Jewell Parker Rhodes - Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons For Black Authors

PREFACE
CELEBRATING SELF AND COMMUNITY

Y ou might think all writers do is write. Its not that simple. Good writing demands your whole selfwriting freely, without limits, from your unique connections to your world.

As an African American, you have incredible riches to draw upon, including a bittersweet history which created a new ethnic group capable of transforming heartache into art.

African Americans have not only survived but thrived creatively and spiritually despite hardships and challenges. This book is meant to celebrate usour connections to ourselves and our community. Words are powerful. Artists create the mirrors which reflect and critique the blessings and complexity of being African American people. We are spirited, powerful people; at times, rough-edged, but always real, authentic, always striving to unearth and transmit what W. E. B. Du Bois called the souls of black folk.

African American writers share pieces of themselves and their heritage through the power of words. Listen to the spirit, rhythm, and unique quality of self in the following examples:

What you mean, Whats this? She looked as
perplexed as if someone had asked her why the sun burned
in the sky. Its collards, with some mustard greens mixed
in. A little bit of fatback, rice, and cornbread. What you
been eating all your life. What you think it is?

Randall Kenan, The Origin of Whales

allegra found ambrosia. her hair grew pomegranates &
soil, rich as round the aswan. allegra woke in her bed to
bananas/avocados/collard greens/the Tramps latest disco hit/
fresh croissant/pouilly-fuisse/ishmael reeds essays/charlotte
carters stories/streamed from each strand of her hair.
everything in the universe that allegra needed
fell from her hair.

Ntozake Shange, Oh She Got a Head Full of Hair

Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny
played. Every now and again, one of them seemed to say,
amen. Sonnys fingers filled the air with life, his life. But his
life contained so many others.

James Baldwin, Sonnys Blues

I think, say Sugar pushing me off her feet like she
never done before, cause I whip her ass in a minute, that
this is not much of a democracy if you ask me. Equal
chance to pursue happiness means an equal crack
at the dough, dont it?

Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson

Each of these examples conveys our heritage in different ways. But they all begin with the writers sense of self as African American and a commitment to sharing African American culture.

Because black people are infinitely varied, heritage can be drawn from very personal meanings about yourself and how you experience your culture and the world around you. Culture includes remembering slavery, witnessing present-day events, celebrating ancestral and familial connections. For some, Harlem may be the epitome of the black experience; for others, it may be a pastoral setting in the South. The concrete world encourages the sensualthe taste, sight, smell, and sound of our beautifully dark spirit.

Our heritage is in the leftover scraps slaves transformed into soul food. It is in the images of undaunted, rock-steady people captured by Gordon Parks. It is in the smell of a mothers hands cradling a child. In the silken sweat of hard work and passion. Our people are celebrated in Monks syncopated piano, in the rolling cadences of the preacher, and the high-pitched shrills of children playing jacks and singing about Miss Mary Mack who never came back. Our stories celebrate our deeply rooted cultural ties.

SelfFamilyCommunitythis is the stuff of life. You cannot be a great writer if youre afraid to live. And living a life colored by a unique heritage is truly glorious! Celebrate your body, soul, and culture. Even when youre experiencing and writing about hardships and horrors, there is grace in your spirit and among our people. Feel it. Believe it.

As a writer you have the opportunity to explore what it means to be human, to conjure through words those passions, those spirits which are important to you and which echo the legacy of our people.

Good writers probe themselves and their world; good writers laugh and cry; good writers observe; good writers dont just talk about writing, they write.

1
GETTING READY TO WORK:
CLAIMING A JOURNAL,
THE WRITER WITHIN

S elect a three-ring binder, a glamorous notebook, a diary with lock and key, whatevers most comfortable for you. This journal is where youll begin your initial explorations of self and community. First, you can use it as a place to do the exercises in this book. Later itll become a workbook for recording dreams, story ideas, characterizations, and comments about stories youve read. Your journal is your passport to thinking like, acting like, and becoming a writer!

Dont try to do the following exercises all at once. Take time between exercises to experience, observe, reflect, and revise.