Beyond Morrison and Walker: Looking Good and Looking Forward in Contemporary Black Women's Stories.

Lena did look good. She was looking like a woman from a Maya Angelou story. A character from a Toni Morrison novel. A person from an Alice Walker poem. (Ansa 273)

Examining black women fiction writers' literary tradition ought to generate at least the same excitement scientists feel when they find a new solar system in the making; we are privileged to have a chance to watch first-hand the process of evolution in the tradition. And a new solar system may save our present one from total eclipse. (Pryse 21-22)

Books, like the genetic parents, beget books. (Spillers 250)

Quiet as it's kept, it has been more than thirty years since The Bluest Eye and The Third Life of Grange Copeland first arrived in our bookstores, some fifteen years since the publication of The Color Purple, and more than a decade since the arrival of Beloved. It is difficult to imagine our classes, most modern literature conference programs and journals, or even the local "mainstream" bookstore existing without the continuing wise presence of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker. To be sure, Morrison and Walker, and many of the black women who entered with them into our literary consciousnesses, are still contributing their art and vision to our lives today. However, we also need to begin to acknowledge these influential authors as forces acting upon a new generation of writers--to see them as, in Walker's terms, the "mothers" of a new set of "gardeners"--and to take careful note of what the newer writers are adding to such a powerful tradition. Are recent novelists, as Thulani Davis suggested in a 1990 article (" Don't Worry, Be Buppie"), too concerned with the ordinary, too complacent, too inward-seeking to be the proper heirs of Morrison and Walker, of Nozake Shange and Toni Cade Bambara? Davis's article claimed then that "African American fiction is miscegenating" (29), yet relationships between new authors and the traditions from which they evolve are rarely so simple or so apocalyptic. Moreover, despite Davis's argument that many in the new generation of writers have abandoned their "genuine African American riches" for mainstream banality (28), and despite her lack of enthusiasm for "announc[ing] a new generation...the bridge to the next century (WOW!)" (26), these writers are already part of the tradition, and thus demand--and often deserve--our attention and careful consideration. Many 1990s novels clearly reveal their debts to earlier black women's narratives, while adding viable and sometimes compelling new perspectives.

It is of course too early to be making any kind of general pronouncement, positive or negative, about the state of such a lively, complex tradition [1]; indeed, the ink seems barely dry on the covers of some of the novels I mention below. Yet for the sake of starting a necessary discussion, the following pages offer a brief survey of some of the contributions being made to the living traditions given us by Morrison and Walker, and given to them in turn by writers such as Paule Marshall and Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Redmon Fauset. My selection of texts and authors is idiosyncratic and surely incomplete: Focusing on authors who have had their first tastes of broad public support and/or critical acclaim within the last decade, I primarily consider novels by Bebe Moore Campbell, Terry McMillan, Sapphire, and A. J. Verdelle--all African American women--and by Susan Straight, a white woman writing about African American communities and characters. (Tina McElroy Ansa, J. California Cooper, April Sinc lair, and Davis herself, among others, have also staked literary claims recently, though they receive less frequent mention in this analysis.) To call my selection diverse--in authorial style, textual theme, geographical and temporal setting, and the racial, ethnic, cultural, and class backgrounds of authors and characters--is to understate the case; this variety also makes any collective judgment difficult. And certainly to predict the staying power of any of these texts, or the paths their authors will travel beyond this point, is impossible.

Yet there is enough common ground to open a discussion, to explore the bright new threads being woven into the warp (or, as Davis warns, to look carefully for any snags or holes in the literary fabric). Confronted with a changing set of daily realities, and knowing they can build upon the work of authors like Morrison and Walker, [2] the 1990s writers I discuss have markedly and somewhat similarly shifted the focus and scope of narratives about African Americans without, I argue, breaking the threads that connect them to the past. The following analysis looks at the most basic of warp threads: character development, narrative structure, and thematic explorations. In brief, I note that these new novels share an admiration for and focus on strong black women who already know who they are and what they need; they also embody a shift--and not necessarily a destructive one--toward plain-spoken stories and toward a focus on external, situational conflicts that must be addressed one at a time. The books demonstrate an equal awareness of the pathways opened for them by earlier writers, and of the contemporary social and artistic challenges they and their characters face. Far from sounding a death knell for black women's narratives, these novels extend the achievements of earlier writers and grapple, often successfully, with challenges facing black women speaking out in the 1990s.

Being Your Own "Best Thing": A New Self/Confidence

To understand how the contemporary texts both shift perspectives and hold steady, it helps to recall some of the earlier movements within the tradition of black women's fiction. It hardly needs pointing out that one of the great themes of African American texts in the 1970s and 1980s was the internal search for a recognizable self. [3] Yet these familiar strategies were once "new": Morrison and Walker had themselves been transforming the strategies used by earlier African American novelists, who in Barbara Christian's explanation most often "directed their conscious intention toward a refutation of the negative images imposed upon all black women" ("Trajectories" 173). In contrast, novels like The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and The Color Purple vibrated with the struggle for internally based self-creation. Knowing, as one of Morrison's characters explains, that "definitions belonged to the definers" (Beloved 190), a generation of writers focused intently on helping their black women characters learn to define thems elves positively instead of just reacting against others' stereotypes, and gave them the power to speak their own names and stories. Pecola Breedlove struggled to see her own beauty; Sethe Suggs finally acknowledged Paul D's admonition" 'You your best thing, Sethe. You are'" (Beloved 273); and Walker's Celie took steady steps toward reclaiming her self and her voice from the world around her. Far from being self-absorbed, these characters fought battles on behalf of millions of women-and the fruits of their triumphs are beginning to appear in the novels of contemporary writers.

Perhaps because of the painful work of characters such as Pecola, Sethe, and Celie, the writers under consideration in this analysis have felt less need to have their characters start over with fundamental questions of personal identity. Rather, the characters in these recently published novels, whether facing challenges in the 1950s or in the 1990s, frequently enter the first chapters with the confidence that earlier characters struggled to reach by the final pages. To be sure, the younger characters do expand and deepen in self-awareness as they mature, but they begin in relative self-security--so their self-alterations can indeed seem "hardly tangible" (Davis, "Buppie" 28). Yet some progress is made. In The Good Negress (1995), for example, we follow Verdelle's heroine Denise Palms through the adolescence that sank Pecola and nearly destroyed Celie, yet despite similarities of situation there is much less emphasis on the personal angst of self-discovery. Returning to her mother's house in Detroit after fi ve years with her grandmother in Virginia, twelve-year-old Denise takes over the management of the household, and discovers "from the work a naked ache of my own" (Verdelle 25). Yet she is already prepared to confront the situation: "What did I want? I had to think. Somethin I knew or recognized, I guess" (32). School provides this "somethin," and without fanfare Denise decides "to write myself to a future" (175).

In Straight's 1992 novel I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, Marietta Cook is similarly determined and sure of herself. Traveling to 1950s Charleston alone at age fifteen presents no end of threats and conundra, yet quiet Marietta is confident enough that she can walk into a men's clothing store and stare down the salesmen as she pulls long pants and men's shirts off the rack, determined to be comfortable rather than modestly fashionable (Kitchen 54). [4] Even Sapphire's heroine Precious Jones (Push [1996]), who is besieged by everyday life in present-day New York, and who struggles as Celie did for language to express herself, opens her narrative by declaring the unfairness of a school policy that expelled her for becoming pregnant, and of the tests that "paint a picture of me wif no brain"--because deep within herself Precious already knows better (33).

Likewise, while older characters falter and struggle to regain ground, they rarely remain off-balance for long. McMillan's women, for instance, seem to have no end of personal reserve to draw upon when the modern world increases its demands on them. In McMillan's first novel, Mama (1987), Mildred Peacock is the consummate survivor, deciding on a moment's notice to move or marry, advance or retreat when her current life brings her pain or no longer matches her needs. In McMiIlan's third book, Waiting to Exhale (1992), Bernadine Harris rebounds from a devastated daze following an unexpected divorce by fervently promising her absent husband (and herself) that "I won't let you reduce me to this" (91). In some ways, Campbell's black women characters struggle more often than McMillan's with worry, doubt, or crises of motivation, yet overall their senses of selfworth are rarely shaken. Typical of these characters is Delotha Todd, from Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992): Although haunted by the mid-1950s lynching of her only son, Delotha has self-confidence to spare:

. . . one look at [her husband] Wydell's expression and she realized that her simple idea of hard work and prosperity was as real to him as being able to make gold out of shit. In that split second she saw that he didn't believe in himself and that he never had. If he was ever to have faith and self-confidence, she would have to give it to him. (221)

Despite the odds she faces, Delotha's decision--like Denise's--is a matter of a moment, and for her almost a matter of fact; it is a "simple idea" that she comes by naturally. Moreover, though it is not stated as such, these women's confidence is itself part of the "genuine ... riches" of African American women's cultural and literary traditions.

Indeed, whereas Morrison's Pilate and Walker's Shug seemed mysteriously and uniquely powerful, many of these contemporary characters see strength as a general birthright, even a requirement: They expect it of themselves, and of each other. Not coincidentally, and in keeping with another tradition of black women's narratives, the security these women feel arises in large part from other women in their families. Denise, for example, remembers being "the meat on the plate," the center of attention, when her mother and grandmother were in the house together (Verdelle 7); the child Marietta feels overlooked or ignored, but is comfortable among the "echoing murmurs, rising and falling, of the women's voices" at home in the South Carolina lowlands (Straight, Kitchen 3); Bernadine survives the divorce in part with the support of her mother, who explains succinctly, "'He's hurt you, and it's the same as hurting me'" (McMillan, Exhale 139); and Davis's young heroine Willie Tarrant likewise finds the community connection central to the success of the Civil Rights battles she witnesses: "Each one of us had become precious to many; the many had become precious to each one" (1959 246). In each case it is clear that, from childhood through to adulthood, the characters in these novels know who they are and believe that--particularly with the support of other black women--they can get where they're going. These and other contemporary authors show us how to celebrate the selves Morrison and Walker's generation uncovered and (re)built piece by piece.

A potentially unsettling corollary to this self-celebration is the characters' willingness to replace concern about who they are with worries about how they are perceived by others--by white bosses and police officers, by black woman friends and male lovers Noting this shift, Davis expresses her concern about "a narcissism downright unusual for African American literature" ("Buppie" 28). In what could be read as a setback, a hearkening backward toward an older pattern of the narrative tradition that we hoped we had outgrown, the characters' focus shifts from wholly internal to frequently external views. Recalling an earlier alteration of perspective, Deborah McDowell argues that Walker's interest in characters' sell-examination had been a distinct improvement on the character development in texts like Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1893):

Whereas Harper approaches Iola's character largely from outside through her physical characteristics and through what others say about her, Walker reveals Celie's character completely from the inside. Everything we learn about Celie is filtered through her own consciousness and rendered in her own voice. (42)

Still, when the central characters in these contemporary novels interweave their own points of view with concerns about the views of outsiders peering in, they may also plainly be affirming the continuing pervasiveness of a Du Boisian double-consciousness, updated for the more subtle but still palpable racial tensions of the 1990s. Knowing who one is--as many of McMillan's characters do, for instance--does not automatically change how others perceive oneself. In the words of McMillan's Robin Stokes, many of these characters seem to be "seeing myself outside myself, like I was on a big screen or something" (Exhale 56).

A more positive, even strategic reading of this "narcissism" might argue that the characters know that they will be judged first and often negatively on their appearances--particularly in a 1990s world in which confident blacks come into daily contact with skeptical or bigoted outsiders--and they don't want such distractions to prevent them from reaching their goals. So they strive to look as worthy, competent, or successful as they know themselves to be, and they cultivate an awareness of the impact they have on others. For instance, when LaKeesha Jones shows up for her first job interview in Campbell's Brothers and Sisters (1994), even sympathetic Esther Jackson looks at the short skirt, flashy jewelry, and rhinestoned fingernails and decides: "The child wasn't ready for prime time" and, worse, "she probably had no idea how deficient she was" (215). Like other black women in these novels, LaKeesha may get stuck having to look twice as competent as her white or male colleagues to win their respect (somethin g Esther knows from experience). [5] Indeed, even after LaKeesha adopts a more professional look, Esther's white co-worker Mallory still worries that LaKeesha "didn't seem responsible" (Campbell, Brothers 235; emphasis mine).

Outside of work, appearances can be even more important to keeping a sense of self-worth, or even to staying alive and unhurt. Straight's Marcus Thompson (The Gettin Place [1996]) knows that, like a black woman in a bank office, a black man on foot at night is judged to be a suspicious character, even in his own father's driveway. Moving too fast or in the wrong direction could result in confrontation or arrest. These characters' willingness to adjust to outside expectations is indeed hardly the "raw and raggedy self-righteous" attention to "Race Mind" that Davis recalls from earlier novels ("Buppie" 26). Yet rather than being wholly a step backward, LaKeesha's and Marcus's experiences suggest that the focus on external qualities is for contemporary blacks an unsurprising if unlooked-for result of the forward steps taken through the assertion of internal independence and power. The huge changes wrought internally have not been matched by larger societal changes and, perhaps more than most, the characters in these texts know what a backlash is. To move forward, the authors suggest, sometimes requires strategies from--and an awareness of our connections to--earlier times.

Moreover, despite the pressures of external gazes, many of the central characters are strong women who, sure of themselves, speak out when they have something to say, often disregarding the possible adverse reactions from others. This is another talent learned in part from earlier heroines. As Christian notes, for instance, "Walker's women are not silent" ("Contrary" 34). Indeed, McDowell points out, even Walker's "black black" heroines, those not sheltered by light skin or class privilege, speak aloud in their own voices about the events that impact their lives (42). This confident voice is one of the strongest gifts that contemporary writers have received from the earlier generation of writers; they often depend on its power and continue to expand its boundaries. They can and do move beyond letting us look quietly over Celie's shoulder at her private journal or share Sethe's hidden "rememories." McMillan's novels, for example, thrive on the in-your-face energy of powerful voices, and other writers use stro ng women's voices for emphasis of character and situation. Under pressure, the women in Campbell's and Sapphire's novels say what they think--and more often than not, they say it in public, in front of witnesses. "The first thing" Delotha Todd thinks of when she gets back to Chicago with her son's body is "to call the newspapers, the white ones as well as the colored," to testify about her son's murder in Mississippi (Campbell, Blues 138). Delotha also gives frank interviews: "'I can't forgive, I just can't' (192). In Brothers and Sisters, Esther Jackson likewise confronts managers, waitresses, and friends with equal verbal aplomb when she feels she is being ignored or harassed. Finally, even when confronted with the silencing forces (schools, doctors, social workers) that pervade Sapphire's novel Push, Precious Jones begins with an outpouring of assertion and continues to speak out; she shares her journal entries with her teacher, relates her other experiences to her classmates and support group members, and moves toward a goal of public expression in a class-wide journal. If there is an edginess, a defensiveness to many of these voices, it is not yet defeated or silenced--instead, it reflects the tremendous energy required to be a noticeably (or even potentially) powerful black woman in a world with few allies.

"Get[ting] Inside the Language" [6]: Serious Wordplay

Where this public, confident voice overlaps with the authors' narrative style, these authors expand African American women's space for linguistic play--and for linguistic seriousness. Inheriting from Hurston through Marshall, Morrison, and Walker a reading audience that is mostly willing to see the power and beauty in non-standard English, authors of these recent novels create characters who not only speak out but frequently make the language their own. Marietta's Gullah speech is one of the driving rhythms of Sorrow's Kitchen, though the text expands to include many languages. " 'I look fe Africa woman grave,'" Marietta tells her Aint Sister, referring to her quest for information about a distant ancestor. "'I been a look since you tell me. But you aint tell me no clue'" (Straight, Kitchen 136). Marietta's sons speak the lowland dialect when they're communicating privately, but Straight also gives us their public language from the streets of Los Angeles: "'Oh, man, we livin large. We can choose the ride, th e crib' "(274). Despite Marietta's initial confusion over the boys' new lingo, she admires the men she meets who can "shift [their] languages" to match a variety of situations (339). Both Precious Jones and Denise Palms add their own variations--Precious as she translates her spoken languages into written English, and Denise as she overlays the soft rural Virginia sounds of her childhood onto her Detroit adolescence. "'My name Deneese Palms an I come up from Fuhginia,' "she tells her new classmates (Verdelle 40). J. California Cooper's stories have also received special notice for their representations of African American vernacular speech. [7] Within the relative safety of the fictional texts, there is room for the authors to play with the language, expanding the range of distinct black women's voices.

There is, to be sure, merit to Davis's point that 1990s novels often speak "the practiced tongue of white mainstream literature" ("Buppie" 26). This shift, however, has not happened without comment. In a decade notable in part for a nationwide, often passionate discussion about Ebonics, the authors take the "assimilation" of spoken languages quite seriously. As Chicana activist Gloria Anzaldua has made clear, language in contemporary U.S. culture is closely tied to identity, and to survival. [8] Thus, while Straight's Marietta marvels at the number of languages spoken around her, her grandfatherly neighbor notes the realities of talking with whites in the South Carolina of the sixties: "'You have to look at the faces to judge which Negro they want.... [Sometimes I can use my] schoolteacher voice--some of them don't mind'" (Kitchen 205). Not much has changed in the nineties: McMillan's Gloria Matthews can't help but make the connection between language and identity when her son's father stops by. "He sounded so formal, she thought. No, it wasn't formal. If she closed her eyes, she'd have sworn he was white" (Exhale 77). [9] This wordplay is powerful: The spoken word--the word spoken in just such a way--can establish or erase identity in a single syllable, can create or eliminate power and wealth in a single breath.

Thus, while Cooper's usually anonymous narrators speak unselfconsciously and often solely to other members of their black communities, many of the other women in these novels are working extremely hard to cope with the linguistic expectations of their standard-English-dominated society--paradoxically, as a way to enable them to keep alive their own distinctive language and self-confidence. [10] Of course, none of these women is as overtly silenced as was Louvinie, the slave woman noted in Walker's Meridian (1976) whose tongue was cut out as a punishment. Contemporary forces are more subtle. Whereas Celie's nonstandard language, in her own private world, was a source of strength, Precious's low reading and writing test scores may doom her to a low-wage home-health-care workfare job, as she discovers when (with the help of a more advanced classmate) she sneaks a look at her social worker's report. Understanding the way these politics play in the white corporate world of Brothers and Sisters, Esther uses flashc ards to help train LaKeesha to juggle the "to be" verbs of standard English--what LaKeesha calls "the language of success and power" (Campbell 270).

On an even more intense note, Miss Pearson, Denise's teacher, insists that Denise will escape becoming "'a good little Negress'" (Verdelle 209) only if she alters her accented speech. "'Learning to speak proper English is absolutely necessary for all Americans,' "she tells Denise. So Denise--mortified to discover that she has been spelling her own name "wrong"--goes home to tame her tongue, to practice "closing off [her] throat" and "putting [her] tongue between [her] teeth" (Verdelle 118-19). Like earlier forms of "passing," altering one's language is not an automatic event; neither is it an all-or-nothing decision. Verdelle shows us both Denise's eagerness to learn to speak "proper" and her continuing self-consciousness about her spoken languages. Meanwhile, Campbell's LaKeesha is "sometimes...a little afraid...that she could lose herself in the land where enunciation was crisp and all verbs agreed" (Brothers 270); yet on the bus to work and in private conversations throughout the day she easily slides int o more familiar language patterns. All of these women know they are strong and intelligent and have something to say; their concerns focus on enabling others--primarily whites with economic power--to recognize their abilities more easily. There may be some disappointment here for readers; the earlier generation of writers left us with the hope that, if black women's selves could be defined, accepted, celebrated, and spoken, other facets of their lives would slide smoothly into place. Yet contemporary novelists like Campbell, Sapphire, and Verdelle reveal that felt identity does not have a direct impact on the perceived identity so crucial to broader social progress. As their characters show us, the struggle over representing oneself to others through language as well as through actions is complex and--one ray of hope--persistent.

Narratives and Communities

Part of what made us believe in the power of Morrison's and Walker's characters to change their worlds was the deft narrative style underpinning individual lives and pulling characters together into communities. The weaving together of voices within the texts of their novels; the tying together of stories and lives, past and present; the narrative loops and gaps that pulled the reader into the community with the characters--all these fostered the sense that self-awareness and self-assertion could shake the universe. Powerful, complex narration is part of the legacy Morrison and Walker have bequeathed younger writers, just as earlier writers passed it to them. Indeed, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson explains that, over the length of the tradition, black women writers have frequently written in an interlocutory, dialogic style, reflecting in part the internal "Otherness" that is central to what she calls "the matrix of black female subjectivity" (17-18). Morrison in particular has shown us just how powerful such a mult ivocal narrative matrix can be, and, following her example, contemporary writers often give voice and viewpoint to multiple characters through multiple settings in time and place. None of the texts under consideration here reaches for the intense harmonies of, say, Beloved's choral narrative, yet several show and build upon an awareness of the tradition's storytelling achievements; these contemporary authors celebrate and continue a tradition of narrative power.

Narratively, Verdelle's The Good Negress is the most subtly and tightly woven novel of those I discuss here. At its foundation, the story is simple enough for a sentence-length description: Denise struggles to adapt to life and school with her mother in 1960s Detroit after spending most of her childhood with her grandmother in rural Virginia. But the narrative adds complications: Denise is a young woman who understands how, in conversation, "the subject [can be] changed and changed and changed" (Verdelle 86), and each time she re-tells this story she fills in another color, adds another thread. Scenes showing the crucial events in her early life--the day her mother leaves her at her grandmother's house, the day she returns north, her first days at school--repeat in a quiet fugue through the novel's first chapters, narrative themes woven in with bits of family history and procedures for cleaning house and cooking dinner. Denise rarely reaches consciously for or comments on the arrival of these "rememories" as Sethe does. Instead, Verdelle's deceptively easy narrative lets events r ise to the surface in what she calls a "circle dance" (115), linked to one another by associations that are often not clear to the reader until the second or third version of an event appears and provides the crucial connecting detail. Each repetition helps to deepen our understanding that, as Denise learns in school, "history [, the personal as well as the political,] complicates things" (107). Taking up a different historical narrative, Davis's Civil Rights-era novel 1959(1992) also explores the power of understated narrative shifts. Twelve-year-old Willie's steady first-person narrative is often interrupted by third-person explanations of scenes she could not have witnessed; sometimes this shift happens in mid-paragraph, swooping down from a free-flowing omniscience to the groundedness of Willie's distinctive narration. Neither author places special emphasis on storytelling structure, yet both take advantage of an audience familiar with a tradition of complex narratives, in choosing to weave finely texture d narrative backdrops for their heroines' stories.

Novels by Campbell, McMillan, and Straight are more straightforwardly multivocal and more chronologically linear than the texts by Verdelle and Davis. These three novelists most often rely on omniscient narratives that take us into the minds of a wide variety of people, shifting less frequently to first person narration. In some ways their narration merely mimics the "conservative stylistic choices... [of] mainstream American models" that Davis deplores ("Buppie" 26). Yet in addition to noting that contemporary "mainstream" American fiction has learned much from black women writers, I would argue that here, too, a connection to a black women's literary tradition lingers. Rosemary Bra/s complaint about Straight's Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights (1996), that "the number of people who make an appearance in the novel might serve to confuse all but the most single-minded reader" (2), echoes a comment by Robert Sargent a decade ago that The Bluest Eye suffered because "the contrasting [central] figures are somew hat obscured by a host of minor figures and by the shifting point of view" (231). The need for the whole community to participate in the storytelling still permeates these stories, emphasizing both the connectedness and the diversity of voices and views. [11] Even in apparently monovocal narratives like Mama and The Good Negress, the characters share with their predecessors a reliance on a wide network of friends and family, and an interest in representing these additional perspectives in their stories. Interestingly, both McMillan and Campbell satirize the 1990s version of community--black professional "networking"--as being morally empty and professionally worthless, while they simultaneously validate the narrative contributions of supportive friends and family within a true community.

Not only do these novels include multiple voices, but the characters often speak out directly to credit the community contributions, as I noted earlier. " 'Girl,' "says McMillan's Bernadine in response to a query about her social life after the divorce, "'you'd swear I was dying and they were trying to save my life. Robin took the kids this past weekend and Gloria dragged me to see The War of the Roses.... they won't let me do too much of anything by myself'" (Exhale 111). The shifting point of view remains in itself one of the central motifs of the tradition--and the community now includes not only Straight's dozens of male and female voices but also the viewpoints of both black and white characters as featured in Campbell's novels. Moreover, as Bray discovered, these writers make few special efforts to guide readers through their narrative composites and disjunctures. As heirs to the tradition that has brought us narratives as diverse as Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Morrison's Beloved, and Walker's The Templ e of My Familiar, they can count on readers to find their way through the more direct multivocalities of their current novels, and to appreciate the role that a larger community plays in the storytelling--and in survival.

"It's All About the Paper": New Definitions of Success [12]

One of the most discouraging of Davis's observations is that, even with the inclusion of lively multiple voices and mixed chronologies, these plain-talking novels rarely reach for the all-encompassing or the mythical. She finds in them "an absence of protest which has been replaced by homilies to survival" ("Buppie" 26). Certainly, in the novels considered here we find few direct indictments of slavery or of the beauty culture, few large-scale revelations about identity, oppression, sexuality, or community. Readers looking for what Susan Willis calls the "most compelling aspect" of earlier black women's texts, their "ability to envision transformed human social relationships and the alternative futures these might shape" (159), may be frustrated by characters who seem preoccupied with the smaller stories of the jobs, marriages, mortgages, or child-rearing decisions immediately in front of them. [13] Perhaps we should not so soon expect a whole new set of world- and genre-transforming texts; indeed, many peopl e would argue that the ability to produce black women's stories for the mass markets of pleasure-readers is itself a victory for the authors and for their tradition. Yet on the other hand, for women writing from within the '80s backlash rather than from within the strong if fading idealism of the '60s and early '70s, this shift makes both artistic and cultural sense, and touches important threads of contemporary African American life that deserve investigation.

As racism has moved from the blatant sharecropping and lynching described in the 1950s scenes of Sorrow's Kitchen and Your Blues to the less overt glass ceilings of Brothers and Sisters, and as it has been more thoroughly understood as linked to the pervasive economic oppression equally evident in the 1960s world of The Good Negress and the 1990s world of Push, the battlegrounds and strategies within the novels have shifted, too. Again and again the struggles in these texts are phrased in the economic terms of who has "the paper": dollar bills, to be sure, but also contracts, leases, licenses, and resumes. [14] Some of the references flirt with the kind of general superficiality we have come to associate with the economic views of many 1980s Americans. In Waiting to Exhale, for instance, Savannah Jackson's preoccupation with her expensive household goods is reversed but still validated by Bernadine's vengeful "everything's a dollar" garage sale of her former husband's worldly possessions, including his antiq ue car (McMillan 92). Both characters' reactions reinforce the easy shorthand of using expensive objects to denote middle-class achievements and values--some of them hard-won evidence of success, some of them symbols of emotional emptiness. [15] And some of these objects represent both states of being: In Ansa's The Hand I Fan With (1996), it is difficult to tell if the detailed celebration of wealthy Lena McPherson's "cabin," from the heated stables and hickory tables to the sauna and automatic clothes racks, is supposed to enhance either our admiration for Lena's success or our pity for her overworked loneliness (55 ff.).

Yet can we be sure that this focus is wholly self-centered "Buppie-dom" without any social protest? True, these characters don't always join marches or give newspaper interviews, but the authors do move us beyond the illusion that financial stability and secure employment always buy happiness, to an understanding and often a critique of the very real powers of "paper." In these texts, money keeps families together, moves children out of dangerous neighborhoods, provides educations, aids ailing parents, boosts self-esteem in a capitalist world, and helps those who have it to earn the respect of surrounding whites in power. Thus in Brothers and Sisters, regional bank manager Humphrey Boone dreams of the grand rescue ("If he had big dollars, then he could save them all. He could bring his entire family out of the ghetto" [Campbell 354]), while newly employed teller LaKeesha Jones notices that her younger sisters' behavior improves just from watching LaKeesha make it off public assistance. Delotha's successful C hicago hair salon helps her rebuild her family after her son's murder. And in Detroit, Denise's job keeps her away from school but is important both to her independence and to her sense of family connections:

"Miss Pearson," I rush, a torrent of speech, "I am only gone have the job until the day after Christmas. It's just one month. I haven't had the chance to earn any money since I been--since I have been up here. Margarete's husband Jim gives me money but it's for the food, for the dinners and lunches I fix. I'm sure him and Margarete would give me some Christmas money, but I don't want to ask them for Christmas money. I want to take the bus to the downtown store and earn my own Christmas money and buy what presents I want with the money I earned." (Verdelle 209)

Denise's work ethic, like her "proper" English, may also be rewarded by mainstream American society, though Miss Pearson remains concerned that a low-wage, unskilled-labor job will eventually work to Denise's detriment.

Despite Miss Pearson's concern, however, finding work and financial stability remains a high priority for these characters. It is important to note, too, that men as well as women find themselves looking in from a "paperless" outside: Throughout these women's texts run the shadows of sons, husbands, younger brothers, and nephews whose unemployment or underemployment, or that of their guardians, is a constant threat to their ability to stay off drugs, out of trouble, alive. The novels' social critique comes in the authors' consistent awareness that, like these young black (and sometimes white) men, many of the characters are stuck in a Catch-22. As Straight's novels in particular stress repeatedly, if members of this generation of African Americans are not already educated, housed, and tight with their families--states of being that are increasingly dependent on having "the paper"--financially sustaining employment and personal stability are difficult to find, and require a daily struggle to hold onto. Moreov er, particularly in the modern, urban environments in which many of these novels are set, neither self-love nor a strong sense of connection to family, church, and community is by itself enough for survival, much less achievement, as much as we might wish it so; read in this context, Savannah's artwork and Lena's sauna may represent notable if tenuous triumphs of will and circumstance.

Likewise, in a world where lives unroll in slow spirals--either upward toward success or downward away from it--rather than in rags-to-riches leaps, the ordinary events often sing as loudly as Sethe's and Celie's grand escapes. Adolescent mothers like Precious learn to read to their sons; white and black women in Campbell's two novels stand together against managerial harassment; unemployed women like Denise, LaKeesha, and Marietta find work; the murderers of Delotha's son end up in jail, even if only for a brief time; spouses in Straight's novels rebuild relationships while single women in McMillan's meet good, steady men. The authors in general take the time to explore the daily rhythms of life without always testifying to the larger oppressions of race, gender, and class (after all, they can again assume that their readers have also read Morrison and Walker and know most of what they need to know). Yet this is not to say that the characters are unaware of the forces of patriarchy or racism; even McMillan' s upbeat, successful, groove-finding Stella is thoroughly conscious of the gazes of white male beach-goers, and of the historical and political significance of these gazes (How Stella Got Her Groove Back [19961) [16]

Finally, although Davis justifiably worries about the replacement of an aware, resisting "Race Mind" by quiet, assimilationist compliances, race-- which in these texts nearly always means blacks and whites--remains an important public and personal issue for this recent generation of writers; it is just not usually directly addressed as "the point" of the text. As noted at the beginning of this analysis, the authors mentioned herein have a diverse array of points to make. On one hand, for instance, Sapphire and Verdelle give us few glimpses of white people. Even so, the dominant white power structure remains an ever-present, direct, unsolved challenge--to Denise's language, to her brothers' attempts to "make it" in the outside world, to Precious's upward climb out of institutions toward some amount of control over her own life. When both young women succeed, their achievements suggest a "bootstraps" approach to the problem: In some situations, education and careful maneuvering--efforts that reach beyond self- discovery--can overcome challenges and by implication can mitigate the racial tensions that created the barriers in the first place. On the other hand, for Campbell's characters, both black and white, racial conflict and reconciliation exist up front on a tightly focused personal scale. By teasing the monolith of racism into its familial, economic, and situational complexities, focusing on instances and individuals more than on patterns or systems, and often offering situational solutions (how to outmaneuver a racist boss) within continuing cultural struggles, Campbell describes the possibility of one-on-one, day-by-day truces. These characters haven't given up; they're just fighting different battles.

None of the texts suggests that readers should or will unanimously support one strategy over another, or even find the same point being portrayed. Indeed, reviewers of Brothers and Sisters (to take one example) say alternately that Campbell has unfairly caricatured her white characters (Gleick 18), that she has "scraped away all the myths and fears" about diversity (Farley 81), or that "racism isn't the overriding factor" in the novel (Tucker 224). And to add to the mix, Straight calls us back to a question that itself has no single answer, but must be answered by situational investigation: Can--should--a white woman write the stories of black women? In Straight's case, her insider status (as a member of predominately black family and community structures) and public acceptance by black as well as white readers gives us one answer. More importantly, as we evaluate the larger tradition we can begin to realize that, like the other authors in this survey, Straight would not be writing the way she does, through the characters she creates, and for the audience she has, without the ground-laying of earlier black women writers like Morrison and Walker; that she does write, and does so with deliberate care about how blacks are perceived by whites, may suggest yet another strategy for considering racial conflict.

Still, this group of recent writers offers few ideas about long-term solutions; characters' lives and selves are rarely reborn into completely fresh starts; and there is less sense of "the crucial importance of transforming the future" than what Willis finds in earlier novels (168). Rather than "imagin[ing] the future in the present" (Willis 159), the current novels appear to take the smaller, ultimately less utopian step of imagining the present as, more or less, the future. Denise will earn her teacher's certificate and "make it," but the last scenes of The Good Negress show her still tied to her family's troubles. Campbell's Esther Jackson and Mallory Post can't agree whether it's possible for a black woman and a white woman to be friends: " 'Maybe it's supposed to be hard,'" offers Mallory, saying aloud what the previous 500 pages have made perfectly clear (Brothers 542). Instead, we are immersed in the processes of their lives and thoughts, still building and growing. The characters remain almost indist inguishable from the rest of us, if somewhat braver than we usually are, and somewhat steadier toward the ends of novels than they were at the beginnings; they manage as most of us must, without miracles, metaphors, or grand revelations. Though Davis mourns the focal shift from racial issues to "some form of ordinary life," she concedes that "if I can feel it in the street... I shouldn't be surprised to find it in our literature" ("Buppie" 29). And perhaps these authors have a new point rather than a new pointlessness: People just like us learn and survive and make progress in small steps [17]-and the traditions change and continue.

Hortense J. Spillers explains, cogently, that "traditions are not born. They are made. We would add that they are not, like objects of nature, here to stay, but survive as created social events only to the extent that an audience cares to see them" (250). Heading into the next several decades, "we" will be not just the readers who identify with the characters and find our stories revealed in the texts, but the audience at a reflective distance who looks for and sees traditions forming, who helps to form them. As readers and scholars we, like Davis, must continue to ask where participation in a tradition becomes appropriation or dilution of it, and to ask of these and other authors whether focusing on daily skirmishes is compelling enough to keep a world-changing tradition alive. We will also have to ask questions of ourselves, for in Spilers's definition it is not solely the authors who are responsible for transforming the tradition or its vision of our possible futures. Marjorie Pryse's excitement, noted in the second epigraph to this essay, may only be the beginning: Think of what it means to be not only the observers but also the active partners in the evolution of this new solar system. I offer my own interpretations--that stories of African Americans written by contemporary women are newly comfortable with strong, outspoken black women; that in reaction to contemporary societal and literary forces they are focusing outward, shifting more to the economic, the quotidian, and the situational; and that within straightforward narratives they provide ever more community voices for us to consider--in order to help us start this process, so that we may be part of keeping this tradition visible, variable, and powerful for the next generations of readers and gardeners.

E. Shelley Reid is Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. She has published articles on Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Amy Tan, and is currently working on a study of narrative and identity in the works of Ana Castillo. A version of this article was presented in June 1997 as a paper at the National Women's Studies Association Conference in St. Louis. Professor Reid wishes to express her appreciation for the assistance of audience members there, as well as that of Eric Anderson, Sharon Delmendo, and Joy Reid, in helping her to refine her analysis.

Notes

(1.) I use the ward tradition here to represent a flexible, multifaceted, recursive process; as Deborah McDowell notes, literary influence among African American women writers often "departs in significant ways" from the more linear "adversarial and parodic" relationships that scholars have identified among male writers (48).

(2.) That this generation of authors expects readers to be familiar with the earlier generation of texts is evident in part from their characters' reading preferences. Ansa's character Lena isn't the only one to have read Angelou, Morrison, and Walker: Sapphire's heroine Precious counts Walker's The Color Purple among her most important books (82), and April Sinclair's narrator Jean "Stevie" Stevenson gets "so absorbed" in Morrison's The Bluest Eye that she tunes out the world around her, even temporarily forgetting her grandmother's critical illness (312).

(3.) "The extent to which Afro-American women writers in the seventies and eighties have been able to make a commitment to an exploration of self," writes Barbara Christian, "as central rather than marginal, is a tribute to the insights they have culled in a century or so of literary activity" ("Trajectories" 172.).

(4.) In his review of the novel, Henry Louis Gates despairs of Marietta's "damned dignity," and wishes that Straight had created a protagonist "who isn't on the brink of beatitude" ("Dishing" 4). Yet one wonders if--pants and all--Marietta isn't the kind woman Celie would have liked to become, given the chance, or if Marietta's comfort level with her physically awkward self isn't a large part of what Sula spent some of her life searching for. Straight gives Marietta both cause and need for such dignity and, as I suggest below, responds to a culture that asks--requires--just such behavior of strong black women.

(5.) Harriette Cole's 1999 book How to Be: Contemporary Etiquette for African Americans and the focus of the front-page feature-section story about it in The Dallas Morning News--"Doing the Right Thing: Blacks Learn to Deal with Separate Code of Conduct" (Johnson 1C)--suggest that Esther and the other contemporary characters are not unique in their pragmatic concerns about how they are perceived by others. According to the article. Cole "says she's not suggesting that blacks sell out. But if you are climbing...you have to play by the rules"--a view shared by the four other black women interviewed for the article (Johnson C2).

(6.) When Preston, the seventeen-year-old brother of the narrator in Davis's novel 1959, decides to trade in his Episcopalian background, he attends a Baptist service with a friend, and sees the language as the key to his goal: He wants "to get inside the language till he could slip there into the belly of it without even knowing....it was a place he had to go back to" (69).

(7.) Cooper's narrative vernacular stands out in this group for its consistency of voice, which has won praise from Walker: "In its strong folk flavor, Cooper's work reminds us of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston" (Some Soul, back cover). Cooper's lack of deliberate language switching has also drawn some criticism. Writes Valerie Smith of In Search of Satisfaction, "the language collides with and often trivializes" the book's powerful emotional scenes; Cooper's concern about such "limitations of style" coincides with the other authors' recognition that any single dialect speech is often most powerfully found in combination with or under the influences of other languages.

(8.) Anzaldua's arguments about Chicano/a battles for linguistic control echo the undercurrents of many of the texts by black women: "For a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo...what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A language which they can connect their identity to" (55). Anzaldua notes that, "as long as I have to accommodate the [standard] English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate" (59). Moreover, language can be a kind of shorthand for broader "othering" forces, as Campbell reveals obliquely in Brothers and Sisters when she describes a "diversity training" session: A Latino man addresses the mostly white bank employees, asking for their hypothetical response if they were to arrive early at a staff meeting to find all the other employees there speaking Spanish to one another (233). The white audience, tellingly, has no answer for him.

(9.) Campbell's Esther Jackson makes almost the same comment about the bank's new regional manager: "If I closed my eyes, I'd think I was talking with someone white, Esther thought, listening to Humphrey's clipped enunciation and perfect diction." For Esther, the language is clearly linked to success: "This brother has some real power" (Brothers 315).

(10.) As Denise explains, "There is proper English, and then separate, there is your train of thought. As long as I repeated what [Miss Pearson] said, she was satisfied, and then I could follow my own train of thought" (Verdelle 175).

(11.) Susan Willis argues, "All the novels by black women...[involve] reconstructing the development of the character's individual personality in relation to the historical forces that have shaped the migrations of her race, the struggles of her community, and the relationships that have developed within her family" (3). Morrison likewise notes that it is her intent "to use, even formally, a chorus. The real presence of a chorus. Meaning the community or the reader at large, commenting on the action as it goes ahead" ("Rootedness" 341).

(12.) When a friend's brother announces plans to move to Alaska, Sinclair's narrator Stevie asks him why. "'I need to stack up me some dead presidents,' " he replies. Stevie comments, "'So, it's all 'about the paper?' " and Alaska-dreaming Buster nods: "'Money's got all kinds of friends'" (239).

(13.) Even Davis's heartfelt rendering of Willie's experiences with Civil Rights protests uses the narrator's twelve-year-old perspective--including her worries about her father, her social life, and her fantasies about comic book characters-to keep the scope of the novel tightly bound to the quotidian, although the last chapters of the book use an omniscient, authorial voice and the voice of the adult Willie to reach for more powerful insights.

(14.) As the National Urban League's Hugh Price noted recently, "You have to amass economic power if you're going to be a player in a capitalist society..., the endgame is the accumulation of economic power."

(15.) Gates suggests that "a sense of precariousness haunts the new black middle class" and that under the success lies "the black bourgeoisie's deep-seated fear that they're only a couple of paychecks away from the fate of the underclass" ("Black" 75). Even so, the women in these texts seem less worried about such a middle-class precipice and more interested in moving among a variety of points along the modern economic continuum.

(16.) "'I can't imagine,' " Stella tells the man who suggests heading for a nude beach, "'getting any real gratification or pleasure prancing around [naked] in front of a bunch of white folks...and besides that I wouldn't want to give white men the pleasure of seeing my black body considering they used to rape us when we were slaves or did you forget about that little part of our history?'" (MoMillan, Stella 114).

(17.) Despite Davis's argument that one fault of contemporary novels is "the death of the heroic figure" as a type ("Buppie" 26), it's interesting to note that in none of the novels discussed here do we find the death or destruction--or even "merely" the deep humiliation--of power-gaining central women characters equivalent to that which is visited on, for example, Hagar and Pilate (Morrison, Song), Sula (Morrison, Sula), Baby Suggs (Morrison, Beloved), or Tashi (Walker, Possessing).

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