Webster Fabio also published several other col-
lections of poetry, Saga of a Black Man (1968), A
Mirror: A Soul (1969), Black Is a Panther Caged
(1972), and Black Talk: Soul, Shield, and Sword
(1973). She edited Double Dozen: An Anthology of
Poets from Sterling Brown to Kali (1966). In 1972,
she made two sound recordings for Folkways
Records: “Boss Soul” and “Soul Ain’t, Soul Is.”
Her poems often appeared in Negro Digest/Black
World, Journal of Black Arts Renaissance, and Phase
II; they were included in Addison Gayle’s Black
Aesthetics and Stephen Henderson’s Understanding
the New Black Poetry. Married to dentist Cyril L.
Fabio, whom she later divorced, Webster Fabio was
the mother of six children: Cheryl, Ronnie, Renee,
Angela, Leslie, and Thomas.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Henderson, Stephen, ed. Understanding the New
Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Po-
etic References. New York: William Morrow and
Company, 1973.
Wilfred D. Samuels
Fair, Ronald (1932– )
Novelist Ronald L. Fair was born in Chicago on
October 27, 1932, to Herbert and Beulah Fair,
whom Bernard Bell describes as transplanted Mis-
sissippi plantation “workers who were proud to
be black” (301). After graduating from Chicago’s
public school system, Fair studied business at the
Stenotype School of Chicago and enlisted in the
U.S. Navy for three years, serving in the hospital
corps. Returning to civilian life, Fair worked as a
court reporter from 1955 to 1956, before embark-
ing on a brief teaching career at Chicago’s Colum-
bia College; Northwestern University, where he
was a visiting teacher; and Wesleyan University,
where he was Visiting Professor of English from
1970 to 1971. He then moved to Europe, where he
has lived for more than three decades.
Fair is known primarily as the author of two
novels and three novellas: Many Thousand Gone,
An American Fable (1965), Hog Butcher (1966),
which was reprinted as Cornbread, Earl and Me
(1970), and We Can’t Breathe (1972). In his fable
Many Thousands Gone, whose title comes from
black folklore, Fair revisits slavery and the slave
narrative genre through the experiences of his
major characters, Granny Jacobs and her great-
grandson Jesse, who live in Jacobsville, Mississippi,
where slavery is still a way of life. Jesse escapes with
Granny Jacob’s assistance and becomes a popu-
lar author. Granny Jacobs, with the assistance of
Preacher Harris, the local black preacher, writes
to the president, exposing the situation in Jacob
County. In the end, however, the central theme,
from slavery to freedom, encompasses the ac-
tive role of the entire community in its quest for
wholeness and meaning in the face of oppression
and repression. Fair celebrates in the process the
success and rise of militancy among young blacks,
through which regeneration is possible.
Set in Chicago’s South Side, Hog Butcher (1966)
is written, to some degree, within the tradition of
RICHARD WRIGHT’s naturalistic novel NATIVE SON.
Much like Bigger Thomas and his friends, who
discuss the circumscription they know as urban
dwellers, Wilford Robinson and his best friend
Earl are aware that their life in Chicago, where
there are no playgrounds, is not much better
than the one their parents had left behind in Mis-
sissippi, where “[t] hem white bastards soon kill
you as look at you” (8). The two friends witness
the accidental shooting of their friend and hero,
Nathaniel Hamilton (Cornbread), an 18-year-old
high school basketball star, by two policemen, in-
cluding a black officer. “Brave bastards come in
here shootin’ kids.... Yeah the bastards think they
gods (25–26), responds the frustrated commu-
nity before a small riot erupts and the policemen
are beaten. During the inquest, in which Wilford
and Earl are key witnesses, Wilford is pressured to
change his testimony.
Fair explores resonant themes of the black
community’s search for meaning and wholeness
in the suffocating urban environment in World of
Nothing (1970), which contains two novellas, Je-
rome and World of Nothing. His somewhat auto-
biographical We Can’t Breathe (1971) is the story
of Ernie Johnson, who grows up in Chicago during
the Great Depression and becomes a gang leader toFair, Ronald 179