whom she supports, Willa Mae follows up by dis-
carding her daughter’s few belongings, clinically
cleaning her bedroom, painting the room a new
color of her choice. Willa Mae concludes, “what’s
past is past, can’t change the past. And tomorrow
ain promised. But I got today, yeah. I got today
and life to live. I am” (72). Critics praised Ameri-
can Dreams, and in 1994 Sapphire won the Mac-
Arthur Scholarship in Poetry. In that same year,
she was awarded Downtown Magazine’s Year of
the Poet III Award.
However, Push (1996), Sapphire’s debut novel,
garnered her the most critical recognition. Push
recounts the life of Clarice Precious Jones, an il-
literate, HIV-positive teenager who has been sexu-
ally and physically abused by her father and her
mother. At the beginning of the novel Precious,
raped continuously by her father since she was an
infant, is pregnant for the second time. Still in ju-
nior high school at age 16, she is sent as the client
of Advancement House to Each One Teach One, an
alternative school. There, Precious meets Ms. Rain,
who sees her as more than a “client”; she teaches
Precious to read and write by encouraging her to
write and talk about herself. Above all, Ms. Rain
helps Precious come to grips with her identity and
negative self-concept.
When told as part of her therapy to write a fan-
tasy about herself, Precious reveals a deeply held
self-hatred that resonates with that of TONI MOR-
RISON’s Pecola in The Bluest Eye. For her life to be
perfect, Precious notes,
I would be light skinned, thereby treated right
and loved by boyz. Light even more important
than being skinny; you see them light-skinned
girls that’s big an’ fat, they got boyfriends. Boyz
overlook a lot to be wif a white girl or yellow
girl, especially if it’s a boy that’s dark skin wif
big lips or note, he will go APE over yellow girl.
So that’s my first fantasy, is get light. Then I get
hair. Swing job, you know like I do with my
extensions. (Push, 113–114)Asked to present an in-class reading of a poem,
Precious appropriately selects and reads LANGSTON
HUGHES’s “Mother to Son.” At the end of the novel,
it is clear that Precious will fulfill her many dreams
for herself and her son, despite her life-threaten-
ing disease. She will not only get her GED but also
go on to college. In an interview by Lisa Miller for
Urban Desires in 1996, Sapphire comments; “As a
political writer I was really trying to paint a pic-
ture of a person who I feel is the object of almost
genocidal neglect and genocidal assault in terms of
the removal of services that someone like Precious
would need.” Push was praised for its raw portrayal
of life. In 1997 Sapphire won the Black Caucus of
the American Library Association’s First Novelist
Award and the Book-of-the Month Stephen Crane
Award for First Fiction. Sapphire’s book Black
Wings and Blind Angels (1999) addresses a plural-
ity of topics: abusive parents, sexual identity, and
police brutality.
In an interview Sapphire identified BLACK ARTS
MOVEMENT poets HAKI MADHUBUTI, SONIA SAN-
CHEZ, NIKKI GIOVANNI, and NTOZAKE SHANGE as
writers who have influenced her. Her three criti-
cally acclaimed literary works identify her as a
strong contemporary African-American literary
voice.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sapphire. American Dreams. New York: Vintage
Books, 1994.
———. Push. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Beverly TateSchuyler, George Samuel (1895–1977)
The most prolific African-American journalist of
his day, Schuyler is best remembered now for his
essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926), his satiri-
cal novel Black No More (1931), and his conser-
vative political views. These aspects of Schuyler’s
career reveal only part of a complex man who was
variously a cultural assimilationist and a Pan-Af-
ricanist, a socialist and a vitriolic anticommunist,
a NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT
OF COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP) activist and a critic
of MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. Such contradictions450 Schuyler, George Samuel