left-wing politics, his disillusion came quickly, and
his description of Brotherhood in Invisible Man clearly bespeaks his feelings about the
American Communist Party. He was editor of Negro Quaterly and saw active duty in World
War II before writing his novel. Since then he has taught and continued to write occasional
stories and essays. An important essay collection, Shadow and Act, appeared in 1964, but
he has yet to publish a second novel.
Invisible Man has been criticized for not being militant enough, and accused of
lacking the instant emotional impact of, for instance, Native Son. But this is precisely its
greatest accomplishment. Through the use of myth and symbol it achieves a universality any
critic can recognize. Ellison’s aim, he said, was based in his early “passion to link together
all I loved within the Negro community and all those things I felt in the world which lay
beyond.” In Invisible Man he succeeds.
Janes Baldwin was born in Harlem, and at the age of twenty met Wright, who
encouraged him to write. He has spent much of his life in Europe, first publishing from there.
His first book, the heavily autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) is still
often considered his best. His subsequent novels deal with homosexuality, interracial love,
and racial conflict; the best-known are Giovanni’s Room (1955), and Another Country
(1962). But it is also because of his essays that he has been called the most important
American Black writer of the twentieth century: Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody
Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963) include some of the best. More
recently he has published A Rap on Race (1971), a series of dialogues with the famous
anthropologist Margaret Mead. He has also written a successful play, Blues for Mr.
Charlie (1964). Although he, too, has been accused of not being militant enough, his
brilliant verbal force has often exploded in articulate anger, and he has always maintained
that the fate of American Whites is inseparable from that of Blacks.
The most prominent novelist to emerge from the next generation is unquestionably
Ishmael Reed (b. 1938), with such exuberant, absurdist works as Yellow Back Radio
Broke Down (1969). Of more extreme Black voices, the best-known is LeRoi Jones (b.
1934), who at 32 took the name Imamu Amiri Baraka to show his connection to Africa and
his rejection of White culture. He is better known as a poet (Preface to a Twenty Volume
Suicide Note, 1961) and playwright than as a prose writer, though he has also published
fiction, essays, and two books on Black Music. In “Black Arts” he writes “We want poems
that kill, Assasin poems that shoot guns.../ We want a black poem. And a Black world.” Such
plays as Dutchman and The Slave (both 1964) are at least equally savage.
Such anger was partly a development from the Harlem Renaissance, which made
Black poetry a poetry of open protest against the inferior role forced on Blacks by white
society. Beginning in the 1950s, both the leadership of Malcolm X and a new renewal of
Black separatism, and the moral idealism of Martin Luther King inspired social and political
poetry among Blacks. The Civil Rights Marches and confrontations of the 1960s gave Black
writers a new context for their poetry, though were far from unified in their approach.
A more moderate reaction to the same period is the humanistic protest poetry of
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), and Margaret Walker (1915-1998). Brooks is perhaps the
most accomplished Black poet after Hughes. Her poetry is realistic about the tragic plight of
the American Black, but is without rancor, for she is imbued with the moral idealism of Dr.
Martin Luther King. She has reached a wide audience of Black and White readers, and won
the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In one poem, “Riders to the Blood Red Wrath,” she comes
to the conclusion that the American Black’s suffering gives him a unique insight into
humanity:
But my detention and my massive strain
And my distortion and my Calvary
I grind into a little lorgnette
Most slyly: To read man’s humanity.
But after the assassinations in the sixties of President Kennedy, Dr. King, Malcolm X,
and Robert Kennedy, most Blacks found it difficult not to be cynical. Some, like Baraka,
began to write what has been called “the poetry of hate.” “It is a poetry based on and
motivated by “poetic” hatred for white Americans and everything associated with them,
including middle class Negroes,” writes critic Arthur Davis.
Younger Black poets such as Don L. Lee (b. 1942), Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934), and Nikki
Giovanni (b.1943) have all been strongly influenced by Baraka’s experiments in poetry and
his militant stance. These poets write what has been termed protested literature, but it is
also a poetry which upholds the values of Black families supporting each other, the strength
of Black women, and the need for Blacks to achieve a self-actualizing identity by which they
accept themselves without wanting to be White.
These poets, regardless of their particular stance, have inherited an emphasis on the
Black vernacular, and a recognition that Black poets can and must address the Black
experience in their poetry. From the ambivalence of Claude McKay, to the humanistic
protests of Gwendolyn Brooks, to the revolutionary militancy of Sonia Sanchez, the Black
writers persist in a commitment to ejecting racism and its effects and to speaking out against
a dishonest, unjust establishment.
Finney, Kathe Davis. “Afro-American Literature”.
American Literature: A Handbook of American Literature for students of English
/ Zbigniew Lewicki, ed. P. 75-79)

Later two African American women published some of the most important post-
World War II American fiction. In The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon
(1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison created a
strikingly original fiction that sounded different notes from lyrical recollection to magic
realism. Like Ellison, Morrison drew on diverse literary and folk influences and dealt with
important phases of black history — i.e., slavery in Beloved and the Harlem
Renaissance in Jazz. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Alice Walker,
after writing several volumes of poetry and a novel dealing with the civil rights
movement (Meridian [1976]), received the Pulitzer Prize for her black feminist novel The
Color Purple (1982).
https://www.britannica.com/art/American-literature/African-American-literature
2. Read the Study Guide on Langston Hughes and the selections of his
poems. Answer the questions in the Discussion Section.

Langston Hughes
(1902-1967)
Besides being a poet, playwright, novelist, songwriter, biographer, editor, newspaper
columnist, translator and lecturer, Langston Hughes also included in his prolific career
earlier stints as a merchant seaman, a chef (in Paris), and a beach-comber (in Italy and
Spain). Born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, he lived the first twelve years of his
life in Kansas, Colorado, Indiana, and New York State. He graduated from high school in
Cleveland, Ohio, where in his senior year he was elected class poet and editor of the year-
book. Hughes' other travels included trips to Europe and Africa, and the character of his
adventurous, wandering life was reflected in such works as his novel, Not Without Laughter
(1930), his short stories, and his autobiography.
Hughes received recognition as a poet when, as a young man working as a waiter in a
Washington, D.C. hotel, he showed some of his poems to a guest, the eminent poet, Vachel
Lindsay. Linday enthusiastically introduced the poems to a literary gathering at the hotel
and Hughes' first book, The Weary Blues, was published as a result of the encouragement
he received from Lindsay.
By 1925, Hughes, together with other Negro writers, had formed a group in the
Harlem section of New York City for the purpose of exchanging ideas, encouraging one
another, and, eventually, sharing in the triumph created by the sudden popularity of their
work. As spokesman for the group, Hughes published an article, "The Negro Artist and The
Racial Mountain," which amounted to a public declaration of the intent of Hughes and his
contemporaries to break from their literary heritage and to initiate a new trend in Negro
literature. For new black writers, Harlem and its people were to provide the inspiration for
much of their artistic work.
In later years, Hughes became known as the "O. Henry of Harlem" and wrote
countless short stories, a number of volumes of poetry, seven novels, and six plays. In his
early volumes of poetry, he successfully caught and projected scenes of urban Negro life, and
his sketches in verse with their undertones of bitterness, humor, and pathos became also a
form of social protest.
In constant demand as a lecturer, Hughes traveled on speaking tours throughout the
United States, to the West Indies, and to parts of Europe and Africa. He received many
awards and honors for his writings, which have been translated into more than 25 languages.
 Dreams
by Langston Hughes
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
(Bode, Carl. Highlights of American Literature. Washington, D.C.: English Language Programs
Division Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs United States Information Agency, 1995. P. 228 – 230)
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
by Langston Hughes
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human
veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve
seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44428/the-negro-speaks-of-rivers
Mother to Son
by Langston Hughes
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se (1) been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
_______________________
1. I’se (dialect): I have.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47559/mother-to-son
 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Dreams
1. What is the symbolic meaning of “Life is a broken-winged bird”?
2. Does the theme of this poem have a universal significance? Give your reasons.
3. Could this be called a “protest” poem? Explain.
4. How does the fact that the poem was written by a Negro poet give it a special poignancy?
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
1. What does the poet mean when he says that his soul has grown deep like the rivers?
2. What is the purpose of the second stanza?
3. How do the repetitions heighten the effectiveness of the poem?
Mother to Son
1. What is the central idea of this poem?
2. What symbolic meaning is attached to “crystal stair”?
3. Does the mother’s counsel have universal application? Explain.

3. Read the Study Guide on Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man”. Answer
the questions in the Discusion Section.
Ralph Ellison
(1914-1994)
I am a novelist, not an activist. But I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens
to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement. As to the individual, I am
primarily responsible for the health of American literature and culture. When I write, I am trying
to make some sense out of chaos. To think that a writer must think about his Negroness is to fall
into a trap.
Quoted in The New York Times Magazine, November 20, 1966.

America belongs to everyone who loves it. Each must live his life and understand it, and be
responsible for his own conscience. The way home we each seek is that condition of man's being at
home in the world which is called love, and which we term democracy.
Quoted in Mirror, February 20, 1953.
Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) was born in Oklahoma. He has seen many sides of Negro
life and has put the essence of them into his outstanding novel, Invisible Man.Though it was
published in 1952, it is still timely.
The characters are strongly if simply drawn. They are often types, often exaggerations,
but they stay in the reader’s mind. There is the Negro president of the college the young hero
attends, a shrewd, classic “Uncle Tom (1),” using both white and black men for his own
benefit. There is the bigoted Southern businessman and his opposite number (2) in the
North. There is the young Negro idealist who is killed because of his idealism. There is the
Black Nationalist leader, Ras the Exhorter, a kind of leader later to become much more
important on the American scene. There is the Communist official in Harlem, using the
Negro to help the aims of the Party, and a gallery of others, black and white.
The nameless hero, the Invisible Man, meets all these characters in the course of the
book. A few treat him well. Most treat him badly. Many ignore him. They never see him as a
person. That is why at the end of the book he retreats to complete invisibility. No one can
see him in his cellar except himself.
Ellison tells his story with an intensitythat hits the reader hard. In the first chapter of
the book, from which an excerpt is taken, the Invisible Man tells us what it means to be
invisible and what he has done in his desperate effort to cope with the problem.
_________________________
1. Uncle Tom: term applied to Negroes whose behavior towards whites is regarded as
fawning or servile.
2. opposite number: a person having a rank, position, or function comparable with
that of another in a different situation or organization.
 SELECTION I
from Invisible Man
Chapter 1
One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near
darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels
and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his
he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he
struggled. I pulled his chin down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had
seen the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and the blood gush out, and I yelled,
“Apologize! Apologize!” But he continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him again and
again until he went down heavily, on his knees, profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly,
in a frenzy because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood. Oh yes, I
kicked him! And in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there
beneath the lamp light in the deserted street, holding him by the collar with one hand, and
opening the knife with my teeth when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me,
actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare! And I stopped
the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to the street. I stared at
him hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the darkness. He lay there, moaning on the
asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom. It unnerved me. I was both disgusted and
ashamed. I was like a drunken man myself, wavering about on weakened legs. Then I was
amused. Something in this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch
of his life. I began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would he have awakened at the point of
death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living? But I didn’t linger. I ran
away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. The next day I saw his
picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been ‘mugged’. Poor fool,
poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man!
Most of the time (although I do not choose as I once did to deny the violence of my
days by ignoring it) I am not so overtly violent. I remember that I am invisible and walk
softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there
are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers. I learned in time though that it is
possible to carry on a fight against them without their realizing it. For instance, I have been
carrying on a fight with Monopolated Light & Power for some time now. I use their service
and pay them nothing at all, and they don’t know it. Oh, they suspect that power is being
drained off, but they don't know where. All they know is that according to the master meter
back there in their power stationa hell of a lot of free current is disappearing somewhere into
the jungle of Harlem. The joke, of course, is that I don’t live in Harlem but in a border area.
Several years ago (before I discovered the advantage of being invisible) I went through the
routine process of buying service and paying their outrageous rates. But no more. I gave up
all that, along with my apartment, and my old way of life: That way based upon the fallacious
assumption that I, like other men, was visible. Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free
in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and
forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in
thenight from Ras the Destroyer. But that’s getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the
end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
The point now is that I found a home or a hole in the ground, as you will. Now don’t
jump to the conclusion that because I call my home a ‘hole’ it is damp and cold like a grave;
there are cold holes and warm holes. Mine is a warm hole. And remember, a bear retires to
his hole for the winter and lives until spring; then he comes strolling out like the Easter chick
breaking from its shell. I say all this to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because
I'm invisible and live in a hole, I am dead. I am neither dead nor in a state of suspended
animation. Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation. My hole is warm and
full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole
of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway.Or the Empire State Building on a photographer’s
dream night. But that is taking advantage of you. Those two spots are among the darkest of
our whole civilization pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I've heard)
which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how
the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the
spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.) I know; I have
been boomeranged across my head so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness.
And I love light. Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire
light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality,
gives birth to my form. A beautiful girl once told me of a recurring nightmare in which she
lay in the center of a large dark room and felt her face expand until it filled the whole room,
becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney. And so it is with
me. Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's
form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until
I discovered my invisibility.
That is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power. The deeper reason, I
mean: It allows me to feel my vital aliveness. I also fight them for taking so much of my
money before I learned to protect myself. In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369
lights. I've wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with
the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know.
I've already begun to wire the wall. A junkman I know, a man of vision, has supplied me with
wire and sockets. Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever
more and brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth. When I finish all four
walls, then I’ll start on the floor. Just how that will go, I don’t know. Yet when you have lived
invisible as long as I have you develop a certain ingenuity. I’ll solve the problem. And maybe
I’ll invent a gadget to place my coffeepot on the fire while I lie in bed, and even invent a
gadget to warm my bed like the fellow I saw in one of the picture magazines who made
himself a gadget towarm his shoes! Though invisible, I am in the great American tradition
of tinkers. That makes me kin to Ford (2), Edison (3) and Franklin (4). Call me, since I
have a theory and a concept, a ‘thinker-tinker.’ Yes, I’ll warm my shoes; they need it, they’re
usually full of holes. I’ll do that and more.
Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical
deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my
ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong (5) playing
and singing “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue” all at the same time. Sometimes now I
listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the
red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that
military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because
he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is
invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I
asked for acigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer (6), which I lighted when I got home and
sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives
one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead
and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware
of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip
into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis' music...
____________________________
1. mugged: (slang) assaulted and robbed.
2.Ford: Henry Ford (1863-1947), American automobile manufacturer.
3. Edison: Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931), American inventor.
4. Franklin: Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), American statesman, writer, and inventor.
5. Louis Armstrong: famous American jazz musician (1900-1971).
6. reefer: (slang) marijuana cigarette.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why does the narrator in this excerpt attack the other man? Why does he stop short of
slitting the other man’s throat with his knife?
2. What does the narrator mean when hesays he suddenly realized that the white man did
not see him?
3. Are bursts of violence usual with the narrator?
4. How does he customarily handle his “invisibility”?
5. What does he mean when he says he can see the darkness of lightness? What outwardly
light places does he say are the darkest parts of American culture? What does he mean by
this?
6. Why does the narrator refer to the junkman who is supplying him with wire and sockets
as “a man of vision”? Do you think this reference has meaning on more than one level of
interpretation?
7. In what way does the narrator say he is like his invisible compatriots?
8. Why does he say Louis Armstrong was able to make poetry out of being invisible?
9. Is race the only criterion that society uses to make a person invisible? Explain.
(Carl Bode Highlights of American Literature. Washington, D.C.:
English Language Programs Division Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
United States Information Agency, 1995. P. 244-248)

4. Read the biographical note on life and literary career of Alice Walker,
and the short story “Everyday Use”. Answer the questions in the
Discussion Section.
Alice Walker
Alice Walker, in full Alice Malsenior Walker, (born February 9, 1944,
Eatonton, Georgia, U.S.), American writer whose novels, short stories, and poems are noted
for their insightful treatment of African American culture. Her novels, most notably The
Color Purple (1982), focus particularly on women.
Walker was the eighth child of African American share-croppers. While growing up
she was accidentally blinded in one eye, and her mother gave her a typewriter, allowing her
to write instead of doing chores. She received a scholarship to attend Spelman College,
where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College. After
graduating in 1965, Walker moved to Mississippi and became involved in the civil rights
movement. She also began teaching and publishing short stories and essays. She married in
1967, but the couple divorced in 1976.
Walker’s first book of poetry, Once, appeared in 1968, and her first novel, The Third
Life of Grange Copeland (1970), a narrative that spans 60 years and three generations,
followed two years later. A second volume of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias and Other
Poems, and her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black
Woman, both appeared in 1973. The latter bears witness to sexist violence and abuse in the
African American community. After moving to New York, Walker
completed Meridian (1976), a novel describing the coming of age of several civil rights
workers in the 1960s.
Walker later moved to California, where she wrote her most popular novel, The Color
Purple (1982). An epistolary novel, it depicts the growing up and self-realization of an
African American woman between 1909 and 1947 in a town in Georgia. The book won
a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985. A musical version
produced by Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones premiered in 2004.
Walker’s later fiction includes The Temple of My Familiar, an ambitious examination
of racial and sexual tensions (1989); Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), a narrative centred
on female genital mutilation; By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), the story of a family
of anthropologists posing as missionaries in order to gain access to a Mexican tribe;
and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2005), about an older woman’s quest for identity.
Reviewers complained that these novels employed New Age abstractions and poorly
conceived characters, though Walker continued to draw praise for championing racial
and gender equality in her work. She also released the volume of short stories The Way
Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000) and several other volumes of poetry,
including Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), A Poem Traveled Down My
Arm (2003), Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010), and Taking the Arrow Out of
the Heart (2018). Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991) collects
poetry from 1965 to 1990.
 Walker’s essays were compiled in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist
Prose (1983), Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing
of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001), We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting
For (2006), and The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World
Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way (2013). Walker also wrote juvenile fiction and critical
essays on such female writers as Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston. She
cofounded a short-lived press in 1984.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Walker
Everyday Use
by Alice Walker
I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday
afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard.
It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine
sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look
up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house.
Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners,
homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a
mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand,
that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her.
You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has “made it” is confronted,
as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A pleasant
surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to curse
out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other’s
faces. Sometimes the mother and father weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans
across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these
programs.
Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a
TV program of this sort. Out of a dark and soft-seated limousine I am ushered into a bright
room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny Carson
who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Then we are on the stage and Dee
is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she
has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers.
In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the
winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a
hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day,
breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes
after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain
between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall.
But of course all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me
to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens
in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and
witty tongue.
But that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a
quick tongue? Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems
to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head fumed in
whichever way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She would always look anyone in the eye.
Hesitation was no part of her nature.
“How do I look, Mama?” Maggie says, showing just enough of her thin body enveloped
in pink skirt and red blouse for me to know she’s there, almost hidden by the door.
“Come out into the yard,” I say.
Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person
rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him?
That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet
in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground.
 Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She’s a woman now,
though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve
years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie’s arms sticking to me, her hair
smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched
open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the
sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched
the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don’t
you do a dance around the ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much.
I used to think she hated Maggie too. But that was before we raised money, the church
and me, to send her to Augusta to school. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words,
lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath
her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we
didn’t necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us
away, like dimwits, at just the moment we seemed about to understand.
Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation from high
school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d made from an old suit somebody gave me.
She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker
for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a
style of her own: and knew what style was.
I never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed down.
Don’t ask my why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now. Sometimes
Maggie reads to me. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can’t see well. She knows she is
not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passes her by. She will marry John
Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and then I’ll be free to sit here and I guess
just sing church songs to myself. Although I never was a good singer. Never could carry a
tune. I was always better at a man’s job. I used to love to milk till I was hooked in the side in
’49. Cows are soothing and slow and don’t bother you, unless you try to milk them the
wrong way.
I have deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three rooms, just like the one
that burned, except the roof is tin; they don’t make shingle roofs anymore. There are no real
windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not
square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside. This house is in a pasture too,
like the other one. No doubt when Dee sees it she will want to tear it down. She wrote me
once that no matter where we “choose” to live, she will manage to come see us. But she will
never bring her friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie asked me, “Mama,
when did Dee ever have any friends?”
She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on washday after school.
Nervous girls who never laughed. Impressed with her they worshiped the well-turned
phrase, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye. She read to them.
When she was courting Jimmy T she didn’t have much time to pay to us, but turned
all her fault-finding power on him. He flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of
ignorant flashy people. She hardly had time to recompose herself.
When she comes I will meet … but there they are!
Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay her
with my hand. “Come back here,” I say. And she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with
her toe.
It is hard to see them clearly through the strong sun. But even the first glimpse of leg
out of the car tells me it is Dee. Her feet were always neat looking, as if God himself had
shaped them with a certain style. From the other side of the car comes a short, stocky man.
Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail. I hear
Maggie suck in her breath. “Uhnnnh,” is what it sounds like. Like when you see the wriggling
end of a snake just in front of your foot on the road. “Uhnnnh.”
Dee next. A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A dress so loud it hurts my
eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel my
whole face warming from the heat waves it throws out. Earrings gold, too, and hanging down
to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves her arm up to shake
the folds of the dress out of her armpits. The dress is loose and flows, and as she walks closer,
I like it. I hear Maggie go “Uhnnnh” again. It is her sister’s hair. It stands straight up like the
wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope
about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears.
“Wa-su-zo-Tean-o!” she says, coming on in that gliding way the dress makes her
move. The short stocky fellow with the hair to his navel is all grinning and he follows up with
“Asalamalakim, my mother and sister!” He moves to hug Maggie but she falls back, right up
against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling there and when I look up I see the
perspiration falling off her chin.
“Don’t get up,” says Dee. Since I am stout it takes something of a push. You can see
me trying to move a second or two before I make it. She turns, showing white heels through
her sandals, and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops down
quickly and snaps off picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with
Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is
included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and
Maggie and the house. Then she puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up
and kisses me on the forehead.
Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions with Maggie’s hand. Maggie’s
hand is as limp as a fish, and probably as cold, despite the sweat, and she keeps trying to pull
it back. It looks like Asalamalakim wants to shake hands but wants to do it fancy. Or maybe
he don’t know how people shake hands. Anyhow, he soon gives up on Maggie.
“Well,” I say. “Dee.”
“No, Mama,” she says. “Not ‘Dee,’ Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo!”
“What happened to ‘Dee’?” I wanted to know.
“She’s dead,” Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the
people who oppress me.”
“You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie,” I said. Dicie is my
sister. She named Dee. We called her “Big Dee” after Dee was born.
“But who was she named after?” asked Wangero.
“I guess after Grandma Dee,” I said.
“And who was she named after?” asked Wangero.
“Her mother,” I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired. “That’s about as far back as
I can trace it,” I said. Though, in fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil
War through the branches.
“Well,” said Asalamalakim, “there you are.”
“Uhnnnh,” I heard Maggie say.
“There I was not,” I said, “before ‘Dicie’ cropped up in our family, so why should I try
to trace it that far back?”
He just stood there grinning, looking down on me like somebody inspecting a Model
A car. Every once in a while he and Wangero sent eye signals over my head.
“How do you pronounce this name?” I asked.
“You don’t have to call me by it if you don’t want to,” said Wangero.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I asked. “If that’s what you want us to call you, we’ll call you.”
“I know it might sound awkward at first,” said Wangero.
“I’ll get used to it,” I said. “Ream it out again.”
Well, soon we got the name out of the way. Asalamalakim had a name twice as long
and three times as hard. After I tripped over it two or three times he told me to just call him
Hakim-a-barber. I wanted to ask him was he a barber, but I didn’t really think he was, so I
didn’t ask.
“You must belong to those beef cattle peoples down the road,” I said. They said
“Asalamalakim” when they met you, too, but they didn’t shake hands. Always too busy:
feeding the cattle, fixing the fences, putting up salt-lick shelters, throwing down hay. When
the white folks poisoned some of the herd, the men stayed up all night with rifles in their
hands. I walked a mile and a half just to see the sight.
 Hakim-a-barber said, “I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle
is not my style.” They didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask, whether Wangero (Dee) had really gone
and married him.
We sat down to eat and right away he said he didn’t eat collards and pork was unclean.
Wangero, though, went on through the chitlins and corn bread, the greens and everything
else. She talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes. Everything delighted her. Even the
fact that we still used the benches her daddy made for the table when we couldn’t afford to
buy chairs.
“Oh, Mama!” she cried. Then turned to Hakim-a-barber. “I never knew how lovely
these benches are. You can feel the rump prints,” she said, running her hands underneath
her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee’s
butter dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was something I wanted to ask you if I could
have.” She jumped up from the table and went over in the corner where the churn stood, the
milk in it clabber by now. She looked at the churn and looked at it.
“This churn top is what I need,” she said. “Didn’t Uncle Buddy whittle it out of a tree
you all used to have?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Uh huh,” she said happily. “And I want the dasher, too.”
“Uncle Buddy whittle that, too?” asked the barber.
Dee (Wangero) looked up at me.
“Aunt Dee’s first husband whittled the dash,” said Maggie so low you almost couldn’t
hear her. “His name was Henry, but they called him Stash.”
“Maggie’s brain is like an elephant’s,” Wangero said, laughing. “I can use the churn
top as a centerpiece for the alcove table,” she said, sliding a plate over the churn, “and I’ll
think of something artistic to do with the dasher.”
When she finished wrapping the dasher the handle stuck out. I took it for a moment
in my hands. You didn’t even have to look close to see where hands pushing the dasher up
and down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there were a lot of small
sinks; you could see where thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light
yellow wood, from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived.
After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of my bed and started rifling
through it. Maggie hung back in the kitchen over the dishpan. Out came Wangero with two
quilts. They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them on
the quilt frames on the front porch and quilted them. One was in the Lone Star pattern. The
other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both of them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee
had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s paisley shirts. And
one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa
Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War.
“Mama,” Wangero said sweet as a bird. “Can I have these old quilts?”
I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door slammed.
“Why don’t you take one or two of the others?” I asked. “These old things was just
done by me and Big Dee from some tops your grandma pieced before she died.”
“No,” said Wangero. “I don’t want those. They are stitched around the borders by
machine.”
“That’ll make them last better,” I said.
“That’s not the point,” said Wangero. “These are all pieces of dresses Grandma used
to wear. She did all this stitching by hand. Imagine!” She held the quilts securely in her arms,
stroking them.
“Some of the pieces, like those lavender ones, come from old clothes her mother
handed down to her,” I said, moving up to touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero) moved back just
enough so that I couldn’t reach the quilts. They already belonged to her.
“Imagine!” she breathed again, clutching them closely to her bosom.
“The truth is,” I said, “I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she marries
John Thomas.”
She gasped like a bee had stung her.
 “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” she said. “She’d probably be backward enough
to put them to everyday use.”
“I reckon she would,” I said. “God knows I been saving ’em for long enough with
nobody using ’em. I hope she will!” I didn’t want to bring up how I had offered Dee
(Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told they were old-fashioned,
out of style.
“But they’re priceless!” she was saying now, furiously; for she has a temper. “Maggie
would put them on the bed and in five years they’d be in rags. Less than that!”
“She can always make some more,” I said. “Maggie knows how to quilt.”
Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. “You just will not understand. The point is
these quilts, these quilts!”
“Well,” I said, stumped. “What would you do with them?”
“Hang them,” she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts.
Maggie by now was standing in the door. I could almost hear the sound her feet made
as they scraped over each other.
“She can have them, Mama,” she said, like somebody used to never winning anything,
or having anything reserved for her. “I can ‘member Grandma Dee without the quilts.”
I looked at her hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and gave
her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her
how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt.
She looked at her sister with something like fear but she wasn’t mad at her. This was
Maggie’s portion. This was the way she knew God to work.
When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down
to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in church and the spirit of God touches me and I
get happy and shout. I did something I never done before: hugged Maggie to me, then
dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped
them into Maggie’s lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed with her mouth open.
“Take one or two of the others,” I said to Dee.
But she turned without a word and went out to Hakim-a-barber.
“You just don’t understand,” she said, as Maggie and I came out to the car.
“What don’t I understand?” I wanted to know.
“Your heritage,” she said, And then she turned to Maggie, kissed her, and said, “You
ought to try to make something of yourself too, Maggie. It’s really a new day for us. But from
the way you and Mama still live you’d never know it.”
She put on some sunglasses that hid everything above the tip of her nose and chin.
Maggie smiled; maybe at the sunglasses. But a real smile, not scared. After we
watched the car dust settle I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us
sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed.
https://harpers.org/archive/1973/04/everyday-use/
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What kind of person do you think the mother is? How does she seem to feel about
Dee? About Maggie?
2. What elements in the story prepare the reader for Dee before she arrives on the scene?
3. How would you describe the way that Dee reacts to the food and objects in her mother’s
house? What role did Dee assume for herself? Does this change after she leaves home?
4. Discuss the relationship between Maggie and Dee.
5. Why has Dee assumed African dress, hairstyle, and name? How would you characterize
the attitudes of her and her new husband/boyfriend toward their race?
6. Why does Mrs. Johnson decide to stand up to Dee and not allow her to take the quilts at
the end of the story?