bold, not flamboyant. They learned how to
exploit the language so that readers would be
affected by what they said and how they said it.
And they had talent. (xvi)Born in 1951 in Port Huron, Michigan, Mc-
Millan is the daughter of Edward McMillan and
Madeline Washington Tilman. Her father worked
as a sanitation worker. Her mother held numerous
jobs after her parents divorced. As the eldest of five
children, McMillan worked, while in high school,
to help her single mother raise her siblings. One of
her jobs was in the public library, where she dis-
covered a love of reading:
As a child, I didn’t know that African-Ameri-
can people wrote books. I grew up in a small
town in northern Michigan where the only
books I came across were the Bible and re-
quired reading for school. I did not read for
pleasure, and it wasn’t until I was sixteen when
I got a job shelving books at the public library
that I got lost in a book. It was a biography of
Louisa May Alcott. (xv)McMillan took a course in Afro-American liter-
ature when she enrolled at the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, in 1973, discovering the works of
such prominent black writers as COUNTEE CULLEN,
LANGSTON HUGHES, ANN PETRY, ZORA NEALE HUR-
STON, RALPH ELLISON, JEAN TOOMER, and RICHARD
WRIGHT. She recalls, “I signed up and couldn’t wait
for the first day of class. I remember the textbook
was called Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in
America because I still have it. I couldn’t believe
the rush I felt” (xvi).
While teaching at the University of Wyoming in
1987, McMillan discovered that very few contem-
porary anthologies included works of fiction by
African-American writers: “What became appar-
ent almost immediately was that I couldn’t recall
any recent anthologies in which contemporary Af-
rican-American fiction writers—who’d been pub-
lished from the early seventies to now—had been
published.... I learned very quickly that there
hadn’t been an anthology comprised of fiction in
over seventeen years” (xix). That insight became
the genesis for Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Con-
temporary African-American Fiction (1990). This
anthology includes a plethora of black literary
intellectuals: AMIRI BARAKA, RI TA DOVE, ISHMAEL
REED, CLARENCE MAJOR, PAULE MARSHALL, and
ALICE WALKER, to name a few. In the preface, nov-
elist and essayist JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN acknowl-
edges the marginality of black writers and the way
this position in American society “refined our
awareness, our proficiency in nonliterary modes
of storytelling.”
After editing Breaking Ice, McMillan published
her first novel, Mama (1987), whose protagonist,
Mildred Peacock, is a strong black mother simi-
lar to McMillan’s mother. In the novel, the mother
triumphs over poverty, domestic abuse, and rape.
After Mama, McMillan published her second
novel, Disappearing Acts (1989), a novel about the
relationship between a young woman, Zora Banks,
a teacher and aspiring singer who hangs her hope
on becoming a successful star, and Franklin Swift,
an out-of-work construction worker and not-
quite-divorced father of two. Franklin dreams of
starting his own business. Like most of McMillan’s
characters, although as lovers the two are involved
in a stormy relationship, they eventually learn to
overcome individual weaknesses. In 2000, Disap-
pearing Acts, directed by the African-American
woman director Gina Prince-Blythewood, was
made into a cable television movie, starring Sanaa
Lathan and Wesley Snipes.
In 1992, after the success of Disappearing Acts,
McMillan published Waiting to Exhale, her most
controversial novel. The story follows the lives of
four middle-class African-American women, Sa-
vannah Jackson, Bernadine Harris, Gloria Mat-
thews, and Robin Stokes, as they struggle through
and overcome familial, romantic, and career rela-
tionships and issues. A best seller, the novel con-
tinues to garner attention because of its portrayal
of the complications and hardships between black
men and women.
Although well received by the majority of Af-
rican-American women, many African-American
men felt, at the time of its publication, that theMcMillan, Terry 351