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  For the ancestors, for you, and for the readers, writers, and thinkers to come

  CONTENTS

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  Foreword: Our First Stories

  NIKKI GIOVANNI

  Introduction: Reading Matters

  STEPHANIE STOKES OLIVER

  THE PERIL | 1800–1900

  Suspected of Having a Book

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  Nine Years Deprived of a Sheet of Paper

  SOLOMON NORTHUP

  A Whole Race Begins to Read

  BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

  The Negro in Literature and Art

  W. E. B. DU BOIS

  THE POWER | 1900–1968

  Books and Things

  ZORA NEALE HURSTON

  Poetry Is Practical

  LANGSTON HUGHES

  The Business of the Writer

  JAMES BALDWIN

  Turning Point

  MALCOLM X

  Lessons in Living

  MAYA ANGELOU

  Morehouse College

  MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

  The Site of Memory

  TONI MORRISON

  Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?

  WALTER DEAN MYERS

  Reading for Revolution

  STOKELY CARMICHAEL [KWAME TURE]

  Twenty-One

  ALICE WALKER

  A Temporary Library in a Small Place

  JAMAICA KINCAID

  What Is an African American Classic?

  HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.

  New Black Scribe

  TERRY McMILLAN

  THE PLEASURE | 1968–2017

  MFA vs. POC

  JUNOT DÍAZ

  Create Dangerously

  EDWIDGE DANTICAT

  How to Write

  COLSON WHITEHEAD

  From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself

  MARLON JAMES

  I Once Was Miss America

  ROXANE GAY

  The Mecca

  TA-NEHISI COATES

  The Danger of the Single Story

  CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

  BONUS FEATURE

  What Books Mean to Me

  PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

  AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHIKO KAKUTANI

  Permissions and Credits

  Acknowledgments

  About the Editor

  FOREWORD

  *

  Our First Stories

  NIKKI GIOVANNI

  Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and spent her summers with her grandparents in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she was born in 1943. Giovanni graduated with honors from her grandfather’s alma mater, Fisk University. A world-renowned poet, author, commentator, activist, and educator, Giovanni has published volumes of poetry, nonfiction, essays, and children’s books.

  She gained initial fame in the 1960s, as a leading voice of the Black Arts Movement, in the time of the civil rights and Black Power struggles. Awarded seven NAACP Image Awards, she has been nominated for a Grammy and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Since 1987, she has served on the faculty of Virginia Tech, where she is a university distinguished professor.

  Giovanni’s literary greatness is on par with the twenty-five legendary writers included in this anthology. In the following foreword, she has graciously shared her own experiences in the tradition of the narrative of the book. She also sets the stage for what precedes the era of these writers in America—the horrific journey of the Middle Passage. While few of us ever think of it, overcoming language differences among the captured enslaved and then subsequently learning American English were among the first miracles along the path toward Black authorship as we know it today—from the peril of education to the power of literacy and then the pleasure of literature. First a moan, then a song, now a book.

  It only makes sense to me that the first word those captured understood was “SOLD.” They probably heard it so often, they thought that was their name. Off they were sent to various communities where they had to learn to talk to one another. The first language was a song.

  They sang in the evening to comfort one another and in the morning to call us all to work. These folk built homes and communities. They had skills that were put to use to plant and harvest. Through the years, our ancestors found a way to understand we all are of the same community no matter where we came from. We helped one another. It is so easy to think we came from African communities with no knowledge of how to live together—which is just ridiculous.

  No matter who we are or where we find ourselves, our first stories came in song. We have to remember Day Ten on the Slave Ship. On the first and second day we, the captured, were brought up to be washed with seawater and made to jump up and down to keep our muscles in some sort of shape. We could look to see the ending of the country, actually the continent, from which we’d come.

  I once had a professor who had been so very kind to me. She had helped me be accepted in the Pennsylvania School of Social Work. When that was not working for me, she got me accepted in the new MFA program at Columbia University in New York City. Years later, I was in London for a poetry reading when her daughter called to say Louise had died. If ever there was a funeral at which I wanted to be present, it was hers. But the only way to get back to Philadelphia on time was on the Super Sonic Transport (SST) aircraft, also known as the Concorde. I was a young poet, and not having much money, I tried to see how that was possible. Then I realized: It didn’t matter whether I could afford the flight. I just needed to get someone to give me a credit card so that I could charge my flight. Someone did. And I did.

  The SST took off, and it went up and up—and up and up again. They no longer have it, but it was actually a rocket, and there was only one seat on each side. I looked out my window as we continued to climb. The pilot finally said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we are at sixty thousand feet … sixty-five thousand feet … seventy thousand feet.” We could see the curve of the earth. It was totally fascinating.

  My African ancestors probably did not enjoy seeing the push away, but on the fifth and sixth day to the New World they could look out or over, neither they nor I know which one, and see the ending of all they knew. We know that by the tenth day, all the white people on the ship were armed because those captured would now be fighting, if not for their lives, for their knowledge. We lost. Some of us were hanged. Some were thrown overboard. Some jumped. But those who understood that we were lost understood also that we had to rethink who we were or are.

  I always like to think it was an older woman who was put back down in the hole who understood the loss. She knew she needed to say something to her people, though there is no such language as “African.” So she reached into her soul and began a moan. And that moan was picked up and carried forth. By the time the ship reached what would be called America, those on that ship had one thing in common: a song.

  We also found a God that we learned to worship and lean on. We took that same song from the slave ship to worship that God. And that song is what we are looking at now.

  The black people who sold us and the white people who bought us never understood we were going to become a new people. We were going to build a new world. We were going to change the culinary habits of this world. How t
his world worshiped. How in this world we taught our children to be strong and go forward.

  The enslavers thought if we were not allowed to read and write, we would not appreciate who we were becoming, but they were wrong. We wrote sometimes with paper and we always wrote with song. All of us passed our stories down on paper or through song. We fought for education, but we also in the cool of the evening passed down our stories around the fireplace.

  My grandparents sat on the front porch at the end of day, after Grandmother had cooked our evening meal and I had washed the dishes, and talked with our neighbors. Some call it gossip; some call it history. We talked with one another. I learned on that porch to never argue with anyone who was stupid. To never try to persuade anyone who would never agree to help. I also learned to appreciate and love the folk who came to share a secret. To say when there would be a meeting. To share what was needed to get someone up North to school or safety. I learned to listen, to be patient, and most especially, I learned to cheerfully give: time, knowledge, money. What sadness it brings that we no longer sit on front porches and call to one another. What terrible sadness it is that we want the folk who sold us and the folk who purchased us to like us. We have to like ourselves. We have to love one another.

  We write because we have evolved to another century. We write to be sure the words to the songs, and for those who understand, the notes to the music, get written down. We write because we are lonely and scared and we need to keep our hearts open. Black Ink, or as my student Jordan Holmes writes, Black Mail, comes to all of us because that’s who we are and what we do it with. By definition. Black Mail is what we receive. And I am so glad that I do.

  I like those folks on the ship who created that moan that became the spirituals that turned into jazz and blues and everything all the way up to rap and whatever will come next. We who do words are doing what we do. We are not trying to get folk who are frightened of us to be calm around us. We are reminding folk who love us that this is a good thing. Black Ink should be a soup or a drink or something we can embrace with pride. Black Lives Matter. Black Ink reminds us of why.

  INTRODUCTION

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  Reading Matters

  STEPHANIE STOKES OLIVER

  Collectively, the pieces here serve as a testament to the will, the struggle, and the difference that learning to read, and then taking pen to paper, and now fingers to computer, has made in American history.

  It’s hard to believe that the relaxing, recreational endeavor of reading a good book that so many of us savor and take for granted was, for more than two hundred years, not only illegal for most African Americans enslaved in many states of the South, but also punishable by death.

  When it comes to voting rights, Black parents often admonish their grown children to be sure to exercise their freedom in every election, because people died in the fight to obtain the right to vote. The proof is not disputed. Black-and-white newsreels of African Americans being terrorized by state troopers, police dogs, and firehoses during protest marches against disenfranchisement in the 1960s have been continuously and dramatically included in documentaries and other films and news programs. They tell the story that riveted the nation’s consciousness and caused American presidents to act.

  The story of the struggle for full literacy among African Americans has yet to be documented as thoroughly. The purpose of Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing is to help fill that void.

  Much like the griot of African oral history—the revered storyteller of the tribal history, what we would call now the keeper of “institutional memory”—we honor this struggle for literacy by passing on the words and wisdom of the writers included here. We have collected twenty-five of the most elite, brilliant, and wise Black writers of the African diaspora, voices that tell the story of the plight to read, write, and publish throughout generations of our nations. Of course, there are many, many more Black writers, authors, essayists, journalists, and academics that could have been included to make a multivolume comprehensive work. However, we endeavored to provide a satisfying sampler of pieces that may motivate the reader to dig deeper and check out the original books from which these works were excerpted, as well as to explore additional Black authors and essays not included.

  Individually, the authors of Black Ink possess what Dr. Greg Carr, chair of the Afro-American Studies program at Howard University, calls the “deep critical literacy and content mastery necessary to meet intellectual curiosity, spur academic growth, satisfy the need to know, and to act to transform one’s self and the world.” Collectively, the pieces here serve as a testament to the will, the struggle, and the difference that learning to read and then taking pen to paper, and now fingers to computer, has made in American history.

  As poet Nikki Giovanni, one of America’s foremost literary legends, so brilliantly reminds us in her foreword, the first word in that foreign language, English, understood by the captive ancestors on these shores just may well have been “SOLD.” In my favorite of Nikki’s poems, “My House,” she evokes the African American loss of our mother tongue in the transport across the Middle Passage and in our oppressive New World from which I feel we have never fully recovered:

  english isn’t a good language

  to express emotion through

  mostly i imagine because people

  try to speak english instead

  of trying to speak through it …

  Starting in the early 1800s, over approximately twenty-five decades up to today, the twenty-five writers of these expository essays of Black Ink explain to us the struggle and the joys of overcoming the challenges of reading and writing. They are: Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture], Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Terry McMillan, Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and President Barack Obama, in an exclusive interview with New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. These pieces reflect the phenomenal African American progress from when it was illegal to learn to read—and Frederick Douglass resisted, escaped, and claimed his freedom—up to the election of our first Black President of the United States, an avid reader and mega-bestselling author.

  The voices are classic and contemporary, historic and avant-garde. Some reflect the unique perspective, sensibility, and wisdom of the immigrant. Many of the writers were born in the African and Caribbean diaspora and relocated to the United States, such as Stokely Carmichael (Trinidad), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua), Junot Díaz (Dominican Republic), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti), Marlon James ( Jamaica), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria). Others were born in the States and eventually found a place that felt more like home elsewhere and died there, including W. E. B. Du Bois (Ghana) and James Baldwin (France). Stokely Carmichael, who grew up in New York City, made his transition in Guinea, in West Africa.

  Within the larger American literary tradition, Black voices are often marginalized or included as tokenism. Here, they are front and center, loud and clear, humble and proud, humorous and dead serious. Like ink itself, Black Ink is what gives us common ground whether in the ink made with tree bark by Solomon Northup (author of Twelve Years a Slave) to write a letter that would secure his freedom in 1853 or in the digital ink of our e-readers that now allow us to download novels, such as Colson Whitehead’s highly acclaimed The Underground Railroad, awarded the National Book Award (2016) and the Pulitzer Prize (2017), and chosen in 2016 by Oprah’s Book Club. Oprah Winfrey’s book discussion group, launched in 1996 during the successful twenty-five-year run of her internationally viewed television program, and her influence on the world of publishing, is another phenomenon of Black literary achievement. “In the black” is a positive financial term of success, to which we all aspire.

&nb
sp; As the editor of Essence and, later, editor in chief of Heart & Soul magazine, I had the special honor of assigning and editing feature pieces by great authors. My interest in reading literature was passionately developed while taking an African American lit course at Howard University. I graduated the year that Toni Morrison edited the groundbreaking historical collection The Black Book (an inspiration for this anthology). After college, working as a junior editor at one of the top women’s general interest magazines, Glamour, I was swept into an exciting time of emerging female voices in publishing: Nora Ephron was humoring us with her collection of essays, Crazy Salad; Toni Morrison was publishing her third novel, Song of Solomon; Alice Walker published an essay in Ms. magazine about rediscovering the work of Zora Neale Hurston. At Essence, I worked with a brilliant team of predominantly Black women editors who reveled in their duty to present to the African American reading public the best and brightest African American writers. Essence succeeded in providing a home for our literary writers who may not have been applauded at all or as often by the White-run literary magazines of the day. Many of the writers first published in Essence were then able to secure major book publishing deals. And those who were recognized by the publishing world relied on us to spread the word of their new releases.

  In those premillennial times, before celebrities dominated magazine covers and the center-well features of publications, it was writers, readers, and thinkers who were revered. There wasn’t one celebrity in whose company I would have preferred to be over author and poet Maya Angelou. When her memoir The Heart of the Woman was published in the mid-1980s, I had the plum assignment to interview her in her North Carolina kitchen as she made spaghetti. I learned that for Angelou, poetry was not just a professional pursuit but also a personal passion. When my daughter was born, she sent the gift of her favorite poems to share with my child—not bound volumes, but a thoughtfully chosen “anthology” of photocopied pages from books and magazines that have been saved and cherished as much or more than any of her published books. On the handwritten note attached Angelou wrote to Anique, “I pray you grow strong, well, and beautiful … and with this poetry of joy!”