Cultural Narratives Passed on: African American Mourning Stories

Abstract

wo Chicago stories frame this particular passed-on narrative. But that city is representative of other cities and their stories. New York and D.C., Atlanta and Birmingham and even L.A. stories reside as easily within this frame. Whether the stories are fictive or factual, the mourning stories of African American culture form a cultural narrative. These narratives are on in both senses of the expression-they are stories about death, and they are shared within the culture and from generation to generation. It is my argument as well that they constitute a cultural narrative because dimensions of African American ethnicity find a borderlined identity within their urban frames. From the perspective of these stories, a nation's stories are excerpted, a community is demarcated, and in these ways, a culture's identity emerges as malignantly defined through shallow blackface impressions. irony and sorrow of this narrow and negative glimpse at culture is that a community's culture can be isolated and identified through the narrative of its mourning stories, passed on. This essay rehearses some of these twentieth-century narratives as they have appeared in our nation's history and as they have been represented in African American literature. Their coherence is troubling because it constructs the most damaging dimensions of stereotype. Despite the ways in which Ossie Davis's character Reverend Purlie Victorious described the sweetness of blackness as a secret cup of gladness, black memories in African American culture are as painful as they are precious. Certainly, there are sweet black memories-Easter Sunday speeches in black churches, the swell of voices rising together in the Negro National Anthem, braiding a black girl's hair, and the practiced ritual recitation of James Weldon Johnson's The Creation.