Me Down Easy, deals with the American health-care system. Suzan-Lori Parks
is a prolific and important playwright and screenwriter whose bold, audacious,
experimental, and idiosyncratic works defy easy categorization and have garnered
much critical acclaim. Parks, the recipient of a MacArthur grant, a Pulitzer Prize,
and two Obies, has an extensive body of work that has been widely produced.
Her best-known plays include Topdog/Underdog (2001), for which she was the
first black woman to win the Pulitzer in drama, and The America Play (1995).
Students interested in Parks’s work might examine the volume Suzan Lori-Parks:
A Casebook (2007) in the Michigan Modern Dramatists series.
In the field of mystery and detective fiction, Walter Mosley introduced his
character Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990. Rawlins returns
from World War II, settles in Los Angeles, and attempts to find a peaceful life
but is forced to accept investigative jobs that take him into the seedy and violent
areas of the city. Mosley, who was one of former president Bill Clinton’s favorite
writers, has also written two other mystery series, as well as science fiction, erotica,
and nongenre novels. Barbara Neely initiated one of the first mystery series with
a female African American protagonist in Blanche on the Lam (1992); the ironi-
cally named Blanche White is a cleaning woman who finds herself investigating
a murder. Octavia Butler (treated in a Study Guide on Works and Writers in this
volume) and Samuel Delany explore issues of race in science fiction. Finally, stu-
dents interested in African American memoir might start with Maya Angelou’s I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), which is the subject of a Study Guide on
Works and Writers. By the 1990s several African American authors were using
the memoir to explore issues of biracial identity: Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s The
Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White (1994), the first memoir that
openly discusses the practice of passing as white; James McBride’s The Color of
Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (1996); Gregory Williams’s Life
on the Color Line (1996); and Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting
Self (2001), by Rebecca Walker, the daughter of Alice Walker.
In works in all of these genres, readers will find African American voices
reaching back to the past and forward to the future: working within long-standing
oral traditions and experimenting with Postmodernist techniques and attitudes as
they investigate the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation in
challenging and stimulating writing.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- African American literature has strong roots in oral tradition. Field songs and
folktales were handed down through the generations, along with the forms and
structures that characterized them: call and response, African polyrhythmic
beats, trickster figures, improvisation, vernacular language, ritual, and—as John
Edgar Wideman puts it in the preface to Breaking Ice—the “incantatory power
of the word to name, blame, shame, and summon power.” Many folklorists
maintain that oral traditions cannot exist in writing—that the two forms are,
by definition, opposed. Yet, scholars have made compelling demonstrations of
the integration of oral strategies in written forms: see, for instance, Gayl Jones’s