turning home in 1966, he appeared in his cowrit-
ten film Up Tight (1968), which starred Raymond
St. Jacques. He served as a government adviser
again from 1971 to 1974 in Guyana. A Fulbright
scholar in Turkey, Algeria, Austria, Denmark, and
Germany, Mayfield published his essays in the Na-
tion, Commentary, Negro Digest (Black World), and
many other journals.
Mayfield published three novels: The Hit
(1957), The Long Night (1958), and The Grand Pa-
rade (1961), which was reissued as Nowhere Street
in 1963. His plays include 417, A World Full of Men,
and Fount of the Nation. He published Ten Times
Black: Stories from the Black Experience in 1972. Set
in Harlem, The Hit focuses on the Cooley family,
Hubert, Gertrude, and son James Lee, and specifi-
cally on Hubert’s effort to make enough money
to support his family by playing the numbers.
However, when his number, 417, finally hits, the
numbers man does not pay off. Ironically, Hubert’s
faith in God ensures him an inevitable victory over
his impoverished condition through gambling.
Also set in Harlem, The Long Night develops,
among many themes, an exploration of a father-
son relationship. Abandoned by his father, Steely
Brown is forced to grow up fatherless in the ghetto.
When his mother hits the numbers and sends him
to collect her prize, his own gang members rob
Steely. Although he turns to several sources in
an effort to replace the money, he is turned away
and fails to do so. At the end of the night, he tries
to roll a drunken man asleep in a doorway. The
drunk turns out to be his father, Paul Brown. At
daybreak, after a long talk, father and son walk
home together: “they turn their steps homeward
and seem to face the day and the days to come with
at least a modicum of hope” (Paris, 201).
Mayfield’s early novels explored the “cruel par-
adox” (Richards, vi) of the 1950s, when personal
opportunities were plentiful but blacks were de-
nied those opportunities. He posited that black
people should find their places within their neigh-
borhoods, in the margin, rather than fight for an
unattainable goal. Although Mayfield’s Harlem is
not the best environment, particularly for young
boys, “it is by no means hopeless” (Davis, 201).
Mayfield’s novels are partially autobiographical,
based on his experiences living in the margin and
being denied an opportunity to excel in main-
stream America. Mayfield continued to explore
the nexus between art and politics in his career,
which spanned the black experience. In his sig-
nature essay, “Into the Mainstream,” delivered as
a paper at the First Conference of Negro Writers
(March 1959), Mayfield urged black writers to stay
away from the mainstream: “The likelihood is that
the Negro people will continue for several years to
occupy, to a diminishing degree, the position of
the unwanted child who, having been brought for
a visit, must remain for the rest of his life.” For the
black writer, he concluded, this means, “the façade
of the American way of life is always transparent”
(560–561).BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower. Washington,
D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.
Mayfield, Julian. “Into the Mainstream.” In Dark
Symphony: Negro Literature in America, edited by
James A. Emanuel and Theodore Gross, 557–561.
New York: Free Press, 1968.
———. The Hit and The Long Night. Boston: North-
eastern University Press, 1989.
Rodney, Ruby V. “Julian Mayfield.” In The Oxford
Companion to African American Literature, 486–- New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Kim Hai Pearson
Brian Jennings
McCall, Nathan (1955– )
Journalist, lecturer, and writer-autobiographer
Nathan McCall was born and reared by his mother
and stepfather in Key West, Florida. He chronicles
his youth and early adult life in his award-winning
autobiography, Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young
Black Man in America (1994).
Like RICHARD WRIGHT’s BLACK BOY and MAL-
COLM X’s The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X,
McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler records the ef-
fort of an African-American male to find meaning,
self-respect, and wholeness in white, phallocentric,
patriarchal America. When he was 10, McCall’sMcCall, Nathan 341