Beyond Morrison and Walker: Looking Good and Looking Forward in Contemporary Black Women's Stories

Abstract

Lena did look good. She was looking like a woman from a Maya Angelou story. A character from a Toni Morrison novel. A person from an Alice Walker poem. (Ansa 273) Examining black women fiction writers' literary tradition ought to generate at least the same excitement scientists feel when they find a new solar system in the making; we are privileged to have a chance to watch first-hand the process of evolution in the tradition. And a new solar system may save our present one from total eclipse. (Pryse 21-22) Books, like the genetic parents, beget books. (Spillers 250) Quiet as it's kept, it has been more than thirty years since The Bluest Eye and The Third Life of Grange Copeland first arrived in our bookstores, some fifteen years since the publication of The Color Purple, and more than a decade since the arrival of Beloved. It is difficult to imagine our classes, most modern literature conference programs and journals, or even the local bookstore existing without the continuing wise presence of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker. To be sure, Morrison and Walker, and many of the black women who entered with them into our literary consciousnesses, are still contributing their art and vision to our lives today. However, we also need to begin to acknowledge these influential authors as forces acting upon a new generation of writers--to see them as, in Walker's terms, the mothers of a new set of gardeners--and to take careful note of what the newer writers are adding to such a powerful tradition. Are recent novelists, as Thulani Davis suggested in a 1990 article ( Don't Worry, Be Buppie), too concerned with the ordinary, too complacent, too inward-seeking to be the proper heirs of Morrison and Walker, of Nozake Shange and Toni Cade Bambara? Davis's article claimed then that American fiction is miscegenating (29), yet relationships between new authors and the traditions from which they evolve are rarely so simple or so apocalyptic. Moreover, despite Davis's argument that many in the new generation of writers have abandoned their genuine African American riches for mainstream banality (28), and despite her lack of enthusiasm for announc[ing] a new generation...the bridge to the next century (WOW!) (26), these writers are already part of the tradition, and thus demand--and often deserve--our attention and careful consideration. Many 1990s novels clearly reveal their debts to earlier black women's narratives, while adding viable and sometimes compelling new perspectives. It is of course too early to be making any kind of general pronouncement, positive or negative, about the state of such a lively, complex tradition [1]; indeed, the ink seems barely dry on the covers of some of the novels I mention below. Yet for the sake of starting a necessary discussion, the following pages offer a brief survey of some of the contributions being made to the living traditions given us by Morrison and Walker, and given to them in turn by writers such as Paule Marshall and Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Redmon Fauset. My selection of texts and authors is idiosyncratic and surely incomplete: Focusing on authors who have had their first tastes of broad public support and/or critical acclaim within the last decade, I primarily consider novels by Bebe Moore Campbell, Terry McMillan, Sapphire, and A. J. Verdelle--all African American women--and by Susan Straight, a white woman writing about African American communities and characters. (Tina McElroy Ansa, J. California Cooper, April Sinc lair, and Davis herself, among others, have also staked literary claims recently, though they receive less frequent mention in this analysis.) To call my selection diverse--in authorial style, textual theme, geographical and temporal setting, and the racial, ethnic, cultural, and class backgrounds of authors and characters--is to understate the case; this variety also makes any collective judgment difficult. …