Hands down my favorite book of the semester so far, and likely to remain so. I can’t decide if I’m just incredibly lucky that I picked this one to write about for my short paper, or if I like it so much at least partially because writing about it made me read it more carefully and work harder to understand it than I did for any of the other books. Possibly some of both, but I think it would’ve been my favorite anyway. Cornelia is a comfortably well-off white woman in the South in 1969; Julia, better known as Tweet, is her black housekeeper. The two women share a kitchen-based relationship characterized by Tweet telling stories from her past and Cornelia pretending to listen (she’s mostly deaf, which becomes one of many metaphors for the way she tunes out the problems and lives of other people). Various traumatic incidents happen which force Cornelia out of her shell. I want to tell more, but I won’t, because it’ll turn into an essay, and nobody reading this site wants that. The best thing about it, though, for me, is the narratorial voice, which is intrusive, tongue-in-cheek, sometimes self-contradictory, and generally complicates everything in the book. I pretty much love it when books are self-aware and highlight their own constructedness, and Douglas does a stupendous job with that. I want to read everything she wrote.
Superior

It’s the mid-1960s, but in the rural Southern setting of this novel, the remnants of slavery are still evident; the aging white landowners occupy the plantation house, while the ten or fifteen black families live down in the old quarters. Racial issues come to the fore, but are anything but cut and dried, when a Creole man is killed in the quarters. When the sheriff shows up, he finds a young white woman and several old black men with shotguns all claiming responsibility for the death. Each chapter is narrated by a different character, from the small boy tasked with gathering the shotgun men to the white woman’s journalist fiance, to various ones of the old men (shades of Faulkner). All of this should make for an extremely compelling book; let’s say that it is compelling, but I wish (and my classmates did, too) that Gaines had carried out the sense of race and color variations that began the book out through the end–by the end it turned into much more of a black vs. white battle. The fact that the murdered man is Creole is fascinating; he’s treated as white, but there’s clearly a huge class and culture difference between the Creole community and the older white community. Unfortunately, these issues are not explored as well as they could be. Still, there’s a lot going on here, and the style is definitely evocative.
Above Average

I…didn’t really know what to make of this play upon reading it, and I’m still not sure. Jones is a black man from United States who goes to an island in the Caribbean and convinces the native Negro inhabitants to make him their Emperor. The action of the play concerns Jones’s attempt to flee an impending uprising. I couldn’t say exactly what O’Neill’s message is, but it was an interesting play to read. It seems a bit racist to me, in retrospect, but it was well-received by the Harlem reviewers of its day, so…I don’t know. It also seems as though it would be a lot better and more clear on stage, rather than reading it (there’s a constant tom-tom beat, for example, that obviously doesn’t come across as well on paper). Stylistically, it was very impressive, so I’m definitely set to check out some of O’Neill’s other writings.
Average

This is not, despite the title, an autobiography. It is fiction. Interestingly, Johnson originally published it in 1912 anonymously, leading many people to think it was an actual autobiography of a biracial man passing as white. It’s still powerful, though, even when you know it’s not true–in fact, it adds a level of irony and self-referentiality that’s really cool. The man is “ex-colored” because he’s light enough to pass for white–in fact, he didn’t know himself that he and his mother were black until he was like, seven. His life takes him from Georgia as a little boy, to Connecticut, Harlem, Europe, the deep south, and eventually back to New York, and allows him to compare the treatment of the race question in all those places and among all classes of people. (Honestly, the range of his experiences should be enough to show the book is fiction…then again, Langston Hughes had similarly far-reaching experiences…) It’s a well-done book, and though it seems really simple, actually has many different layers to it, depending on how you choose to read it.
Well Above Average

A small college in New Hampshire, largely white in faculty and student body, is thrown into turmoil when a black student begins receiving threats and hate mail. The main character is the Dean of Students, who came to New Hampshire after working at a largely black institution in Chicago, so a lot of pressure falls on her to sort out the racial difficulties. Through the course of the play, she begins to come to terms with her own innate racism. Much of the play is quite good, sensitively handled, though it tends to end up as stereotyped as it tries not to be. It seems particularly odd that the black student who is so important to the play and so marginalized by the administration’s attempts to cover up the problem or ignore the reality of racism never appears on stage. The play tries to be controversial, but…isn’t.
Average