A Nod to Black Authors for Black History Month

JENN McKINLAY: Today marks the start of Black History Month. Having been a public librarian for twenty years, this was always a glorious month for book displays. An opportunity to showcase stories and history and unsung heroes, well, as you can imagine, it gets librarians all in a fizz. So much to highlight and share and only one month to do it! Ack! 

Recently, publishing has come to realize that authors of color are woefully underrepresented and they've stepped up their game to be much more inclusive and supportive. This is such a huge win for readers! I am just thrilled that we will have so many amazingly diverse stories available to us now. 

It also made me think back on the books I read as a child of the 70's/80's and I was trying to remember the first book I read by an author of color - beyond the picture books I loved such as The Snowy Day by Jack Ezra Keats. Sadly, it took me awhile to pin it down. 

I was a freshman in high school and I chose to write a paper about I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. I remember falling love with her use of language and thinking that my own rough and tumble beginnings would make me strong and possibly a storyteller -- like her. This is one of my favorite quotes:  

So, what about you Reds? Who is the first author of color that you remember reading? 

HALLIE EPHRON: Great question. The first ones I remember were James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Also, assigned pre-college reading: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The first book by a woman of color took longer - the one I remember is THE COLOR PURPLE by Alice Walker. Shocking that it took so long.

RHYS BOWEN: Gosh, I’m trying to remember. My childhood reading was certainly confined to white writers only. There were writers of Indian descent in England but not any of African that I knew about. The first time I was conscious of a black writer was reading the autobiography of Frederick Douglass and being blown away by his eloquence, a man who grew up as a slave!  It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I discovered Maya Angelou and she immediately became one of my favorite poets.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, I had to think about this, too. The first?  I had to look up the exact words, but we did read the poetry of Langston Hughes. When I googled, I remembered the poem “I, too” which includes “Tomorrow / I’ll be at the table / When company comes. / Nobody’ll dare / Say to me, / “Eat in the kitchen.  It ends with “I, too, am America.”

Langston Hughes

Of course we read Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Ellison’s Invisible Man.  And at some point, James Baldwin’s essays The Fire Next Time. But when, and the first one? That is such a good question.  (And I’d love to hear how we talked about them. Possibly pretty cringe-worthy.)

LUCY BURDETTE: cringe worthy is what I am thinking as well, Hank. I really can’t remember reading a single book from a black author. Maybe there were some in my mind has let them go, but it’s possible there weren’t. I wasn’t good at reading books that I hadn’t chosen, and I suppose that hasn’t changed one bit!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: The first thing I thought of was John Howard Griffin’s BLACK LIKE ME, published in 1961. Of course, Griffin WASN’T black. He was a white novelist from Texas who dyed his skin and traveled through the segregated south. Griffin might have eventually come to see his book as cultural appropriation--he wrote some years later that it was  “absurd for a white man to presume to speak for black people when they have superlative voices of their own,” but it is still a remarkable document and had a powerful effect on me as young teen. Here’s a link to a 2011 piece in Smithsonian: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/black-like-me-50-years-later-74543463/

I later read James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and then Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, of course, but it was the Griffin book that really opened my eyes to segregation for the first time.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I couldn't recall the name of the first African-American author I read, but I remember the novel, so I went looking: CONTENDING FORCES by Pauline Hopkins (who, it turns out, was born in Portland, Maine!) 

My grandmother ran an antique/vintage/junk shop out of her enormous 19th century barn. One of the former box stalls was completely lines on three sides by old books, and during my 12th, 13th and 14th summers I read through most of them. I loved the over-the-top romantic drama of the late 19th/early 20th century women's novels, and Pauline Hopkins was a great example of the genre. There were terrible villains, mistaken identities, at least two women who are supposed to have died but show up later, and lots of romance. 

And the whole thing is about several generations of a Black family in the south and the north. It's only thinking back on it now that I realize Hopkins must have been using the popular commercial conventions of the day to educate white readers on Black life and to create understanding and empathy around the prejudices prevalent then... and unfortunately, still with us today.

So, what about you Readers? Who is the first author of color that you remember reading? 

For more reading recommendations (sorry, librarian!) here's a list of favorite Black authors from the African American Literature Book Club:  https://aalbc.com/authors/top50authors.php?

The Jungle Reds Talk Diversity

JENN McKINLAY: So, a couple of books back, I introduced a new character to my long running library lover's series. Her name was Paula and she had purple hair, a tattoo of books going up one arm, and she was a lesbian. I didn't think anything of it since my characters pretty much announce themselves in my head fully formed.

Well, one of the very first criticisms the book got was a vitriolic review from a reader, saying how dare I introduce a lesbian, why did I buckle to the pressure to be politically correct, and, she was never going to read a book by me again. I did not consider this a loss.

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Here's the thing, my world is incredibly diverse. Mostly, I'm sure it's because I worked downtown in a city for twenty years, a real melting pot, but also being a creative sort married to another creative sort, a musician, we tend to mix and mingle with other creative sorts and our world just gets more and more and more diverse. Frankly, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Like I said, I don't consciously choose to have such diverse casts in my books but there is no question that my books have people of every ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, and religion. I can't help it. It's a reflection of my world which is my creative stepping off place but I have come to understand that this isn't true for everyone.

Several years ago an author asked me to co-write an idea with her. When I suggested one of the lead support characters had to be Hispanic as it was set in Phoenix, she blinked. She didn't know how to write a character with a different ethnicity than her own and it completely stymied her. Needless to say, the project was abandoned because we just didn't see the world the same way.

So, Reds, do you write with diversity in mind? 

RHYS BOWEN: Jenn, I got the same response when I created Molly Murphy's lesbian neighbors. Hate letters demanding why I had dared to introduce a lesbian couple. My answer was two fold. One, that I was trying to portray Greenwich Village as it was at the time with Bohemian society, and two that they were the couple I'd want as my neighbors!

I have limited my characters to those I feel I can truly identify with. I don't think I could do justice to an African American or Asian heroine simply because I have not grown up with that community experience and thus wouldn't be authentic. There are so many small nuances of thought and sensibility that I would overlook or get wrong.

JENN: I agree, Rhys. I wouldn't want to misrepresent anyone's culture so I will likely never have a lead that I can't write accurately. Plus, I believe that authors of color and members of the LGBTQ population are the most qualified to write their own experiences.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I'm the first to admit my books are pretty white, because the area I'm writing about is like a white-rice-and-mayonnaise convention. That being said, I consciously try to add racial diversity when I can - the local ADA is Vietnamese, I've mentioned Cambodians living nearby, and several characters visiting from away have been African American. I try to keep in mind that my mental default is "white", and it's a good thing, as a human being and as an artist, to push against that. 

I've included gay and lesbian characters right from the beginning, because that reflects life as I know it. My second book specifically dealt with homophobia and violence, but in all my other novels, I've been careful to make characters' sexual identity be just an everyday part of who they are, not A Big Deal (or worse, A Fatal Flaw.) 

 I despise the term "political correctness." It's so often used as a way to attack people for including the experiences or viewpoints of someone who is - gasp!- different than the attacker. If you can't handle reading fiction, for God's sake, that raises the idea of people who aren't Just Like You, then hop in the freezer, sweetheart, because you're a special snowflake.

JENN: "special snowflake" -- coffee just came out my nose.

HALLIE EPHRON: My first published book had a male protagonist, a lesbian nurse and an Indian psychiatrist as supporting characters. In today’s prickly world I’m not sure I’d attempt anything like that for fear of being outed as trying to write someone else's story. I think what’s even more important than writing a diverse cast of characters is READING diverse voices. And to be read, they have to be published. That’s where I hope I’m doing my part when I’m at writing conferences and workshops, coaching writers and encouraging them to step up to the plate.

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DEBORAH CROMBIE: My books have had gay and lesbian characters from the very beginning. I wasn't deliberately trying to be diverse. They popped, as Jenn says, fully formed into my head. That's who they were.  And as two of my primary characters are male, I've never worried too much about writing the other gender. As the series has progressed we've had many characters who are black or Asian--London is so diverse that it would be hard to write a legitimate story WITHOUT diverse characters. Also, Gemma's and Duncan's foster daughter, Charlotte, is mixed race--her father was Pakistani, her mother white. I think one of the points of writing, and reading, fiction, is to put ourselves in the in the minds and shoes of people whose experiences may differ from ours, but are, as are we all, human.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  I think about this every writing day. How can I make sure my book is "real" and like the real world is?  So I'm very conscious to default to "real" and not white middle class.  Happily my books have juries and court officers and elected officials and judges and cops and reporters so there's a big pool of possibilities.  But I don't want the book to "feel" like I'm just heavy-handedly making them diverse --I want them to be seamlessly diverse. And that sometimes means simply giving someone an ethnic name, and  letting the reader imagine the person for themselves.  But even that may be unfair.  
(I have to balance men and women too--in an early version of my upcoming book, my editor said: "Oh, I love this--all the supporting characters are women. Cool! And I thought-oh, no, I didn't mean to do that. So I changed that.)  Readers, do you notice?

LUCY BURDETTE: In Key West, all kinds of characters abound--and that is reflected in my series. But I would say the diversity has more to do with sexual orientation and economic situation than race, because that's how things are on this island. (Although Cuban-Americans were big in DEATH ON THE MENU. ) That aside, my WIP includes an African American and a Korean woman, Antimony and Linda. They are not main characters, and I've been thinking of them more as people than standard-bearers for diversity. But interesting comment you had Rhys, about making sure you write from the perspective of characters you can identify with. I'm not sure I could do justice to Antimony or Linda in a leading role...

Okay, Readers, chime in. Do you feel authors have a responsibility to portray a wide variety of characters in their work? Is a diverse cast appealing to you? Do you look for it in your fiction or no?