Senior Readers and African American Narratives

SENIOR READERS AND AFRICAN AMERICAN NARRATIVES

People Program, a continuing education opportunity sponsored by the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in New Orleans, is a site where cultures of reading are practiced with alacrity. Senior citizens who volunteer to share their expertise in skills and disciplines with senior citizens who hunger to learn and renew themselves model a civility that is rare in the academic world. Blessed are the elderly, for they shall be elsewhere sooner rather than later, and they shall take with them a neat paradox: the unpleasant pleasure of the text, the African American narrative.

The People Program directors stress that senior citizens should have fun, should discover or re-discover the joy of learning. Since spring of 2018, I have volunteered to direct four classes that focus in whole or in part on African American narratives, displacing traditional student/teacher exchanges in a classroom with conversations about what actually happens as we read, i.e., have transactions with fiction without being encumbered with oppressive theories and worry that our gut reactions lack aesthetic validity. We have not created any remarkably new knowledge in general about readers and literature. The senior readers and I have merely affirmed the value of African American narratives as tools for living, as microscopes for seeing contradictions with greater clarity, and as instruments for discovering why we may have made certain choices and not others in our life histories.

In a special issue on “Cultures of Reading,” the editors of PMLA 134.1 (January 2019) suggest that academic scholars “have been moving away from the imperatives of interpretation and critique” and acknowledging “there are rich pragmatic as well as ethical implications to the new perspectives opened by scholarship that focuses on the mechanics of reading and on the cognitive processes that the act of reading involves” (10) And some of the scholars “have also asked why over the last fifty years the discipline of literary studies has tended to leave the exploration of those [intricacies concealed by the simple term text comprehension] to other disciplines such as psychology or education” (10). Has it taken fifty years for literary study to discover it has all along been cultural study in disguise and in service to the hegemonic templates of higher education which still kick much African American writing to the margins of attention?

In certain “confessions of racial ignorance” which have emerged from time to time in our People Program classes/ forums/conversations, we senior readers have found provisional answers which encourage us to applaud academic scholars for their belated efforts. It is indeed right for Evelyn Ender and Deidre Shauna Lynch, the editors of the special issue, to conclude that “reading demands many diverse acts of translation, acts that involve more than characters on a page. It demands a way of conversing about and exchanging ideas that helps cross boundaries between various cultures of reading”(16). We

senior readers applaud without having delusions that new recognitions about literature and reading will really become standard or commonplace in American education higher or lower. As far as we know, the only genuine, relatively unfettered site for a pedagogy of liberating that includes the nexus of race, ethnicity, class, and gender is in conversations had outside the Academy.

In designing the People Program forums, I tried to leave space for a possibility addressed by Peter McMahan and James Evans in “Ambiguity and Engagement.” American Journal of Sociology 124.3 (November 2018): 860-912. They argue that “ambiguous scholarly language acts like a boundary object between researchers and their communities, drawing competing interpretations into conversation with one another as they build on it.” Thus, ambiguity and uncertainty “create zones of social and intellectual engagement” [ quoted from the abstract]. We needed zones but minimal academic jargon. Ambiguity in the forums would be vernacular, not dependent on literary language, and the zones would be organic. That is to say, the zones would evolve without self-consciousness of theory, without the desperation of philosophical explanation of ourselves to ourselves. We might recognize as Felicia Martinez proposes in “Literary Forms of Life.” Philosophy and Literature 37 (2013): 247-256 that narratives can give form to human life only “if what I am is something like the shifting relations between myself, the world, and language” (255). The nature of the zones would also be determined by who the participants were; the members of the audience changed from one forum to another.

Moreover, I had in mind the power of African American narratives as they were dealt with in Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Traces of a Stream: Literacy and SocialChange Among African American Women (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), Elizabeth McHenry’s Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

The four forums or extended conversations demonstrated that a pedagogy of liberating is not exactly free of limits, of considerations external to the phenomenology of reading which color thought. For example, for the Spring 2018 forum on works by Richard Wright I proposed that each participant could make a significant contribution to (1) elements of the reading experience, (2) our discovery of Wright’s quest to understand the world in which he lived and why his legacy has continuing relevance, and (3) our discovery of how themes function in diverse ways in literature and culture. Reading Black Boy, The Outsider, The Color Curtain and A Father’s Law in chronological order of publication, we set about the task of emphasizing (a) autobiography as genre, (b) a novel’s emphasis on existentialism and ideologies, (c) a travel report’s emphasis on an international affair (the Bandung Conference of 1955), and (d) a novel’s depiction of religious, moral and ethical choices as aspects of the rule of law. The senior readers drew upon their memories and life experiences to illuminate these issues, but they also insisted that I explain why Wright’s authorial intrusions gave birth to frustrations.

Thus, I wrote a blog for them on the productive frustration of reading for older readers. Frustration enabled us to understand our guilt and our innocence during the years of our being under the stars.

Given that I co-directed but did not design the Summer 2018 forum on the impact of black writing on classic American literature, the forum was marked by discord. The white male who designed the forum knew very little about African American literature, and he had the gall to stress to senior readers that actually reading texts was not mandatory. They could learn about impact by watching Arnold Weinstein’s video lectures from Brown University on Benito Cereno, Uncle Tom’s Cain, Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, and Beloved. They could have white fun. Such nonsense would not obtain and prevail at the expense of my being complicit in promoting shallow, arrogant reading. Stopping short of calling the fellow a Trump-stricken idiot, I went on the offensive by way of mini-lectures contra Weinstein on D. H. Lawrence’s 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature and Toni Morrison’s 1992 Playing in the Dark: on how to read Ellison’s Invisible Man; on Mark Twain’s macroaggressions in Huckleberry Finn; on the contrast between Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave and Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno; on James Baldwin’s opinions about what is lacking in Uncle Tom’s Cabin; on Morrison’s anatomy of enslavement in Beloved. Cultures of reading must ever challenge the disabling racial properties of the white reading imagination.

The lessons learned from a summer of discontent served me well in designing the Fall 2018 forum on five African American writers and the Spring 2019 forum on Southern writers, because the senior readers and I could return to conversations predicated on shared authority. We returned to the joy of reading how Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Ernest J. Gaines chose to deal with vital 20th century topics and discussing why the issues they addressed have relevance in our 21st century practice of everyday life. One reader wanted to know if the grandfather’s deathbed advice in Invisible Man was reflected in our country’s present day climate and whether, as she put it so poignantly -----”Is there something faulty in my response, my milquetoast feelings toward the narrator ,as I respond today? In retrospect, I believe that long long ago, when I first read Invisible Man, I think I cared more. Perhaps I don’t want to engage in intellectual fight of the type the book requires. In other words ---is there something faulty that I would not choose to take this book on a deserted island, if I could only take one?” In our current Spring 2019 forum, senior readers devised their own strategies of making sense of Toomer’s modernism in Cane; of Eudora Welty’s peculiar Southern humor in The Ponder Heart, of Ellen Douglas’s creative architecture in Can’t Quit You, Baby (they absolutely loved listening over and over to Willie Dixon’s singing “Can’t Quit You, Baby” and turned the forum into a blues session); of remaining in uncertainty about fathers, sons, and corruption in Wright’s The Long Dream. I suspect the senior readers will have a profound, collective response to Minrose Gwin’s The Queen ofPalmyra.

partial recovery of sanity and civility. In our cultures of reading we have communion.

Appendix: PEOPLE PROGRAM CLASSES

Spring 2018-----Richard Wright: Selected Works

Black Boy

The Outsider

The Color Curtain

A Father’s Law

Summer 2018 --African American Impact on Classic American Literature

The Heroic Slave

Benito Cereno

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Huckleberry Finn

Invisible Man

Beloved

Fall 2018 ----Five African American Writers

Invisible Man

Go Tell It on the Mountain

The Third Life of Grange Copeland

The Bluest Eye

A Lesson Before Dying

Spring 2019 ---Southern Writers

Cane

The Ponder Heart

Can’t Quit You, Baby

The Long Dream

The Queen of Palmyra

~Dr. Jerry Ward