Avery R. Young, local Chicago wordsmith, educator, personality, and friend of darkjive, is in the midst of publishing a series of thirty works (some poetry, some script treatments, and some more visual pieces) in the form of facebook notes. The work plays with notions of language, blackness, and the canon of African-American pop culture as only he can. Check it out a sample below, and jive 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Ronald Fair still writes today, but has dropped off the national literary radar, unpublished in the U.S. in more than twenty years, yet the messages within his work remain eerily pertinent for folks coming up in our hardscrabble city.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.”
“We took comfort in the rebel music that was pumped into the city from up North. Hip-Hop was the rumble of our generation, unveiling all our wants, fears, and disaffections. But as the fabled year of ’88 came upon us, we saw something more in the music, a deeper thing that interrogated our random lives and made us self-aware. We needed 1988, like the mariners of old needed the North Star. I needed a text for understanding my present crack-addled world; Bill needed some conception of a future.”
— from The Beautiful Stuggle, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates’autobiographical ode to black manhood (and the struggle to reach it and to cultivate it) is the premise for The Beautiful Struggle(Random House, 2008), a title hip-hop heads might recognize from a 2004 Talib Kweli album. The album popularized a phrase from a Martin Luther King, Jr. speech, in which he stated:
“We must move past indecision to action. Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response.”
In the Beautiful Struggle, Coates’ father is larger than life, both Black Panther & Vietnam vet, publisher and cultural historian, trying to raise up seven children in an era when crack created a desert tooled for the destuction of a whole generation. A book that is both a love note to hip hop, a battle cry, and a tale of rising up, A Beautiful Struggle is beautiful to be sure.
…courtesy of afripopmag.com… lots of good stuff for a book nut like me.
Anthem of the Decades, by Mazisi Kunene. Biko, by Donald Woods Roots, by Alex Haley Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal el Sadaawi Purple Hibiscus + Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimimanda Adichi Ngozi Our Sister Killjoy, by Ama Ata Aidoo Head Above Water, by Buchi Emecheta The Heart of Redness, by Zakes Mda You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town/David’s Story/Playing in the Light, by Zoe Wicomb Mother to Mother, by Sindiwe Magona Unbowed, by Wangari Maathai Decolonising the Mind, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o Anthills of the Savannah, by Chinua Achebe Hero of the Nation, by Henry Masauko Chipembere Kaffir Boy, by Mark Mathabane Distant View of a Minaret, by Alifa Rifaat So Long a Letter, by Mariama Ba A long way gone, by Ishmael Beah Song for Night/Becoming Abigail, by Chris Abani Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Desert Flower/Desert Dawn, by Waris Dirie Born Under the Big Rain, by Fadumo Korn When Rain Clouds Gather/Maru/A Question of Power, by Bessie Head Women are Different, by Flora Nwapa The Stone Virgins, by Yvonne Vera Call me Woman, by Ellen Kuzwayo And they didn’t Die, by Lauretta Ngcobo Maru, b y B e s s i e H e a d Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o Petals of blood, Weep not child, Ngungi wa Thiongo Black Sunlight, by Dambudzo Merachera My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by Amos Tutola Question of Power, by Bessie Head Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston Ready For Revolution, by Kwame Ture Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X and Alex Haley The Making of Black Revolutionaries, by James Forman Destruction of Black Civilization, by Chancellor Williams The African Origin of Civilization, by Cheikh Anta Diop The Isis Papers, by Francess Cress Welsing The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois simply bcoz this century is about identity O’ Mandingo!: The Only Black at a Dinner Party, by Eric Miyeni Gerard Sekoto: I Am An African, by Chabani Manganyi The Good Women of China, by Xinran just coz Africa and Asia share so much in common Capitalist Nigger, by Chika Onyeani African love stories, (edited) by Ama Ata Aido Black skin, White masks, by Franz Fanon Scatter the Ashes and Go, Hyenas, by Mongane Wally Serote Black God of the Sun, by Ekow Eshun Mavericks, (edited) by Lauren Beukes Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad Indaba, My Children, by Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa Development as freedom, by Amartya Sen The Spirit of Intimacy, by Sobonfu E. Some God’s Bit of Wood, The Money Order with White Genesis, by Ousmane Sembene Zenzele: A letter for my Daughter, by J. Nozipho Maraire The Bible The Land Is Ours: The Political Legacy of Mangaliso Sobukwe, by S.E.M. Pheko Subukwe and Apartheid, by Benjamin Pogrund I Write what I like, Steve Biko Blues People, by Amiri Baraka Stolen Legacy, by George G. M. James Democracy Matters, by Cornel West Encyclopedia Africana, probably the greatest manuscript about the entire African Diaspora Speak so You Can Speak Again: The life of Zora Neale Hurston, by Lucy Hurston
Poet Stacyann Chin’s memoir, “The Other Side of Paradise” (Scribner, 2009), is a coming-of-age story. It’s a tale of growing up never fitting in, not with family, not with social structure. It’s also about living in Paradise (both literally and figuratively), but never feeling as though Paradise’s bounty is available for you. Ultimately, however, the book is about discovering that no man (or woman) is an island in regards to pain and loss…and joy.
A one-time performer on Def Poetry jam, Stacyann Chin’s upbringing was enough to seal in insecurities, and yet, she kept trying to break out beyond her circumstances. She was born on Christmas Day in Lottery, Jamaica, and systematically denied by both her mother and father, something she struggled with throughout her childhood. Stacyann grew up in the slums of Jamaica that tourists never visit, and she suffered abuse that no girl should ever have to suffer at the hands of family… always dreaming of the life of the fortunate ones, always dreaming of being safe and happy.
“The Other Side of Paradise” is a fresh, poetic read that balances images of hope in trying times and the darker side of Paradise.
Below, Stacyann Chin performing “Untitled” on Def Poetry Jam.
Picture it. It’s the mid 1990s, I’m in high school, late for the morning bus, desperate for something to read during my lengthy commute. On my Grandmother’s disheveled porch, I find a slightly sunfaded paperback. The book is Sweet Flypaper of Life, with text by Langston Hughes and photography by Roy DeCarava (originally published in 1955). I toss it in my backpack, completely unaware that:
1. My life would never be the same… I would see the world differently from that day on.
2. That paperback was (at the time) thirty years old and worth nearly 100 bucks. I would only discover its value when I attempted in college to upgrade for a hardcover. Apparently, it’s an exceptionally rare book. And I threw it in my backpack. Did I mention it rained that day?
About the book:
Essentially, the Sweet Flypaper is written from the vantage point of an older woman named Sister Mary Bradley, who’s a fixture in her Harlem community. The Langston Hughes’ text is accompanied by photos by Roy DeCarava. In the text, the woman introduces us to each person in her world, as conceived by Hughes as a means to tie together a series of DeCarava’s intimate, moody photographs. We’re let in on the subjects’ struggles as well as the hard-fought victories in their lives.
How I love this book. It captures a time on the cusp of the Civil Rights Era: a time steeped in the Electrified Delta Blues, in Joe Louis Fights, in sedans with gleaming chrome portholes, in Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan, in Miller High Life, in the smell of Dixie Peach pomade. It captures something so timeless that it stays with you…. always. I recommend you discover a copy of your own, but until you do, enjoy the pages I reproduced here for you. Jive on!
I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.
–from I Am Not Sidney Poitier
This is not a full review… that, my pretties, is still to come. This is just a heads up on “I Am Not Sidney Poitier”, a forthcoming (May ’09) novel by Percival Everett. According to the publisher, Graywolf Press:
“Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.
Percival Everett’s hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem:
Avery R. Young, local Chicago wordsmith, educator, personality, and friend of darkjive, is in the midst of publishing a series of thirty works (some poetry, some script treatments, and some more visual pieces) in the form of facebook notes. The work plays with notions of language, blackness, and the canon of African-American pop culture as only he can. Check it out a sample below, and jive on.
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darkjive.com 