WORD: Across Generations Sunday, January 17 2:00pm – 3:30pm
Victory Gardens Biograph Theater 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. Chicago
Join The Public Square and Chicago Public Radio for WORD: Across Generations with poets Carloyn Rodgers, John Murillo, and Aja Monet.
•Carolyn Rodgers (see poem below) emerged from the Black Arts Movement in Chicago in the 1960s as a “revolutionary poet,” creating a distinct and profound black aesthetic.
•John Murillo is an Afro-Chicano poet and playwright, a graduate of New York University’s MFA program, and a recent fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
•Aja Monet is a Cuban-Jamaican poet originally from Brooklyn, now residing in Chicago. At 22 years old, she is currently the youngest Grand Slam Champion of the Lower East side’s legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café.
Each poet will perform their work and then participate in a post-performance conversation, followed by an Open Mic Showcase. This event is taking place as part of Chicago Public Radio Presents… The 2nd Annual Winter Block Party for Chicago’s Hip-Hop Arts.
“The Block Party is a tribute to the working artist of the hip-hop generation in Chicago and an opportunity for the city, traditionally segregated, to see each other across neighborhood and viaduct.” – Winter Block Party Artistic Director Kevin Coval.
It is Deep (don’t never forget the bridge you crossed over on) by Carolyn Rodgers [pictured above]
Having tried to use the
witch cord
that erases the stretch of
thirty-three blocks
and tuning in the voice which
woodenly stated that the
talk box was “disconnected”
My mother, religiously girdled in
her god, slipped on some love, and
laid on my bell like a truck,
blew through my door warm wind from the south
concern making her gruff and tight-lipped
and scared
that her “baby” was starving.
she, having learned, that disconnection results from
non-payment of bill (s).
She did not
recognize the poster of the
grand le-roi (al) cat on the wall
had never even seen the books of
Black poems that I have written
thinks that I am under the influence of
“communists”
when I talk about Black as anything
other than something ugly to kill it befo it grows
in any impression she would not be
considered “relevant” or “Black”
but
there she was, standing in my room
not loudly condemning that day and
not remembering that I grew hearing her
curse the factory where she “cut uh slave”
and the cheap j-boss wouldn’t allow a union,
not remembering that I heard the tears when
they told her a high school diploma was not enough,
and here now, not able to understand, what she had
been forced to deny, still–
she pushed into my kitchen so
she could open my refrigerator to see
what I had to eat, and pressed fifty
bills in my hand saying “pay the talk bill and buy
some food; you got folks who care about you . . .”
My mother, religious-negro, proud of
having waded through a storm, is very obviously,
a sturdy Black bridge that I
crossed over, on.
Ronald Fair is perhaps best known as a teller of crisp, satirical, and unsentimental Chicago Tales: inner city stories of struggle, morality, and overcoming (not unlike his own Chicago story). Born in Chicago on October 27, 1932, Fair attended public school. He was inspired as a young man by fellow Chicagoan Richard Wright to begin writing. Wright, as well as a black English teacher encouraged him to keep at his craft despite setbacks.
Fair ultimately published various short writings in the Chicago Defender, Ebony, Chat Noir, and other publications. His first novel, Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable, was published in 1965. The book covers the span of time from the Civil War to the 60s, and presents a fictional town called Jacobsville, Mississippi, whose residents were unaware that slavery had been abolished. The work, through symbolism, called for Blacks to wake up and rise against the systemic oppression they were under.
His second novel, Hog Butcher (1966), set in the 1960s, told the story of three inner city Chicago boys and one tragedy that changed a community forever. It was adapted into the film Cornbread, Earl, and Me (1975, see the theatrical trailer below). The film starred a pre-pubescent Laurence Fishburne, and featured a grooving soundtrack composed by Donald Byrd and performed by the Blackbyrds.
Fair’s next work, World of Nothing, was published in 1970. The work consists of two edgy, perse, short novellas: one of which dealt with sexual abuse in the Catholic church and, like Hog Butcher, featured a young central character.
Soon after the publication of Hog Butcher, Ronald Fair moved to Europe, were he remained, as he was “fed up with American racism”. While in Europe, he published what he considered his supreme work,”We Can’t Breathe” (1972). The book covered the lives of five Chicago friends (one of whom becomes an author), and was deeply autobiographical. The book sold well at first, and then sales inexplicably tapered off.
Ronald Fair still writes today, but has dropped off the national literary radar, unpublished in the U.S. in more than twenty years, yet the messages within his work remain eerily pertinent for folks coming up in our hardscrabble city.
In 1971 Fair went to Europe. Later in life he would bemoan the lack of opportunities available to African-American writers, but he was drawn to Europe while he was still riding high career-wise. Like many black creative figures before him, Fair felt liberated in Europe from American racial tensions. He and his wife spent several months in Sweden with support from that country’s government culture ministry, and then enjoyed six months in 1972 in a French villa on an academic house exchange. Fair, according to From Harlem to Paris author Michel Fabre, announced a plan to “buy a house over here and return HOME to France.” Later, however, despite having disliked Sweden’s cold climate, he moved to Finland and remained there.
Ronald L. Fair’s body of work displays contradictory qualities. On one hand, he was a realistic chronicler of the lives of urban African Americans in the 1960s, one who captured the disillusionment of blacks who fled Southern white racism only to discover that Northern cities brought oppression and dislocation of a different kind. On the other, he was a literary experimenter, one who wrote in economical, clipped, often ironic and satirical styles quite distinct from the expansive, preacherly prose of some of his African-American contemporaries. Audiences of the 1960s and 1970s never knew quite what to make of Fair’s writing; he remained less well known than other African-American writers of the period, and he eventually left the United States for Europe, never to return. Yet he had several strong advocates in the literary world, and his output, with several finished but unpublished works, seemed ripe for rediscovery in the new millennium.
Born in Chicago on October 27, 1932, Fair was the son of Herbert and Beulah Hunt Fair, Mississippi farmworkers who took pride in their African heritage. Fair attended public schools in Chicago. He started writing as a teenager as a way of questioning the world in which he found himself and of expressing angry feelings. He was inspired by the example of Richard Wright, one of his prime influences, and a black English teacher encouraged him to keep writing. Fair joined the U.S. Navy in 1950 and served for three years as a hospital worker. He married while he was in the Navy and had two children, but that marriage ended in divorce.
Back home, Fair attended a business college, the Stenotype School of Chicago. He got a job as a court reporter after finishing school in 1955 and remained in that profession for 12 years. Fair kept writing outside of work hours, and he published various short writings in the Chicago Defender, Ebony, Chat Noir, and other publications. His first novel, Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable, was issued by Harcourt in 1965.
Fair’s first novel covered a span of a century, from the Civil War to the 1960s, in 120 terse pages. It presented a fictional town called Jacobsville, Mississippi, whose residents remained unaware that slavery was no longer in existence. Against this backdrop, Fair unfolded the various forms of governmental and extralegal horrors that befell African Americans beginning in the Reconstruction era. Reviewers praised the unique bitter tone of Fair’s descriptions of rape and lynching, but many failed to appreciate the symbolism of the novel’s plot, which was directed toward the idea that African Americans had to wake up to the repression under which they lived.
Fair worked as a writer for a year as an Encyclopedia Britannica writer while readying his second novel, Hog Butcher, for publication. Hog Butcher remains perhaps the best known of Fair’s writings. In 1975 it was made into a film called Cornbread, Earl and Me, featuring future superstar Laurence Fishburne as the ten-year-old protagonist and narrator, and it was published in paperback under that title. The book tells the story of a police coverup intended to conceal a mistaken fatal shooting of budding basketball star “Corn-bread” Maxwell. Rich with detail about the lives of transplanted Southern blacks in Chicago and about the myriad ways in which the city’s government and society were stacked against them, Hog Butcher, in the words of Bernard W. Bell in The Contemporary Afro-American Novel, showed “the continuing appeal of traditional realism and naturalism to some contemporary black novelists.”
In 1967, Fair took a job teaching literature at Chicago’s Columbia College. He moved on to Northwestern University the following year and also married his second wife, Neva June Keres, with whom he had one more child. With the help of awards and fellowships that included a stint at Wesleyan University’s Center for Advanced Studies in 1969 and an Arts and Letters Award the following year, Fair became a full-time writer. He taught at Wesleyan as a visiting professor in the 1970-71 academic year.
Despite his new freedom from a nine-to-five workday, Fair’s productivity as a writer slowed down somewhat. His next book, World of Nothing, did not appear until 1970. True to form, Fair changed direction and confounded expectations yet again with that book, which consisted of two short novellas, both with elements of pointed, edgy satire. The story that gives this book its title is a picturesque but sharp and partly surreal portrait of a group of black Chicagoans whose lives interact, while “Jerome” dealt with sexual abuse in the Catholic church and, like several of Fair’s earlier works, featured a youthful central character.
The book Fair considered his supreme effort, We Can’t Breathe, was published in 1972. Another realistic tale, it followed five Chicago friends, one of whom becomes a writer by the book’s end. Strongly autobiographical, We Can’t Breathe won the American Library Association’s Best Book award in 1972 but was criticized, to use the words of New York Times critic George Davis, as “not as well shaped as his previous books.” We Can’t Breathe sold well at first, but sales eventually tailed off.
Fair continued writing after this setback. He won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1975 and worked on an epic novel called The Migrants, which traced a large cast of characters through black America’s Great Migration from South to North. He published two collections of poetry and several short stories in the late 1970s. The Migrants remained unpublished, however, and Fair grew disillusioned. “I’m still writing—seven books looking for a publisher, perhaps that will happen again.…Sorry I can’t be more helpful, but I don’t care to talk about many of these things, …” he told Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor R. Baxter Miller in the early 1980s. “[S]orry they haven’t published more of my books, but you know…they cut off the Black writer…they really cut him off.”
In 1971 Fair went to Europe. Later in life he would bemoan the lack of opportunities available to African-American writers, but he was drawn to Europe while he was still riding high career-wise. Like many black creative figures before him, Fair felt liberated in Europe from American racial tensions. He and his wife spent several months in Sweden with support from that country’s government culture ministry, and then enjoyed six months in 1972 in a French villa on an academic house exchange. Fair, according to From Harlem to Paris author Michel Fabre, announced a plan to “buy a house over here and return HOME to France.” Later, however, despite having disliked Sweden’s cold climate, he moved to Finland and remained there.
The book Fair considered his supreme effort, We Can’t Breathe, was published in 1972. Another realistic tale, it followed five Chicago friends, one of whom becomes a writer by the book’s end. Strongly autobiographical, We Can’t Breathe won the American Library Association’s Best Book award in 1972 but was criticized, to use the words of New York Times critic George Davis, as “not as well shaped as his previous books.” We Can’t Breathe sold well at first, but sales eventually tailed off.
Fair continued writing after this setback. He won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1975 and worked on an epic novel called The Migrants, which traced a large cast of characters through black America’s Great Migration from South to North. He published two collections of poetry and several short stories in the late 1970s. The Migrants remained unpublished, however, and Fair grew disillusioned. “I’m still writing—seven books looking for a publisher, perhaps that will happen again.…Sorry I can’t be more helpful, but I don’t care to talk about many of these things, …” he told Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor R. Baxter Miller in the early 1980s. “[S]orry they haven’t published more of my books, but you know…they cut off the Black writer…they really cut him off.”
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