was an early talk-radio host (1978–1984), first on
Pacifica’s WBAI-FM and then winning numerous
awards for The Judy Simmons Show on Inner City
Broadcasting’s WLIB-AM. Based in Alabama after
mid-1991, Simmons was managing editor of the
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF
COLORED PEOPLE’s magazine The CRISIS, editor-at-
large with AOL-Time Warner’s webzine Africana.
com (founded by HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.), and an
award-winning columnist for The Anniston (Ala-
bama) Star.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black
Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic Ref-
erences. New York: William Morrow & Company,
1973.
Redmond, Eugene B. Drumvoices: The Mission of
Afro-American Poetry, a Critical History. Garden
City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1976.
Rich Roberts
Sinclair, April (1954– )
Born in Illinois, Sinclair was raised on Chicago’s
South Side. After graduating from Western Illinois
University, she moved to San Francisco and later
to Oakland, California, where, as a community ac-
tivist, she served as the director of the Emergency
Food Coalition and taught at Oakland’s Read-a-
Lot Program. In the interim, Sinclair wrote essays
for small womanist and feminist publications and
took graduate courses in film at San Francisco
State University. Discouraged from pursuing a ca-
reer in film, Sinclair, who wrote poetry at age 10,
began working on her first novel, Coffee Will Make
You Black (1994), which, after she had written the
first 20 pages, she began promoting through pub-
lic readings. As a result of her self-promotion and
the positive response and feedback she received,
Sinclair was able to secure an agent and a contract
for her novel.
Coffee Will Make You Black, like ROSA GUY’s
The Friends and PAULE MARSHALL’s BROWN GIRL,
BROWNSTONES, is a bildungsroman. It chronicles the
coming of age of its protagonist, Jean “Stevie” Ste-
venson, who grows into young womanhood dur-
ing the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT and BLACK POWER
movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Sinclair fol-
lowed Coffee Will Make You Black with Ain’t Gonna
Be the Same Fool Twice (1997), in which the main
character, Stevie, discovers and explores her lesbi-
anism while living in San Francisco’s Castro Dis-
trict, and I Left My Backdoor Open (1999), in which
the main character, Dee Dee, a deejay, yearns for a
more mature, successful romantic experience.
Coffee Will Make You Black is, to some degree,
reminiscent of LORRAINE HANSBERRY’s A RAISIN IN
THE SUN and RICHARD WRIGHT’s NATIVE SON, which
are also set in the South Side of Chicago. Jean, like
Bigger and Beneatha, grows up in a working-class
family that has migrated from the South in search
of a better life. However, thematically, Sinclair is
concerned with Jean’s sexuality and emotion, fam-
ily relationships, political awareness, friendships,
and, above all, ultimate existential responsibility
for herself. As a domestic, Jean’s grandmother had
to work on holidays, while her own family had to
wait until the following day to celebrate. However,
as Jean’s grandmother explains to her daughter Ev-
elyn: “Chile, when I would be cooking them din-
ner, I’d be thinking about how good the leftovers
was gonna taste. We might not have ate good on
Thanksgiving, but, chile, we sho greased the next
day” (33). From the exchange between her mother
and grandmother, Jean learns that, like her par-
ents (her father is a janitor), her grandmother, too,
“had to do whatever [she] could to make a honest
dollar” (33). Like Ruth, Lena, and Beneatha of A
Raisin in the Sun, Jean, her grandmother, and her
mother form a community of women who men-
tor and guide Jean to maturity and womanhood.
Life for Jean, unlike for Bigger, is filled with love,
despite the family’s economic status.
Equally important are the friendships Jean de-
velops, particularly with Nurse Horn and her best
friend, Carla. When Jean, who plays basketball as
well as anyone around her, male or female, tells
Carla she was unable to lose her virginity to her
boyfriend, Sean, and that she thinks one reason
for her emotional fear was the possibility that she
might be “funny,” a lesbian, Carla tells Jean she will
never have a freak for a best friend. Jean, who re-466 Sinclair, April