Summer Reading List for Africana Literature

The following is a sampling of many of my favorite Africana authors, novels, and theoretical works. This list of course, is by no means comprehensive, as the variety of compelling works available by writers of the African diaspora is very broad and dynamic. However, the following are among the most noteworthy and influential.

The Slave Narrative/Reconstruction
Clotel; Or The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember edited by James Mellon
When I Was a Slave, edited by Norman R. Yetman
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or My Bondage and My Freedom
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Women's Slave Narratives by Annie L. Burton, et al.
12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from The Civil War to WWII by Douglas A. Blackmon
A Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington

The Harlem Renaissance
 
By Zora Neale Hurston:
Dust Tracks on a Road
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Seraph on the Sewanee 
Jonah's Gourd Vine
Moses, Man of the Mountain
The Black Rose: The Dramatic Story of Madam C.J. Walker, America's First Black Female Millionaire by Tananarive Due
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois
Quicksand and Passing by Nella Larsen
Cane by Jean Toomer
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by J.W. Johnson
Gods Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse by J.W. Johnson
There is Confusion by Jessie Fauset
The Big Sea by Langston Hughes
Banana Boat by Claude McKay

Modernists/The Chicago School
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Black Boy ( American Hunger ) by Richard Wright
Native Son by Richard Wright
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

By James Baldwin:
Giovanni's Room
Go Tell it on the Mountain

Universal Apartheid/Pan-Africanism
Long Walk to Freedom: With Connections by Nelson Mandela
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid by Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger
Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography--The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa by Mark Mathabane

The Civil Rights Movement
Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody
Free At Last: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died in the Struggle by Sara Bullard, Julian Bond
A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School by Carlotta Walls Lanier, Lisa Frazier Page
Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Black Power Movement
Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis
Women, Culture and Politics by Angela Davis

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley/Malcolm X
Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed 
Yellow Back Radio Broke-down by Ishmael Reed
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton by Bobby Seale
Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton

Black Women's Renaissance Writers
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Letter to my Daughter by Maya Angelou

By Alice Walker
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
The Temple of My Familiar
Meridian
The Color Purple

By Toni Morrison:
Beloved
Sula
The Bluest Eye
Song of Solomon
Home


Mama Day by Gloria Naylor
The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara
Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara

Contemporary African American Women's Fiction and Theory
Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo by Ntozake Shange
Baby of the Family by Tina McElroy Ansa
The Hand I Fan With by Tina McElroy Ansa
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America by Melissa V. Harris-Perry
The Coldest Winter Ever by Sistah Soulja
Push by Sapphire
Corregidora by Gayle Jones
Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash

Afro-Futurism, Fantasy and Science Fiction:
Blood Colony by Tananarive Due
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy ed. Uppinder Mehan and Samuel R. Delany
Voodoo Dreams: A Novel of Marie Laveau by Jewell Parker Rhodes

By Octavia Butler:
Wild Seed
Parable of the Sower
Parable of the Talents
The Ancestors (Collection) Brandon Massey, Tananarive Due, L.A. Banks
Louisiana by Erna Brodber
Immortal by Valjeanne Jeffers

Re-Visioning History in the Contemporary Age:
Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
Jubilee by Margaret Walker

Alice Walker: Reaping the Ancestor's Garden

"Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender." (Alice Walker)

Alice Walker, (born 1944), the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Color Purple. The author of multiple novels, volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, children's books, and essays, she is perhaps best known for the landmark novel that focuses on Celie, a disaffected black woman from the rural South who has been deliberately disconnected from her children.

Our text points out that Walker was interviewed in 1973 by scholar Mary Helen Washington, in which the author professed a commitment to portraying the lives of black women in her novels. Gates, et al. observe that Walker "described the three types of black women characters she felt were missing from much of the literature of the United States. The first were those who were exploited both physically and emotionally, whose lives were narrow and confining, and who were driven sometimes to madness, such as Margaret and Mem Copeland in Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. The second were those who were victims not so much of physical violence as of psychic violence, women who are alienated from their own culture. The third type of black woman character, represented most effectively by Celie and Shug in The Color Purple, are those African American women who, despite the oppression they suffer, achieve some wholeness and create spaces for other oppressed communities" (Gates, et al 2425). 

Raised in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Walker left home to study first at Spelman College (HBC), and at Sarah Lawrence in upstate New York. During these years her career as a writer began to flourish, fueled by the hardships and setbacks she experienced early in her life. She became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and notably interrogated the Black Nationalist Movement for its emphasis on "Black Manhood," and its virtual negligence of the plight of African American women (2426). An ideologue, Walker outlined her notion of "Womanism," which she explained originated in the African American folk term "womanish," and "honors a long tradition of strength among black women" (2426). Womanism, for Walker, was a term that encompassed the experience of black women and a pervasive sense of self and communal belonging.

*From In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Amazon.com

Walker observed early in her career an impulse to explore the artistry of black women--not simply that of Phyllis Wheatley and Zora Neale Hurston--writers whom she identifies as "foremothers"; but the artistry of average black women, past and present. As we consider the excerpt from "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," in what ways does the author pay homage to the unknown, unseen foremothers of the past?

Jamaica Kincaid: Literary "Badass"

According to the Huffington Post's special section entitled Black Voices, Jamaica Kincaid is a "badass." Well, this is not news. 

photo from Huffington Post/Black Voices

However, Joseph Erbentraut has discovered the "Twelve Reasons Why" Kincaid continues to impress a new generation of readers, which can be read in full here. 

"Jamaica Kincaid is simply not one to mince words. When she speaks, the revered 65-year-old Antiguan-American novelist does so deliberately -- and she's not afraid to interrupt a question when she sees it fit.

Kincaid, who got her start at the New Yorker during the magazine's William Shawn era in the '70s, has produced work that has earned her an enviable list of awards, including an American Book Award for her latest novel, 2013's See Now Then.

One gets the impression Kincaid is afraid of nothing -- something that comes across in her writing, as well. Her work, at times, has been criticized for being "angry," a criticism she's rightfully dismissed as invalid, saying her work is only labeled that because she is black and a woman.

Based on an interview with The Huffington Post, here are just some of the many qualities that make Kincaid -- and her work -- so incredible.'"

Born Elaine Potter in St. John's Antigua, to a homemaker and carpenter, Jamaica Kincaid was the oldest child of four children and the only daughter. Having had her mother to herself for the first nine years of her life, Kincaid reportedly felt 'abandoned' by her mother by the time her three brothers came along (1). The author was educated in the British Colonial system, Antigua having remained a British colony until 1981. According to one source, Kincaid's traditional parents forbade her to pursue a career in writing--her chosen vocation, and at the age of seventeen, she was sent to the U.S. to work as an au pair. It was at this time in her life that she began to write professionally. William Shawn of the New Yorker hired her as a staff writer in 1976. She would leave the New Yorker in 1996, when the magazine became less literary and more focused on celebrities. 

Though critics observe that Kincaid's writing has been labeled "angry," Kincaid herself regards these observations as "invalid" along with allegations that a writer's work is necessarily autobiographical. But, a topic that does recur within her work includes post-colonial female identity: the experience of growing up in the islands still under British rule, and the experiential effects of post-colonial trauma. 

In the video below, Kincaid reads from her short narrative "Girl," a piece that reflects the inner thoughts and experience of a young girl growing up in Antigua.

Honoring Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

This year we lost one of the most important and influential writers, poets, and essayists of African American--and American Literature. Maya Angelou passed away today in her Winston-Salem home at the age of eighty-six.

Marguerite Johnson was born in 1928, and "before she and her brother [Bailey] were old enough to start school, her parents divorced. Angelou and her brother grew up in Stamps, Arkansas," and were cared for by "their grandmother, Annie Henderson." In the autobiographical text that has been recognized as Angelou's finest, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the author recounts the events of her first seventeen years, and the methods of surviving the Jim Crow South taught to her by her benevolent and resilient grandmother. However, a traumatic event she endured at age ten drove her into a state of silence that was broken only by her love of literature (Hill). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings could easily be located in a feminist genre, inspiring other feminist (and Womanist) writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker; however her writing transcended racial, gender, and socio-economic lines and touched readers across multiple demographics.

In the more than eight decades that Angelou lived, she produced volumes of poetry and essays, and became a formidable instrument of change in the Civil Rights Movement, acting as the northern coordinator for the SCLC, and in her cooperative associations with leaders such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Her marriage to Vus Make led her to a fuller absorption into African culture, and though the marriage did not last, extended Angelou's influence as an advocate of civil rights and liberties on a global scale (Hill).

Clearly the author's talents reached beyond the pen and page and extended to the theater, for which her talents earned her a Tony; a successful nightclub performance; and her performance as the grandmother of Kunta Kinte in the television adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots earned her acclaim. Further accolades include her over thirty honorary doctorates, accomplishments in film and stage, and the lecture circuit (2). The nation recalls her recitation of "On the Pulse of Morning" at the 1993 presidential inauguration of fellow Arkansas native, Bill Clinton:

A Rock, A River, A Tree Hosts to species long since departed, Marked the mastodon.The dinosaur, who left dry tokens Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their hastening doom Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, Come, you may stand upon my Back and face your distant destiny, But seek no haven in my shadow. I will give you no more hiding place down here. You, created only a little lower than The angels, have crouched too long in The bruising darkness, Have lain too long Face down in ignorance. Your mouths spilling words Armed for slaughter. The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me, But do not hide your face. Across the wall of the world, A River sings a beautiful song, Come rest here by my side. Each of you a bordered country, Delicate and strangely made proud, Yet thrusting perpetually under siege. Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore, currents of debris upon my breast. Yet, today I call you to my riverside, If you will study war no more. Come, Clad in peace and I will sing the songs The Creator gave to me when I and the Tree and the stone were one. Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your Brow and when you yet knew you still Knew nothing. The River sings and sings on. There is a true yearning to respond to The singing River and the wise Rock. So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew The African and Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh, The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher. They hear. They all hear The speaking of the Tree. Today, the first and last of every Tree Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River. Plant yourself beside me, here beside the River. Each of you, descendant of some passed On traveller, has been paid for. You, who gave me my first name, you Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, you Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of Other seekers--desperate for gain, Starving for gold. You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot ... You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare Praying for a dream. Here, root yourselves beside me. I am the Tree planted by the River, Which will not be moved. I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree I am yours--your Passages have been paid. Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need For this bright morning dawning for you. History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced With courage, need not be lived again. Lift up your eyes upon The day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream. Women, children, men, Take it into the palms of your hands. Mold it into the shape of your most Private need. Sculpt it into The image of your most public self. Lift up your hearts Each new hour holds new chances For new beginnings. Do not be wedded forever To fear, yoked eternally To brutishness. The horizon leans forward, Offering you space to place new steps of change. Here, on the pulse of this fine day You may have the courage To look up and out upon me, the Rock, the River, the Tree, your country. No less to Midas than the mendicant. No less to you now than the mastodon then. Here on the pulse of this new day You may have the grace to look up and out And into your sister's eyes, into Your brother's face, your country And say simply Very simply With hope Good morning (3). Maya Angelou's work, life, and influence have made an indelible mark upon this nation, our lives, and our literature. Works Consulted: Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary      Tradition. Patricia Liggins Hill, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 1577. "Maya Angelou." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Angelou. 28 May 2014.           . "Maya Angelou, Lyrical Witness of the Jim Crow South, Dies at 86." NewYork Times Online. 28 May 2014.

The Mother of AfroFuturism: Octavia Butler

Born in Pasadena, California in June of 1947, Octavia Estelle Butler, was raised by her mother, a maid, and her father, who shined shoes for a living. When her father passed away when Octavia was seven years old, her grandmother helped to raise her. According to one source, Butler grew up with a painful shyness that made making friends difficult, and dyslexia, which made schoolwork even more difficult. She was often the target of teasing from bullies, but she found a haven in the public library, where she pored over Science Fiction magazines like Amazing Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She determined that she would write her own stories, so she begged her mother for a typewriter for the purpose (1).

photo of Butler from tansyrr.com

Recipient of two Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, and the first Science Fiction writer to have received a MacArthur Fellowship, Octavia Butler was the first African American woman to have traversed the largely white male-dominated genre of Science Fiction (1). Her novels such as Kindred, The Parable Series, Patternist Series, and Xenogenesis Series have been praised as biting social criticism and commentary, told in terse, economical language. Butler's work often featured strong, solitary, black female protagonists, confronted by bleak and dystopian landscapes and fates that one might at first judge "insurmountable" (2).

In Kindred the author focuses on an African American woman who travels back in time to find herself living on the antebellum plantation of her great, great grandfather. In the vein of speculative fiction, which envisions alternate histories, Butler's narrative allows the reader to experience, with great immediacy, the horrific indignity of slavery and racism through her character. It is a story she was inspired by her mother to write. Butler is quoted in the New York Times as having said that "I didn't like seeing her go through back doors...If my mother put up with all those humiliations, I wouldn't have eaten very well or lived very comfortably. So I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that place people have had to live through in order to endure (2).

Though Butler did not categorize her work generically, she has been chiefly associated with the genres of Science Fiction and Afrofuturism--the latter term introduced by Mark Dery, who defines it as "speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture" (1). Her themes included the necessity for community cohesiveness, the heroic lone survivor, the "remaking of the human," as well as social critique. Butler also broke traditional barriers with narrative voice, often assuming a male, or ungendered narrative role.

Believed to have suffered a stroke and fallen at her home, Octavia Butler passed away at her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington after a long period of depression and illness. Only fifty-eight when she died, she left a significant legacy for new ways of envisioning the world, of treating topics like race, gender, class, and the specific questions confronting African Americans (and African American women) in the advancing technologically-dominated age (1).

Langston Hughes: American Poet

Photo from The Academy of American Poets

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was one of the most beloved and celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Among his many contributions, Hughes helped to "define the spirit of the age" by underscoring the connections among multiple expressive forms--namely poetry's kinship to jazz--of the era. As our text explains, Hughes's autobiography, The Big Sea offers a rare, first-hand account of the scenes, sights, and happenings of one of the most important eras in African American literary--and cultural--history (Gates et al. 1289). Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes hailed from an illustrious family line: as Gates points out, Hughes was the grandson of a prominent Kansas politician; and his brother, John Mercer Langston, was, among other things, "founding dean of the law school" at Howard. Despite his auspicious family tree, Langston grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, in virtual poverty.

In the years that followed, Hughes worked a number of odd jobs that included delivery boy, produce farmer, busboy, and crewman on a merchant steamer--a job that enabled him to visit much of Europe and Africa. Throughout all of his various posts, Hughes continued to polish his poetry, and in 1921, published his first, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," in The Crisis. Later, his jazz-inspired poem, "The Weary Blues," won first prize in Opportunity magazine's literary contest. Hughes looked to a number of poetic sources as inspiration, from Carl Sandburg and Claude McKay, to James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. DuBois. Mostly, Hughes discovered his creative influence to be the radical and experimental forms of jazz and blues.

As you read Hughes' poems, keep in mind some of the major themes the poet engaged. These include: Poems that expressed the diversity of African American experiences The role of art in everyday life and experience Artistic expression as African American 'salvation' The mission of the black artist at the beginning of the 20th century* Black urban folk wisdom *Keep these things in mind when reading his essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"--the essay that Hughes wrote in response to George Schuyler's "Negro Art Hoakum." How does Hughes define the African American poet, his work, and his purpose? What, according to Hughes, is the duty of the 'young Negro artist'?


 

Paul Laurence Dunbar

                                  photo from this site.



The Poet

He sang of life, serenely sweet,
With, now and then, a deeper note.

From some high peak, nigh yet remote,

He voiced the world's absorbing beat.
He sang of love when the earth was young

And Love, itself, was in his lays
But ah, the world, it turned to praise

A jingle in a broken tongue

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who at the time, were newly freed slaves. Dunbar expressed a prodigious ability for poetry at the tender age of six. He grew up to excel in secondary school, becoming class president and editing the school newspaper. Later, he began publishing with the help of high school classmates, Orville and Wilbur Wright, who later helped to fund Dunbar's own press, The Dayton Tattler (1). Dunbar's first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy, published in 1893, attracted the attention of such figures as midwestern local colorist, James Whitcomb Riley, and publisher of The Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells. Publishing during a time in which remembrances of the antebellum South were becoming quite popular, Dunbar was immediately praised for his ability to capture the aesthetics of the African American folk through his dialect poetry. However, despite the indelible mark his contributions made in African American letters, modern-day critics have condemned Dunbar for having pandered to a white-controlled publishing industry. Still others champion Dunbar for his ability to maneuver within a limiting set of parameters, by publishing more openly critical pieces such as "The Mask," along with subtler, signifying poetry that reflected the nuances of the African American antebellum experience. Though James Weldon Johnson lauded Dunbar as one of the premiere African American poets and one his greatest influences--particularly for his dialect poetry--Dunbar still lamented that he had not achieved as much with his work as he would have liked. The poem above, simply entitled "The Poet," subtly betrays the poet's inner misgivings about his own dilemma (2). However Dunbar may have felt about his life's work, the following video features a modern poet who explains Dunbar's legacy as it has affected him.

Question for discussion: Watch the following video after having read some of Dunbar's poetry--particularly those dialect pieces that recall the Antebellum South. Considering the trends evolving at the time Dunbar was writing, such as the emerging "New Negro Movement," in which black artists and poets were discovering new, informed modes of self-expression, how might Dunbar's backward glance at the plantation south complement or inform such movements? How might Dunbar's experience and life work continue to inspire, inform, or influence us today?

James Weldon Johnson

photo from this site.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) enjoyed a long and multifaceted career as essayist, critic, songwriter, poet, diplomat, attorney, educator and politician. In each of these capacities, Johnson dedicated his energies and passions toward the advancement of African Americans. Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida to parents of humble, yet noble vocations: his father worked as a headwaiter at the opulent St. James hotel; and his mother was the first female and black teacher at an elementary school in Florida. It was his mother who taught her son her love for music of the European tradition and English Literature (1). At the age of sixteen, Johnson became a student at Atlanta University. He graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1894, and later received an honorary MA from that institution. Johnson began a career in education with a teaching post at a rural, backwater Georgia school in which he taught the children of freed slaves. Later he continued at Stanton Preparatory College, eventually become its principal at the age of twenty-three. As principal, he broadened the curriculum with courses in English, Algebra, Spanish, and bookkeeping. Johnson left this post to pursue a law career, and passed the Florida Bar, becoming the first African American since Reconstruction to do so.

Perhaps one of the most striking characteristics of James Weldon Johnson's illustrious career as a member of the African American--and American intelligentsia, was the emphasis he placed on the folk.While still a young man, Johnson went to rural Georgia, where he made his first acquaintance with the children of former slaves. Gates, et al. quotes Johnson as he reflected on the experience, saying that "[i]n all my experience there has been no period so brief that has meant so much in my education for life as the three months I spent in the backwoods of Georgia...I was thrown  for the first time on my own resources and abilities. I had my first lesson in dealing with men and conditions in the outside world...It was this period that marked the beginning of my psychological change from boyhood to manhood. It was this period which marked also the beginning of my knowledge of my people as a 'race'" (qtd. in Gates 791). Such a stance would put Johnson at odds with at least one of the most outspoken cultural leaders philosophers of Africana during this period: W.E.B. Dubois.

By the turn of the last century, Johnson launched a career in activism first through publishing, and founded the newspaper The Daily American. Though the publication went bankrupt only a few years later, Johnson was undaunted. Johnson became the first African American organizer--and later, secretary--of the NAACP, and served as editor and anthologist during the Harlem Renaissance. In this latter capacity he was instrumental in undermining white publishing entities and bringing numerous African American artists and poets to national attention.

Johnson's own literary contributions during this time were generative, and today have been anthologized and studied widely. His collection, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, was published in 1922, honors the tradition set forth by the African American 'folk' preacher, and celebrates the unique poetry and art expressed through the sermon.

Respected actor and bass-baritone singer, the late William Warfield recites James Weldon Johnson's "The Creation":

Introduction: Talking Books

James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and the Metaphor of the "Talking Book"

"[My Master] used to read prayers in public to the ship's crew every Sabbath day; and then I saw him read. I was never so surprised in my life, as when I saw the book talk to my master, for I thought it did as I observed him to look upon it, and move his lips. I wished it would do so with me. As soon as my master had done reading, I followed him to the place where he put the book, being mightily delighted with it, and when nobody saw me, I opened it, and put my ear down close upon it, in great hopes that it would say something to me; but I was sorry, and greatly disappointed, when I found that it would not speak. This thought immediately presented itself to me, that every body and every thing despised me because I was black" (qtd xxxvi). 

In the following video, an actor performs the script of Gronniosaw's narrative:

The metaphor of the "Talking Book" is a central and significant one to African American Literature. Denied the basic right of an education and forcibly consigned to using the "King's English" to communicate, African American slaves and their descendants called upon the remnants of their tribal past to express themselves. The storyteller of the West African tradition, or griot, was held in high esteem because he or she was considered the keeper of lore and tradition. However, when African slaves were displaced to the New World, they were forced to give up their native language and customs and denied access to written text. These statutes were in place to reinforce servitude among the African slaves and to hold them in ignorance. The editors of our text observe this statute from 1739 that followed the Stono Rebellion. This statute imposed penalties on slave holders for educating their slaves:

“And whereas the having of slaves taught to write, or suffering them to be employed in writing, may be attending with great inconveniences; Be it enacted, that all and every person and persons whatsoever, who shall hereafter teach, or cause any slave or slaves to be taught to write, or shall use or employ any slave as a scribe in any manner of writing whatsoever, hereafter taught to write; every such person or persons shall, for every offense, forfeit the sum of one hundred pounds current money” (xxxvii). 

Little wonder why a persecuted people would locate the means to freedom from bondage in the written text. Even the tradition of communication through the practice of beating a drum in the evening was outlawed by white slave holders in the eighteenth century:

“And for that as it is absolutely necessary to the safety of this Province, that all due care be taken to restrain the wanderings and meetings of negroes and other slaves, at all times, and more especially on Saturday nights, Sundays and other holidays, and their using and carrying wooden swords, and other mischievous and dangerous weapons, or using or keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes…And whatsoever master, owner or overseer shall permit or suffer his or their negro or other slave or slaves, at any time hereafter, or beat drums, blow horns, or use any other loud instruments, or whosoever shall suffer and countenance any public meetings or seatings or strange negroes or slaves in their plantations, shall forfeit 10 current money for every such offence” (xxxvii).

The African American literary tradition has been since its inception, grounded in the orality and vernacular traditions of its ancestors. The transmission of folk tales, songs, wisdom, and spirituality by word of mouth was the means by which tribal people communicated. Therefore this tradition has become an empowering mode of resistance and creativity within the African American Literary tradition. The idea of the "Talking Book" would permeate and persist throughout the centuries of African American storytelling. In the early twentieth century, author and ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston sought to capture the lyricism and dynamic quality of African American vernacular; more than that, she sought to recreate the way African American folk interacted and elevated dialogue to the spoken performance. For Hurston's "folk" characters, the spoken word and the voice were central to self-revelation.

Other, more contemporary authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison call upon the traditions of ancestors to recreate the spoken word and the performativity of Africana tradition. In her essay "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Tradition" Toni Morrison describes the role of the author as being similar to that of the tribal griot. One must be "in the culture/of the culture" but must also speak for the culture. Further, she reveals her endeavor to recreate the performance and uniqueness of African American dialect and dialogue--thereby creating a kind of "Talking Book."

However, the early writers of slave narratives such as Gronniosaw, Olaudah Equiano, Cugoano, John Jea and John Marrant, faced the bullying Euro-centric culture of eighteenth-century America. The printed text was prioritized, and the cultural production of Europe was considered the standard by which all art was measured. Art and literature produced by those of African descent was considered inferior, because its producers were considered "not human." Therefore, the first priority of the earliest writers of narrative was to prove his own merits--to prove that he was capable of intellectual thought and artistic production on par with that of the European. 

The European standard of art followed the former slave author, forcing him to acquire the speech and manner--and writing style of the day. This early practice evidenced a kind of mimicry for which the African American writer has often been credited. However, this was not simply a means of copycatting: the author of the slave narrative acquired the manners and style of the European in order to encode messages of resistance and self-assertion. Writing for the slave author meant empowering the self: "Writing the self into existence" and creating a document that would testify to his experience and therefore give it added relevance. 

More than that, the slave narrative would evolve from biography into a tool of abolition and protest. Over the next decades leading into the twentieth century, African American Literature would often hearken to the strategies of the early narratives and their modes of creating subtle but forceful protest, African American literature would then adopt specific and recognizable characteristics that made it unique from that of other cultures.