A History of American Literature

The American Century: Literature since 1945 663

of orphanhood leads inevitably into the search for a past, which is the subject of

The Chaneysville Incident (1981), the second and major novel of David Bradley.

The incident the title refers to is a collective suicide. According to local legend, the

protagonist John Washington learns, his forebear and thirteen slaves killed themselves

at Chaneysville, Pennsylvania, on the Underground Railroad route. Determined to

discover the truth about this, John, a history professor, undertakes assiduous

research. The research remains abortive, at first. It is only when John’s wife, white

and the descendant of slaveholders, joins him, and questions his motives, that the

gaps in the story begin to be imaginatively bridged. The slaves evidently chose death

in preference to threatened recapture and a return to bondage. Out of respect, a

white miller then buried them: an act of empathy between the races that is repeated

in the restored relationship between John and his wife. Complexly mixing black and

white narrative forms, The Chaneysville Incident bears witness to the chance of racial

reconciliation in both the past and the present; and it does so through the use of a

familiar trope in African-American texts, the speaking of a silenced history. By

forging the link between history and storytelling, too, it inscribes the belief that

finding a past and a voice are indissolubly linked enterprises. And to this it adds a

rider: to find a voice is to find oneself, as an individual, a race, and a nation.

Defining a new black identity in drama

An African-American dramatist who believed equally in possibility, the chance to

be and express oneself, was Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965). Accused by some

critics of confining herself to the conventions of the well-made play, and

verisimilitude, Hansberry replied by insisting that what she was after was “genuine

realism.” This she carefully distinguished from naturalism. “Naturalism tends to

take the world as it is,” she explained; “but ... I think that the artist who is creating

the realistic work imposes on it not only what is but what is possible ... because

that is part of reality too.” Hansberry believed firmly that people could, as she put

it, “impose the reasons for life on life”; and she was profoundly skeptical about any

intellectual or artistic tendency that seemed to her to deny hope or the opportunity

for social change. When she died, for instance, one of the unpublished plays she

left satirized Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and what she felt was the

spiritual bankruptcy of absurdism. Born and brought up in Chicago, the child of

middle-class parents who dared to move into a white neighborhood and faced the

threat of violence as a result, Hansberry decided to become a writer after seeing a

performance of Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey. She wanted to capture the

authentic voice of the African-American working class. After associating with

various prominent figures in the cultural life of Harlem and working on Freedom,

a newspaper founded by the singer and activist Paul Robeson, she began working

on a play set in the South Side of Chicago. Originally titled “The Crystal Stair,”

after a line from a poem by Langston Hughes, it was eventually named after

another line from a Hughes poem called “Harlem.” “What happens to a dream

deferred?” Hughes had asked. “Does it dry up / Like a raisin in the sun?... / Or

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