3. Pioneers
IN SEPTEMBER 2020, Butler, the groundbreaking writer of Black speculative fiction, finally achieved her goal of making it onto the New York Times best-seller list. It came 14 years after her death. Butler’s eventual inclusion among the first rank of Black American authors is testament to a confluence of factors, especially the emergence of a community of Black women science fiction writers with literary capital — Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Sheree Renée Thomas and Nnedi Okorafor among them — who’ve prompted a backward glance in search of ancestors.
Other, less famous literary forebears are similarly surfacing in response to the cultural currents and social conditions of our time. The novelist William Gardner Smith, who died in 1974, was antiracist before “antiracist” was a ubiquitous term. His 1963 novel, “The Stone Face,” about a Black expat in Paris forced to confront the snarl of injustice beyond a Black-white American context, “resonates with contemporary concerns about privilege and identity,” the writer Adam Shatz argues in his introduction to the 2021 reissued edition. Or consider the recent proliferation of Black queer fiction, from Brandon Taylor’s “Real Life” (2020) to Daniel Black’s “Don’t Cry for Me” (2022). Though certain canonical books, central among them James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (1956), are vital to that lineage, the roots stretch much further back, in works often hidden or suppressed.
Angelina Weld Grimké, already canonized as a writer of propagandist plays of racial uplift and pastoral lyrical poetry, might more provocatively be recast as a queer and feminist pioneer. Her best-known work, the anti-lynching play “Rachel” (1916), is of more interest to modern readers as artifact than art. However, her erotic poetry, much of it unpublished in her lifetime and still not widely read, is a revelation, articulating same-sex desire in scrupulously formal verse. “Caprichosa” (1901) is an erotic poem of unrequited love written in a truncated trochaic tetrameter: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, repeated four times but left with only the stressed syllable at each line’s end, as in Shakespeare’s famous lines delivered by the witches in “Macbeth” (“When shall we three meet again / In thunder, lightening or in rain?”). In Grimké’s hands, the meter generates an unsettled urgency:
Little lady coyly shy
With deep shadows in each eye
Cast by lashes soft and long,
Tender lips just bowed for song,
And I oft have dreamed the bliss
Of the nectar in one kiss. …
Longing quickens the pulse of these lines: their singsong regularity followed by sudden disruption, a conscious stumbling as Grimké’s first-person speaker makes her passion plain, before returning to the rigid music of the form.
As a teacher at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., Grimké nurtured many young writers before dying in 1958 at 78. Among her brightest pupils was Richard Bruce Nugent, who worked across the literary and visual arts. Where his teacher had to seek subterfuge, Nugent, who died in 1987 at 81, could give fuller and freer expression to his identity — in the words of Thomas H. Wirth, his friend and literary executor, Nugent was “the first African American to write from a self-declared homosexual perspective.” His most enduring work, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” published when he was 20, is an erotic prose composition published in the first (and only) issue of the Harlem Renaissance-era literary magazine Fire!! (1926). Nugent uses ellipses after nearly every phrase, which function both as indication of omission and a break in linear time. In one scene, his protagonist encounters a man on the street at 4 in the morning and returns to his room, where “they undressed by the blue dawn … Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being … his body was all symmetry and music … and Alex called him Beauty. …”
4. Fan Favorites
BUILDING CANONS REQUIRES architects: writers and scholars, teachers and publishers. Reshaping them is everybody’s work. “When it comes to Black authors, at least for me as a Black woman, so much has been culled for us,” says Traci Thomas, 36, the Los Angeles-based host of the literary podcast “The Stacks,” which features interviews with contemporary authors alongside book club episodes in which Thomas and guests discuss the literary past. “Going back to the archive is about trying to figure out why those people were given the magical treatment, and maybe figure out who else is there, too.”
