BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lester, Neal A. Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the
Plays. New York: Garland, 1995.
———. “Shange’s Men: for colored girls Revisited,
and Movement Beyond.” African American Review
26 (Summer 1992): 319–328.
Shange, Ntozake. “Ntozake Shange Interviews Her-
self.” Ms., December 1977, pp. 35, 70, 72.
Simon, John. “On Stage: Enuf Is Not Enuf.” New
Leader 59 (July 5, 1976): 21.
Neal A. Lester
Forrest, Leon (1937–1997)
Leon Forrest was born on January 8, 1937, in Chi-
cago, Illinois. His interest in writing emerged dur-
ing his grade school years, and his formal work as
a writer began in 1960 when he became a public
information specialist while touring Germany
in the U.S. Army. In the early 1970s, Forrest met
RALPH ELLISON, whose support of the young novel-
ist is detailed in Conversations with Ralph Ellison.
Forrest also met TONI MORRISON, who was then an
editor at Random House in search of new African-
American writers. Under Morrison’s editorship,
Forrest published his early novels and established
himself as a prodigious novelist.
Forrest’s works are best understood when read
as his attempts to transform African-American life
and history—from everyday occurrences to life-
explaining and life-sustaining events and achieve-
ments—into art. His success as a major novelist
rests in his ability to reinvent narrative strategy by
employing African-American vernacular traditions
such as spirituals, folk speech, the BLUES, and ser-
monic texts that observe conventions of oral lan-
guage, repetition, and orality. In each of his novels,
cultural themes and themes of religion, flight, and
family emerge and are presented with substantial
genre modifications. The action of each novel is
presented using multiple narrative conventions,
including the eulogy, the folk sermon, epistles,
poetic monologues, and stream-of-consciousness
surreal episodes. Because his novels investigate the
way contemporary African-American identity is
informed by the past, they find a readership with
anyone interested in how racial identity is formed
in the contemporary moment.
Forrest’s first novel, There Is a Tree More An-
cient Than Eden, was published in 1973. Endorsed
by fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow and introduced
by Ellison, There Is a Tree introduces readers to
Forrest’s fictional Forest County (modeled largely
after Chicago) and to Nathaniel Witherspoon,
who reappears in his later novels The Bloodworth
Orphans (1977) and Two Wings to Veil My Face
(1984). Experiencing the agony of a motherless
child, Nathaniel is the editor of his life and his
family’s history. His attempts to process fragments
of biographical, sociological, and emotional infor-
mation about his relatives, his ancestors, historical
figures, and, finally, himself in order to cope with
his mother’s death serve as the nonconventional
plot of the novel.
Forrest’s second novel, The Bloodworth Orphans,
continues the saga of the Witherspoon family. Na-
thaniel has reached age 33 and has moved away
from his role of journeyman in There Is a Tree to
the role of witness to the fate of the many members
of the extended Bloodworth family, most of whom
have been orphaned either by death or by miscege-
nation at the hands of the white Bloodworth clan.
The Bloodworth Orphans is divided into two large
sections, chapters 1–7 and chapters 8–12, and it is
centered primarily around two events—the sui-
cidal death of Abraham Dolphin and the death of
Rachel Flowers, who succumbs to cancer.
As in There Is a Tree, where Nathaniel and his
aunt Sweetie Reed first appear, the main action in
Two Wings to Veil My Face, Forrest’s third novel,
has already taken place, but it is told through the
process of (re)memory. Fourteen years prior to
the story’s opening, Sweetie has promised to tell
Nathaniel why she refused to go to her husband’s
and to Nathaniel’s grandfather’s funerals. What
Nathaniel comes to realize during the course of
the novel is that her story is her father’s story, her
husband’s story, Nathaniel’s story, and in a more
general sense, the African-American story.
Forrest’s fourth novel, Divine Days (1992),
returns to the liminal space between chaos and
re-creation developed in the latter stage of The
Bloodworth Orphans. Forrest introduces a newForrest, Leon 189