The American Century: Literature since 1945 641Toni Cade turned to her own ancestors first, adding her grandmother’s name,
Bambara, to her own. That name was to appear on her short story collection Gorilla,
My Love (1972), about a young black woman who is trying to survive in the city –
and whose sassy straight talk expresses what Bambara herself called “a certain way of
being in the world.” “I say,” the young woman declares, “just like the hussy my
daughter always say I am.” Her words, catching the rhythms of African-American
folk speech and the “games, chants, jingles” of the streets, are her way of improvising
and affirming herself; they speak resistance, and her sense of relation to other black
women, into life.
Audre Lord was to pursue a similar path to Bambara, in her accounts of what she
called the “strong triad of grandmother mother daughter,” the “mattering core” of
strong black females who gave her sense of presence. So, as we shall see later, have
many other African-American women novelists. So, too, has a writer whose work is
part autobiography, part picaresque fiction, and part social history, Maya Angelou
(1928–). In the first volume of her series of autobiographical fictions, I Know Why
the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Angelou confers an exemplary status upon the
experiences of the narrator, whose childhood is spent shuttling between rural and
urban America, smalltown America, San Francisco, and St. Louis. Exemplary, too, is
what she learned: the two major strands of the African-American tradition, both of
them inherited from women. From her grandmother, the narrator tells us, she
absorbed the religious influences, the gospel tradition of African-Americans. From
her mother, in turn, she received “the blues tradition.” Both elements of the black
vernacular inform the account of this exceptional yet exemplary woman, and her
meetings with other remarkable black women: among them, a friend who teaches
her to speak again, to rediscover the beauty of the “human voice,” after the shock of
rape has left her temporarily dumb. They also inform the later, extraordinary
volumes in this series, Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and
Getting’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God’s
Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), and A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002).
“The black man is the future of the world,” wrote the man who has been described
as the father of the Black Arts movement, Imamu Amiri Baraka (1934–). “Let Black
people understand that / they are the lovers and the sons of lovers,” Baraka has
declared, “ / and warriors and sons of warriors. Are poems / poets & all the loveliness
here in the world.” “We are unfair, and unfair,” he says elsewhere, in a poem titled
“Black Art,” “ / we are black magicians, black art / & we make in black labs of the
heart / ... / ... we own / the night.” Appropriating the mythic power that Western
symbolism habitually imputes to blackness, black writers have been in the vanguard
of those aiming to turn those symbols inside out, so as to make them a source of
pride for black people and a source of fear and wonder for whites. Absorbing black
cultural influences as ancient as Islam and as modern as the music of John Coltrane,
they have pushed Langston Hughes’s commitment to cultural separateness to a fresh
extreme. As far as forms and performances are concerned, this has involved the
frequent adoption of the “preacher style” of public speaking, endemic to the African
and African-American traditions, where the poet/leader recites at a rapt, rapid paceGGray_c05.indd 641ray_c 05 .indd 641 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM