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Credit: Nick Romanenko
Cheryl Wall, professor of English, New
Brunswick
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In 1974, English professor Cheryl Wall brought “The Black Book” home to her parents. The large paperback book – edited by Toni Morrison at Random House – told the story of African-Americans in America through photos, artifacts, inventors’ patents and other scraps of information gleaned from everyday people.
Reading the book prompted Wall’s father to share the story of his relocation from South Carolina to New York City during the Great Migration. She learned of a cousin whom she never knew and how her father was almost arrested after unwittingly stumbling upon a game of craps.
“I treasure it [The Black Book] for the gift of the family stories it inspired my parents to tell,” Wall writes in her new book “Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition” (University of North Carolina Press 2005). She argues that for black women writers of the 1970s and 1980s, the traditional narrative structure of a novel is not adequate. Pieces of the storytelling puzzle were lost during the horrifying voyages of slave ships or the separation of multitudes of families in early America.
“The stories particular to black women’s experience ... have been either omitted or glossed over in African American literature and in American literature more generally,” says Wall, who has taught in New Brunswick since 1972.
“Worrying the line” is a term from blues music, describing the act of breaking up a phrase by changing pitch, adding a shout or repeating words to emphasize or clarify a moment in song. Black women writers employ similar techniques in fiction writing, Wall says, subverting literary convention to make up for those missing pieces of personal and cultural history. They stimulate ancestral memory with the creation of spectral characters, the interpretation of dreams, and the use of images and artifacts. They also allude to and revise the works of white and black male writers.
“One of the threads in the story is that this generation of black women writers, when they came of age, the canonical writers, even black writers, were men,” Wall says. In a sense, black female writers improvise on established literary traditions and infuse their texts with elements not typically found in a narrative – much as a song written on paper does not include a shout but takes on new meaning when the performer revises it.
Poet Lucille Clifton took such an approach in her 1976 memoir “Generations,” an examination of her father’s death and the history of her ancestors. It begins as a slave narrative, but with roots starting in the mythical African nation of Dahomey, rather than in the slavery economy of the United States. By extending her genealogical line to Africa and reconstructing her family’s narrative through photographs and memory, Clifton creates a new niche for herself in literary history.
The same way Wall was able to fill gaps in her family history, black women authors attempt to fill those spaces in the family history of African-Americans at large. In Morrison’s “Beloved,” a ghost is reincarnated to help several former slaves reclaim parts of their past. The title character in Gloria Naylor’s “Mama Day” discovers her family’s past in dreams and by revisiting sites of her ancestors’ loss. Wall also examines the works of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde and Gayl Jones.
Wall says she wrote the text primarily for academics and graduate students in English but hopes the work will reach beyond that audience. “I’m not happy writing just for the few hundred maybe scholars who are in my field,” she says, adding that fans of black female authors will read and be inspired to reread some of the classic works. “I hope that my work sends readers back to the text. That is always my aim.”
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