Part 1 (1/2)

Gumbo.

A Celebration of African American Writing.

E. Lynn Harris.

Acknowledgments.

From Marita Golden:.

Clyde McElvene, my friend and fellow cultural worker, without whom the Hurston/Wright Foundation would not exist.

E. Lynn Harris for the zeal, dedication, and generosity with which he has supported the Hurston/Wright Foundation and for suggesting this anthology.

Janet Hill, for her energy, intelligence, and vision; and for making this big project more fun than I suspected it could be.

From E. Lynn Harris:.

Thanks to Marita Golden and Clyde McElvene for their friends.h.i.+p and leaders.h.i.+p of the Hurston/Wright Foundation and for allowing me to be a part of their mission.

Janet Hill, for her leaders.h.i.+p-and for proving to me time and time again that she is among the best editors and people in the business.

All of the writers who didn't think twice when we asked them to contribute a story for free. This couldn't have happened without you.

About the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

Since 1990, the Hurston/Wright Foundation has been in the forefront of developing programs that support the national community of Black writers. The Hurston/Wright Award, the country's only national award for college writers of African descent has recognized over thirty emerging writers, six of whose books have been published by leading national imprints.

Hurston/Wright Writers' Week is the country's only multi-genre summer writers' workshop for Black writers, held on the campus of Howard University. Over five hundred writers have attended Hurston/Wright Writers' Week, and three alumni of the workshop have had books published. The Hurston/Wright Foundation also offers cla.s.ses in creative writing for high school students in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award is a new national award for published Black writers, presented by the Hurston/Wright Foundation in partners.h.i.+p with Borders Books and Music. Three winners in the categories of Fiction, Debut Fiction, and Nonfiction will receive, respectively, $10,000 for the winner and $5,000 each for two finalists.

The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award is the only award to published Black writers presented by a panel of their peers, and honors the works of Black writers who represent the tradition of excellence and innovation established by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright.

For more information on the Hurston/Wright Foundation you may visit our Web site at e the stars of tomorrow. Some of you will reacquaint yourself with old friends in the form of stories you've loved that were previously published but you'll also be able to meet some new friends and be introduced to authors who have been waiting for the chance to meet you.

By buying and supporting this collection, you'll ensure that there will always be entertaining, heartfelt and poignant stories by a wide range of writers who will always tell the stories of people of color.

Thank you so much for your support.

Warmest regards,

E. Lynn Harris.

Note from Marita Golden.

Our mission is to tell the truth at whatever cost.

RICHARD WRIGHT.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow d.a.m.ned up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON.

The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation was started with $750 and a dream. The money was mine. The dream belonged to every writer, everywhere, and it was the desire for recognition, support, and community. The African American writer has, of necessity, been visionary and witness, a channel for an individual sense of story even while recognizing that for Black people in America, writing is fighting. The most important and crucial lesson I have learned from other writers about the lonely, difficult, rewarding-beyond-measure, dangerous, amazing, misunderstood endeavor we undertake is the lesson of courage. Courage not only in the face of a society and a world that often seeks to silence the complexity and beauty of the experience of African people, but courage in the face of the fear and narrow-mindedness and orthodoxy that bedevils our own community. Writing is fighting. But it is also building and loving and confirming and creating. It's a job. A lifestyle. An honorable and even sacred way of living in the world.

Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright exemplify all the contradictions, all the peaks and valleys of the writer's life. They made their lives their epitaph, and their spirits remain vivid, combustible, energizing, and inspiring, continually altering the world. The more I learn about the life of Richard Wright, every time I read or teach his autobiography, Black Boy, I am rendered nearly mute with admiration for his guts, his bravery, and the powerful things that words became when he used them. Every time I read Their Eyes Were Watching G.o.d, or just think about how Zora Neale Hurston strode through her life as though it was a gift not only for her but one she was bound to share, I know that I can face today and tomorrow. The world doesn't create many writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. The African American community in America did, and I wanted to show that to the world.

It was 1990, and I was a faculty member in the MFA Graduate Creative Writing Program at George Mason University. Like many MFA programs, ours received few applications from Black students. Nevertheless, when I founded the Hurston/Wright Foundation, naturally I hoped that some of the winners of the Hurston/Wright Award for Black college fiction writers would apply to and enroll in the program at George Mason, where the foundation was housed (in my office) for the first four years.

I was watching with enormous pride and excitement what can only be called the third major wave of literary activity after the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, and wanted to encourage emerging Black writers. I'd had a little success with a novel, Long Distance Life, and I wanted to ”give back.” So with $750 I underwrote the first Hurston/Wright Award. With a cadre of several other ”true believers” the foundation was incorporated, and we set about changing the American literary landscape.

Because we wanted to give as much encouragement as possible, after the first year, we decided to choose three winners, not one. The support of HarperCollins, publishers of Wright and Hurston, made this possible. In addition, from the very first award, the winners were invited to receive their prize at a ceremony at which they were recognized and honored by established writers. I wanted to create a ritual, a ceremony in which young Black writers were acknowledged and embraced by their peers, their elders, their fellow writers, on behalf of the Black community and the larger society. And so Nikki Giovanni, Maxine Clair, David Bradley, Colson Whitehead, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Gloria Naylor and others have spoken words of praise and encouragement to the winners. I wanted to model encouragement of activities that still gets short shrift in many pockets of our community-reading and writing. I wanted people to believe that it is as exciting for a young person to grow up to be a writer as it is for them to grow up to be Michael Jordan, or Mary J. Blige. I wanted to say to young Black writers that there was a group of people who believed in them, who would always ”have their back.” The prize winners check went into their bank account, but I hope the meaning and significance, the import of the awards ceremony, went straight to their hearts.

I will never forget how my father raised me on stories of Hannibal, Frederick Dougla.s.s, Sojourner Truth, and Cleopatra. These stories introduced me to larger-than-life heroes and heroines and, listening to my father, I subconsciously learned the tenets of good storytelling. My mother simply told me when I was fourteen that one day I was going to write books. And because I was an obedient child, I did. My parents were my first literary mentors. When I moved to New York City in the early seventies, Sidney Offit, who taught the first fiction cla.s.s I ever took; poets Audre Lorde and June Jordan; novelist Paule Marshall, all gave me the charge to continue writing and to believe in myself. To this day I remember how much their words meant to me. The belief and support of this unofficial coalition shaped my sense of what was expected of me. I was to write, to fulfill my gifts. I was also expected to pa.s.s on the sense of possibility that I had received to others.

I named the award and foundation for Hurston and Wright to bring together the spirits of two major American writers who simply couldn't stand each other's work. Wright thought that Hurston's stories of rural Black life, drenched in folklore, humor, and emotional resilience, offered up characters who were buffoonish and played into the worst White stereotypes of Black life. Hurston felt that Wright, in his blistering condemnation of American racism, created Black characters devoid of humanity, dignity, and pride.

Of course the tragedy of this particular literary spat is that only through a close and complete reading of both of these geniuses of the American South do we get a clear picture of the African American experience and how it speaks to universal humanity.

When I started the foundation, the bitter gender-based cultural battles over feminism and The Color Purple, movie and book, while past, still cast a pall over the Black writing community and echoed the ego/cultural battles of Hurston and Wright. Somehow we had survived this cultural/literary Battle of the Bulge, the kind that plagues intellectual/artistic communities.

Because of the significance of the foundation and the new award, I felt its name had to symbolize the best writing we'd created and invite Black male and female writers to ”sit down together.” As an inheritor of the literary legacy of Hurston and Wright, I felt myself ”called” to unite them, to join their legacies and their artistic boldness. As an inheritor and protector of their legacy it was my job, to perhaps be even bolder that they had been able to be. So I linked them. A legacy is a contract that obligates the recipient to rise to meet the best that the legacy symbolizes. Hurston and Wright were not saints. But they were major literary voices of the twentieth century. They were both rebels, opinionated individualists who gloried in re-creating themselves, and who at various times during their long careers were castigated, marginalized, and rejected as often by Blacks as by Whites. Maybe they had not been able to see that they were bound inextricably by all this, but I could.

I have been a literary and cultural activist for more than thirty years. Nonetheless, the growth of the Hurston/Wright Foundation into a major literary inst.i.tution, I have to admit, caught me by surprise. This development was, of course, planned, hoped for, even prayed for; yet I still don't think anyone is ever really prepared for their dreams to come true. I also was not prepared for how much the hard work and long hours of working with others to build this foundation would enrich and positively transform my life. It has been enormously gratifying to see the foundation receive the kind of wide-ranging and diverse support that has kept us not just afloat but growing. Virginia Commonwealth University provided an office, and administrative and financial support for seven years. Publishers HarperCollins, Ballantine, and Doubleday recognized the significance of our mission. The National Endowment for the Arts, visionary and major support from Borders Books and Music and many corporations have made our work possible.

The national writing community bought into the idea of the foundation and supported it from day one. One of the most satisfying aspects of the work that I do is to work with other writers and to see how many of us are dedicated to cultural work. Terry McMillan, John Grisham, Connie Briscoe, John Edgar Wideman, Gloria Naylor, and many others have made the foundation possible. And it was E. Lynn Harris, the hardest-working man in the book world and one of the most generous, who suggested this anthology and who has been extraordinarily generous with time, spirit, and treasure.

The most daunting challenge I faced in the twelve years of the foundation's growth was how to balance my need and my call to write with my need and my call to build this inst.i.tution. Fortunately there were so many role models for me to follow-the philanthropy of Gwendolyn Brooks; the fierce, nation-building/nation-time work of Amiri Baraka and Toni Cade Bambara; my friends Susan Shreve and Alan Cheuse, who worked with the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and who provided helpful advice about how the build the Hurston/Wright Foundation. I looked to these writers and others and saw that it could be done. In fact, the twelve years of the Hurston/Wright Foundation have been years of consistent and satisfying creativity for me. I have been charged, energized, renewed, and inspired by this work.

Gumbo arrives at an auspicious moment. Never before have more Black writers been read by more people, not just in America but around the world. And don't believe the old frequently flaunted notion that ”n.o.body but Blacks” read books by Black authors. Black writers are raising Cain, moving mountains, rewriting the script, redefining notions of character, story, place, literature.

Who can forget the summer of 1998, when Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker were on the national bestseller lists simultaneously? Black and White folks put them there. The works of scores of living Black writers are being taught in universities and colleges across the country, despite the a.s.sault on Affirmative Action and multiculturalism. Black writers are in the canon and ain't going nowhere. Several years ago, as part of a United States Information Agency tour of Turkey, I lectured at several universities there about contemporary African American writers. The interest among students and faculty was pa.s.sionate. One faculty member had shared photocopies of Their Eyes Were Watching G.o.d with her students because the book was unavailable in the country. The Turkish people loved Hurston because in her wise, enduring rural folk they saw themselves. Paule Marshall told me of a Richard Wright Society in j.a.pan, made up of scholars devoted to a study of Wright's work. We are a community that has traditionally created stories that speak to and nourish the world, and we still are.

Never before have Black writers mastered as many genres-literary fiction, (winning major awards from Pulitzer to n.o.bel), commercial fiction (making major money and racking up major sales figures), extending and enlarging science fiction, mystery, detective writing, wiping out the borders that separate genre and literary fiction altogether (a la Walter Mosley). In some quarters there is much hand-wringing about the ”commercialization” of Black literature. And some have even charged that popular, clearly commercial fiction by Black writers is a threat to the future of Black writing. I think the only threat to the future of Black writing is a Black community that fails to understand and rejoice in the fact that it has a story that the world cannot get enough of, a Black community that fails to honor and read its literary writers as well as its commercial writers, a Black community content to let others define its story and establish the prevailing standards by which it will be judged. A Black writer getting a six-figure contract puts more money into our community. At least that's how I do the math.

Gumbo presents an enticing overview of where we are now. Gumbo is an African-inspired dish, and an African-inspired way of speaking. The stories in this anthology will nourish you and introduce you to a hearty stew of Black writers speaking a New World African language that mixes it all up and that calls on all of our traditions and creates some new ones.