Clarence Major's homecoming voice in 'Such Was the Season.' (Clarence Major Issue)

"Unlike his previous fiction, which was unstintingly experimental Such Was the Season is an old-fashioned, straight-ahead narrative crammed with action, a dramatic storyline and meaty characterization," writes novelist Al Young (19). This is the consensus of reviewers of Clarence Major's fifth novel However, although more conventional and accessible on the surface for readers than his other novels, Such Was the Sawn is actually an exploration on its lower frequencies of the double consciousness of the implied author and of Dr. Adam North, whom the narrator/protagonist calls Juneboy, as both return to their Southern black vernacular roots. Rather than "contagious affection" for his characters, especially Annie Eliza Sommer-Hicks, the black matriarchal narrator/protagonist, Major's homecoming voice is characterized by social and cultural ambivalence.

Set in the post-Black Power and Black Arts era of a black bourgeois 1970s community of Atlanta, Georgia, the narrative of Such Was the Season is indeed rather conventionally structured. Annie Eliza retrospectively tells us about her "killer-diller" (1) week: Juneboy, her estranged nephew, returns as Dr. Adam North to Atlanta from Yale and Howard Universities to lecture at Spelman and Emory on his sickle cell research and to stay with her and his Southern family; Renee, her materialistic, feminist daughter-in-law, announces her candidacy for the state senate at a large dinner party, Senator Dale Cooper, Renee's political opponent and the incumbent, becomes mysteriously sick with a rare sickle cell disease and is nearly assassinated; the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Hicks, Renee's husband and Annie Eliza's hustler/minister son, is involved in a local tomato industry scandal and nearly killed by an abused lover, DeSoto Hicks, Annie Eliza's police sergeant son, hosts the family at the policeman's ball; and Annie Eliza aids Juneboy in his quest to reconcile himself to his Southern past and family, especially his murdered father Scoop, a numbers runner and surrogate father to Jeremiah. Annie Eliza is centered in her racial, ethnic, and regional vernacular culture, but the implied author and Juneboy are respectfully ambivalent about her beliefs, values, and behavior. She is a septuagenarian whose own double consciousness is apparent in her ambivalent reference to Renee as a "nigger" (19), her feeling like a "pickaninny" in the company of some whites, her confession of telling a "pickaninny" joke to her favorite white employer (152), and her disapproval of interracial romance even on television, which she watches compulsively. She also has for many years worn a "blond but kinda red" wig, which may have once looked "real natural" on her, but, as her sister Esther told her bluntly two years earlier, now makes her" |look like one of these here street hussies.'" Defiantly, she says, "I wore my wig all over Chicago, strutting my stuff just as pretty as I pleased" (17).

Is this behavior consistent with Annie Eliza's self-identification as "just a plain down-to-earth common sense person" (16)? Is she more folksy than folk? To be folksy is to be a stereotypical rather than a typical or individual member of the common people. To act folksy is to exploit surface appearances of reality rather than to explore deeper significations of reality. The informality of folksiness distorts and demeans the ways of black folk for personal survival or self-aggrandizement by reinforcing the mythic sense of superiority of white people. What then is the implied author revealing about the ironies and paradoxes of Annie Eliza's double consciousness as an elderly Southern black woman of the 1970s? How are readers encouraged to respond to her voice and world view, which makes little or no fixed distinction between fact and fiction?

The illusory character of reality and the reality of illusoriness are dramatized and symbolized by the manner in which television informs Annie Eliza's consciousness and language. The rhythms of her everyday life, like the rhythms of her black vernacular speech, are punctuated by the integration of the technology of television with the traditional morality - the passions, prejudices, and pride - of hard-working, church-going home-owning lower-middle-class Southern Negro housewives of the 1940s and 1950s who helped to support their families by ironing, washing and cleaning for white folks. Her vibrant, idiomatic dialect illuminates her uncolleged, opinionated, independent, protective, provincial, pragmatic, politically conservative character.

This is particularly true of the sound and sense of her sayings, slang, and sentences, such as her anxiety about her arthritis, stomach pains, and sex life while she watches the soap opera romance of Luke and Laura on General Hospital. "My body was talking to me something powerful," she says. "I sho wont having no labor pains. Specially since I hadn't been nowhere near no man in that respect in many, many years. I ain't had no use for all the bother that goes with being like that with mens. Oh, I tried it one time after Bibb's death, but it didn't work. Just one time. It wont worth it, child. I might as well had a been shelling peas or shucking corn" (12-13). The multiple negation and inherent variability in the use of past and present verb tenses, as well as the familiar direct-address term child, which implies an intended primary audience of her racial, generational, and gender peers, seem appropriate for the speaker's socioeconomic class, age, race, region, and sex.

Later, at Renee's dinner party, the mayor

ast Juneboy what he did and Juneboy told him nicely bout the research he was spose to be doing, he said, into sickle cell anemia. The mayor sounded real interested and ask Juneboy all about it and Juneboy talked up a storm like he knowed everything in the world bout this Negro disease. He used big words too, words like hemoglobin. Juneboy told the mayor some orgarnization done gave him a grant, which is money, and Juneboy let the mayor know that he was spending a year spending his money from the grant peoples at Howard University Hospital. (21)

The only dialectal rules observed here are those of the pronunciation of ask, the regularizing of the irregular past form of know, the loss of the initial unstressed syllable in about, and the completive aspect done gave. Conspicuously absent in Annie Eliza's speech is the usual reduction in Southern black vernacular English of -ing suffixes, as in singing to singin, and only infrequent uses of the uninflected form of the verb to be in a position in which a Standard English speaker would use an inflected form. But the rhythm, inherent variability, and peripatetic style of the literary idiolect seem authentic enough.

As Renee talks about her hospitalized, mentally ill mother Betsy, Annie Eliza's vernacular reflections on Betsy and the blues tradition further illuminate the color, class, sexual, and cultural conflicts of her personal identity:

For some reason when I think of Betsy I see her in that bright pink dress she had when she and Bob was together in that awful place we saw them once. Place called Tiny's Little Red Rooster in Marietta on a dirt road out where some colored shacks stood by a cornfield. Bibb and me went them not knowing what to spect. There was this old sinner man singing nasty songs bout what he was gone do to some gal when he catch her. He said stuff that no child of God could stand to hear: real ugly filth - stuff bout how big his thang is and what he plan to do with it. All kinda filth came outta his mouth. He talked about going up side the woman's head if she spent his money. He sang another song bout how some gal broke his heart but that old nigger never had no heart to break if you ask me. (35-36)

For Annie Eliza, as for many Southern black church-going women of her generation and lower-middle-class status, the blues was the music of sin and sinners rather than a unique secular form of cultural affirmation of the physical and spiritual resiliency of ordinary black people.

Equally revealing of Annie Eliza's character and the moral, intellectual, and cultural ambivalence fostered by the implied author's double consciousness is the pride of the narrator/ protagonist in the material success of her sons Jeremiah and DeSoto. Worried" bout Juneboy's pearance" at Renee's big dinner party, she says:

You see, I didn't want him to embarrass our side of the family. Esther's children never had the privileges my boys had. They didn't have a proper father. I mean, they were sorta raised here and there first by Momma and they no-good father and his crazy sisters. Then Esther took them up to Chicago but she had to work all the time. They didn't come up with good strict home training. That's the only way children learn good manners. (18)

Ambivalent about Jeremiah's wife Renee, she tells Juneboy and us that

she just one of them nigger gals spoiled something you wouldn't believe, and, child, so full of herself she can't smell her own stink. And all just cause she comes from the Wright family. You know the Wrights is one of the biggest and richest Negro family in politics in Atlanta. (19)

Expecting Juneboy to be as impressed as she is by the driveway "full of Cadillacs and Mercedes-Benzes" and the musical door bells of Jeremiah's and Renee's home, Annie Eliza wryly comments on his disappointing response:

... wouldn't you know it, the poor boy was so unused to such class he just didn't pay no tention to it the way polite people with right kind of background would have. I could hear them bells in there making all that sweet music and I just gave to praise to the Lord that at least one of my boys had made it big in this world. (19-20)

This is more than mere verbal irony (the night before Annie Eliza had suspected that Juneboy was trying to impress them with his stories about his travel experience in Poland!). As is the case with Jeremiah's youthful numbers running to pay for his college education, his use of Scoop's bank accounts to build his church, and his involvement in the tomato industry scandal, the dramatic irony here invites the reader to share the mixed emotions of the implied author and Juneboy for the simplicity and sincerity, but also for the prejudices, provincialism, pragmatism, and paradoxes of Annie Eliza's residual folk beliefs and values.

Atlanta-born Major, who tells interviewers that he remembers the mature vernacular voices of the women in his family, and who has just published a revised, expanded edition of his 1970s dictionary of African American slang, succeeds in capturing the literary idiolect of the time, place, class, sex, and individuality of Annie Eliza. The pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar seem authentic and authoritative for the individualized vernacular speech of a Southern black woman who claims to have changed the diapers of her sixty-three-year-old sister Esther. Raised in a segregated black urban Georgia speech community at the turn of the century, she has lived in East Point for thirty-six years, since her dead husband Bibb bought the house in 1947 with his veteran's benefits. Although not as important in the literary reconstruction of spoken dialect as grammar, such lexical items as killer-diller, killer, hussie, no-count, doodly-squat, and hootchie-kootchie man were popular during that era. Annie Eliza tried for a while during the sixties to use Blacks instead of Negroes as her preferred term of racial identification, but it just didn't feel right to her tongue. "You called somebody black back in the thirties and forties when I was coming up," she explains," you insulted them something terrible" (22).

The most striking aspect of the double consciousness of the implied author and Juneboy is manifested in the pride that Annie Eliza expresses in her Cherokee heritage and the first family homecoming. As she recalls, homecoming

use to be a big thing a custom in our family. Nowadays only time folks get together is ... when somebody dies or somebody marries or haves a baby. But we Sommers use to all go down to Monroe o se Momma and Poppa when they was still living. We did it in the spring, in the first week of May. ... At them homecomings everybody was feeling real good. We all helped Momma cook up a lot of fried chicken and made potato salad and we ate watermelon and drank lots of ice tea. Sometimes the men folk would sneak off and drink whiskey but we womens just pretended we didn't know. We singed a lot of happy songs too .... (3)

At the first homecoming her African American-and-Cherokee father, Olaudah Equiano Sommer," talked Indian" and "told us a story bout his father, a important man in the Cherokee Nation, who helped collect money to send colored families to Liberia. You see, back then a lot of Negroes still wanted to go back to Africa." At other homecomings her father would tell stories about "how his father made good luck come to the tribe.... So homecoming was a time of happiness, storytelling, a time when we all come together and membered we was family and tried to love each other, even if we didn't always do it so well" (4-5). In Such Was the Season, both Major and Juneboy are returning after many years to the South for their homecoming.

Like Annie Eliza and Juneboy, Major, as he reveals on the back cover of his book of poems Some Observations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the Century and in his autobiographical essay "Licking Stamps, Taking Chances," has memories of stories told by his maternal grandmother of her Cherokee ancestry. As is the case with most of his central male characters, Major has much in common with Juneboy. Both were born in Atlanta and left the South at eighteen with their divorced mothers, both were first married to black women, fathered two sons, and were divorced at a young age; both currently have intimate commitments to white women; both have advanced college degrees and teach at predominately white universities, both have traveled in Europe, including Poland, as professors, and both returned briefly to the South on lecture trips and stayed with relatives after thirty or more years of absence. As black intellectuals and professionals, both also have mixed emotions and success in reconciling the tensions of their double consciousness - their biracial, bicultural identities - in returning to their Southern vernacular roots.

Juneboy tells Annie Eliza,

"You know, I've come here because of the lecture they asked me to give at the university, but I have another reason for returning to the South, especially to Atlanta. I have been suffering spiritually, longing for something I think I lost a long time ago. Aunt Annie Eliza, as old as I am, I should have resolved so many questions that I haven't managed to. Who am I? Where did I come from? My first questions, and they are still unanswered. I've been running from my early self, and now I want to stop. Somehow, I am hoping that I can get back in touch with that little boy I was, looking up into my mother's and father's faces and discovering the world. I tried to become a different person and I guess I succeeded. But now I need to find that earlier self and connect it with the new self that I am now." (7-8)

Juneboy's quest, in other words, is similar to that of the quasi-auto-biographical male protagonists in most of Major's fiction.

Juneboy's mixed emotions about his homecoming are apparent in the failure of his Spelman lecture and the failure to find his father's grave." |It was like trying to make an egg stand on its end,' "he tells his aunt.

"The time of year, the season, was wrong. I worked at it, I worked hard at it, Aunt Annie Eliza. I told them what I dream of discovering and they listened as well as any audience can, but I felt sq[ua]re, in the end, that I had not reached them, they had not understood. Not a single face in the audience gave off that certain light of recognition." (7)

The allusion here to the book's title, borrowed from Jean Toomer's poem "November Cotton Flower," gives resonance to the thematic and stylistic irony of homecoming as a ritual of reintegration and regeneration even in an unfavorable climate. Annie Eliza ashamedly concludes that "maybe Juneboy didn't know as much as he thought he did" (7). But the frustration and estrangement voiced here about the distance between himself and the black intellectuals at Spelman seem more regional, cultural, emotional, and psychological than intellectual.

Juneboy's efforts to visit the grave site of his hustling yet compassionate father Scoop in order to reconcile himself with his father's memory prove unsuccessful. Annie Eliza considers Scoop "a no-count person," although he became her son Jeremiah's surrogate father while alive and his economic sponsor after death. She drives Juneboy eighty miles north past Athens to the town of Lexington, where Scoop was buried after being killed in a gunfight in i gambling dispute with a white man. On the way, Juneboy asks his aunt to stop in Monroe so that he can see his grandparents' old home and the family graves, where he takes pictures.

When they finally arrive in Lexington, they are surprised to discover that the "colored cemetery" where Scoop was buried is now under the concrete parking lot of a housing project." |In a way,' " says Juneboy with mixed emotions," 'it's a fitting burial for Scoop. It's like he has lent his flesh and spirit to an continuation of the culture. The little kids playing in those parking lots are the ongoing spirits of all those silent souls down beneath the concrete. Scoop's spirit reaches up through the hard surface and spreads like the branches of a summer tree'" (60).

Although he is unsuccessful in paying his respects to his dead father, Juneboy feels that the week he has spent with his family has been good for him." |This is to say thank you Aunt Annie Eliza, Donna Mae, Whitney, DeSoto, Buckle, for your hospitality,'" he says in a dinner toast the evening before leaving the South. "'But you've given me more without knowing it Through you I've rediscovered who I am and now I can go on from here. I love you all very much" (199).

"I started Such Was the Season after I had taken a trip to Atlanta," Major told interviewers McCaffery and Kutnik," and to some extent Juneboy is based on some of my experiences on that trip. But ... correlations start to break down very quickly once narrative and aesthetic demands and all sorts of other things start to operate on these 'facts'" (126). The book was originally titled "Juneboy," but by the time Major got to the creation of Annie Eliza, he found that this was the first novel in which he was not the model for the main character. "... from the outset," Major says, I felt more secure with the woman's voice I was using in Such Was the Season. I didn't have to think about inventing that voice because I'd grown up hearing it, I knew its rhythms from the way my relatives in the South speak. It was already there, so all I had to do was just sit at the computer and correct the voice by ear, the way you would write music. If the rhythm was wrong or the pitch off, I knew it instinctively because I'd lived with that voice all my life" (McCaffery and Kutnik 127). As a result, Juneboy comes to be "presented through this folksy, down-to-earth woman's point of view,' and Major's "own presence is so diminished in Juneboy's identity that he is at best a catalyst rather than a true persona" (McCaffery and Kutnik 125, 126). Actually, as I have attempted to demonstrate, Annie Eliza's compelling voice in Clarence Major's homecoming in Such Was the Season is more folk than folksy, yet it evokes mixed emotions from the implied author, Juneboy, and this reader.

Major, Clarence. "Licking Stamps, Taking Chances." Vol. 6 of Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Ed. Adele Sarkissian. Detroit: Gale, 1988, 175-204. - . Such Was the Season. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1987. McCaffery, Larry, and Jerzy Kutnik. "I Follow My Eyes': An Interview with Clarence Major." African American Review 28 (1994):121-38. Young, Al. "God Never Drove Those Cadillacs." New York Times Book Review 13 Dec. 1987: 19.