Evening Exchange; Black Authors and Literature

A talk with writers Gloria Naylor and John Edgar Wideman. Up next an evening Exchange. Good evening and welcome to evening exchange. I'm Kojo Nnamdi. The people places and experiences one finds in a book can touch you like no other medium can from the pages of a book. For instance you can use your imagination to really see how green the color of her dress was from the pages of a book. You can set the tempo of the music heard by the crowd at that jazz club. You can travel into the depths of the character's mind with an efficiency not afforded you by television nor film. The author of a

good book takes you by the hand and tells you the deepest darkest secrets of each character and sometimes tells you your own. Tonight we welcome two authors who are renowned for the journeys we travel from the pages of their books. Gloria Naylor is the author of Mama day Linden hills the Women of Brewster Place and her latest Bailey's cafe. Ms Naylor is the winner of the 1983 American Book Award for first fiction for the Women of Brewster Place. Welcome Gloria to evening. Thank you T.J.. John Edgar Wideman HAS WON THE PEN Faulkner Award twice in his career. The New York Times calls him one of America's premier writers of fiction. He also writes nonfiction Pantheon Books has compiled a collection of his work called the stories of John Edgar Wideman. Welcome to you John. Also joining us is Marilyn Saunders moblie Mobli is the director of African American studies and associate professor of English at George Mason University Roca Maryland.

Thank you John. I said you write both fiction and non-fiction but most people who critique your work say that you blend the imagination and reality so that they are interchangeable and often one is indistinguishable from the other. Why is that important to you. Well there is a there's an e-book saying that I first heard from Chinua Achebe. And it's an intriguing. Thought. Quote All stories are true and that indeed is the name of the first story in your new collection and that's the name of the first 10 as well. A little subsection in the book. I don't know exactly what that means but it's a fascinating idea and I think the stories the first 10 stories in that book are a meditation on that proposition. Just exactly what does it mean. It means many things. It means some simple things. It means that I can be sitting here with you. Talking with you and talking with Gloria and talking with Marilyn but my head could be someplace else I could be flashing on some event that's occurring right now or something occurred 50 years ago that I read

about. And still. The presence in this room maybe has less importance than my presence at that other event. And so what's that say about where we are and what's true and what isn't true. But I think it's something that I. Am fascinated by rather than I can explain and virtually everything I've read about you even in your conversations with people you seem to be virtually obsessed with what they travel through in their imaginations and that's something we hope to explore during the course of this conversation. Gloria Naylor when I think of you I think of characterisation the depth of characters that you create. Was that a conscious and deliberate effort on your part. From the time you started writing Were you always fascinated with first character it seems and then story of that that's a very astute observation on your part because it's quite true. The creative process began as me first images and I visited by faces. Ultimately they will be faces in a situation and I see my task in writing a

novel is to go out in search of that face and that person say the character is fairest. How do you go about the process of developing what is behind the face. Well a lot of time has to be spent with that person if they lived in an area different from my own and I have written about it clearly as Bailey did in a novel or so back as well. They lived in the early 1800s. I go back through journals to that time I will go back to sort of racial memory if you will to that time as well because I believe that we simultaneously know everything that's gone before and that will come after us. That's just me. I feel the mine has that power. And when you get very quiet that will filter through you. People have often said you seem older than you are in your writing. Well I think I'm an old soul. I had babies coming in will say oh my god that baby is an old soul you had.

Yes I've heard my parents say that on numerous occasions and yes you do seem older than you turn out to be in your record. Oh I start with you. To your parents said you are an old soul. No they don't say so. Is a lot of things about me but that was not one of the things they said. Marilyn what is it that you think of when you think of each of these writers individually and what is it you think that joins them so to speak. Well I'd like to say we're joined them first because it's what I like about both of their writing and that's their use of language especially their use of the black vernacular. When I read either of them I just hear voices of black folk. I hear the way we use language the nuances the complexity underneath our language. My students are always talking about how we never say never say anything head on. We always have some other things that we're saying at the same time and in there in both of their writing and the phrases that they use and the way they use African-American vernacular in particular is what's so exciting about their writing for me. Mean I thought about an essay that Jane Wyman wrote not long ago was a few years ago it was in the New York Times magazine called

black writers and the magic of the word are magical words and logic of the magic of the word. Yeah. To me that's what was so important about both of their works when students read them when I read them I hear how we use language how black folk use language and you hear the power of the word. That's what I like about each of them in terms of Gloria's work I also like what you were talking about the characterization you feel like you know some of these grandmothers you feel like you know Saffir away. And you feel like you know some of the characters and women of Brewster Place which is I suppose that's the book I've taught the most. But in the works you just feel like these are characters that you've met that the narrator at the beginning of Bailey's cafe the way he's using language you feel like you're sitting down talking to him. You don't feel like you've got to go find somebody who talks like that you feel you've heard it already. And in John whiteman's works part of what you said is what I like as well. That you hear the very I guess

I was thinking about the issues that we're dealing with in our in our culture and in our communities. You hear fiction and you hear the very issues we're dealing with at the same time and that's what grabs you. I just ask him for example whether people were asking him questions about the connection between the move incident and the incident in Texas and because of the issues that come up in that book even though it's it's fiction. Let's talk about that. You wrote Philadelphia fire it was based on the bombing of move headquarters back in 1985 and now we're confronted with the assault on the headquarters of David Koresh in Waco Texas. And we all know that from the very moment that incident began with the killing of the four ATF officers black folks around the United States were saying Remember move if that was black people there would have been long killed eventually as it turned out these people have all perished anyway. What are your reflections I'm thinking about. Well first of all depression. Completely I understand one reason I wrote Philadelphia's fire and the way it ends is I can't let it happen again. Of course that's always

wishful thinking. That's a mantra that we cite when we're just about ready to do bad again usually. And of course the Holocaust Museum is opening up and I put it somewhere in between Philadelphia fire and then what's happened in Waco. I would put our intervention in Iraq. Because it's the it's it's the same exact syndrome. You demonize people. You you pick out one of them as some sort of representative of Satan and then you go about your business of destroying them. Mainly because they really represent some threat. That is unspoken that is an articulated threat so deep that our culture can't even talk about it. And that's the threat of difference the threat that life might have to be changed somewhat to accommodate what these other people are thinking and feeling whether the others are black people or some religious cult or the whole nation.

People I don't know if this has anything to do with what we're talking about. But I got the impression that Saddam Hussein and move were demonized to a much larger extent than David Koresh and that maybe one of the reasons why the lingering controversy over how the event in Waco ended because there were occasions on which we were being given the impression that David Koresh was in fact a negotiating partner here that it was possible that they could come out of this. So I think the suddenness of what happened has taken a number of people by surprise but nevertheless obviously the comparison holds up that I'm interested in your. Well I can give you quite a bit of thought lately. I think it's no secret that in deep white lies that means more than black life in this country. But then how does that play out that different factors will move was destroyed Wilson good it was the mayor of Philadelphia and very much in the center of that action. We now have the Waco cult. Janet Reno is a woman who had to OK the fiasco that ultimately occurred. I think the hesitation

on part might be with having a woman in power. I think the ability to go out and destroy people. I think their speech was half a day before they finally firebombed you can correct me if I'm wrong John but they had only held that half a day before they firebomb the move headquarters. Some of that had to do with the pressure I think a black mayor felt with having the world look at him in the city with Philadelphia's peculiar history. Look at him. It's never easy black do you think Waco had anything to do at all with the pressure a woman felt that being the attorney general of that reticence to go in there and to destroy children had to do with the fact argument was at the helm. Now that is part of the reason for the hesitation but I have heard the talk if you will that had they been black two seconds you know they would have gone in and just started people on it. I'm just saying that I don't think it's quite that simple. When the decisions are made and it's who's making them. And we have to remember Wilson good part and what happened to those people in Philadelphia.

Any thoughts on this at all Marilyn. Everybody has some thoughts on that. Well I've been I've been hearing the same thing and I believe it's just very complicated. I think it's very complicated and it's when people are angry the comparisons come really easy and very simplistic. But I would have appreciated more hesitation in both incidents. You know definitely more and Philadelphia it seemed like no time at all. But also more in the other case 53 days a lot of attention for federal marshals kill. Well I think there was a lot of hesitation but I'm saying at the point that they were ready to make a different action. Apparently there was less time taken for that particular you know in other words the particular way they started to put the gas in and all that. It didn't seem like there was a long deliberation about that maybe they were deliberating. Once they were given the go ahead. Well that's what I'm saying. Go ahead. I'm talking about let's say go ahead. I agree that it was. Yeah. Well I know all of you tuned in to listen to us talk about writing and believe we we're going to bring it back to writing. Is this the kind of incident given what you have written about the Philadelphia Fire given what we're seeing going on now in Bosnia with the so-called ethnic cleansing. Is this the

kind of incident that makes you want to write more or do you find it so depressing that you just want to get some distance from it for a while before you deal with what I wish is I had a subject that I could write about and make people laugh. I think that's a real good gift. It's That's a great gift that's a soothing gift not just silly love not slapstick but some of that too. But I would love to be able to write a comic novel a great comic novel but. Unfortunately there are a lot of things that I don't find very funny right now. And so the energy is directed in that towards trying to keep up with what's happening and trying to keep trying to connect what is happening at this moment with what's happened in our history and that's a that's a two fold job because our history is this has disappeared. We have to reinvent and recreate it. And then somebody is in the business of recreating it in a negative fashion so we have to always fight flash fires and then we have to compete with the media overall in creating the present. So it's a big job and it's an important job and again it comes down to

something about who tells the stories and who owns them and which stories are true and how how we try to make our is true. But just one little point. The the CORISH business and the media intervention. I think. Because Koresh was alive and being negotiated with. He couldn't be bad mouth too much. It was like playing a fish on the end of a line so that prevented the absolute demonization. But on the other hand if you look closely at reports there are plenty of indications that that whole scenario was sitting there ready to be pulled in at any time and the seeds had been of that story had been had been planted and so there were there were preparations for four different kinds of outcomes. But the literary point here and the language point as I read today the beginning of the autopsy. The both the literal autopsy and the rethinking of what went on in Waco. And. One could have taken the language the

words the phrases. From the 1985 move incident. And use them today or vice versa. Leading Edge being that people burned themselves. The people were accused of setting fires to burn themselves. One official said that the buck stops here. But after that person says it then there's all sort of scurrying around at lower levels of authority that are going to qualify that statement so don't really ever stop there. And I'm talking about exact sentences. And exact replicated from the with it the same way all the commission reports after riots. Are interchangeable. But John since we do live in a country where it makes a difference as the song goes if you're black or white pervert the song it makes a difference if you are black or white. And what difference do you see then the two incidents because there has to be one in race I think does play a part. Do you see a difference in how they treat it.

Because when there's a quite radical group that is a black radical Well 50 some days one one part of the difference the waiting. Well friends said to me Have you ever seen the police. They didn't say police had ever seen the cops or whatever go after a group of black people and be under armed. Have too little firepower. Well no I don't think I ever remember that happening. And that's that's for openness I mean it's that's clear. Never have we have they been under on when they or under. I have two little fire Paul and they went out. So it's just one of these. When John talks about the kind of reality that makes him it makes it difficult for him to write the kinds of funny or comic stories that he'd like to write. This board really makes me laugh. But do you find that because of the circumstances we think we reflect last year on the turbulence in Los Angeles and the like how does that affect your ability to create characters who make us laugh.

Well I am old enough that I think this tape was on that I remember when Los Angeles burned before. You all of. Yes. Isn't that precious. Yes. I was in diapers before. And I look at the whole picture it is extremely depressing to see the inhumanity that that men can perpetuate against men. But you have to be humorous a bit about life if you're going to get through it. I think that my background has something to do with that. It's a working class background and working well we aspire to be working class families to say from when you watch how poor people get through life. There is a great deal of humor that will go on with the most dire circumstances with the right not being able to be paid with the kid needing shoes. You laugh because that helps you to stay human. And then you go about hustling to find a way to have it happen. And I think that's why the stereotype may have arisen that black people are happy people you know but that we're not intrinsically any happier than any other race of people. But yes we find a way to get through something with laughter.

Marilyn to what extent do your students those who are aspiring writers and many who are obviously writing already. To what extent do incidents such as Waco the violence in Los Angeles last year or any of the things we're we've been talking about. What how does that affect them. Is are those things that they tend to want to write about a lot. Well they definitely want to talk about them and sometimes they want to write about them. I mean it depends on what's going on. One of the things I have my students do is keep a reader response Journal. And what I find in the reader response Journal is that in the process of responding to the fiction that we're reading they seep in their responses to what's happening around them. And so I always get both and I get the response to the literature and I get how it's connected to what's happening in real life. And so of course last year and of course I was teaching on the 60s. The verdict came out the last day of class. It was almost like I planned it. For all those doubting people in the class who thought the 60s was just something that I liked to talk about. They had evidence of how racial hatred and racial

violence operate in this culture and it was very contemporary for them at that moment. And there was also that sort of thing the language of the past and the language of the present moment started to reverberate for them. But the one thing I was going to say is I think in these two writers we have some of the responses that I also try to teach and that is that it's very important for us to look at our our current moment and see how it's connected to our racial history but it's also important for us to look at how what I call the cultural unconscious works in the cultural unconscious for me is how cultural memory works how racial memory as Gloria alluded to works. We have collective memories that talk about how we survived some things and we've survived a great deal and lived to talk about and lived to laugh about it. So at the same time we have to be very connected with our pain we have to be connected with how we we have some strategies for survival that we use. And I would recommend to students that if they are indeed enraged about something or have a

passion with something that perhaps they attempt to channel that to the essay form it they will because of the fiction I can very quickly become didactic. If you don't allow it to ferment and to strive after language and form and just the simple creation and elucidating of moments for themselves and their beauty and having the belief that that will ultimately 2000 years from now tell the whole truth. But I don't think that fiction or novel would be the place for passion about a political cause an essay can be your passions will inevitably come out. They have to because they only come through you but I would think it. Well we'll find out whether John ethical Wideman thinks that death is necessary because of the stage of writing that students are read or if that kind of advice. Is applicable to writers whenever. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.

Welcome back. We're talking with renowned writers Gloria Miller and John Edgar Wideman. We are joined by

Marilyn senders Mobley who is an associate professor of English and head of the African-American Studies Department at George Mason University. When we broke Gloria Nilo was sounding off about what she felt how she felt the issue of Waco and riots or read rebellions need to be addressed in the form of essays rather than in the form of fiction and I wanted to throw the same question to John. Go wide. Well there's anything I've learned in about 30 35 years of pretty intense writing it's the process of of creation is quite mysterious. And one never knows where the one consults one. One's own work and history or looks that the masterworks that we would all acknowledge and ask how they were created under what conditions you just don't know. It wouldn't be art if there were a program or some some way to produce it mechanically. So. I always urge my students and I know I'm pretty sure this is true that they're not going to write their best until they find the subject matter about

which they intensely care. Until they find the subject matter which they have a stake in. Now I think what Gloria is addressing is is very crucial and that's the that's the question of resonance. In somebody slaps me in the face. I may be able to write down that boy I was mad and that I filled a red streak across side of my face but maybe I don't see much further than that. I don't notice the way their eyes were looking at me I don't notice the way their feet were planted I don't notice the fly on the wall over there. I just know I'm mad. And I might want to strike back. It's very intense and so I write down in my journal some gun get me on and off the so-and-so. Not maybe I need a scene. In my novel which I want to show someone hitting another person and what that reaction would be. Well I might draw from that. Actual incident but the fact that I've observed many. Beatings both. Blows that I've been hit or blows I've struck or reading about torture or

etc. etc. Then when I bring to bear all that information. There's a chance that I'm going to get that multi dimensional quality that has resonance that probably makes great work. Out of many many drafts. Now he will go back in and elect between six words one word that would fit somewhere. He'll elect that lamps of sentences to set up a certain rhythm to get the effect for the reader that you're trying to create. It is artifact. Of an emotion. Yeah. So I how do you get. How do you get to that point. From where you started which was with a basic desire to write. How did it all get started for you. How did I start writing this. Well I've been writing all my life again and it had been Yeah I don't I can remember when I consciously began to connect the things I cared about and the written word was about 12 and a half years old. And my mother gave me a diary I spoke about that earlier today

because I was very into a very child and I talk much in those years and I began writing a short transit doable in GA India which she never shared. I'm not dying know and I began to do that because I read about things and I was a bright kid and a sensitive kid and I brooded a lot. So I began to write down at that point what I cared about which is why I had my 12 year old 13 year old 14 year old wounds on me. You know emotional wounds or whatever. So it began from then that I associate it using words to make order out of disorder. And in a sense I think I'm still doing that today that with larger issue. How did you come or how do you continue to try to grasp the technical aspects of writing that is to understand the structure and the rhythm rhythm that best suits what you're trying. To say or commit to present. And I think as a practitioner by simply doing it over and over and over again I'm an apprentice I to my own efforts in that regard. And also by reading good books and having been a reader

all of my life you have to absorb a certain amount about the language just in. You're talking about language earlier Marilyn and I got the impression that that is one of the things you try to insist on to your students that the understanding of the language and how to use it. Effectively is probably the most crucial aspect of what they're trying to do rather than simply trying to get something down on a piece of paper. Yeah but I need to clarify what I was saying earlier. I teach literature and not creative writing. So I'm not teaching students in the same way that Gloria and John sure are teaching them. So I teach them to value the word. And we often spend class time actually dissecting a passage because I want them to hear everything that's resonating in it. And so I use that those kind of exercises of close reading to get them to pay attention to how language is operating how just a choice of a word it changes a whole sentence. And then of course I encourage them to write carefully I mean and that gets into grading papers and you know let me talk about that today.

FLATOW You want to talk about it. I want to talk about I've got a pile of the great at home but I'm just saying that on the other side for me is the actual grading of their writing. But in the teaching I'm trying to get them to pay attention to how different writers use language to communicate. It's been said John Edgar Wideman that you have been or are different white writers in a manner of speaking. You're a Rhodes scholar and during that period of your life when you studied at Oxford and it is said that during that time you read most the works by white or European writers and that you yourself moved from being a kind of Eurocentric writer to an Afro centric writer. Do you consider that to be true. And if so what are the influences that caused you to do that. Well I was always very Weidmann and Edgar Weidmann son. During all that stuff all those periods of my life. And I think. Like all stories that one has a little bit of truth in it. But I think it's too handy. I think it's too easy it's too easy because the first thing I can remember

writing and really wanting to hold onto was a piece about my grandfather. And it was his voice. His home would. That Pittsburgh a black Pittsburgh community voice and he was high on what he called Daigo read what everybody else called Daigo read and he was coming to get my mother in the hospital because he was unsure whether he wanted her there or not. And she was pregnant with me. And he's tromp into the hospital the nurses telling him you can't come in here and he said My daughter is upstairs I'm going you know so that's the thing that stuck with me and that's the thing I try to get down on paper. And it had little flourishes of Rambo and little flourishes a land and Parallels and everything was in it. The music that I'd heard the rhythm and blues I dance to all of it all that was in there. But as I've grown. And become more conscious of subject matter and more conscious of the language than I have tried to draw on the resources that. I didn't get as part of my formal education growing up.

And in that in that during that same period of time. Like most of us who went to school and who were Westernized I was I was I believed the propaganda. I believed that there was. A difference between. What white people did and what black people did and one counted a little more than the other. I didn't really believe that. But I could become enough of a chameleon to know where my bread was buttered then so I could I could produce. Their version of things pretty much on demand whether it was whether it was vernaculars whether it was entire vernacular speech or a point at which you simply made a conscious decision to stop doing that. Well I still haven't done it. You can't. Because because you are too deeply imbued in fact you are probably always. At your peril if you forget. That those forces are there. The deck conditioning is

there. And I think any black person in America who pretends that they have. Totally escaped. That kind of conditioning is nuts and they shouldn't totally escape it. We're not talking about black good and white bad. We're talking about true mix and anything that's that's central to the culture already has components and history that that's African-Americans So it's it's a mix. But I'm talking about the terrible aspects the propaganda and propagandizing aspects the aspects that were consciously designed in terms of words and institutions to destroy us to make us a subject people that we have to continue to root out and fight and learn to kill and ourselves. I know of you speak I spent the first half of my life being educated by the British in the second half living in an African American community in this country and often fail to distinguish between what is what at any given point in time. Well I was listening to John very poignant because I was thinking. How

my own familial circumstances helped me to escape as much as it is possible to escape just that. Having values from the outside imposed on you as your own values. I think because of how my parents started out as sharecroppers you know and bitterly at least from my mother's point of view conscious of the situation you would put it in context of what they were not allowed to receive things that would have been free to any other citizen like libraries because my mother like myself was an avid reader and having no access to the libraries that were there for poor people to do just that. So when we began to come of consciousness we were told repeatedly and my father being cursed or blessed depending on what day you talked to him with three daughters. You know he wanted sons badly and he made no bones about that but he had three daughters. Being told repeatedly when my sisters and I were coming up let no one tell you what you were. You know that no one tell you what you were because what they knew coming out of the cotton fields of Mississippi that

they had been told that they were worthless and they knew that the scars that it took to climb beyond that. So I am grateful. On one hand for that kind of indoctrination in me it has turned me into a maverick at times but yet it has indeed spared me from that and you can see the brainwashing everywhere you truly can. And yes I think it is still a part of us. You will get little messages in your own head because it's in the air it's in the media. You know it's everywhere that you count less so it is a constant struggle. John is right. We're not only socialized in the middle of a European oriented society we're also socialized along gender lines. Your father you had three daughters and wanted a son and you happen to write about baseball very well. My dad's a big baseball fan and of course John is obsessed with basketball. But you write about baseball very well. Oh yeah. He I grew up seeing him he'd have one game on television of game on the radio and he'd be you know looking or listening or whatever. Both of them. Yeah he's a big baseball fan but when I thought

about that period for somehow baseball seemed to just be so pivotal to what America matter was a very innocent time before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in this country. And baseball was America in microcosm. And then Bailey had his own spin on the introduction of Jackie Robinson to the White leagues. But Bailey is an iconoclast guy. But yeah that's why I think I chose baseball. Marilyn a great deal has been said and written about the increasing prominence of women writers in the post 1980 period which has a little bit to do with my noticing how well Gloria writes about baseball because more and more of those women writers are causing us to focus on issues that a lot of male writers have not been focusing on in the past and that has led to some resentment among some male writers. The name Ishmael Reed springs to mind of course but what is your own take on this.

Well I think when people start that argument they need to look at it historically and historically so many women's voices were excluded and left out that I don't really have a lot of patience with it. I look at how much when I started reading African-American literature I was reading male writers almost all the time. Again I read someplace and interviewed John Weightman talked about the process of re-education. So if you're trained in European and America and white American writers and you have to start re-educating yourself about your own history and culture and that process for me began almost solely with black male writers. So that's why the 70s and 80s were such an exciting period. So to me that argument doesn't stand a lot of weight. But I also talk in my classes about the differences between the way black male writers write and the way black women writers write. And I don't think it's simplistic it's not absolute but often I see black male writers talking about forces with outside of the community and how they affect the community home and community. And I see women writers focusing on the pressures

outside and inside. So you have women writers focusing more on the domestic space and looking a little bit on whatever what are our resources as a black community in spite of those outside pressures. And as I say I don't want to make it absolute because sometimes when I think about James Brown when I think of a writer who was always looking outside and inside but I see black women writers filling a kind of void about this cultural unconscious cultural memory. How do we remember how do we draw on our spiritual dimensions of our lives and how have we survived as a result of those. And so I I think the gap that's getting filled in makes it exciting and makes me interested in perpetuating that debate and I don't see how Ishmael can believe it really. And I think it is a media or sponsored debate that the man that you and in Ishmael's defense he is I will just draw him out of the closet. A great weekend in Washington for that metaphor. I'll tell you he is a dear friend of mentors catching gaze has been supportive of this woman

over the years. It is hard to find a more radical feminist than Zake holographically and Ishmael has been there so you know like pushing her on and encouraging her in that regard. We have a public face and we have a private face. And in this man's private world he has always encourage young black writers male and female. But if you read the media it's different. Roseanne agrees it's media driven debate so we don't even have to have no go ahead. What does that tell you. Well it's like a lot of things. There are many dimensions. To the problem or the question to the issue male writers female writers. One thing we have to remember is to contextualize it is some major forces in this country have from the very beginning driven black men black women apart. And that continues to this day. It was conscious it was intentional and we have to we have to blow the whistle on that. We have to recognize the many forms it takes. It's a

continuing destructive problem it's a problem about age as well. And one thing that African society figured out in an interesting way not a perfect way but age sets in the way the younger people relate to the older people the way everybody relates to the ancestors. There was a lot of thought cultural thought given to that and some pretty interesting solutions. That we as a people came up with. But now we have we're in this country and we find out that the generations have been severed. But over time and so when when we talk about the dangers of young black men are facing we have to remember that there is something to do with. The splitting of male from female and the splitting of the generations and so we're dealing with the logical outcome of strategies that we should that are the real problems and we have to always go back to those. I think you're right John that I would like to to put it in a little plug here for self-determination. You know having had a teenager a young black male in my home there is there are some things we need to take responsibility for ourselves

in our relationships and how we conduct ourselves in our society. The repercussions for our own personal behavior. I have come to believe that we can fight about this after the break that you cannot lay on the shoulders of American oppression or racism or our peculiar history. All of the reasons for why we behave like we do toward each other as men and women black men and women and we will continue this fight. Let's fight for it and celebrate. You told her you're going to take it anyway. I did not get mad. We'll be right back. Stay with us. Let's go back to the exchange we're talking with the well known

writers Gloria Naylor and John Edgar Wideman along with Marilyn Sanders Mobley from George Mason University. And again when we broke John was making the point that the division that exists between black men and black women is deliberate that was consciously intended and therefore its consequences are logical. Gloria was about to make the point that despite that there must be some responsibility taken for how black men and black women presumably behave generally and toward one another particularly exactly within the confines of their own home within their own community what we've watched happen I think in this country in general when it comes to young people that there is less of a willingness to commit to anything to commit to a career to definitely to commit to a relationship. And black people are not apart from what makes us American we are African-Americans and so young black men are not. And I'll get to black women and men but young black men are not as willing to commit when children are created. Now we here have a

whole hoopla about finding the delinquent dads right who are not doing child support. Well those are young black men too who are not supporting children and that they have created that is a national problem. I cannot put the fact that a man. Well let me just get personal get personal. The fact that my sister's husband's in plural and not supporting your children will fall upon the extended family to do that has nothing to do with the white man. One of the one of the things that fascinates me is that there are social scientists who can explain that social phenomenon. Who can say that one of the reasons that black men tend not to take care of their children is because of a variety of social phenomena. But when it becomes personal it seems that we tend to ignore all of those arguments or do we ignore them in general or just in the case of your eye or others. And I know I just I am what you may call Gyges probably being a lay psychologist

here you will be hard pressed to put up a history today against the history of my father for example coming out of Robinson Ville doing the kind of jobs they had to do in factories in New York City slugging it away. You mean if we want to have an oppression beauty contest. I think he plays second maybe third in this beauty contest he hung in there with his family. It was not a perfect marriage in all marriages because people aren't about that. But I saw that whole generation our willingness to work at something and I don't see that willingness now. But I think what maybe happens with the black community is that general trends come packed on us with greater detriment. So therefore with a man will Abscam from his family it will mean more in the black community because that woman is making less. She will have twice as a long time to go because you also seem to be saying is that we have become so used to a victim syndrome that we don't expect a

great deal of our young people or our males and so they don't give a great deal because people social scientists that I just referred to keep making excuses for them and so after a while they they they ride on they piggy back on those excuses and simply do nothing John or teenagers do. Any thoughts on that. Well I'm almost hesitant to enter into the discussion because it is so complicated and you can't resolve it in a few back and forth. Clearly anybody would admit that the social conditions the economic conditions of this country have gone far to destroying a certain degree of. Of of initiative. And sense of possession in regard to family. And the family structure itself as an economic unit is dependent on some sort of network of support. If you if you are a man. And you don't and you know if you are a sharecropper in the 1940s you started probably five or six

families. I've just been reading about people who did not talk to people in my family. Yes. There's cereal families. Men tried to start four or five times now who are and women try to start four or five times. Now who's to say those were bad people. Who's to say they were irresponsible. But each year when they when when the when it came time to settle with the man it turns out that you are sharecropping but brought back breaking labor et cetera et cetera produced a minus. They owe that they owe the cracker at the end of the year. And then you look around the kids don't have any clothes that you can give your wife anything. Those those conditions can tear people up. But they were eternally optimistic next spring they may move to try to start up other family units so that's part of what goes on and that's. And it's somewhat that has parallels what happens now. The question of individual responsibility and fate and what a human creature is and free will versus what environment. I

mean we can't sort those out. They're all relevant but in our history it's not worth losing the fact that there is a tremendously large component of outside pressure or oppression that has been part of determining who we are. But I say to all that. I have to learn to say it. And anybody who wants to escape it. Not that either. But anybody who even professes to escape has to say forget it. It's all there. It explains certain things. But if I want to become a mother and if I want to become a person that I can respect other people's but then I have to take the weight. I have to take the weight this morning and there's not. Meryl I don't interrupt the ride. But no I would give it. What are you going to do. Well at one point he made me think of something because it is not selective oppression. It is a blanket oppression which therefore would negate it altogether. So therefore if I get up and breathe that and you get up and breathing and your excuse

is that I'm not doing anything because I'm a black woman in America and look what they do to black women but if another black woman gets up and she's doing something then you turn and you say you know the classic What is your excuse then it is there for everyone. So I think that negates it altogether it means we all carry the 10 pound pack on our backs. So if a relationship is flailing if you are not there for your home do not say it is oppression because it's oppression and racism. But the guy next door who is struggling to job to support his family that's all. Well I don't know how to get in this. Maybe it's just about over or it's just about over. What I want to say is that when we when I teach in my classes about oppression for me it's always important for my students to know that as African-Americans our history didn't begin in America. And I always let let them know that slavery was a rude interruption. And we have to acknowledge that rude interruption because in Africa we had family values we had ways of being ways of knowing ways of remembering that were our own. This

rude interruption came and brought us over here. So I don't believe in using that as the great excuse for everything slavery happened. But I just think when people start talking about family values I think it's important to look at what happened to our families what how did our families get separated how do we have to take on a whole new way of being in a strange land. And then I think it's important to say OK that stuff did happen. There are things that we can do in spite of and that's where responsibility comes in. But I just I. It scares me that either or thinking scares me and I try to discourage my students from thinking that way I let them know it's both. And we have been oppressed. We are victims of oppression but we're not totally victims of oppression. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to sit here to talk about it. So we know we knew how to survive and so that we need to of course may be heightened that at this point in our history we need to focus on how do we survive. How do we make it in spite of. But I don't think we can ever negate that part because it's too real. We're still dealing with how racism acts. It's just more subtle now and sometimes it's not even subtle now and it's helped Gutmann book the

black family and slavery and freedom is that's still about tax. Why has he. Has he already been discredited. Because I know it's been discredited because he had did extensive research. I think the mid 17 to mid 7500 to the early 18:00 to show that that our concept of the slave family was just far off from what the reality was that many slave families stayed together as units more so than than we like to believe. And that often the odors would encourage marriage because it meant that a man who had a family would be less likely to run away. And I don't know if whether that's still in the never never now and in historical circles because I don't go in a circle. I don't go in those circles either. And I'm a literature professor. And guys I teach literature I teach slave narratives So I'm teaching the account that black men and black women give up their lives in slavery. What the sociologists and the psychiatrists and that are historians say I don't always know but I'm looking at first

accounts you know first person narratives by the slaves themselves. And in those accounts they all from Frederick Douglass to Harriet Jacobs They all talk about the various forms of separation that they endured. So there is this there's a simple thing here. I mean not so much simple but then the historical argument. The argument was from contemporary period if somebody like Moynihan saying black families break down 60s. And then then there was a jump to the slave period is if the time in between didn't exist. And so Gutmann proved more or less that there was tremendous stability and among some slave families and that was that's a new point and it's still it's still unclear exactly. But. That leaves what he didn't fill in was the time post-slavery to the 1920s the great migration and that new era. I mean that Newt that period is being re-examined because unless you know what happened then doesn't really tell you it doesn't connect with the

slave experience and what people are finding out in something like the promise land by one layman. Nicholas layman is that there was another devastating period in our history which was not in some ways not as bad as slavery but maybe even worse. The breakdown of the economy of the South the dispersion of families and the movement of the north and the getting hit in the head by the urban experience of that was as destructive to family as the African experience. And in one of those brilliant segues forwards evening exchange this highly acclaimed the names of the books are the words of John Weidmann and Bailey's kufi by Gloria Miller we have been very happy to have your book he was our guest today joined by Marilyn Sanders Mobley and they will be back with us. But we do have to take another short break. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Our thanks once again to Gloria Naylor for joining us. Thank you for being so coy and quiet.

Thank you John for joining us. And Marilyn Sanders Mobley had a quick word of advice to students. Well just to always keep in mind the diversity within our community and to celebrate all the versity of our perspectives and ways of being in knowing and remembering. Thank you all for joining us and of course thanks to you for watching. Evening exchange until tomorrow. Good night.