The American Century: Literature since 1945 661significant art, to celebrate human possibility “in spite of the fact that human
existence is so often mostly a low-down dirty shame.” Murray has realized his belief
in the formal and moral potential of the blues in his fictional trilogy, Train Whistle
Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991), and The Seven League Boots (1996). The three
novels trace the growth of their protagonist and narrator, Scooter, from his childhood
in smalltown Alabama to his maturity as a bass player in a touring jazz band. Along
the way, he learns lessons about living and testifying from his family, friends, and
neighbors; from the man, for instance, who plays guitar “as if he were also an
engineer telling tall tales on a train whistle.” Above all, he learns individual worth
and communal responsibility; he discovers that the best way to live is in an instinctive,
rhythmic exchange between self and others – something like the relationship
between musicians, the jazz soloist and the supporting band.
Two African-American male writers of an earlier generation who have had a
significant impact in the period since World War II are John O. Killens (1916–1987)
and John A. Williams (1925–). Killens published his first novel, Youngblood (1954),
during the early years of the civil rights struggle. Bearing the stamp of its times, it
describes the lives of four characters in the segregationist South who fight against
oppression. His 1967 novel, Sippi, also addresses the struggle for racial equality.
In The Cotillion; or, One Good Bull is Worth Half the Herd (1971), however, he moved
away from racial protest to satire, exploring the conflicting claims of Afrocentrism
and Eurocentrism specifically within the black community. A more prolific writer
than Killens, John A. Williams has produced eleven novels, six nonfiction books, one
play, and many essays. His main claim to fame, however, is The Man Who Cried I Am
(1967). Structurally complex, The Man has a double chronology. On one level,
it recounts one day in the life of its protagonist, a writer called Max Reddick.
Terminally ill, Reddick discovers an international agenda for annihilating all people
of African origin; the day ends with his murder. On another level, the novel moves
through the entire experience of Reddick, with special reference to his encounters
with American racism. The net effect of this chronology and the structural
complexity is to problematize the notion of history. History is written out, not in
linear terms, as a monolith, but as myriad – changing, contingent, related to states of
being, habits of narration. It is seen, in short, as inextricable from power, its truth
dependent on whose story manages to get told. This was a perception to be taken up,
structurally and theoretically, by a number of other African-American writers, some
of whom have acknowledged Williams’s influence; among them Charles R. Johnson,
John Edgar Wideman, and Toni Morrison.
John Edgar Wideman (1941–) began as a self-conscious modernist. It was only
after a long writing hiatus in the late 1970s that he learned, as he put it, “a new
language to talk about my experience.” The result of this was his “Homewood
Trilogy” (Damballah (1981), Hiding Place (1981), Sent for You Yesterday (1983)), set
in his birthplace, Pennsylvania’s Homewood community, reconstructing the family
history and reclaiming and recording the central role played by his great-great-great
grandmother, a runaway slave, in founding an African-American version of the city
upon a hill. Aware now of what he has called the “pervasive process of the paradigmGGray_c05.indd 661ray_c 05 .indd 661 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM