Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Stephanie Stokes Oliver is the author of Daily Cornbread: 365 Secrets for a Healthy Mind, Body, and Spirit; Seven Soulful Secrets for Finding Your Purpose & Minding Your Mission; and Song for My Father: Memoir of an All-American Family. Formerly the editor of Essence, and founding editor-in-chief of Heart & Soul, she started her magazine career at Glamour. For more information, see StephanieStokesOliver.com.

Nikki Giovanni is one of the most decorated poets of our time. She is the recipient of seven NAACP Image Awards, a National Book Award, a Caldecott Honor, a Coretta Scott King Award, and a Grammy nomination. She is the author of three New York Times bestsellers as well as many poetry collections for children and adults. You can visit her online at Nikki-Giovanni.com.

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Black Ink

FOREWORD

Our First Stories

NIKKI GIOVANNI

Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and spent her summers with her grandparents in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she was born in 1943. Giovanni graduated with honors from her grandfather’s alma mater, Fisk University. A world-renowned poet, author, commentator, activist, and educator, Giovanni has published volumes of poetry, nonfiction, essays, and children’s books.

She gained initial fame in the 1960s, as a leading voice of the Black Arts Movement, in the time of the civil rights and Black Power struggles. Awarded seven NAACP Image Awards, she has been nominated for a Grammy and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Since 1987, she has served on the faculty of Virginia Tech, where she is a university distinguished professor.

Giovanni’s literary greatness is on par with the twenty-five legendary writers included in this anthology. In the following foreword, she has graciously shared her own experiences in the tradition of the narrative of the book. She also sets the stage for what precedes the era of these writers in America—the horrific journey of the Middle Passage. While few of us ever think of it, overcoming language differences among the captured enslaved and then subsequently learning American English were among the first miracles along the path toward Black authorship as we know it today—from the peril of education to the power of literacy and then the pleasure of literature. First a moan, then a song, now a book.

Black Ink

INTRODUCTION

Reading Matters

STEPHANIE STOKES OLIVER

Collectively, the pieces here serve as a testament to the will, the struggle, and the difference that learning to read, and then taking pen to paper, and now fingers to computer, has made in American history.

It’s hard to believe that the relaxing, recreational endeavor of reading a good book that so many of us savor and take for granted was, for more than two hundred years, not only illegal for most African Americans enslaved in many states of the South, but also punishable by death.

When it comes to voting rights, Black parents often admonish their grown children to be sure to exercise their freedom in every election, because people died in the fight to obtain the right to vote. The proof is not disputed. Black-and-white newsreels of African Americans being terrorized by state troopers, police dogs, and firehoses during protest marches against disenfranchisement in the 1960s have been continuously and dramatically included in documentaries and other films and news programs. They tell the story that riveted the nation’s consciousness and caused American presidents to act.

The story of the struggle for full literacy among African Americans has yet to be documented as thoroughly. The purpose of Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing is to help fill that void.

Much like the griot of African oral history—the revered storyteller of the tribal history, what we would call now the keeper of “institutional memory”—we honor this struggle for literacy by passing on the words and wisdom of the writers included here. We have collected twenty-five of the most elite, brilliant, and wise Black writers of the African diaspora, voices that tell the story of the plight to read, write, and publish throughout generations of our nations. Of course, there are many, many more Black writers, authors, essayists, journalists, and academics that could have been included to make a multivolume comprehensive work. However, we endeavored to provide a satisfying sampler of pieces that may motivate the reader to dig deeper and check out the original books from which these works were excerpted, as well as to explore additional Black authors and essays not included.

Individually, the authors of Black Ink possess what Dr. Greg Carr, chair of the Afro-American Studies program at Howard University, calls the “deep critical literacy and content mastery necessary to meet intellectual curiosity, spur academic growth, satisfy the need to know, and to act to transform one’s self and the world.” Collectively, the pieces here serve as a testament to the will, the struggle, and the difference that learning to read and then taking pen to paper, and now fingers to computer, has made in American history.

As poet Nikki Giovanni, one of America’s foremost literary legends, so brilliantly reminds us in her foreword, the first word in that foreign language, English, understood by the captive ancestors on these shores just may well have been “SOLD.” In my favorite of Nikki’s poems, “My House,” she evokes the African American loss of our mother tongue in the transport across the Middle Passage and in our oppressive New World from which I feel we have never fully recovered:

english isn’t a good language

to express emotion through

mostly i imagine because people

try to speak english instead

of trying to speak through it . . .

Starting in the early 1800s, over approximately twenty-five decades up to today, the twenty-five writers of these expository essays of Black Ink explain to us the struggle and the joys of overcoming the challenges of reading and writing. They are: Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture], Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Terry McMillan, Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and President Barack Obama, in an exclusive interview with New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. These pieces reflect the phenomenal African American progress from when it was illegal to learn to read—and Frederick Douglass resisted, escaped, and claimed his freedom—up to the election of our first Black President of the United States, an avid reader and mega-bestselling author.

The voices are classic and contemporary, historic and avant-garde. Some reflect the unique perspective, sensibility, and wisdom of the immigrant. Many of the writers were born in the African and Caribbean diaspora and relocated to the United States, such as Stokely Carmichael (Trinidad), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua), Junot Díaz (Dominican Republic), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti), Marlon James (?Jamaica), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria). Others were born in the States and eventually found a place that felt more like home elsewhere and died there, including W. E. B. Du Bois (Ghana) and James Baldwin (France). Stokely Carmichael, who grew up in New York City, made his transition in Guinea, in West Africa.

Within the larger American literary tradition, Black voices are often marginalized or included as tokenism. Here, they are front and center, loud and clear, humble and proud, humorous and dead serious. Like ink itself, Black Ink is what gives us common ground whether in the ink made with tree bark by Solomon Northup (author of Twelve Years a Slave) to write a letter that would secure his freedom in 1853 or in the digital ink of our e-readers that now allow us to download novels, such...