Nellie McKay--a memorial.

Foreword

Before editing this special section, I could not have imagined that 50 writers could praise a single person in the mellifluent diversity with which the 50 scholars and students who wrote for this section commemorate Nellie Yvonne McKay. Many of the poignant professional and personal reflections on McKay's life and work published here were presented as part of "Nellie Y. McKay and Black Women's Studies: A Symposium," convened at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on April 1, 2006. I am honored to present in this issue these remembrances of Professor McKay, who, together with Houston Baker, Jr., Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Keith Byerman, served at the behest of Editor Joe Weixlmann as Associate Editor of AAR for nearly 30 years.

Professor McKay received degrees in English and American literary studies, taking the BA at Queens College in 1969, an MA at Harvard in 1971, and the PhD also at Harvard in 1977. Her best-known publication is the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, but that massive 2,600-page, 2.5-lb. canonical volume, co-edited with Gates and 11 associate editors, was only one of more than 60 pioneering black feminist books, articles, and essays that she produced after joining the Afro-American studies faculty of the University of Wisconsin in 1978. Living a dictum she learned at Harvard--"never enter a fight that you don't intend to win" (Hall 269)--she served UW-Madison for her full career, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in the African American Studies Department as well as in the Women Studies Program and the Department of English, in which she ultimately held a joint appointment as Evjue Bascom Professor of American and African-American Literature.

Professor McKay's contributions to AAR, no less than to the profession at large, are already palpably missed. Yet her greatest contribution to the academy remains and grows, for it may well have been the inestimable number of graduate students she reached in person and in print: they begin to redress the problem of the professional pipeline that she famously condemned in a May 1998 PMLA essay. Elsewhere, as Herb Boyd has noted, Nellie once remarked: "No one believes that human beings live only an exterior life" (McKay 219). Whatever private experiences she kept veiled, the 15 senior scholars who were among McKay's closest friends and colleagues and the 35 contributors to "The Nellie Tree"--each a student whose life she singularly touched--all affirm the integrity, the true grit, and the extraordinary example of Nellie Y. McKay.

Works Cited

Boyd, Herb. "Noted Scholar Nellie Y. McKay Dies of Cancer." New Amsterdam News 155.53474 sec. 2 (16 Feb. 2006): 26.

Hall, Donald E., ed. "A Love for the Life: An Interview with Nellie McKay." Professions: Conversations on the Future of Literary and Cultural Studies. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. 264-76.

McKay, Nellie Y. "Response [to "Biography and Afro-American Culture," by Arnold Rampersad]." Afro-American Literary Studies in the 1990s. Eds. Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. 214-19.

Joycelyn Moody, Editor

African American Review

Nellie--In Her Own Words

Professing the McKay Way

Nellie and I were friends and collaborators for a long time, so I've become used to opportunities to participate in celebrations of her work. For this occasion, however, I propose to let Nellie speak for herself. I am sharing portions of public conversations that she and I have had over the years. About four years ago, we embarked on a project of encouraging professional collaboration and cooperation in the humanities. We appeared together on many panels and at many podiums, and we came close to perfecting what I privately called "The Nellie and Frances Show," but to which we referred in public as "conversations."

Our conversations generally began by us talking a bit about our discovery that we actually had been collaborating for many years. Or, to put it another way, we discovered that the multitude of times when we talked, shared, plotted, planned, sketched, detailed, and otherwise worked as teachers and as scholars constituted a way of working that had a name: collaboration. What we had been doing as a matter of course was not only different from how some other people worked, but it had saved our professional and psychological lives. We came to understand "creative collaboration" as a strategy for survival and as a way of transcending--maybe even transforming--some of the less appealing parts of our profession. In redacting some of our co-presentations below, I exclude all of my own parts of the script, to highlight representative sections that Nellie wrote and presented.

Nellie began by observing:

Perhaps our collaboration is at least partly the function of our having taught African American women writers for many years now, and having learned from their writings that, as a group of people almost always situated on the least favorable rung of the social ladder, black women learned (without having to be told explicitly) that survival for each one depended on the entire group's embrace of such strategies as cooperation, dedication to, and collaboration among themselves. In essence, for generations, black women writers have continually reminded us that these elements of which we speak were building blocks that generations of "ordinary" black women constructed; they were realities that kept them and those around them alive.

Doubtless, I learned some of these lessons within the community of women among whom I grew up long before I encountered their guiding principles in books. But I never gave much thought to the significance of those principles until I began to observe patterns of those principles in the books by black women on black women that I now read....

In another public conversation, Nellie elaborated upon these lessons:

My students and I have been reading both the slave narrative of a woman who lived the slave experience and a novel by a late 20th-century African American woman whose neoslave narrative reconstructs and revises the canonical history of slavery. In both texts, women working together across boundaries of race and class defeat the white men who demeaned and sought to demoralize black women. At the beginning of a new century and millennium, as the first-in-history sizeable cohort group of African American college and university professors begin to contemplate retirement from this field of struggle, many of us can look back and recognize that our careers and our lives in general have not strayed very far from the ways in which many black women in this country lived theirs long before our time. Many of us have held on, consciously and unconsciously, to those values that served well the generations that preceded us and continue to serve us well today.

And Nellie said:

Turning to "Harriet," that is, to The N[orton] C[ritical] E[dition] of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which Frances and I worked on together. It was not even "the book" to us. We call this project "Harriet," for as we worked on it, we worked as much for ourselves--scholars who have worked and will work in this area--as for those within the academy and outside of it who will (we hope) read this volume to understand better what Jacobs's life and letters might mean to their own, which is to say to our own. We knew that our friends and colleagues Jean Fagin Yellin and Nell Irvin Painter were also editing Incidents, so we carefully outlined our work as complementary to their respective texts, work that emphasized our particular strengths and interests with minimal overlap with the others. We decided that our version would include 19th and 20th-century responses to Jacobs and her work as well as other writings by and about the author. We could choose the best and most representative scholarly articles we could find, but we would look especially hard for works by scholars and critics of philosophy, history, religion, and other disciplines, who claimed the text as significant to their disciplinary and interdisciplinary lives. We consciously included younger and older scholars into the conversation that we hoped to continue with our version of what this text, this author, this enterprise was, is, and can be about.

Harriet Jacobs has played a major role in the recovery of African American women writers works and in the career aspirations of many scholars, both female and male. Nellie related one reason that Harriet was important to her own life when she declared: "....Jacobs holds a special place in my history as a scholar in African American literature and African American women writers in particular. I "met" Harriet in Madison, Wisconsin, when, in 1979 or 80, my then-new colleague Susan Friedman gave me a copy of Incidents. Until then I did not know that a slave woman had written a full-length account of a portion of her life. Seen in the light of my subsequent friendship with Susan, Susan's particular gift to me at that time--a recently recovered black female text, passing from a new white colleague to a new black woman colleague--serves as a symbol of the kind of collaboration in which open minds come together, to bring to the work that we do, the best that each of us has to offer.

And more than once Nellie said:

"Having no time" is a situation that African American women in the academy all face! The work that we do for our institutions, along with the students we are training, and the multiple forms of professional service we also provide, is stupendous. We have no time, and always we are tired. However, we continue to do, because the work is important.

Nellie also said:

But ... it struck me that ... without thinking too deeply, [we can] come up with different lists of several other women colleagues, and a man here and there, with whom we have similarly shared both the "heat and the burdens of the day" ... as well as the laughs, the gossip, good meals, family tragedies, and the joys in our successes.... I suspect that today the make-up of many current higher education faculties is sufficiently different from what it was 25 or 30 years ago, that certain activities have not only increased but are now more visible than before. For, although far from being enough, the struggle for diversity in higher education has achieved marked successes. The 30-year influx of women and minority racial and cultural group faculty and students into institutions previously closed to them has significantly altered how persons in these institutions carry out their work. But before the changes occurred, the new groups had to discover for themselves the coping strategies to ensure their survival. For them, there were no models and no blueprints to guide them, and so they made a way where there was none.

I think we were flying with blindfolds on in those days. We sometimes did not know where we even wanted to go, and we certainly had no assurances that wherever that was, we'd end up there. Besides, our numbers were very small, and most of us were still untenured. I had some lessons in collaboration (although I would not have thought of it as such then) from my association with the still fledgling Women's Studies Program at Madison. There I saw strong and powerful women disagree vehemently with each other in Program meetings but close ranks elsewhere for the good of the whole. In the absence of women of color among my colleagues, several white women in that group reached out to me with supportive and lasting friendships.

Here's Nellie again:

I think of my scholarly collaborative work as mostly in concrete materials like the NAAAL [Norton Anthology of African American Literature], on which I worked with Skip Gates and nine additional editors; the Casebook on Beloved that I co-edited with Bill Andrews; the Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison, I co-edited with Katheryn Earle, and the newly minted McKay/Foster edition of the Norton Critical Edition of Incidents in the Life a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. I am certainly very proud of these texts that others can see, touch, feel, and learn from. But I can also understand that there are other kinds of collaborations equally as important, and that much of that work grows out of and in conjunction with my relationships with others. These relationships are products of networks created with colleagues and friends: a "we" woven through the fabric of individual lives and activities that developed because we called on and responded to each other for or with advice, or help, or comfort, and with the selfless willingness to walk the last mile with the "other" even when we had no energy left to do it. We did it because we knew that the "other" will be there in our moments of need, whatever and whenever that may be. But I blather on, and Frances says that I tend to digress into idealism.

Finally, Nellie said:

There is a great deal to be said for collaborative scholarship that brings together experienced scholars from different literary periods. The Jacobs project helped me to offer better training to graduate students in 19th-century African American women's writings. Over the past three years, more students than before are choosing to work in the area. One of them helped me with the "Harriet" edition and was delighted to have a firsthand experience of doing the research and helping to read the proofs for a "real" book publication. She, too, "adopted" Harriet, also occasionally confusing others who overheard us referring to Jacobs as familiarly as if she were someone we know and love....

I believe that Nellie's students are impressed not just by the process of such productions, but by the example of her work and her life, which was always her work-in-progress. My work and my life remain my own work-in-progress; they are not just literally impressed with, they are irrevocably stamped by the work of Nellie Y. McKay, as they are by my ongoing work with other people who also worked with Nellie, many of us in the process of perfecting the art of Professing the McKay Way.

Frances Smith Foster

Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women's Studies

Emory University

The Praxis of a Life of Scholarship: Three Nellie McKay Letters from 1995

The life of scholarship entails an enormous amount of writing, and not simply for teaching and publication. Getting through academic life on a daily basis demands emotional support, especially when one works in a new field or in communities with challenging demographics, as did Nellie McKay. Nellie's letters to me, a record of intellectual life and development, document the praxis of a life so dedicated to her field. Personally I thank her for the psychological support she offered me over the long term. History will appreciate her documentation of a life of the mind.

As many of our colleagues know, Nellie and I exchanged letters on a very regular basis for more than a quarter century. We met in the fall of 1969 for the first time at Harvard as first-year graduate students, she in English, me in History. We didn't really get to know one another well until 1976, when she stayed with me in Philadelphia; I was an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. (An aside: I bought my house on Pine Street for $25,000 in 1974 and sold it for $75,000 in 1980, when I moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thadious Davis, now at Penn, tells me that house was listed for sale last fall for $675,000.)

In 1976 Nellie had come to Philadelphia to interview the second wife of the subject of her dissertation, the reluctant Harlem Renaissance novelist Jean Toomer. Coincidently, I was paying my first visit to the subject of my second book, Hosea Hudson, who lived in Atlantic City. Nellie accompanied me to Atlantic City, getting in on that project on the ground floor. She also rode across the country with me in 1977 in a research trip that took me to Hudson's Birmingham, Alabama, iron works. Nellie couldn't drive, so she also couldn't navigate. She also couldn't keep up with the finances. But she could always tell when we'd arrive at our each night's destination.

We were both fellows back at Harvard in 1976-1977. She was a dissertation fellow at the Du Bois Institute, which Preston Williams was heading at the time. I was at both the Charles Warren Center and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. We hosted dinners together in the basement of Robinson Hall for interesting people and had a pretty good time. When she moved to Wisconsin the following year, a friend and I drove her moving truck from Cambridge to Madison, with Nellie crying all the way. She recovered in time to serve as my maid/matron of honor when Glenn and I married in Princeton in 1989.

Our correspondence probably dates from 1977 or 1978, but I honestly don't remember a time when I wasn't writing to Nellie. I miss that correspondence terribly, a lack already felt in 2004, a grievous silence now. This correspondence currently resides with my papers in the John Hope Franklin Collection at Duke University. Because it's all in North Carolina, I had access at home only to what I had saved on floppy disks. I want to share with you excerpts from Nellie's letters to me in the first half of 1995. Most of what we wrote dealt with the details of the every day. The everyday included, of course, texts and friends we shared. Someday, someone with a lot of patience will go through this correspondence for its social history of late 20th-century black women scholars. But until that day, what I share here will be more personal than public.

The first letter comes from 3 January 1995 and begins with our discussion of Cornel West's Race Matters, which I find highly censorious of educated black people. Nellie wrote:

   One thing I was going to say was that I recall your sentiments about
   Race Matters from a long time ago when you did quote it to me. I
   think a lot of white people like that book because it probably says
   things they say too. I did not mean to aggravate you by mentioning
   [a colleague's] great praise of it, but I think it is also important
   to know who among our friends likes that kind of stuff. I still
   have not read it and probably won't until I have time on my hands.

      I saw Thad [Davis] in San Diego, and had dinner with her and
   Hortense [Spillers]. [Thad] is excited about going to Vanderbilt but
   also noted that she is aware that you don't think it's a good choice
   for her. You also know that your strong black women friends will
   do whatever they want to do.

The second letter, from 3 February 1995, describes a talk she had given to a group of retired people in Madison. Nellie spoke autobiographically to very good effect, words that acquire more weight, given what we now know of her own autobiographical fictions:

      Today was interesting. In some past long gone, I promised to give
   a talk, a 2-hr talk to a group of retired people, many of them
   former professors of this university. A few weeks ago someone called
   to remind me. I had completely forgotten and for some reason it was
   not on the calendar. In any case, I had also forgotten what I had
   agreed to talk on, and made a mental note to myself a few nights
   ago to call the contact person and find out what I was supposed
   to do. But then I forgot to call, until last night when it was too
   late.

      Today I showed up at the hour, 10:00 a.m., and had to ask my
   Introducer exactly what I was doing. It was something about the
   Evolution of the Black Woman writer in America. But flushed with
   victory from my King Day talk, I decided to go the path of my own
   autobiography and to talk about how I got to be doing the work I
   do. So out came another romantic version of my growing up years
   and how the riots at Queens College [of the City University of
   New York] in 1967 led to my decision to study American Literature
   (that's absolutely true). Also true was the part of how important
   my folks thought education was and how all of their daughters
   lead successful lives (also true).

      What I really did however, was to spin a tale that I consciously
   knew I was trying to weave to show that there were black people,
   still are, who are not from the slums and ghettoes, whose values
   are very middle class whether they have money or not, and who,
   to a large extent are "just like white people." It was all in the
   casting. The story was basically true but the emphasis pointed to
   something that was romantic and propagandistic. I found it very
   interesting. Autobiography is a construction (as we've known for
   sometime) and how one shapes it makes all the difference. I found
   myself enjoying the yarn I was spinning, and when I concluded after
   moving away from me to a mini lecture on black women writers from
   Lucy Terry to Toni Morrison, I noted that the writings of these
   women have focused on building the internal core of the black
   person/community rather than on the victimization of racism, and
   after all, that was what the dinnertime conversations were all
   about in my growing up years: giving us the chance to build up
   strength to deal with the problems of the world outside....

The last letter I want to share, from 30 May 1995, depicts the satisfactions of long friendship and settled achievement. The two women figuring in this excerpt, Frances Foster and Thadious Davis, were with Nellie when she died last January. Nellie speaks of a conference in Baltimore:

   ... An hour later everyone left except Thad and me, who hung out
   together for the remainder of the day. We had lunch, talked more,
   browsed in the stores close by, then returned to her hotel which
   was about 12 minutes away. There we put our feet up and talked
   some more. Much later we realized we had not had dinner but by then
   it was close to 10 p.m. We'd planned to try out a good restaurant
   we'd heard about. But it was late and the restaurant was far away,
   so we settled for dinner in her hotel, then I went home.

      We'd been together from about 9:30 a.m. until past 11 p.m. And
   we talked about everything and everyone. Hurston would have used us
   for the example of how at the end of the day the tired folks sat
   on the steps and "ran the world through their tongues." It was such
   a good day and I realized how much we think alike about some things.
   If I had my choice of any two black women literary critics to have
   as colleagues in my own university, my choices would be Thad or
   Fran Foster.

      As far as I can tell, the three of us appear to be the ones with
   the least amount of competition between us and everyone else; the
   ones who are genuinely happy for the success of others and who wear
   our own like loose robes. I detect no malice in either of these two
   women, and when we talk about the others it is often with a sigh of
   disappointment rather than with envy over what they have.

      Thad put it well when she observed that we who are in mid-career
   now do little to celebrate ourselves as a group, and that we need
   more genuine celebrations. Since most of us have known each other
   now for more than 20 years, we have essentially "grown up"
   together. In the early days, when we were all nobodies, we cared
   about each other differently. We've lost that along the way to
   fame and success. Maybe those of us who wanted to keep things as
   they were simply expected too much.

      But it was great to be with Thad. It's the longest time I've
   spent with her alone in her company since we lived in Boston. I
   predict she'll do well in Nashville. She told me she's thinking
   about doing a biography on Hurston and I told her she should. She
   wondered about the other writers on whom there is no biography.
   I replied that there are multiple [of] biographies on Du Bois and
   Hughes for instance, so there is no reason not to have another
   good biography on Hurston. I've been worried (and shared this
   with her) for sometime that someone incapable of doing the kind
   of biography Hurston deserves will do one. People have been
   asking for years now when a black woman is going to do one.
   Hemenway's is excellent, and will always serve a function, but
   there is need for a new perspective on Hurston given all that we
   know now that Hemenway did not know. I think Thad is the right
   person to do this one, not some new Ph.D. who has no long
   experience with literary studies. So I hope that she does it....

These are just three excerpts, glimpses of our everyday musings, from letters in turn part of a massive correspondence. Nellie did not leave me with any guidelines regarding limitations on the use of this correspondence. I welcome your advice, remembering that most of the people she and I discussed are alive, kicking, and perfectly able to read. We spoke candidly to each other, so our letters are nobody's puff pieces, not even our own.

Nell Irvin Painter

Emerita Professor of English

Princeton University

Tribute for Nellie McKay

I write this tribute not only as Nellie's friend and colleague, but as her publisher. Nellie produced five essays for the Feminist Press, and before she died, directed that others complete the major task she had committed herself to do. A brief review of her contributions to the Feminist Press's publishing program will confirm how important she and her work were to us and we to her.

Just as the Feminist Press and women's studies began at the beginning of the 1970s in what I have called a symbiotic relationship, so did Nellie then begin her journey into feminism and women's studies. (1) At our request, Nellie wrote three essays--in 1990, 1995, and 2000--about her intellectual movement into feminism and particularly into black women's studies. The first of these was a contribution to a panel at the Modern Language Association in 1990 called "Books That Changed Our Lives," published a year later in Women's Studies Quarterly. (2) In her essay, Nellie named two books: The Souls of Black Folks, which she said she read first on Thanksgiving Day 1969, then a year or so later, Their Eyes Were Watching God. About the first, she writes, "It changed my worldview and the way I saw my life in relation to the world. [W. E. B.] Du Bois's words continue to guide my intellectual thoughts" (13). About the second she writes, "... it was from [Zora Neale] Hurston's masterpiece that I first understood the meaning of black femaleness and my true relationship to the world of white and black men and white women" (13).

In 1995, as her contribution to the book, Re-visioning Feminism around the World, produced to celebrate the 25th-anniversary of the Feminist Press, Nellie wrote an essay,she called "Celebrating Bold Innocents--Someone Forgot to Tell Us We Couldn't." (3) She opens by noting that the years 1994 and 1995 were special twenty-fifth anniversaries in her own life. This is Nellie: "In 1969 I went to graduate school; in 1970 the Feminist Press was established; and in 1969-1970 the Afro American Studies department at the University of Wisconsin/Madison, a home within my home, came into being" (49). She continues, a bit later on:

      How different my world is today! Since 1969, I've learned that my
   audacity (a word I could not have conceived for me in 1969 either)
   to be in that place at that time made me something I did not know I
   was: a feminist, a black feminist then too. Today the Feminist Press
   is a beloved institution in my life, to value, to respect, and to
   celebrate: one with an anniversary I too claim in 1995. One for our
   side. (49)

But what of the "bold innocents?" She tells a story about her encounter with male professors at the University of Wisconsin, who thought that without her presence they could "go back to business as usual." "Shortly following my return [from a sabbatical]," she writes,

      I was in a hallway conversation with a group of four or five male
   colleagues when they decided it was time to go to the Terrace ...
   "to have a beer." A few minutes into their arrangement-making for
   this late afternoon's social time, I realized that no one had
   included me. In a voice that intimated black women's well-known
   "hands on hips" posture, I told them exactly what I thought of
   them. The rowdy outburst of spontaneous male laughter did not
   disguise (even to me) their discomfiture. The youngest of the
   group took instant flight, deserting his companions and calling
   loudly as he hurried down the hall: "See, I told you so, now you
   guys are in trouble again." They had been "back to business
   as usual." (50)

She ends this essay by describing the Feminist Press as "a very bold adventure of innocent idealists," and herself as "one (unknowingly) bold black woman, first on the family tree to enter the world of graduate school," and "a group of young black and white students and untenured assistant professors, almost as innocent [as] bold enough to move a mostly unmovable giant to make Afro-American studies a reality in Madison. We were all bold innocents who not only survived but triumphed, and in that triumph helped to forever change the face of American education" (50). She concludes:

      Now less than a decade and a half beyond my first unpleasant
   encounters with some of my male colleagues, it is not "business as
   usual" in the places where we entered.... I claim my anniversaries
   all, take pride in celebrations of hard battles won, and raise a
   toast: One for all Bold Innocents, someone forgot to tell us we
   couldn't. (50)

During the next five years, Nellie was trying to find time to write the essay she had promised to the volume published in 2000 called The Politics of Women's Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding Mothers. (4) In 1998, she asked me whether I'd be willing to come to Madison and interview her, and then she would take my typescript and turn it into an essay for the book. Which is what happened. In the brief biography she supplied, one may catch a glimpse of the toll her commitments were taking on her body if not on her spirit. She writes:

      I am not sure whether I chose this life or it chose me. For
   although I feel enormously fortunate to have had the chance to
   contribute to the overall recognition of women's lives and academic
   achievements over the past twenty years (especially to those of
   black women), I'd like to believe that had the choice been entirely
   my own, I would have given more consideration to the personal costs.
   Fickle fate handed me a life to love, but also one I often resent
   for its relentless demands on my time--my person. So, while I take
   joy and satisfaction in ... the project.... I yearn ... for my own
   time to rest from the weariness of continuous overextension--the
   relentless demands on my time. Like others, I see wonderful
   achievements but only at the cost of extremely heavy tolls on the
   well-being of the self, on personal relationships and health. (204)

Nellie called her long and beautiful memoir in this book "Charting a Personal Journey: A Road to Women's Studies." It charts her intellectual life first at Queens College/CUNY, then at Harvard University, and into her first teaching job at Simmons College in Boston, and ultimately to Wisconsin. After Harvard, she says, Simmons "was a place of healing for me" (209). And yet, though offered promotion and tenure, she could not remain comfortably at rest, but had to challenge herself--and get to her mission by leaving the "cocoon of the East Coast" (211) for Wisconsin, where the university would become her "home," and where her work would become the educating of a new generation of scholars of African American literature.

Especially wonderful about the essay is the glimpse Nellie offers of her immersion into a group of African American graduate students and instructors in the Boston area in 1972. She describes her time with them as a "jolt" that moved her onto "another turn in the road." She continues:

      The group galvanized itself around the issue of the absence of
   black women writers from among the recently rediscovered black
   writers whose works were coming to light and beginning to shape
   the African American canon. We talked together well into the
   night, and each of us left that gathering with a clear
   understanding of a new mission. We had work to do. The task was
   to make black women writers visible in the world of American
   literature: to be talked about, written about, and taught in
   classrooms was part of the larger struggle for black rights from
   which we could not permit women to be excluded. (209)

"Charting a Personal Journey" also charts Nellie's abysmal loneliness during her first two years at Madison, and then, in her third semester at Madison, "a woman professor with appointments in the English department and the women's studies program [i.e., Susan Friedman] invited me into a group of faculty women.... Most of the women were, like me, untenured.... The periodic meetings of this group, where women articulated fears and anxieties in the safe space of one another's company, was a welcome opening to new relationships with women, even if there were no women of color among them" (213).

Not long afterwards, as many know, Nellie was "drawn into the women's studies program," and, she writes, "my life began turning around." She continues: "I like to believe that in the early days of my relationship with women's studies in Madison, my colleagues and I together planted seeds that yielded the rewards of women learning to work together across many differences, learning respect for and sharing knowledge with one another" (213). She ends "Charting a Personal Journey" with a wonderful moment of vision:

      I came to Madison in 1978 to make a career for myself as a
   specialist in American and African American literature, and to help
   establish a permanent place for black studies in the American
   academy. Along the way, I discovered that racial identification
   alone is not enough to make a whole self: Each of us lives in many
   worlds at the same time. Women's studies at large, and my women's
   studies colleagues in Madison in particular, helped me to clarify
   the meaning of inhabiting multiple spaces simultaneously and to
   define my identity in relationship to those spaces. Now I work to
   bring all of myself, together and whole, to everything that I do
   wherever I find myself. (215)

Nellie wrote two essays in literary criticism for the Feminist Press rediscovered classics series. In the early 1970s, the Feminist Press published three ground-breaking volumes of "lost" fiction by women writers: Life in the Iron Mills, by Rebecca Harding Davis; The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Daughter of Earth, by Agnes Smedley. Probably Tillie Olsen set us on the path we have followed ever since when she provided an Afterword to Life in the Iron Mills. For the most part, we were publishing American writers who were completely unknown to a contemporary audience--hence, the importance of the Afterword to each volume. (5) In 1983, Nellie agreed to write an Afterword to Jo Sinclair's The Changelings, a 1950's novel about racism and anti-Semitism in Cleveland. Barbara Smith had suggested that we reprint this "lost" classic, although she could not write its Afterword. This assignment was perfect for Nellie. She mentions Du Bois's writings on the "color line," and continues:

   ... The Changelings goes to the heart of the problem, exploring the
   dilemma of the human condition at the intersection of race fear,
   class consciousness, and ethnic bias, which turns "good" people into
   racists and bigots. Sinclair is a sophisticated writer who fully
   understands the complexity of the issues ... and helps her readers
   comprehend the intricacies of the motives behind the actions of her
   characters. This is a novel that does not let anyone off
   the "hook".... (325)

Nellie notes that Sinclair's novel "focuses on a Jewish girl and a black girl who face each other across generations of racial and ethnic differences and hostilities, even as they both stand hesitantly at the line that divides childhood from womanhood." They are each 12, and recently evicted from gangs of boys in which they had been quasi-or real leaders. Judy Vincent and Clara Jackson, changelings within their families and communities both, form a relationship that represents the novelist's vision of the harbinger of possibilities for a new era in American life and culture. Judy, the Jewish girl, tells Clara--and here Nellie quotes from the novel: "I'm the changeling in my house.... I'm not going to run around crying and hating people.... I'm going to be free, so I can go out in the world.... You can't be free if you're scared of everybody" (325).

Nellie's professional and personal optimism throughout her career seems inscribed in the conclusion of her Afterword, for it reminds readers that, though "centered on a certain period of our national history," The Changelings is thematically still of major importance. The novel is "timeless," Nellie says, "for the future always belongs to the young." Vincent and Clara, she writes in her concluding paragraph, recognize their sameness to each other, and their differences, not only from one another, but also from those people they are supposed to be like. Girl-changelings both, they are joined in believing that "now black is white and white is black. A whole world dances and is full of joy" (337).

A year after The Changelings appeared, Feminist Press published Louise Meriwether's Daddy Was a Number Runner. Nellie McKay's Afterword begins, "Daddy Was a Number Runner is the single fictional account in our literature of a year in the life of a young, black, adolescent girl, growing up in Harlem in the middle of the Great Depression. This fact alone gives it major historical importance ..." (209). As in The Changelings, the novel covers a year in the life of a black girl: Francie Coffin's twelfth. Nellie suggests that "the goal of the author is not to have her protagonist make a quantum leap from innocence to full comprehension of the nature of her world in one year, but rather to help readers better understand the complexities of the world of this book and the metaphoric implications of its title" (210). In her view, Meriwether has created a character both with "refreshing and believable naivete" who also has "ghetto-survival 'smarts.'" Further, she sees that "the double vision we have of Francie reflects a similar ambiguity in the community's responses to its situation" (210-11). Nellie charts the ways that the community has organized itself for survival, even as Francie does for herself, including her need to protect herself from various kinds of predators and sexual harassers.

Again with characteristic optimism, Nellie observes that the novel fundamentally reinforces "the idea that hope continues to live in spite of the failures that have characterized the lives of many American blacks throughout their history." As she concludes, Nellie pays homage to Meriwether for not blaming "the men for their inability to secure work, nor does she castigate them ... for their inability to remain stoically with their families through the worst times.... At the same time, because Meriwether respects the men's humanity, her treatment of them is never condescending and she makes no apologies for them." Ultimately, however, Nellie reads the novel as "largely a tribute to poor, uneducated, black women, who, through centuries of watching their men being ground down by poverty and racism, continue to live each day with the assurance that conditions will improve. Expecting little for themselves, not from lack of self-worth, but because they understand the politics of race, gender, economics, and power, they scrub floors, wash windows, and absorb racist and sexist insults, so that their children can have better lives than their own" (231).

I want to report that, just for fun, I looked up the royalty reports on these two books for which Nellie wrote the Afterwords. I don't think she ever asked me about the number of readers she might have reached. But I know that we have sold 10,000 copies of The Changelings and 30,000 copies of Daddy. Since these books have been in print for 20 years, there is no telling how many "used" copies have been sold as well, nor can I do more than estimate the number of copies that reached readers through libraries. Perhaps it is safe to say that some 20,000 readers read Nellie's essay on Sinclair's novel and 60,000 read the one on Meriwether's. I would add only that the majority of these readers, especially in college courses, would have to be white, both male and female, perhaps for the first time reading out of their cultural milieus and learning about difference-one important strand of Nellie's life and work.

And now to the project that Nellie began thinking about in the early years of this new century. It was to be a part of her edging into retirement: a new conception and a new volume of the book we call "Brave," the full title of which is All the Women are White, All the Men are Black, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. First published in 1982, and edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, it needed a new edition as early as 1992, but no one could do the work, and, for many reasons, the book--excellent in many ways--continued to sell just as it was. In 2002 Nellie agreed to co-edit a new edition with her UW colleague Stanlie James, but only after the two of them could (under the auspices of the Ford Foundation) convene a meeting of African American scholars who would review the published volume and design the shape and content of a revised edition. Then in the spring of 2003, Nellie wrote to say she wanted to meet me in New York to talk about the new "Black Women's Studies." We set May 11th as the date.

Certainly that was the chief topic of conversation, as we sat together over tea in my sunny living room. Nellie said that almost nothing from the first volume would be included in the second, but the consensus had been that the first volume should stay in print as an historical artifact. I had been coming to that conclusion myself, and had talked with others at the Feminist Press about keeping it in a "print-on-demand" program that we were exploring for slow-selling classics we wanted to keep available. Nellie said that by 2004 she thought she'd be able to do serious work on the anthology.

But she had another agenda, something just as urgent, she said, and all depended on my response. Would I be willing to accept an honorary doctorate from the University of Wisconsin? Yes, of course, I said, but I don't recommend your spending your time in this way. Better spend it on the Black Women's Studies project or other scholarship. Better still, take a vacation, rest, and take care of your health, I said. Please don't spend your precious energy on me.

The following spring--2004--I received the honorary degree over which Nellie and Susan Friedman and people in 12 different departments had labored. Nellie seemed even more tired than the year before, and still, she gave a party for her students who were graduating and, of course, included me and my daughter. In Nellie's kitchen, we took a few minutes to talk about "Black Women's Studies," and she told me she would work on "Brave" all that summer. We even discussed a publishing schedule for it.

One final note: After Nellie's death, Stanlie wrote to tell me that, during her last few days, Nellie had asked her, Frances Foster, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall to edit "Black Women's Studies" and thus fulfill her promise to Florence Howe. We will, of course, dedicate that volume to her integrity and dedication, as well as to her powerful intellect and vision.

Works Cited

Howe, Florence. "Women's Studies and Feminist Publishing: A Symbiotic Relationship." Women's Review of Books 6.5 (February 1989): 12-13.

McKay, Nellie Y. "Books That Changed Our Lives." Women's Studies Quarterly 19.3-4 (1991): 12-14.

--. "Celebrating Bold Innocents--Someone Forgot to Tell Us We Couldn't." Re-Visioning Feminism around the World. Ed. Florence Howe. New York: Feminist P at CUNY, 1995.

--. "Charting a Personal Journey: A Road to Women's Studies." The Politics of Women's Studies: Testimony from 30 Founding Mothers. Ed. Florence Howe. New York: Feminist P at CUNY, 2000. 204-15.

--. "Afterword." The Changelings. By Jo Sinclair. New York: Feminist P at CUNY, 1985. 323-37.

--. "Afterword." Daddy Was a Number Runner. By Louise Meriwether. New York: Feminist P at CUNY, 1986. 209-34.

Notes

(1.) See Howe. I wrote in that essay that, in less than 20 years, we-meaning the Feminist Press and Women's Studies--had created a new publishing industry. As Nellie's autobiographical essays make clear, she knew throughout her adult life that her commitment to Black Women's Studies required a concomitant commitment to publishing work by Black women. Hence her high regard for the Feminist Press, a publishing house that had, between 1979 and 1986, "rescued" Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Louise Meriwether, Sarah E. Wright, Dorothy West, and also helped establish Black Women's Studies.

(2.) In 1989, as chair of the division of Women's Studies in the Modern Language Association, I asked 11 writers to write no more than two pages on the book or books that, 20 years ago, had changed their lives. They all appeared at the MLA meetings in December 1990. In the fall of 1991, Women's Studies Quarterly published their remarks. Besides Nellie and me, the group consisted of Meena Alexander, Electa Arenal, Mary Anne Ferguson, Elaine Hedges, Robin Morgan, Lillian S. Robinson, Domna C. Stanton, Catharine S. Stimpson, Susie Tharu and J. J. Wilson.

(3.) In 1994, on the eve of the 25th-anniversary of the Feminist Press, I invited many authors and feminist publishers to contribute brief essays about feminism in their lives and in their vision of the future. Nellie was one of 72 contributors, 12 of them from outside of the United States. Re-visioning Feminism around the World, the beautiful book that Feminist Press published--with photographs of all contributors, was supported generously by the AT&T Foundation, and thus was never for sale. Nellie's essay appears on pages 49-50.

(4.) In this volume, not surprisingly, Nellie's essay fit appropriately a section called "Providing Feminist Scholarship for Texts, Teaching, and Other Scholars"--the symbiotic relationship at work.

(5.) These days, Feminist Press continues the mission, now often with Iraqi or Somali or Pakistani writers. Still, the Afterword remains essential to our publishing program, for its rendering not only of literary value, but also of social, political, and cultural contexts.

Florence Howe

Publisher, The Feminist Press at the City

University of New York

Emerita Professor of English, CUNY

Nellie--Pioneer of Black Feminist Literary Criticism

Nellie McKay and Black Women's Studies

Nellie McKay belonged to the first cohort of African American women to join the faculties of majority-white colleges and universities. I belong to that cohort still. Many of us, isolated in our home institutions, met each other at profession al conferences. I met Nellie at an MLA convention. It was sometime in the 1970s; I'm not sure exactly when. What I am sure of is that my friendship with Nellie grew during our encounters at the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association conventions. In the 1970s those conventions were lonely spaces for black women and for people of color in general. A sighting in a fancy hotel in Chicago or New York could cause one's head to snap. Yet lonely as those experiences were, Nellie from the beginning of her career recognized the need to create a space for us in those organizations. That they are as relatively welcoming as they are today owes much to her presence and to her example.

In collaboration with black feminist activists and in response to the willful omissions and unintended blindnesses in Black Studies and Women's Studies, my generation of scholars created the field of Black Women's Studies. Black Women's Studies not only involved the highly visible work of creating theoretical paradigms and publishing groundbreaking articles and books. Its existence depended equally on the less visible work of recuperating neglected primary texts and publishing anthologies and reference works that document the literature and history of black women. Nellie's meticulous and selfless scholarship was foundational to the enterprise.

McKay has been justly honored for the pivotal role she played in the creation and publication of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Not only does the anthology document centuries of African American literature, it does so in a way that fairly represents the contributions of male and female writers. For its editorial board was divided almost equally among male and female scholars. If one looks on the spines of the other field-shaping anthologies with the Norton brand--if one looks at the tables of contents in almost any literature anthology published before 1997--one will gain some idea of how unusual an accomplishment this was. Much of the credit surely goes to Nellie. But the Norton Anthology was only the most visible of many editorial projects that she undertook.

McKay edited Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (1988), one of the first volumes devoted to the not-yet Nobel Laureate. She later co-edited with Kathryn Earle Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison (1997) and co-edited with William Andrews Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook (1999). In 2000, she and Frances Smith Foster published a Norton Critical edition of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. McKay also wrote numerous introductions to long out-of-print books by black women, including autobiographies of Marian Anderson and Mary Church Terrell. In addition, she contributed dozens of articles to reference books that undergraduates regularly consult. These books codify the conventional wisdom that the next generation of scholars can and will deconstruct.

Because Nellie took all of her assignments seriously, these less visible pieces have much to teach about the past and future enterprise of Black Women's Studies. One introduction that has stayed in my mind is the one that she wrote to The Narrows, the novel that Ann Petry originally published in 1953. It was reprinted in the Beacon Black Women's Writers Series in 1988. Founded by Deborah McDowell, the Beacon series played an invaluable role in giving readers a sense of the multivoiced traditions of black women's writing by bringing work by Marita Bonner, Octavia Butler, and Gayl Jones back into print. The series also included Petry's best-known novel, The Street. In contrast to that million seller, however, The Narrows was seldom read and rarely written about.

What had been written was in McKay's view mostly wrong. She was not afraid to say so. Her introduction set out to demonstrate that Perry was not a failed practitioner of naturalism or a weak imitator of Richard Wright. Moreover, the introduction asserts, The Narrows represents an advance in Petry's corpus. Less plot driven and more complex structurally than The Street, it explores the psychology of characters that are male, female, black, white, poor, middle class, and upper class. After unpacking several layers of complexity in the representation of these characters, McKay concludes:

   The Narrows shows Petry at her best. This is a remarkable novel for
   its time, contemporary in the intricacies of its literary,
   philosophical, and social implications. In 1953--in the
   pre-contemporary feminist days of the 1940s and 1950s, when
   deliberate black feminist fiction and black feminist interpretations
   were ideas whose time had not yet come--it was revolutionary.
   Perry held a unique black female vision. This is a novel of
   inclusion, of complex and entangled relationships with demonstrable
   implications for contemporary feminist criticism. It explores the
   relationship of race, gender, and class to the lives of all
   Americans, not just blacks, and exposes the roles that white
   economic power and sociocultural conventions play in creating
   racial antagonisms and class distinctions. (xvii)

McKay's criticism partakes of the vision she identifies in Petry's novel. It recognizes that the interlocking factors of race, gender, and class oppress black women, and it insists that all members of the society suffer under the oppression of white supremacy. As savvy about the politics of citation as she was about the politics of professional institutions, McKay names Hazel Carby, Barbara Christian, Deborah McDowell, Marilyn Richardson, Barbara Smith, Hortense Spillers, and Mary Helen Washington as critics whose work shares a similar perspective. Significantly, McKay's approach recognizes and acts on the potential of protocols of black feminist criticism to analyze the society as a whole. Her skillful ability to shift between the telephoto and wide-angle lens of criticism is exemplary.

Since 1988 our awareness of additional lenses through which to read and interpret has only grown. Critics now employ lens that zoom in on differences of sexuality, ethnicity, national, and transnational identity. But as the awareness of difference continues to grow, the ability to negotiate shifts in perspective, as McKay did so well, becomes ever more necessary.

Yet as important as it was to emphasize the paradoxical inclusiveness of The Narrows, McKay singles out "Petry's vision of the complicated dynamics of black women's lives [as] especially compelling" (xvii). McKay draws attention to the range of black female characters in the novel and the various ways in which they broke the molds of characters in earlier writing by black women. Characters such as Abbie Crunch, Frances Jackson, and Mamie Prowther had no precursors in the fiction by women of the Harlem Renaissance. But they become precursors for characters in literature by the generation of black women writers who came to print in the 1970s. McKay's critique is able both to hone in on the representations of black women and to view those representations in the broadest contexts.

In one of McKay's most resonant observations, she writes that The Narrows "features women who, even in a racist and sexist society, seek individual autonomy as their human right" (xvii). Rereading that sentence now I'm tempted to read it as among the more autobiographical observations Nellie McKay committed to print.

But my emphasis is on McKay as a scholar, whose example has much to guide a new generation of feminist critics, as the scholars she mentored have so eloquently affirmed. They will, I trust, adopt Nellie's understanding of the importance of doing the less visible work that is required to institutionalize as well as to construct new forms of knowledge. They will, I trust, emulate her example in making sure such work gets done. However, I hope they will struggle to change the academy's system of reward and recognition so that such necessary work is rendered more visible.

The protocols of confidentiality will always require that certain types of service remain invisible. Nellie fulfilled more such obligations than anyone I know. Who can number the manuscripts she read for presses and the tenure and promotion letters she wrote? I feel certain that there are numerous editors and administrators who are in her debt. More profound is the debt that those of us in Black Women's Studies owe Nellie McKay.

Work Cited

McKay, Nellie. "Introduction." The Narrows. By Ann Petry. 1953. Boston: Beacon P, 1988. vii-xx.

Cheryl Wall

Associate Professor of English

Rutgers University

Nellie McKay and the Trajectory of Black Women's Studies

When I was beginning my teaching career at Spelman College in the early 1970s, I met Nellie McKay. During this time she was a doctoral student in English at Harvard University, a professor at Simmons College, and a member of the women's caucus of the Modern Language Association (MLA). Over the next 30 years, we remained long-distance friends; colleagues by virtue of our associations with English Departments, Africana American Studies, and Women's Studies; and bonded because of our mutual interests in Black women writers and Black Women's Studies, and our contributions to Black feminist thought.

In those early years (1970s and 80s), we were a small band of renegades, all trained as literary scholars, and determined to chart a new course in African American literary studies that would undermine its masculinist orientation and analytic frameworks. I'm speaking of Nellie McKay, Barbara Smith, Barbara Christian, Mary Helen Washington, Hortense Spillers, Thadious Davis, Frances Smith Foster, Deborah McDowell, Gloria Hull, Claudia Tate, Cheryl Wall, Hazel Carby, and bell hooks. (1) This time was before Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and other Black women writers had joined the American literary or African American literary canon; it is important to recall that it was Alice Walker who actually taught the first "Black Women Writers" course at Wellesley College in the 80s. We would, many of us, gather at MLA, talk about our work and the importance of writing and publishing. It was a genuine sisterhood. When the genealogy of Black Women's Studies is mapped, it will be instructive to ponder its beginnings, especially the preponderance of literary critics in its evolution.

There was an urgency and excitement about the work, and Nellie--solid, steadfast, steady, disciplined, generous, indefatigable--headed the band, leading us on, prodding us to do more, reminding us always that we had a younger generation to mentor and to whom we should pass on our sisterly wisdom, even if it was unsolicited.

Nellie was the quintessential scholar, mentor, friend, and colleague, and we will not see the likes of her again because of the particular sociocultural context in which she and our generation of Black women scholars came of age. It is important to pause, as we are doing now, and remember this very special Black "herstory." We were caught in a vortex. The civil rights and women's rights movements swirled around us and impacted us in particular ways. It catalyzed the field we now call Black Women's Studies, a field still struggling to take its rightful place within African American Studies and Women's Studies.

A brief focus on one Nellie's publications, her Black feminist reading of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folks (1903), a canonical text in Black Studies, allows a way of underscoring her contributions to the field. In her compelling essay, "The Souls of Black Women Folk in the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois," she names what makes Du Bois such a unique figure in African American literary and cultural history: "The extent to which he includes the influences of women's experiences, and especially those of black women, on his thinking; his recognition of gender oppression; and his acceptance of the worth of his emotional and spiritual feelings makes his works distinctive" (229). Here McKay is referring to Du Bois's emphasis on the soul--the sensitive, feeling component of the self--as opposed to the intellectual, rational component stereotypically considered to represent masculinity. McKay went on to assert, "We also know that he was aware that the folk were not all men. If anything can be said about his views on the souls of Black women folk, it is that he felt that they had struggled through to an even higher plane than Black men had" (229). Furthermore, his "perceptions of the 'souls of Black folk'--that spiritual essence that made survival and transcendence possible for an entire race in spite of indescribable oppression, was most obvious in his discourse on Black women" (230).

This important essay in the expanding field of Black Women's Studies instructively employed gender as an analytic category, a strategy central to all of our work on African American (women's) experience and culture. Nellie helped to establish Du Bois as a feminist forefather and repositioned his Souls of Black Folk such that it could be seen with new eyes. I would not have returned to Souls in an essay I wrote on progressive Black masculinities without Nellie's essay, without particularly her insights into Du Bois's chapter on "The Meaning of Progress." (2)

For our preface to Gender Talk, Johnnetta Cole and I selected two quotes one from Audre Lorde, and another from Nellie's writing on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill saga. Nellie wrote: "In all of their lives in America ... Black women have felt torn between the loyalties that bind them to race on one hand, and sex on the other ... yet they have almost always chosen race over the other: a sacrifice of the selfhood as women and of full humanity, in favor of the race." Johnnetta and I were deeply aware that Nellie was a model for many of us in terms of how to be both loyal to the race and to ourselves as Black women. Thanks, Nellie, for all your gifts.

Works Cited

McKay, Nellie Y. "The Souls of Black Women Folk in the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois." Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. 227-43.

--. "Remembering Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas: What Really Happened When One Black Woman Spoke Out." 1992. Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Pantheon, 2003. 269-89.

Notes

(1.) Though bell hooks is known primarily as a feminist theorist, her doctoral dissertation in the English Department at Stanford University was on Toni Morrison.

(2.) Inspired by McKay's essay, the anthology on progressive Black masculinities is edited by Athena Mutua and forthcoming from Routledge, 2006.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Director, Women's Studies Research Center

Spelman College

Nellie--Colleague

The Debt I Owe Nellie

Reflecting on Nellie McKay's many accomplishments, I think personally as well as professionally about what I owe Nellie. For more than nine years she and I were colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison at a time that was formative in both of our careers. After I left Madison we continued to stay in touch, to see each other at conferences, to work together on a variety of projects, and to support each other's various enterprises. Nellie was the best colleague I ever had in my 32 years of professional life. Although I could easily devote these remarks to what she accomplished as a scholar, I'd rather consider how she helped others, me in particular, to accomplish scholarly things. Since I doubt there's a person who knew her who could not talk about how Nellie helped him or her to accomplish something in their careers, I don't think I'll have anything terribly revealing to say about Nellie in this regard. But since people like Nellie are rarely rewarded for this sort of work--we might call it the scholarship of service--I want to pursue this line of appreciation, not only to give Nellie her due but also to suggest what all of us can learn from Nellie's example.

Scholar, critic, and editor, Nellie has left her stamp on the study of African American literature as an academic discipline. When she began her postdoctoral career at Madison in 1978, African American literature was still emerging as a respectable discipline, even at an institution as supposedly liberal as the UW-Madison. Nellie, keep in mind, was neither sought nor hired by the English Department at the UW. She was brought in as an assistant professor of Afro-American Studies. I had been hired a year earlier--in fact, I was on the search committee that recommended Nellie's hiring--but even though I had been hired by the English Department, neither the department nor I had any notions about my teaching courses on African American literature at the UW-Madison. I was hired to teach American literature before 1914, which had been my area of specialization in graduate school. The book I was working on for tenure--a study of the literary career of Charles Chesnutt--gave me no special cachet with my senior colleagues, although they didn't in any way discourage me from working on a single-author study of an African American writer for my tenure.

Nellie came to Madison's Afro-American Studies department as its only literature specialist, and she wasted no time in establishing the study of literature in that department as a serious academic pursuit. She plunged into her own tenure book, Jean Toomer, Artist (1984), which has become a standard study, a solid monograph not unlike my first book, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Some of my best memories of the time when I was writing my Chesnutt book stem from evenings that Nellie and I spent in her apartment in Madison talking about our two books. Nellie took justifiable pride in her cooking, and I was only too grateful to give her the opportunity to cook for someone besides herself. We soon discovered that we were among the few people to be found on the UW-Madison campus who shared our passions and professional determination for African American literature. We needed each other for support, and we became important sources of mutual encouragement.

I could have written my Chesnutt book without ever knowing Nellie, and she could have written her Toomer book without ever knowing me. But what I owe Nellie was the fact that she was my first critical audience, the model I had for my ideal reader. And what I owe to her even more is the fact that through her I got to meet a range of colleagues in African American literature whom I could never have got to know any other way. They too shaped my sense of the audience I wanted to write for and appeal to in my criticism and scholarship.

Why did she do this? Because Nellie was more interested in how differences in color and background could complement, rather than merely complicate, the kind of intellectual community she wanted for herself--and for all of us. Nellie decided that what she and I had in common was more important than the differences that anybody could see just by taking a look at either of us. In the late 1970s that decision on her part meant the difference between my remaining marginal to the developing field of African American literature study--or whether I would have a chance to get to know and work with some of the best in the business.

I could list a half-dozen prominent people in our field whom I met at dinner at Nellie's Bluff Street apartment in Madison. At those dinners the atmosphere was different from what we generally encounter at academic conferences when we try to talk with people we hardly know under cash-bar circumstances or gatherings in cramped and overheated hotel rooms or in other meet-and-greet gatherings of that sort. There's nothing wrong with those kinds of conference gatherings, of course, but they do have their limitations. I, however, was blessed to meet many people in African American literature under far more advantageous circumstances, namely, at Nellie McKay's board. I have had many blessings in my career--an extraordinary number of lucky breaks and undeserved kindnesses extended to me. But the biggest blessing of all, in terms of my professional opportunities, was simply being Nellie's friend and colleague.

The first time I met Frances Foster face-to-face was in Ithaca in 1985 where Skip Gates had summoned us prospective editors of Skip's most audacious pipe-dream of the moment--a Norton anthology of Afro-American (that's what we called it back then) literature. The only way I knew Frances, other than by reputation, was the fact that she had reviewed a couple of my books in the New York Times Book Review. For the most part, she liked those two books, although she had some reservations. In any case, I remember that when she and I met in Skip's living room, I think, one of the first things she asked me, after the usual pleasantries, was, "How did you get here, Bill Andrews?" Frances can be very direct when she wants to be, which is something I've always liked about her. I have no recollection of how I replied to that question, except that I mentioned Nellie. I invoked her name not because she had been responsible for getting me on the editorial board of the anthology. I mentioned Nellie because it was very unlikely that I would ever have become visible enough to be invited onto the board if Nellie had not introduced me to the wide range of colleagues of our generation who would create that anthology and thus have a big part in establishing, for better and for worse, a canon of African American literature.

Although Nellie's interest in my work and personal kindness towards me were crucial to my joining the community of scholars in our field, I want to make clear that I don't think her treatment of me was somehow unique or attributable to some special quality in me. The debt I owe Nellie is typical of many people's debts to her, regardless of gender or color or age or sexuality or background. Nellie was always dedicated to community, whether we speak of the friendship networks she created or the bonds she forged among her many professional colleagues. If Nellie had wanted to be an empire builder, she had all the tools. But somehow she always seemed to put her strong sense of self in the service of community, rather than creating the kind of cohort that too many big scholarly egos we all know of seem to need all too badly. Though I lack both Nellie's gift for community and her skills in creating and maintaining community, one thing I learned from her is the importance of community to the accomplishment of almost anything of lasting professional value.

In our profession we tend to lionize those whose contribution to knowledge is epitomized by what I've always called "the big book," the single-authored critical volume that changes the way we think or evaluate big issues, major writers, central movements, defining genres of African American literature, and so forth. Nellie never wrote that kind of big book. Few of us do. In the last years of Nellie's life I joined a number of her friends and colleagues in writing recommendation letters in support of Nellie's candidacy for major endowed chairs at Wisconsin. Nellie never won any of those chairs. Why?

What the committees who evaluated Nellie's record against those of other high-powered scholars couldn't find on her vita, I suspect, because we don't have established categories for it, is just what Nellie worked the hardest to create. More than anyone I know in our field, Nellie's greatest creation was an intellectual community that made it possible for so many of us, and so many scholars a lot younger than we, to envision ourselves as people who could make a big contribution to a field, African American literature, that offered big opportunities for personal, intellectual, and social leadership. From the standpoint of its impact on our field and on the general American reading audience, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, for example, has had an incalculable effect on our capacity to think big about African American literature. Yet what academic committee evaluating Nellie for a major endowed chair could reckon or appreciate all that the Norton represents. In my mind, however, without Nellie, who was the glue that held that entire enterprise together, there simply would be no Norton Anthology of African American Literature. This is not to detract at all from Skip's vision and entrepreneurial skill, which got that project off the ground. But it would have crashed and burned a long way from its destination had Nellie not come on board and guided that craft through the storms it had to weather. Why did Nellie devote so many years to that project? Not because she imagined it would be the vehicle that would deposit her in a big-bucks endowed chair, you can be sure of that. Nellie was dedicated to the goal that that anthology represented to all who teach African American literature, and because of her dedication, she brought us all with her to the fulfillment of that goal.

This dedication was one of the defining leitmotifs, I believe, of Nellie's professional life. Think of how many volumes Nellie's letters of recommendation alone would fill. Why would someone be so available to others, becoming famous, in part, for putting aside her own priorities to help so many other people? It's hard for me to answer that question, partly because I lack the degree of professional selflessness that Nellie personifies more than anyone I've ever known in our business. But what has most impressed me about Nellie is that she was a person of abiding faith in us all, all of her friends and colleagues whose work she encouraged and recommended and praised and critiqued, always constructively. Nellie's faith in what we could all do, individually and collectively, has been, I believe, a force of subtle but persistent power over the last 30 years, as the study of African American literature has matured into a discipline that in many ways sets the agenda and challenges that conscience of US literary scholarship today. We'll never be able to track and measure the extent of Nellie's influence by examining her vita. Nor will our collective vitae provide an adequate index to her influence. But if we ever learn how to say what we mean when we talk about "the humanities," I think that vocabulary will be highly inflected by the work and the example of Nellie McKay. She was a great soul.

William L. Andrews

E. Maynard Adams Professor of English

Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts & Humanities

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Nellie's Laughing

Once upon a time, it feels like a lifetime ago, Nellie, our friend Dee Morris, and I traveled together to a conference on Women and Religion at King's College in Cambridge, England. Oxbridge: the belly of the beast so to speak, the heart of English privilege and white male entitlement. As we walked along the flagstone path inside the courtyard of the imposing college, the devil got into Nellie. She looked at the manicured lawn, she looked at Dee and me, she grinned. And off she hopped right onto the forbidden lawn. We all had Virginia Woolf in mind, how she was chased off the lawns at Oxbridge into A Room of One's Own--only the fellows can walk on the lawns of Oxbridge ... certainly NOT a woman, not a foreigner, not a black woman. "Take a picture of me," she chortled. And she knelt on that grass and plucked some green tufts for a souvenir of her rebellion.

Those who knew her can easily imagine how she laughed and laughed--throwing her head back with her explosively peeling laughter. We can still hear her laugh. And I do wonder how long the sounds can and will echo in our ears. I hope for a long time because I miss her already.

It's April Fools' Day today, and Nellie is still laughing. She fooled us all. Which one of us could have passed as she did, for 16 years younger, let alone as a woman whose only children were her beloved students? And for so long. Out of what necessity or compulsion? And with what devilish glee? In one of her articles, she defended Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, much-maligned for its fictional selves, by saying that "Hurston was playing the trickster on all her readers" ("Race" 182). But more profoundly, Nellie insists that "Hurston's 'life' and her autobiography are not one and the same; nor did she intend them to be. It is unproductive to continue to focus on the discrepancies between text and life, however problematical. Instead, we need ... to come to terms with the very conflicts out of which the text was made, or what Barbara Johnson refers to as Hurston's strategies rather than her truths" (180). Hurston's strategies, she insists, were put in the service of her black community. Again, what Nellie wrote about Hurston, provides a roadmap to Nellie's own life:

   In assuming the role of the historian-storyteller as the point of
   departure for her personal story, Hurston remains faithful to the
   tradition of collective responsibility that is the hallmark of black
   and women's autobiography.... As narrator, she resembles more the
   African griot, whose memory preserves the sense of a past culture,
   than the political activist in the struggle to improve contemporary
   black life. (183-84)

That's Nellie, writing on Hurston, writing about herself as well.

No, I don't think her fooling us all--friends and acquaintances alike--was simply a matter of fun or rebellion. At times it must have tickled her fancy, at other times perhaps it left her feeling quite alone. Nellie must have gone to Harvard with her daughter as her sister because that was the only way a divorced and single black mother of 38 could get into Harvard in 1969. It has to be. She went into the belly of another beast--Harvard, America's Oxbridge, the seat then and still today of elite privilege and entitlement. She remembered those years as hard, terribly hard. She went in to conquer, not just for herself but for her community and to change the nation's legacy of hate and discrimination. She went in with a mission.

Here's Nellie in 2001 recollecting her early sense of destiny and dedication in graduate school at Harvard to interviewer Donald Hall:

   I remember a day when one of my male colleagues (whose name
   everyone would recognize if I mentioned it) said to me, 'Do you
   realize that we are going to be the first people to train the
   Ph.D.s in African American literature?' I can still remember where
   we were standing when he said that and feeling shivers go down my
   spine.... The notion that I was going to be part of a group of
   people who would be breaking the kinds of boundaries that he was
   referring to was both frightening and exhilarating." (266)

And break those boundaries, train those PhDs in African American literature, Nellie did--in the belly of yet another beast--a nearly all-white university when she left her tenured position at Simmons College in 1978 to become an assistant professor in Madison; and a nearly all-white profession of literary studies. She did it not only with a tireless dedication to the archaeological recovery of a lost and devalued tradition of black writers that produced The Norton Anthology of African American Literature but also with a capacious vision of how a recovered African American literature transforms literary studies in general. Nellie dreamed big. She wasn't going to be satisfied with a small corner of the academic pie for black writers and scholars. She wanted to change American literary studies in general. She wanted to turn the profession upside down--or, better yet, right side up. And with a combination of wisdom and dogged persistence, she became one of the most visionary and effective leaders in the Modern Language Association--on its executive council, almost elected to be its president, published repeatedly in the pages of PMLA, its leading journal, and generally available as consultant. Loving literature as she did, she lived out her vision of how getting people to read books, most especially African American literature, could start people on a journey to the horizon and back.

This past January, as Nellie's strength faded day by day, I traveled far to Hyderabad, India, to attend a conference of MELUS-India. At the first tea break, a woman came up to me and asked, "Do you know Nellie McKay? She was very kind to me years ago when I had a Fulbright at Yale. She brought me to Madison, and I want you to give her my love." I almost burst into tears. Alladi Uma, now chair of the English Department at the University of Hyderabad and specialist in African American literature, was very distressed to hear about Nellie's passing a few weeks later. She sends a message for us at this celebration:

   As I spent a couple of days with her, I felt as if I had always
   known her.... She never for a moment made me feel I was an outsider,
   and we conversed on intellectual, cultural, and other subjects with
   ease.... I took back with me to India the many sided Nellie--the
   intellectual, the warm person, the wonderful host and much more. (1)

Alladi Uma has captured something of Nellie's uncanny effect on people--all kinds of people, from all over the world. When news of her illness spread, "the Nellie Tree" sprang up overnight, made up of people whose lives she had touched and enriched in some special way, people who wanted to help her, people who knew her in so many different ways, people who wanted to know how she was doing. (2) So many flowers poured into the house that Nellie asked to have them all lined up on the floor in her living room across from her chair--my flower garden, she called it. Pin-chi Feng, a former student of Nellie's and now a dean in Taiwan, sent a little bonsai tree, whose slow growth symbolized her hopes for Nellie's recovery. Nellie's card basket overflowed, and she was overwhelmed by the showers of love. "What goes around, comes around," I told her. "You are simply getting back what you gave."

Nellie had a gift for intimacy in spite of her secrets, the parts of her life she did not share with even her closest friends. We celebrated our May birthdays together every year at the Edgewater hotel, getting there when the dining room opened, leaving as it closed. We talked for hours and hours about everything and anything, seamlessly weaving back and forth between families, jobs, colleagues, the state of the profession, books, and above all our students--each one of them lovingly worried about, fussed over, dreamed for. We plotted and planned how to get them over the Bridge, through the program, and on to jobs of their own.

One of Nellie's most powerful legacies is her students--perhaps the one she was proudest of. I remember her saying to me at some point in the 1980s that all of the success that her generation of black scholars was having when universities finally, belatedly woke up to the desperate need for black faculty and students did not put her mind at ease. "I am worried," she said, "that my generation that struggled so hard to succeed is not reproducing itself. If we can't train students to take our places, we will have failed." Out of her prescient vision and tireless efforts to recruit, retain, and graduate African American graduate students came the pipeline of the young to whom she has devoted herself. Paradoxically, to strengthen that pipeline, she added the scores of nonblack students who flocked to her classes.

She wrote about the paradox of the pipeline problem in PMLA, in a 1998 Guest Column she called "Naming the Problem That Led to the Question 'Who Shall Teach African American Literature?'; Or, Are We Ready to Disband the Wheatley Court?" In this powerfully reasoned and complex argument, Nellie navigates through so many potential shipwrecks that it's amazing she got out alive. On the one hand, she chastises universities for creating the shortage of black faculty as well as experts in African American literature in the first place by steering white students away from the field for so long and by neglecting to recruit black students. "As Homer said," Nellie writes, "once harm has been done, even a fool understands it" ("Naming" 364). It's imperative, she writes, that universities get more black students into the pipeline. On the other hand, she chastises anyone who assumes that nonblack students can't become responsible experts in African American literature--if they work very very hard and listen well. Getting more nonblack students into the field of African American literature will free up black students to study what most interests them. Nellie chastises anyone who assumes that black students must study black literature just because they are black, but she also chastises anyone who assumes that it is easy to become an expert in this field.

Nellie could be the consummate chastiser for the cause of justice. You didn't want to get in the path of her wrath, or even her disapproval. She was a little woman, but she had a very big frown. What I love about Nellie's PMLA Guest Column is how it articulates so precisely the kind of nonessentialist, affirmative, and welcoming both/and strategy for genuine change. We must both get more black students through the pipeline and onto faculties and encourage the growth of the field of African American literature by training white students and other students of color.

Is it any wonder that students of all colors have passed through Nellie's ever-open door?

I was Nellie's student, too. She taught me as a scholar, teacher, and administrator. On my first day as chair of the English Department, a bouquet of flowers from Nellie appeared on my desk with a note of encouragement--reminders of her love and also her commitment to both/and. I must tackle the problem of the pipeline and at the same time feel free, indeed responsible, to teach and write about black literature--if and only if I would work very very hard and listen very very well.

I miss already hearing Nellie talk and talk. I miss her listening and listening. I walk past her door on the fourth floor of our building, and it's closed. I have to make do with something she told the interviewer, Donald Hall in 2001, in her seventieth year:

   I still look forward to every day on my job. And I'm not just being
   a Pollyanna, I do look forward to every day and want to continue
   doing this work for a long time to come! I don't think I personally
   could have chosen a field or an area of work that I would have liked
   better than the one I have! My students know that; they take
   advantage of that. I let them. (276)

Works Cited

Hall, Donald. "A Changing Profession: Interviews with J. Hillis Miller, Herbert Lindenberger, Sandra Gilbert, Bonnie Zimmerman, Nellie McKay, and Elaine Marks." Professions: Conversations on the Future of Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Donald E. Hall. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. 224-86.

McKay, Nellie Y. "Naming the Problem That Led to the Question 'Who Shall Teach African American Literature?'; Or, Are We Ready to Disband the Wheatley Court?" Guest Column. PMLA 113.3 May (1998): 359-69.

--. "Race, Gender, and Cultural Context in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on the Road." Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography. Eds. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. 175-88.

Notes

(1.) Editor's note: Alladi Uma's letter appears on p. 54 of this volume.

(2.) Editor's note: See p. 39 of this volume.

Susan Stanford Friedman

Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies

University of Wisconsin-Madison

I take it as a given that Nellie McKay's public contributions to the profession are well-known to readers of this journal. Indeed, no fully cognizant English professor in this country, much less anyone calling him- or herself an African Americanist, should be unaware of Nellie's important additions to the literature about race, gender, and the profession. So it is not that Nellie McKay that I have chosen to write about.

While there is ample reason to celebrate Nellie McKay the scholar, I believe there is greater reason to celebrate the person whom the general public did not know. The woman who cared deeply about her students and was ever-willing to go the extra mile to ensure that they learned and developed. The person whose concern for her discipline led her to assume many minimally or completely unrewarded tasks, such as serving on commissions, on committees too numerous to list, and as an advisory editor, then associate editor for African American Review. The person who, in addition to assuming tasks that keep our profession vital and expansive, also took the time to care about others in uncommon ways.

My memories of Nellie and her generosity are many. Let me focus on what may seem a "small" one, because it is so emblematic of the amazing human being Nellie McKay was. Every so often, and without an immediate context, a letter from Nellie would appear in my mailbox, or an e-mail would pop up on my screen, saying that she'd been thinking of me and wanted to let me know how important my work as Editor of AAR had been for her personally and for the profession more generally, or expressing the hope that all was well with me and my family. I wish I could say that such selfless acts are de rigeur in our profession. I wish I could say that I make the extraordinary effort to do that sort of thing far more often than I do. But few of us, especially those who are uncommonly busy, regularly offer such gestures of kindness and connection.

Nellie McKay the scholar, the teacher, and the truly exceptional colleague and human being is sorely missed. Her passing has left a physical hole in many people's lives. Yet Nellie remains an eternal glow, highlighting the values of community, caring, and personal transformation. For me, she will always stand as what Robert Hayden, praising another legendary figure in African American culture, called a "deathless primaveral image ... that transfigures many lives."

Joe Weixlmann

Provost and Professor of English

Saint Louis University

I loved Nellie McKay, and I am proud played a part in keeping her at the University of Wisconsin. I have been trying to remember what I said to her. I think it was: "If you go to Harvard it will still be Harvard after 10 years. If you stay here, you will transform Wisconsin and the literary world you care about." She stayed--of course, and bought that house, had friends to drag her out of her office on weekends, and had a deep and meaningful impact on all the worlds and people she cared about.

She intimidated me and made me laugh. I loved her laugh--when I flew out to Wisconsin the last summer to see her, she wanted to reminisce--about good times.

People impact institutions in various ways: Some are bigger than life, charismatic personalities; others bring their anger to produce reform. Nellie was different. She brought intensity, high intelligence, extraordinary hard work, passion, and a calling to shape a field of study and give it breath and depth.

I am grateful for her friendship, but even more grateful for the brilliance, vigor, and passion that educated and guided a fine group of young scholar-teachers and changed the University of Wisconsin, indeed, the academy, forever.

Donna Shalala

President, University of Miami

Former Chancellor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1987-1992

Former Cabinet Secretary, Health & Human Services Administration, 1992-2000

It was my privilege and joy to work closely with Nellie McKay through two editions of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. As Co-General Editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Nellie was instrumental in shaping the content of this influential anthology. If that were her only contribution, it would be sufficient evidence of her field-defining impact both on the teaching of African American literature in high schools, colleges, and universities worldwide and on the prominence of this literature in the society at large. In her editorial role, Nellie McKay helped, and will continue to help, introduce tens of thousands of new readers to the African American literary tradition.

But her contributions extended beyond that. Eleven years in gestation, the Norton Anthology needed a wise and diplomatic midwife to help with birthing. Nellie's skill in the art of collaboration, her ready sense of humor, and her patient conviction that the goal was not just worthy but necessary were essential to bringing the project to completion. Once published, the Norton Anthology became Nellie's means--through interviews, lectures, seminars, colloquia, and conferences--to spark fresh discussion about teaching on local, regional, and national levels.

Nellie cared deeply about the profession of teaching. She lived this ethic through the daily acts of love--mentoring, questioning, challenging, engaging personally and in a sustained way--that distinguish great teachers. That her students follow her example is the best legacy.

Julia A. Reidhead

Vice President and Editor

W. W. Norton & Company

Once, when I was in a waiting room with Nellie for one of her appointments after she got ill, she asked me to write down some ideas she had for the titles of books: three of them were "All I Really Wanted Was a Roast Beef Sandwich," "Not an Elegant Illness," and "The Nellie Tree." So it really seems fitting that a book she had wanted to write, but ultimately couldn't, will in fact come out in honor of her.

I am not a former student of Nellie's, but I knew a lot about Nellie's outreach work. Over the 20-plus years that we were colleagues, she always said yes when I asked her to speak to librarians, elderly retired folks, adults at the poverty level, prisoners, and community groups. She wrote an independent learning course on Afro-American literature that is still being taken through the US mail and online by students all over the world. Together she and I also produced some 12 hours of Wisconsin Public Radio programs on writers like Toni Morrison, Phillis Wheatley, and Harriet Jacobs. She cared deeply about getting the literary word out to people outside academia. I'm glad that I could witness and share Nellie's public contributions in that way.

Emily Auerbach

Project Director, UW Odyssey Project

Co-host, University of the Air, Wisconsin Public Radio

Professor of English

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Nellie Mentor and Role Model

I have had great difficulty in even thinking about writing this remembrance. I have blamed it mostly on my semester-long killer traveling schedule, but in reality it was my subconscious way of delaying and denying the sorrow I feel about the passing of my friend. Thank goodness my travels have taken me back and forth to Emory University, where I am Visiting Professor this semester. Emory has offered me a safe space away from the necessity of having to walk through the halls of the UW Afro-American Studies Department and see that closed door--or even worse to see the door open (as it was yesterday) with no Nellie sitting at her desk inside.

Nellie was instrumental in bringing me to Madison in 1988: from the moment we first met, she served as my advocate, my mentor, my friend. I always thought of her as my older sister, but recently, as we have all become aware of the nuances of her life, I have come to realize that she was my very own "other mother" as well.

There are so many ways that she mentored me--from her candid description of what it would be like for me, as a Black single woman, to live in Madison; I will always be grateful for her honesty with me about that. When (for the first time) Madison hired a cadre of Black Women faculty, she made herself available to us as mentor and friend regardless of our academic areas. She actually put together tenure packages for two of the four of us Black women who made history here at Madison when we were tenured together in what I like to call "the class of Donna Shalala." We were Sandi Adell, Gloria Ladsen Billings, Deborah Johnson, and I, and under Nellie's stalwart leadership, we were fierce and fearless!

Early on when I was floundering about, seeking a community of Black Feminist scholars (since we were located in so many different fields, I couldn't figure out which conferences to attend to meet like-minded souls), it was Nellie--along with Freida High and Cora Merritt--who together insisted that the Afro-American Studies department support what became the Black Feminist Seminar. This Seminar was a way for me to meet folks in different disciplines who were doing important, interesting work. In fact, we had two historic meetings of that Seminar and from those meetings came our anthology Theorizing Black Feminisms, one of the earlier interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and diasporic attempts to grapple with the issues of Black Feminisms. I edited that text with Abena Busia (who loved Nellie, too), which is to say that it was edited in the best feminist tradition of collaboration. In our two meetings (one at Madison and the other at Spelman) we read and critiqued each other's work, and analyzed it across the boundaries of academic discipline so that the art historian critiqued the lawyer while the literary critic analyzed the political scientist, and so on. We were determined that this work must be open and accessible to all.

Nellie was like the vigorous queen in the center of a web that spread out across the Wisconsin campus, across the nation, and indeed around the world. At the center of that web she was instrumental in the conceptualization and implementation of the Midwest Consortium of Black Studies, which included Wisconsin, Michigan State, Michigan, and Carnegie Mellon. Under her leadership, we utilized the tools of collaboration and consensus building in new venues. Wisconsin's contribution to the Consortium was a year-long seminar on Black Women's Studies for faculty, graduate, and upper-level undergraduate students. Our students in the consortium were provided with a wonderful opportunity to meet some of the most exciting Black feminist scholars engaged in cutting-edge research and writing from across the academy.

Some years ago Florence [Howe] invited Nellie to edit a new anniversary edition of the seminal text All the Men are Black, All the Women are White but Some of Us are Brave, and Nellie in turn asked me to serve as her co-editor. We did our Wisconsin thing--that is, we invited all of our friends and colleagues from around the country to come to Madison to talk about what we might do to put together a new text. (By the way, I remember Beverly [Guy Sheftall] blowing our carefully planned agenda right out of the water with her fierce questions at the beginning of the meeting!) Although Nellie had bought herself a wonderful new desk for her home so that she might work on this project (and others she had in mind) as she moved into remission [from cancer], unfortunately, this was one project that Nellie did not have the time to complete. But she did leave me with instructions about the women she wanted me to work with to finish this project.

As my mentor Nellie spent many hours reading my own work even though it was outside of her field. Her criticism was invaluable. I learned early on that if I won Nellie's approval of my work (as well as the approval of my other mentor, Florencia Mallon) and if my own mother could understand what I was writing about, then I was good to go.

As many people knew--her reputation for it was legendary-when Nellie was in Madison, she was in her office seven days a week. (To be sure, I worried that she worked too much and used to tease her about being my "unrole" model.) I would come to the office on Saturday or Sunday, ostensibly to work but really that was when we had our special times to talk. Nobody else was around, and we would laugh and joke and also talk about serious issues in our work and our lives. I so already miss those precious times.

But finally, I want to observe that Nellie very much loved celebrations--we often celebrated birthdays, publications, and so on, over wonderful meals in lovely restaurants, and inevitably we drank champagne. So I hope that her many colleagues and admirers near and far will soon lift a glass of champagne (or even sparkling water) in honor of Nellie.

Stanlie James

Afro-American Studies

University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Lifting As We Climb": Nellie McKay and this Black Woman in the Academy

Sometime during the academic year of 1984-85, when I was a new member of the (almost as new) W. E. B. Du Bois Society of Harvard, that institution's first black graduate student organization, Nellie McKay's path intersected with mine. Then residing in Cambridge, recipient of a Ford Foundation grant, Nellie was invited to be, and accepted, the role of distinguished academic speaker at the Society's February 1985 inaugural graduate conference. Three months later, I gave a paper at the annual convention of the New England American Studies Association, my realworld academic debut--invited to do so by that visiting professor from Wisconsin who had so graciously chaired a Du Bois Society's session, listened to all of our concerns, and encouraged me as though I had been a student in one of her Madison seminars. Finding Nellie was one of the best things that ever happened to me in the academy. Since that time I have been a four-star member of the Nellie McKay fan club, even if I can't claim having been one of its charter members.

Nellie has always been there for me--and I won't use the past tense, because I have internalized her precepts, and will take heed of them until I too pass from this world. Over the 20-plus years that Nellie and I were on the same plane, her counsel always stood me in good stead, and was always available when I needed it most. When I searched for my first job, I asked Nellie what she thought of the various appointments available; her ability to help me sort through pros and cons enabled this parochial New Yorker to make a good decision based less on geography and more on values. When I was pulling my hair out over the co-editorship of one of my first volumes, Nellie offered sage advice--again. And proffered that help still again, when I was stalled with revisions of We Wear the Mask and smarting from three publishers' rejections. Nellie said, "Send chunks out to people who love you- and who will be hard on you, too." And she took a chapter to read herself, to underscore her point. For these reasons and more, I dedicated my "half" of the Jacobs anthology to her, the sister (in so many senses of that word) who had urged and cheered me on.

Nellie taught me all about the profession, even to convention manners. Truth be told, there are qualities of mine that could exasperate Nellie. Two memories: many years ago, in an elevator in some convention city, I was doing my victory dance after a successful paper; Nellie narrowed her eyes at me, and queried, "When are you going to grow up?" "Never!" I laughed, and danced over to her, landing a big wet one on her cheek. She chuckled what I can still hear as her Nellie-chuckle, shaking her head with an affectionate look that said, "She's nutty, but I think she has promise." Another time, at another conference, I was running around badge-less--not because I hadn't registered, but because I then thought such identifying marks were nerdy. To my lame denouncement Nellie replied, "Why do you think everyone knows who you are?" Deflated--and educated--I put my badge on meekly. Now, having been in the profession for 20 years, and possessed of the inevitable scholarly bifocals (not to mention a middle-aged short-term memory), I am very grateful for those plastic-clad reminders--and for Nellie's sisterly advice.

To honor Nellie properly, I promise to pass along what she taught me. In a letter supporting one of her many honors, I once wrote,

   It is her example that I often find myself considering, when I
   think of how I might make an impact on the field: her influence
   comes from far more than her scholarly publications, even as
   those articles and books continue to be field-shaping. As a
   beginning graduate student I was struck by McKay, for she
   embodied what I was and could be: a former CUNY undergrad
   (Queens College in her case, City College in mine, both of us
   cure laude graduates of our respective English departments) who
   was a black woman and a Harvard PhD.... She has demonstrated
   time and again that one can succeed while helping others, that
   one can publish field-shifting scholarship while remaining
   devoted to one's students, that one can be a mentor to a
   student at one institution while calling another home.

Thank you, Nellie, for giving me so much. My sharing this gift of yours will be my memorial to you.

Rafia Zafar

Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies

Washington University in St. Louis

What Nellie Knew

I'm profoundly honored to offer a tribute to Nellie McKay, especially at once with this august company of some of Nellie's most intimate friends. But Nellie's life and career earned her our esteem. My labor here thus fulfills a charge I feel very responsible to.

That said, I must accept that I fit awkwardly in this company. My more distinguished friends here--including Frances Smith Foster, William Andrews, Susan Freidman, and Nell Irvin Painter--knew Nellie far longer and much better than I. I suppose I write, then, not because of the temporal span of my relationship with Nellie, but because 11 years ago, Nellie took a strong liking to me, almost filial.

I met Nellie in 1994 at the Modern Languages Association convention in San Diego. There I interviewed with a small group of faculty from the departments of English and African American Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison for a keenly attractive faculty position whose line would be shared between units. I don't remember what I said during that meeting, but I must have said everything that Nellie wanted to hear. I'll never forget the glow in her countenance at the end of that interview and the indescribable look of sincerity and approval in her eyes as I left the room, her one hand firmly clasped to mine, the other, more gently, covering our coupled hands' embrace. Our meeting was a lot like the one Baldwin described in The Fire Next Time between the friendly woman pastor of his best friend's small Pentecostal church and him. On meeting 14 year old Baldwin, that charming woman asked, "Who's little boy are you?" Baldwin's heart's reply: "Why yours." I was blessed that Nellie was so fond of me. And I, of course, like 14 year old Baldwin, was charmed by her kindness and that inscrutable aura of sensitivity around her.

Not many weeks after our meeting, I suffered the shamefulness--all I know to call it is shamefulness--of hurting Nellie very deeply when I declined her offer to me to join her at University of Wisconsin-Madison and went instead to Yale. It made for awkward moments later on when I saw her at professional meetings. Sometimes she was her usual warm self; other times she seemed wounded by me, disappointed at least, and was therefore discernibly less warm. Who can feel good about ever having hurt Nellie McKay? Although the material advantages of accepting Yale's offer were slightly more substantial than what Nellie and Thom Schaub had worked so hard to give me, the material advantages were not my issue with Madison really. Nor was it the strange sensation of feeling like Matthew Henson on that unspeakably frigid day when I arrived at Madison for a campus visit. My real issue was, in fact, Nellie. I never had the courage to tell her honestly--I am somewhat embarrassed to confess it now--that I did not join her here because I feared our closeness. I feared the filial feeling that I sensed growing fast between us. I feared, that is, being daily beholden to her high expectations of me. I feared failing her, or resenting her for the pressure, unspoken, of her high regard, of her professional and scholarly example, of her unreciprocable goodness. In short, I feared Nellie's motherhood.

I realize that it is perhaps untoward, finally, to publish the personal dimensions of one's professional relationships, risky of me to disclose what I thought about Nellie exactly. But I cannot get at the signal importance of her scholarly legacy without this bit of personalization. Because my fear of her motherhood, a decidedly masculinist reflex toward the fiction of intellectual individualism, is not mine alone but the lamentable condition of the field of inquiry that today goes by the name "black masculinity studies." That project, about which I am so ambivalent, has thus far failed in my judgment, owing to men's presumptions about who is, or should be, laying the groundwork for such scholarship. Even in its specifically black male feminist ambitions, black masculinity studies, despite the press, is languishing and nearly bankrupt.

All of us know Nellie's reputation as one of our pioneers in black feminist criticism and theory. That is the context in which I first came to know who Nellie McKay was, her brilliant work on Jean Toomer notwithstanding. Indeed, I could never have imagined taking up the subject of black masculinity as I did in my 2002 book except for the powerful influence of black feminist criticism and theory, having been trained as I was by Karla F. C. Holloway and influenced by the modeled professionalism and generosities of the late Claudia Tate, by Hazel Carby, and, of course, by Nellie. But I fear today that this thing called black masculinity studies that these women, their work, and the work of many others enabled--this thing called black masculinity studies that, odd and naive as it may sound, I was not seeking to help establish exactly, has lost its black feminist moorings. It has erased the Mother and is consequently at its current impasse, unable or unwilling to extricate itself from the illusion of self-generation.

There are at least two major problems with black masculinity studies today, the first of which is its narcissistic impulse. From where I stand, "black man" is not synonymous with "black masculinity." Anatomy is not ideology. As far as I am concerned Missy Elliot, Condoleeza Rice, and the uniformed female who fights the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq each perform discretely different masculinities. The second problem of black masculinity studies, which is the upshot of the first (and may extend, as the first, to masculinity studies broadly) is one we should have learned from Nellie and a few others many years ago. Black masculinity studies, despite its genealogy, consistently obscures and, therefore, devalues black women's lives and circumstances. The nuanced ambivalence around Du Bois's fetishization of black women, especially those nearest to him (wife Nina, daughter Yolande, and close colleague Jessie Redmond Fauset), that Nellie conveyed in her essay "The Souls of Black Women Folk" in Gates's Reading Black, Reading Feminist augured this very issue. Few have picked up on it. No one has followed through with the rigor and incisiveness and political costs/benefits analysis like Hazel Carby. Race Man threw down a black feminist gauntlet that extends to its logical conclusion the argument begun subtly by Nellie so many years ago, an argument far wider than the problem of Du Bois's version of black male feminism. Nellie pointed to the problem of black masculinity per se.

The gauntlet laid down by those black feminist critics from Nellie to Hazel has yet to be answered, even by any black male feminist. We'd prefer rather to pretend it was not challenge, which is of course one more violence--a discursive one--against black women done in the name of black male feminism and black masculinity studies. Let me be clear: None of us black men who have found ourselves doing black masculinity studies are afraid to name our mothers. But only naming our Nellie or Hazel is not hearing or, better, seeing Nellie or Hazel in our vision of properly doing our black masculinity work. To merely name the Mother is to marginalize her. Here and now, however, I join this distinguished company in moving Nellie McKay from the margin to the center where, if we had been better, more attentive feminists, male or female, we would have known Nellie has been all along.

Briefly, a coda: In 2002 just prior the publication of my own Constructing the Black Masculine, by Duke University Press, I benefited from the criticisms of two anonymous readers who recommended the manuscript to the press. Those two readers, still anonymous to me, I thanked in the acknowledgements pages. I had also thanked Nellie, not for reading the manuscript, which I had not asked her to do--feeling guilty I suppose for having disappointed her. I thanked her instead for other generosities that she extended to me over my short career. "I hope this book pleases her," I wrote. Much later, I learned by some means I do not now remember that Nellie was, in fact, one of those anonymous readers of my manuscript. Although I had named her, I did not--could not--then appreciate as I might have appreciated, how central she was to that work and whatever may be its strengths and value. Where it fails to realize its black feminist potential, though, I alone--not Nellie, not Karla, not Claudia, not Hazel--am hard-headedly responsible.

Maurice Wallace

Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies

Duke University

Academic Mothers and Their Feminist Daughters: a remix

Motherhood, mothering, and mothers in general get a bad rap. I want to address that unfortunate circumstance and to claim mothering as a both a workable concept for feminist and academic advancement, and, based on my experience, one that has proved effective in cultivating the life of the mind and in raising a new generation of scholars. A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of sitting on my first MLA panel with Nellie; our topic was "academic mothers and their feminist daughters" (a title that she suggested). It was part of a larger conversation on effective mentoring techniques and proven strategies for intergenerational scholarly development. During the question and answer period, someone asked if I didn't think that the concept of "mothering" was too limited, disempowering, even patronizing to describe what should in essence be a strictly professional relationship. At the time, I retreated, saying that motherhood was really only a convenient metaphor, more hyperbole than descriptor. Now, however, I disagree with my disavowal. Actually, when I look back on my brief professional career (which is still outnumbered by my years in graduate school), I find "mothering" to be an accurate and elastic description of my relationship with Nellie. I am fortunate and proud to say so.

Nellie's was not an idealized, pie in the sky mothering. Hers was the realistic, the highs and lows, hard work, bad news, what-the-helMs-taking-you-so-long to-finish-that-dissertation-anyway version of mothering. Still, in terms of my work and professional life, Nellie was my other mother, one whom my own mother never failed to inquire about during our weekly phone calls, always asking about "Dr. McKay."

I feel a bit at a loss about how, chronologically, to characterize the depth of my connection with Nellie. I don't have the vantage of many years from which to consider the ways that she impacted my life and the lives of her other students. Given this limitation, I turn to more familiar and familial territory to explain what Nellie gave me. The familiar and familial ground I choose is "mothering" and its satellites of care, intimacy, work, discipline, pride, and hope.

In what follows, I connect Nellie's academic mothering with that of my own mother, a comparison that I make with the intent to honor them both. My mother has a way of saying things, expressing herself in a language that's colorful, if not totally unique to southern women. For instance, my mother does not run errands. She finds herself "running and ripping" or "traipsing and gallivanting" throughout our small city. A fast or morally-loose woman does not simply walk, she "flounces." My two younger sisters and I refer to these expressions as "momma-isms." To indicate the complexity of my feeling and debt to Nellie, I turn to a few momma-isms that characterize what I admire and value most about Nellie.

Momma-ism #1: "Lisa, school is not so serious. Stephanie, school is not a joke."

I am the oldest of three girls. My mother worked with each of us quite differently to generate the same results: to make us feel special, to teach us to respect ourselves and others, to show us the value of hard work. She patented us deliberately and specifically. Perhaps it is an oldest child thing, but I was a high achiever. Apparently, many PhDs are first born. Deborah McDowell once told me that during her time at the Bunting Institute, many of the fellows there were first children. I would come home crying from school because I got B on a quiz, and my mother would say: "hey, school is no big deal; as long as you do your best, it's fine. Even if you get a 'D,' and you did your best, that's fine." She tells me now that she could never talk about school with my youngest sister Stephanie and me in the same room. Though she is now a successful medical professional and mother, during her early years, Stephanie had no such compunction about school. She was content to torture teachers, get into fights, and cause general mayhem. In addition to bringing home poor grades, Stephanie also brought home teachers: they more than once accompanied her for a one-on-one chat with my mother. My mother addressed each of us vehemently--and separately--about the value of school: I was to take it easy; my sister was to take it seriously.

Similarly, Nellie mentored her graduate students deliberately and specifically. She addressed each of us from within our individual situations, directing her attention to our particular weaknesses or our special strengths. One of my cohort says that "Nellie adjusted her methods according to our individual personalities (no small feat given how different we all are). I'm convinced she acts and responds differently towards you, Kim, Keisha, Shanna, and others based on what we dish out to her, our personalities, and expectations." Equally important to the different modes of address to her students is the common thread of her high expectation. She wants us to succeed, but knows that success will look different on each of us. She also gives us sometimes brutally honest and useful feedback. As she told one of my cohort, "Well, I'm glad the second reader really likes it. I don't think it's all that original but...." One of my most treasured signs of her mentorship is her response to my angst-ridden email about preparing for my third year review as tenure track faculty. She wrote: "The anxieties are real and perfectly justified. The bar gets moved higher and higher and many of us who were tenured in the 1980s could not get tenure now. I've been trying to tell grad students that they have to hit the ground running as soon as they deposit their dissertations .... It's tough and most students, no matter what they hear as grad students, don't understand until they get into the job. So, you do your best and you can't do more."

Momma-ism #2: "I can show you better than I can tell you."

When my mother said, "I can show you better than I can tell you," these words were usually a preamble to a disciplinary action. After tiring of repeatedly telling us to do or not do something (her limit was three times), she would remind us that she, as they say, "had ways" of getting our attention; she wasn't afraid to show us what they were. Nellie's association with the-show-rather-than-tell modus operandi is also disciplinary, but of a different kind. Her discipline was located in the constant, reliable steadiness of her presence. And her discipline was dual: most clear in her own relentless work ethic that made her accept, for instance, inconvenient and arduous department or university service commitments. Less public but no less valuable was her commitment to instructing, advising, and advancing her graduate students. Her interest in our lives, her concern for our work, her commitment to making us the best we could be are all ways that we benefited from Nellie's discipline. She taught the untenable lessons about diligent work ethic, intercollegial relationships, professional comportment and commitment by virtue of her presence. I arrived in Madison in the fall of 1992 after an initial summer visit with my mother and cousin, both of whom experienced Madison as freezing even in June. What I recall from that initial meeting is Nellie's light and energy, a kind of brightness and intensity. Her welcoming presence made me feel cared for in a department where I was the only black student until, fortunately, others came in the years soon after my first.

Nellie's way was to meet you where you are, then cultivate the best in you. As a colleague once observed, "One thing I really appreciated about Nellie's dissertation advising is that she never tried to mold any of us into her image. She is always able to see the value and worth of work that oftentimes has nothing to do with her interests, theory or work. She's even able to appreciate and support good work that runs counter to everything she believes."

Momma-ism #3 "I am not one of your little friends."

One of my favorite momma-isms is "I am not one of your little friends," which I appreciate particularly for the conciseness with which it established boundaries between my mother and myself. My mother would trot this one out whenever my sisters, or more likely I myself, spoke to her in an unsuitable way; maybe I was flippant, or rude, or said "what" or "yeah" instead of the requisite "yes." My mother then made it clear that she was not one of our "little friends." I'm reminded of Rebecca Walker's memoir. In describing her relationship with her mother Alice Walker, Rebecca laments her mother's description and interpretation of their relationship as sisterly rather than filial, grievously recognizing that "being my mother's friend prevents me from being her daughter" (231). My mother took her role seriously. And so did Nellie.

The ease with which I've been calling her Nellie in this remembrance does not reflect my name for her during the entirety of my graduate career. Save perhaps my last semester, I called her "Professor McKay." This gesture was not at her insistence, but at my own. Not out of fear, but out of genuine and heartfelt respect, the boundaries of our relationship were clear; and as I've grown in the profession, so has my comprehension of our relationship. This maturation is, I believe, right. I was not Nellie's colleague while under her direction in graduate school, and even at the end of her life, I felt only marginally closer to collegiality with her than before. Yet, no boundaries separate us; for me they remain a meaningful and recognizable proximity, familiar and familial.

Nellie's other graduate students often recognized aloud "mothering" as an attribute of Nellie's mentoring. For them, too, that term aptly describes her collective or grouping effect on her students. I refer here to the body of graduate student "siblings" that Nellie's presence began to generate in 1992. Her work with her students brought my cohort together in productive ways. We are aware of each other and available to each other; reading each other's work, encouraging, and advising each other even now that Madison is behind many of us. Though I started out alone, two more black students came to the UW English department in 1993, more in each year after that until there was a collective of students working separately but bound by Nellie's care and training.

Nellie's instruction, guidance, and presence shaped those students fortunate enough to work closely with her. A graduate colleague once explained that "what I think about mostly when I think of Nellie is that great line in Beloved where Sixo says 'she is a friend of my mind.' That's how my heart honors Nellie. She is a friend of my mind." Another graduate school colleague, an academic success story who works with inner-city women, has benefited from Nellie's faith in her. "Nellie gave me a chance. I'm a high school drop out and teenage mother. I suffered, then survived depression. And Nellie McKay saw my potential, she believed in me. When I mentor women in the academy, on the street, in jails, or other institutions, I tell them about her."

I don't believe that Nellie consciously approached her mentoring as mothering, but based on my experience it is a fruitful and accurate description. From me, that is high and fitting praise.

Works Cited

Walker, Rebecca. Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self New York: Riverhead Books, 2002.

Lisa Woolfork

Assistant Professor of English

University of Virginia