York Times Outstanding Book award (1971), the
National Council for the Social Studies/Children’s
Book Council, Joint Committee, Notable Chil-
dren’s Book in the Field of Social Studies (1972),
the Brooklyn Museum and Brooklyn Public Li-
brary Art Books for Children Citation (1973), the
Lewis Carroll Shelf Award (1978), an ALA Book-
list award (1981), and the Reading Rainbow Book
award (1983).
Steptoe created his work with the hope of pro-
viding children with the encouragement “to love
themselves enough to accomplish the dreams I
know are in their hearts.” Steptoe died of AIDS on
August 28, 1989, at Saint Luke’s Hospital in Man-
hattan. He was 38 years old and lived in Brooklyn.
Javaka SteptoeStone Face, The William Gardner Smith
(1963)
Literary critics concur that the finest and most ma-
ture work of expatriate writer WILLIAM GARDNER
SMITH is his novel The Stone Face. Set in Paris, The
Stone Face is divided into three parts: “The Fugi-
tive,” “The White Man,” and “The Brother.” Smith’s
protagonist, black artist Simeon Brown, seeks to
escape American racism and oppression by flee-
ing to France. While there Brown continues to be
haunted by the ever-present face “of discord, of
disharmony with the universe” of the white racist
who intentionally and brutally put out one of his
eyes during his youth. Throughout the novel this
stone face functions as a symbolic embodiment of
universal destructive racism.
In Paris, Brown finds community with a group
of American expatriates, journalists, artists, bohe-
mians, and philosophers, and enjoys the respect
and universal camaraderie denied him in America
solely on the basis of his race. The Arabs living
in Paris label Brown a political “white man,” be-
cause they consider him to have no less political
influence than white French citizens. Involved in
an interracial romantic affair with Jewish Marie,
accorded respect by all around him, and partici-
pating in debate and discussion about current
social and political issues in daily meanderings
from café to café, Brown initially believes he has
found the rewarding and fulfilling freedom he so
desperately sought.
However, by objectively viewing the way his
Algerian friends are oppressed and treated as sec-
ond-class citizens—in fact, as less than human,
particularly by the French police—listening to
their stories of brutality and violence, by witness-
ing the social oppression they encounter, and by
observing their fight for freedom and civil rights
through protest and war in Algeria and in France,
Brown comes to the realization that he had not
escaped racism after all but has merely come to
a place where different people, the Arabs, are de-
fined as the other and marginalized. Following a
bloody riot in which his Algerian friend is killed
and during which he, too, is arrested, Brown de-
cides to leave France and return to the United
States. Before he is released from his temporary
imprisonment, Brown is warned not to get in-
volved with the Algerians by the police officer in
charge: “You understand, we like Negroes here, we
don’t practice racism in France. It’s not like the
United States.”BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” In Notes of a
Native Son [1955], 85–114. Boston: Beacon Press,
1990.
Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American
Writers in France, 1840–1980. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1991.
Wilfred D. SamuelsStreet, The Ann Petry (1946)
Written at the height of RICHARD WRIGHT’s domi-
nance of the African-American literary landscape
following the publication of his autobiography
Black Boy (1945) and his now-classic novel NA-
TIVE SON (1940), ANN PETRY’s The Street is almost
always placed within the context of a Wrightian
school of literary naturalism and protest tradi-
tion. Arthur P. Davis argues that The Street is “per-482 Stone Face, The