African American Short Fiction

Introduction

Although it may be viewed as a modern genre, short fiction emerges from the mists of history in the form of fairy tales, anecdotes, myths, and historical legend. The ancient Greeks already knew the form. Tales of Alf layla wa-layla (fifteenth century; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1706–1708) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s tales are also classified as short stories. Besides the obvious difference in length, short fiction differs from longer fiction by focusing upon a single event occurring in one or two scenes and by including fewer characters. In addition, the compactness and unified effect of the literary form force an economy of words, and setting is oftentimes simple. Edgar Allan Poe, who receives much credit for the development of the short story as a literary genre, remarked that the short story’s primary distinguishing factor is the sense of aesthetic unity that can be read in one sitting. While the nineteenth century saw the development of the short story as it is understood today, the original form, passed down through oral tradition, predates recorded history and includes most cultures.

Oral tradition is especially important in African American (and, more broadly, Black American) literature. Many enslaved Africans, forced to live in such places as Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, originated from cultures rich in oral traditions and oral literature. In an effort to preserve their group history, much of this spoken literature was later reworked and remade as written literature. Well-known American short-story writer John Cheever wrote: “So long as we are possessed by experience that is distinguished by its intensity and its episodic nature, we will have the short story in our literature.” For African Americans, storytelling, especially in the form of folk culture, as critic and writer John Edgar Wideman observed, “preserves and expresses an identity, a history, a self-evaluation apart from those destructive incarcerating images proliferated by mainline culture.” Influential Irish short-story writer Frank O’Connor’s suggestion that short fiction is a method for “submerged population groups” to address a dominant community would certainly hold true for African American short fiction. Often the African American short story has served as a vehicle for making brief, to-the-point statements: social, cultural, economic, political, or otherwise. From its inception, the African American short-story genre has represented a range of styles, events, and experiences and has drawn upon the diversity of African American lives within American history.

Nineteenth Century Short-Story Writers

Before their emergence as short-story writers, African Americans in the United States launched both an oral and a written tradition in the form of slave narratives chronicling their harrowing experiences and their compelling, never-ceasing desire for freedom. During the nineteenth century, African Americans were encouraged to write only autobiographies or slave narratives, such as Sojourner Truth’s Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828 (1850) and Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in an effort to propel the abolitionist movement. These narratives became the vehicle through which African Americans gave voice to their experiences and entered American literature.

The post-Civil War era saw the emergence of African American writers. Emancipation provided opportunities for education. In 1892, Anna Julia Cooper, a leading lecturer on African American women’s civil rights, who at one time shared a stage with the powerful African American civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois, published A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South. The daughter of a North Carolina slave and graduate of Oberlin College, Cooper encouraged women, both African American and White, to seek education. In addition, when her work appeared, the term “Negro” was in fashion, and the term “Black Woman” in the title of her book surprised many. Despite writing extensively on a wide variety of subjects, African American writers essentially remained ignored, except for their slave narratives. It was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who utilized African American tradition and myth to write remarkable short stories, were published. There was one notable exception: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “The Two Offers” (1859) is recognized as the first short story ever published by a African American writer.

Harper was the child of free African Americans, who died when she was three. A poet, novelist, and social reformer, the youngster came under the guidance of her schoolteacher uncle. Harper focused on slavery, motherhood, Christianity, and the role of so-called mulattoes in society. African Americans, she said, “are homeless in the land of our births and worse than strangers in the land of our nativity.” An active abolitionist for the Underground Railroad, which channeled slaves to freedom, Harper details the plight of a woman who goes against social conventions to advocate for the abolition of slavery in her story “The Two Offers.” During an era that prescribed that women be angels in the house, Harper’s story brings to light both Black and White women’s vulnerability, while it challenges the accepted social position of all American women.

Chesnutt, recognized primarily for his psychological realism, blazed a path for African American short-fiction writers. The son of free Black parents, Chesnutt spent much of his early life teaching in North Carolina. Unable to cope with the South’s harsh treatment of Black people, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he became an attorney and established a law firm. Although writing was merely an avocation, he published more than fifty short stories and essays, two collections of short stories, a biography of Douglass, and three novels between 1885 and 1905. In 1885, he published his first notable short story, “Uncle Peter’s House,” for the S. S. McClure newspaper syndicate. The tale reflects the local color of its setting, a popular literary trend during the late 1800s. Historically significant and ironic, “The Goophered Grapevine” represents the first work by an African American to be accepted by The Atlantic. Originating from an oral tale told by the family gardener, the narrative deals with the conjuration of African American Voodoo practices. Beyond this, however, the heroic narrator, Uncle Julius, displays an ability to utilize conjure stories to frighten his White employers and often to secure a financial advantage. “The Sheriff’s Children,” the first significant study of the mulatto in American life, was published in the fall of 1889 and deals with the repercussions of miscegenation, hatred, and violence in the postwar South. In “The Sheriff’s Children,” the illegitimate son of a North Carolina sheriff and a former slave is transported to his father’s jail, where he has the opportunity to remind the sheriff (who fails to recognize him at first) of his parental shortcomings. While the sheriff experiences enlightenment and repents, the son ironically commits suicide in his father’s jail. The tale amplified the era’s social injustice.

Chesnutt is best known for his dialect short-fiction collection detailing incidents of slavery told by an old gardener, the trickster figure Uncle Julius, to his northern employers. The Conjure Woman, Chesnutt’s first short-story collection, was published in 1899 and was critically well received. Unlike some period writers, Chesnutt does not romanticize the slavery practices of the Old South, describing instead a world of brutal masters whose sole focus is on profit. The author admirably describes the slaves’ ingenious methods of retribution and their attempts at any cost to keep their families intact. Through the practice of conjuration, slaves in “Sis’ Becky’s Pickaninny,” “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare,” and “Hot-Foot Hannibal” withstand and endure their dominant abusers. In addition, tales such as “The Conjurer’s Revenge” and “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt,” which illustrate the dark side of Voodoo, demonstrate confrontations between slaves and free African Americans. Chesnutt often illustrates racial prejudice on both sides. In his second collection of nine short stories, The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899), only one story, “The Passing of Grandison,” presents the slave as trickster in a strategy to gain freedom. The rest of the stories occur after the Civil War and deal with social, psychological, and ethical implications of miscegenation. The title story, “The Wife of His Youth,” deals with a free Black man’s conflicting loyalties to the wife he married in slavery and the more refined women he meets years later. “A Matter of Principle” and “Her Virginia Mammy,” drawn from Chesnutt’s own experience, examine with great insight the racial prejudices of light-skinned, middle-class African Americans toward those of darker complexion. In “A Matter of Principle,” the mulatto protagonist Cicero Clayton spoils his daughter’s chance for happiness with a lighter-skinned congressman. In “Uncle Wellington’s Wives,” Chesnutt argues that southern men like Wellington, who believe they can gain equality by marrying White women, are irrational. Assimilation into mainstream American culture, Chesnutt argued, could come about only through education and hard work. The author requested that his publishers not mention his ethnicity in advertising his work because he desired to be judged strictly on literary merit. Often compared to William Faulkner, Chesnutt remained the premier African American writer until the 1930s, when the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Writers’ Project provided a new route of emergence for African American writers. Through his indictment of racism, Chesnutt was viewed as a literary champion for the interests of middle- and working-class African Americans of the South, whom he had known growing up in North Carolina.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins counted herself a novelist, a playwright, an editor, an actress, and a singer in addition to a short-fiction writer. Like many other female writers, Hopkins had been historically overlooked for her literary contributions until she began to receive critical attention. Born in Portland, Maine, Hopkins had won a literary prize for an essay, “Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedies,” by the time she was fifteen. In 1880, her first play, Slaves’ Escape: Or, The Underground Railroad (retitled Peculiar Sam: Or, The Underground Railroad), was produced. Strongly influenced by Du Bois, founder and leader of the new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Hopkins utilized the romance model in the short-story form to explore racial violence and social themes, such as the distress suffered by African Americans after the Civil War. Actually, Hopkins single-handedly opened the door for African American women’s publishing with her 1900 novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, published by the Boston Colored Co-operative Publishing Company, in which she was a shareholder. That same year, the company published the literary monthly Colored American Magazine, whose first issue featured Hopkins’s first short story, “The Mystery Within Us,” which she structured as a conversation between two men. In the time span of five years, Tom Underwood has moved from a state of down-and-out destitution to one of prosperity as a physician and author. Tom reminisces how, on the verge of suicide, a mysterious “Presence” appeared to him and encouraged him to change his way of life. The Presence interjects into Tom’s mind the thoughts of Dr. Thorn, a notable physician, who unfortunately died before bringing his medical discoveries to public attention. Deeply concerned with metaphysics, Hopkins makes such mystical and spiritual phenomena the basis of many of her works.

By the time the Colored American Magazine ceased publication in 1909, Hopkins had published six more short stories, including “Talma Gordon,” “George Washington, a Christmas Story,” “As the Lord Lives, He Is One of Our Mother’s Children,” and her powerful “A Dash for Liberty.” In “A Dash for Liberty,” which focuses on the theme of escape from slavery, the protagonist, Madison, although secure and sheltered in Canada, wishes to return to Virginia to free his wife Susan. Furthermore, as editor of the magazine, Hopkins focused on discovering African American women writers and publishing their short stories. Contributors included Harper. Hopkins denounced racist myths, demonstrated outrage at the role of women as victims, and stressed that African American women must resist victimization whenever possible. She attempted to reify African American humanity and believed firmly that education was the key to conquering prejudice and attaining equality.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of former slaves. A well-known poet and novelist, he wrote four collections of short stories. With the encouragement of William Dean Howells, a well-known American novelist, Dunbar became one of the first African American writers to gain a large public following. In particular, his southern plantation stories were deeply admired by American readers. However, the literary reputation of Dunbar, who worked as a reading-room assistant at the Library of Congress, has been criticized on the grounds of his use of African American dialect, his degrading stereotypes of African American people, and his portrayal of the Old South in romantic terms. Many have incorrectly interpreted Dunbar’s portrayal of the plantation tradition as his tacit endorsement of slavery conditions, perpetuating a misleading picture of “the old good days” before the Civil War. Some argued that Dunbar failed to provide an accurate portrayal of African American history. That he did not completely leave behind the plantation tradition was for some a sign of his conformity and even happiness with the antebellum situation of African Americans. His use of African American dialect was particularly controversial. Although Dunbar had among his supporters such important African American voices as Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Du Bois, and Hughes, in the 1920s those involved in the Harlem Renaissance heavily attacked Dunbar’s work. The hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1972 was commemorated with a number of conferences in which his work was rediscovered and reclaimed.

Many of the stories in Dunbar’s four collections are free of these pejorative descriptions and deserve consideration on their literary merits. His stories (plantation tall tales, didactic stories warning his readers against weakness, narratives decrying southern social repression, and protest fiction) are often aimed directly against racism. Dunbar’s first collection of stories, Folks from Dixie, appeared in 1898 and is concerned with plantation tales depicting southern African Americans who are fiercely loyal and religious. No doubt, the idea of slaves choosing loyalty to their masters over their own wellbeing can indeed be considered highly offensive. “The Colonel’s Awakening,” in Folks from Dixie, which portrays an old Virginia aristocrat, who after losing his two sons is unable to adjust to post-Civil War life, is recognized and praised as one of Dunbar’s best-constructed stories. The Strength of Gideon, and Other Stories (1900) remains Dunbar’s most successful collection. Although it does present the South in sentimental terms, it additionally warns against the evils of northern vice. For instance, “The Trustfulness of Polly” describes the destruction of Polly Jackson’s husband Sam as he falls prey to brothels. Dunbar’s “The Tragedy at Three Forks” protests southern racism, and “The Ingrate” represents a fictionalized account of Dunbar’s father’s escape on the Underground Railroad. The bitterest story Dunbar ever wrote, “One Man’s Failure,” addresses an African American man’s relationship to President Abraham Lincoln. Dunbar’s In Old Plantation Days (1903) presents twenty-five short stories that are marred by the use of degrading stereotypes. The writer’s 1904 short-story collection The Heart of Happy Hollow contains one of Dunbar’s best short stories, “The Scapegoat,” an ironic story of the political revenge that an angry African American party boss takes upon the political establishment. In addition, Dunbar was married to Alice Dunbar-Nelson, whose writings achieved a measure of fame in their own right.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was an early short fiction writer. Born during Reconstruction and only a generation removed from slavery, Dunbar-Nelson felt a strong responsibility toward future generations of African Americans, and in this vein she attempted to share her knowledge and experience. Born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans, Louisiana, she received an MA from Cornell University. Incredibly versatile, she was a trained nurse, stenographer, and musician. Her first collection, Violets, and Other Tales, which included poetry and essays in addition to short stories, was published in 1895. “Amid the Roses,” “Love and the Butterfly,” “At Eventide,” and “Bay St. Louis” thematically center on racism, gender roles in society, and the importance of love, war, and death. The sentimental title story tells the story of a young girl in love, who dies within a year after placing a bouquet of violets, orange blossoms, and other flowers in a letter to her sweetheart. A teacher, Dunbar-Nelson married Dunbar after accepting a teaching assignment in New York in 1898. Dunbar-Nelson was also a journalist and wrote for many Black newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Courier and the Washington Eagle, for which she wrote the column “As in a Looking Glass” from 1926 to 1930. In 1920, Dunbar-Nelson founded the Wilmington Advocate, a weekly newspaper. The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories (1899), the first collection of short stories by an Black woman, focuses on New Orleans Creole culture. In “La Juanita,” which incorporates a blend of Catholic and African American magic practices, beautiful Juanita loves the American Mercer, despite her grandfather’s objections. Known as a transitional figure to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Dunbar-Nelson had a great influence on rising young writers of the period.

The Harlem Renaissance

After World War I, African American soldiers returned to the United States having fought in Europe for the concepts of equality and freedom. The 369th Battalion, “The Harlem Hellfighters,” was the most decorated US unit, and when they marched up Fifth Avenue to Harlem after the war’s end, the African American population felt part of a new beginning. This was the celebrated time for the Harlem Renaissance. The new African American writers generated a powerful and refreshing voice that was heard with a great deal of respect by the White community. These writers, artists, intellectuals, and jazz musicians came to represent the Harlem Renaissance, one of the most fertile periods in America’s literary history. It not only exemplified the advancement of Black arts but also staged the independence and liberty of African American writing and publishing. Two leading African American journals of the day, Opportunity, edited by Charles S. Johnson, which aimed to give voice to African American culture hitherto neglected by mainstream American publishing, and the magazine of Du Bois’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), The Crisis, along with newspapers such as Baltimore African American, continued the fashion established by Hopkins of publishing and establishing African American writers and entered the short-story competition trend between 1920 and 1935. This publishing effort spread the Harlem Renaissance nationwide. Both periodicals and newspapers brought great attention to the African American literary market, launching the careers of such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, Gwendolyn Bennett, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countée Cullen, who made up the lively Harlem writers’ group. Their works began to examine the stigmatizing stereotypes of African Americans that slavery and the post-Reconstruction period promoted in White American minds.

In the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance, also called the New Negro Movement, burst into bloom, bringing a new creative energy to African American literature and changing forever what had been viewed previously as folklore or imitation “White writing” into proud, complex investigations of African American culture. Although the peak of this Renaissance era extended from 1921 to 1931, it remained influential throughout the 1930s. Centered on the African American neighborhoods of Harlem, in New York City, and funded by philanthropic grants and scholarships, the movement cultivated and encouraged the hopeful young African American writers who were central to the Harlem domain. Sadly, the Great Depression adversely affected this dynamic group of writers and many were ultimately forced to leave New York.

Jessie Redmon Fauset is said to be a focal figure of the Harlem Renaissance because of her extensive support of other African American authors. Primarily a novelist, she also wrote numerous short stories and was from 1919 to 1926 the literary editor of the highly influential Crisis magazine. By confronting race and sex stereotyping, Fauset demonstrated a deep awareness of the unique situation of the African American woman. Born in Camden County, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she came from a poor family who placed a premium on education. She received a scholarship to Cornell University and graduated in 1905; she was the first African American woman to be elected to the academic honorary Phi Beta Kappa. During her tenure at The Crisis, she published a large number of women writers, Black and White, who voiced convictions ranging from conservative to radical. After she left in 1926, the magazine never regained its former literary stature. In addition, Fauset played a major influential role in the recognition and promotion of African American art during the period of the Harlem Renaissance.

Zora Neale Hurston, a primary, influential African American folklorist and short-story writer, temporally captured and celebrated rural, southern, African American culture. Early in life she made her way to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, where she associated with such writers as Hughes, the prominent African American poet. Although she never finished grade school, she attended Howard University, going on to become a cultural anthropologist and ethnologist. In her scholarly endeavors, Hurston traveled to Haiti, where she researched Voodoo. Hurston’s first story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” was published in the literary magazine Stylus in 1921 and republished in 1926 in Opportunity, the leading periodical of the Harlem Renaissance. The story deals with young John’s incapacity to accomplish his goal of seeing the world (a desire brought about by a witch’s spell) because the women in his life attempt to tie him down and encourage him instead to settle and marry rather than follow his dream. Throughout his life, John allows himself to be tied down and views the world only after he dies from drowning. This story set the themes Hurston was to develop throughout her career: the dream and the resistance against improving one’s life and the strong, pervading sense of the supernatural.

“Drenched in Light” was published in Opportunity in 1924. The highly imaginative, eleven-year-old protagonist Isis (nicknamed Isie) Watts feels stifled by Grandmother Potts. Similar to the dreamer John, young and impressionable Isis envisions wearing golden slippers and long princess robes while riding White horses to find the edge of the world. In vain, her grandmother disciplines the lively but mischievous girl and punishes her severely for whistling and playing with boys. After a White stranger, Helen, takes Isie to see a Gypsy dance performance, Helen is overwhelmed by the girl’s exuberance and recognizes the emptiness of her own life. In what could be construed as an altruistic gesture, Helen attempts to take the youngster from her home. However, it becomes increasingly clear throughout the evolution of the story that Helen wants to absorb the child’s energy only for her, Helen’s, own delight. As one critic remarked, Helen’s strategy is reminiscent of the Whites who flocked to popular Harlem nightspots to be entertained by “primitive” African American musicians. Hurston was often attacked by African American contemporaries for playing a similar demeaning, entertaining role for her White audiences while not dealing with political issues in her works. “Drenched in Light” describes the youthful effervescence Hurston exhibits in her autobiographical “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”

After moving to New York in 1925, Hurston quickly became known to and a central figure of Harlem Renaissance literary circles. Indeed, Hughes found her the most amusing member of the writers’ group. That year, Hurston also received a scholarship to Barnard College, becoming its first African American student. Hurston’s popular “Spunk” is a story about a giant man, Spunk Banks, who intentionally intimidates people. Using the African American, central-Florida dialect and elements of the area’s folklore, the tale is set in an area much like Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida. The fearless Banks suffers a decline in pride that brings about his downfall when he courts Lena, another man’s wife, in public. This prompts Joe Kanty, Lena’s husband, to seek revenge. Kanty, however, is killed when Banks shoots him. After the murder trial, Spunk loses his courage, believing that he is haunted by Kanty’s ghost, and suffers a grisly death in a mysterious sawmill accident. The townspeople believe the death was caused by Kanty’s spirit, who assumed the form of a black panther. “Black Death” was also published in 1925 and highlights an Eatonville Voodoo man named Old Man Morgan. Mrs. Boger consults him to seek revenge on the cold-hearted Beau Diddeley for refusing to marry her daughter Docia after impregnating her. While Beau courts another young girl, the conjure man casts his deadly spell, and soon Beau is found dead with an enigmatic powder burn found over his heart. In this tale, Hurston demonstrates her skill to connect folklore and fiction. In “Muttsy” Pinkie escapes her poverty-stricken, abusive southern home and moves to Harlem. Pinkie is directed to Ma Turner’s place (a Harlem brothel and speakeasy), where she meets Muttsy Owens, a gambler who is smitten by her detached manner and superior beauty. Swearing his intentions are pure, he gives her a diamond ring, but she insists he give up gambling. Predictably, shortly after they marry, he resumes gambling. Story Magazine published Hurston’s most frequently anthologized story, “The Gilded Six-Bits,” in 1933. Missie May and Joe Banks live happily together in wedded bliss in a paradisiacal setting, as delighted and innocent as two candy-eating children, until the archetypal serpent, Otis D. Slemmons, a sly woman-chaser from Chicago with gold teeth, a gold stickpin, and a ten-dollar gold piece, intrudes into their perfect garden. Like Eve, Missie May is hypnotized by the newcomer’s power and falls away from her loving husband Joe. Joe returns home unannounced one evening to find his wife in bed with Slemmons. Prostrate with grief, Missie May begs her crestfallen husband Joe for forgiveness. After three months, Joe relents and returns to her, and after the birth of a son the couple continue to love each other as before. In the highly acclaimed Mules and Men (1935), her collection of folktales and humorous and tragic sketches, Hurston attempted to find a balance between, on the one hand, the folk culture of her ethnic background and, on the other, her development as an artist and her formal background. In 1997, filmmaker Kristy Andersen came across “Folktales from the Gulf States,” stories that Hurston had compiled when she was researching for Mules and Men. They were subsequently published in 2001 under the title Every Tongue Got to Confess.

For Hurston, it was paramount for readers “to realize that minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem . . . that they are just like everyone else.” Perhaps best known for her controversial 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, about an African American woman’s search for love and identity, Hurston refused to see African Americans as victimized. Indeed, Hurston celebrated her rural heritage of Eatonville, Florida, a town founded by African Americans, and the first incorporated African American town in the United States. In her autobiographical “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston declared, “I am not tragically colored.” Despite poverty, Hurston’s characters, such as Missie May and Joe in “The Gilded Six-Bits” and the aggrieved husband Joe Kanty, at odds with his manhood in “Spunk,” live full-flowering lives. Her characters search for fulfillment not as African Americans but as women and men. Hurston’s literary characteristics can later be seen in the works of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. In her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Hurston comments that she “did not know how to be humble.” Sadly, although Hurston published much more than any other African American woman of her time, she died in poverty and obscurity and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her work was recovered by the women’s movement, and her use of African American dialect, which had been attacked during her lifetime as a racist caricature, was praised. Although some members of the Harlem Renaissance resented that Hurston’s later works failed to spread or convey the political tenets of the movement, she remains central to the Harlem Renaissance. In 2020, eight of Hurston's "lost" tales were published in the collection Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance.

Langston Hughes is referred to by many critics as the most influential African American writer of the twentieth century. Primarily a poet, Hughes recorded the African American experience in the United States. A leading luminary in the Harlem Renaissance, during the early 1920s Hughes helped to open the doors of publishing houses to young African American writers, prompting them to write with racial pride. His career stretched into the Black Arts movement of the late 1960s. Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. One of America’s best-known and best-loved poets, author in particular of the famous poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes was inspired by D. H. Lawrence to write short stories, which are not nearly as well known as his poetry. In his short fiction, Hughes sets an example of self-determination and artistic integrity. His collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks, was published in 1934. Hughes helped to inspire young writers, in particular James Baldwin and Alice Walker.

A Texas native, Gwendolyn Bennett, well recognized as a poet and essayist, also utilized the short-story form to project her literary voice. As the daughter of teacher parents, Bennett grew up on a Nevada Indian reservation before her father brought her to live in Philadelphia. Educated at Columbia University, in New York City, Bennett drew on her African roots for inspiration. In her estimation, African Americans in the United States were sad people, “hidden by a minstrel smile.” She became the editor of Opportunity, writing a popular literary news column and providing a historical account of the Harlem Renaissance. Her story “Wedding Day,” a popularly anthologized piece, explores the question “Who am I?,” the universal conundrum every African American faces. Paul Watson, the protagonist, believes he can escape American racial prejudice by living an expatriate existence in Europe. He succeeds in Paris, becoming a well-known musician before he falls in love with a cruel White woman. His traumatic wedding day (hence the story’s title) illustrates his loss of innocence when she abandons him, leaving him only a cruel note explaining that White women simply do not marry African American men. “Tokens,” which appeared in Ebony and Topaz in 1927, also centers on an American in Paris who remains in France after World War I. Jenks Barnett, dying from tuberculosis, recalls an earlier happier time, when he joyfully sang with other African American expatriate entertainers. Bennett strongly disputes the humiliating treatment of African Americans by White people. Her best-known story, “To a Dark Girl,” is often anthologized.

Dorothy West, also known as Mary Christopher, another member of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote and published the critically acclaimed novel The Living Is Easy (1948) along with forty short stories. The daughter of a former slave from Virginia, West studied journalism and philosophy at Columbia University. A writer from age seven, she published her first short story in the Boston Post when she was fifteen. West joined the Saturday Evening Quill Club, formed in 1925 by twenty emerging African American writers. Opportunity magazine published her “The Typewriter” in 1926. The story presents a spiritually bereft father who uses his daughter’s typewriting lessons to gain a sense of individual worth. Imagining himself to be his daughter’s successful businessman boss, when the father dictates a letter to his daughter he comes to embody the man he dreams of being, the man, ironically, that the dominant racist culture prevents him from becoming. By the story’s end, this dire pretense causes the father’s death. “The Typewriter” was included in Edward J. O’Brien’s The Best Short Stories of 1926.

In Harlem, West worked initially as a social worker and traveled the Soviet Union in 1932, with Hughes and other Harlem writers, as part of a writers’ project. West founded and wrote for Challenge, a periodical that opposed fascism, published emerging African American writers, and documented the African American literary attitudes of the 1930s. She also took part in the Federal Writers’ Project. She wrote stories twice weekly for the New York Daily News until the late 1960s and was one of the earliest to explore the African American urban lifestyle, which most short-story writers overlooked. West, strongly influenced by Fyodor Dostoevsky, accentuates psychological and social confinement. The Saturday Evening Quill published “An Unimportant Man,” which appeared in 1928 and addressed the irony of African American urban existence. Zeb, another frustrated African American man like the father in “The Typewriter,” has a close relationship with his daughter Essie. Through her, Zeb vicariously strives to gain self-importance. He thinks of himself merely as a forty-year-old failure, a cook unable to take the bar exam for the fourth time. However, his daughter, he swears, will become a success. What remains unclear to him, however, is that his actions ironically parallel precisely how his mother treated him, pushing him against his will into difficult careers.

The end of the Harlem Renaissance represented the termination of a rich literary era and a turning point for African American writers. Simply put, African American writers had to differentiate themselves from White writers because they had the double-fold task of coming to terms with White American society and simultaneously opposing its inherent racism. In the process, they had to lend dignity to the African American community.

Federal Writers’ Project

In 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) developed the Federal Writers’ Project as part of the New Deal struggle against the Great Depression. The project provided jobs for unemployed writers, editors, and research workers. Directed by Henry G. Alsberg, the program operated in all states and at one time employed 6,600 men and women. In addition to producing guides for every state, the federal plan supported ethnic studies, folklore collections, and regional histories, producing ultimately more than one thousand publications and providing a means for such top African American writers as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to come to public attention.

Richard Wright, short-story writer and novelist, classified as an American modernist, was deeply influenced by Russian short-fiction writer Anton Chekhov. Wright ingeniously explores the concept of the internalized plot that closely examines the inner emotions of characters. He endures as one of the first African American writers to protest White prejudice and violence against African Americans. The grandchild of slaves and abandoned early by his father, Wright grew up in poverty. The Federal Writers’ Project provided him with the opportunity to write. In Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945), which details his childhood and young manhood in the South, the voice of protest that was to influence many post-World War II writers can also be heard.

In 1937, Wright became Harlem editor of the communist publication The Daily Worker. His first short story, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” appeared in the anthology The New Caravan. “The Ethics of Living John Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch” was published in 1937’s American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse by Members of the Federal Writers’ Project. A year later, after his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children (first published in 1938, reissued in 1940), won a prize from Story magazine, Wright was catapulted into the public eye. Undoubtedly, in the genre of the short story, he was the most talented African American male writer since Chesnutt. Unlike his predecessors, however, he was highly visible and received the attention and praise he richly deserved. In addition, Wright is credited with eliminating the barrier between African American and White writers. In fact, he changed the tone of African American writing from one of placid petition to one of absolute insistence. In 1946, the author moved to Paris and never returned to the United States to live. After his death in 1960, a new generation of African American writers, including James Baldwin, John Killens, Paule Marshall, Mary Elizabeth Vroman, London Brown, Albert Murray, William Melvin Kelley, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Martin Hamer, and Ernest J. Gaines explored, questioned, and challenged what Ralph Ellison called “the full range of American Negro humanity.”

The early years of Ralph Ellison were spent in poverty in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and prompted him to become an activist. An avid reader, Ellison set out “to look at [his] own life through the lives of fictional characters” and to connect his own world with the “worlds projected in literature.” As a young adult in New York City, he met Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, who encouraged him in his efforts to become a writer. He served in the Merchant Marine during World War II. Immediately after the war, in 1945, he began work on his novel Invisible Man, which chronicles a young man’s awakening to racial discrimination, and spent seven years writing it before it was published in 1952. The following year he won the National Book Award. Like Wright’s, Ellison’s tone is insistent and demanding. “Battle Royal,” Ellison’s first short story and an excerpt that appeared a year before the novel, is frequently anthologized. In the story, Ellison insists that the narrator, although a man of substance, flesh, and bone, is invisible because people refuse to see him. The story details a painful episode in a young man’s life; expecting a scholarship, the excited and proud youngster is invited to an elegant social function. However, instead of receiving the academic honors he expected, he is pitted against other teenage boys in a boxing match for the enjoyment of White male spectators. The broader context of the story illustrates the predictable rituals used to preserve racial lines. In “King of the Bingo Game” and “Flying Home,” the main characters also undergo a trial by fire, which concludes in an elevated sense of self, a deeper maturity, and an ultimate responsibility to others. In the 1965 Book Week poll of two hundred writers and critics, Ellison was honored by being chosen above such African American writers as Wright and Baldwin and such White writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, J. D. Salinger, and John Steinbeck, for having penned the most celebrated novel written in the previous twenty years. However, Ellison suffered under the scathing critical scrutiny of the African American nationalist writers of the Black Arts movement, such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), who insisted Ellison “sold out” by being more concerned with style than with substance.

World War II

Unlike many African American writers who focus on the South, Ann Petry focused upon African American life in small-town New England. A pharmacist, Petry moved early in life to New York, where she wrote for the Peoples’ Voice of Harlem before studying creative writing at Columbia University (1944–1946). During World War II, Petry’s stories began to appear in The Crisis. A novelist, who numbers among her best-selling highly acclaimed works The Street (1946), Petry first came to public notice through such short stories as “Like a Winding Street,” a complex, forceful narrative of a couple’s wartime struggle, and her heart-wrenching tale of domestic abuse “The Last Day of School,” which deals with a young woman’s attempt to leave Harlem. Her collection of short stories Miss Muriel, and Other Stories, which contains “Solo on the Drums” and “Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?,” was published in 1971.

Although Frank Yerby wrote thirty-three novels, his short story “Health Card,” which received the O. Henry Memorial Award for best first story in 1944, is his most highly acclaimed work. “Health Card,” published in Harper’s magazine, concerns the injustices inflicted by the military, which tended to view African American women as prostitutes. The story brought Yerby to national attention.

Henry Dumas wrote about the clash between African American and White cultures and captured in the process the psychological tone of the African American southern experience. African American folklore and music and the Civil Rights movement, in which he was an active participant, remained important influences on all his writing. Born in Arkansas, Dumas migrated to Harlem at the age of ten, attended City College of New York, and served in the Air Force. His astute short stories draw on his own southern childhood experiences. “Rain God,” which uses a stream-of-consciousness technique, was published in Negro Digest in 1968 and deals with three boys running home on the heels of a rainstorm. This tale, reminiscent of a folktale that pronounces that when sunshine and rain occur together, the devil is beating his wife, projects the fear experienced by the narrator, young Blue, who fears the devil. “The Crossing,” in the collection Ark of Bones, and Other Stories (1970), also deals with the sense of danger and fear inherent in the lives of southern African Americans, particularly the vulnerability of African American children amid the southern White lynch-mob mentality. Three young children, Jimmy, Bubba, and Essie, walk home from Sunday school, experience the fear of imminent danger, and tease one another until Bubba mentions Emmett Till, a teenager who was lynched in 1953. The tale of atrocity is repeated to Jimmy by Bubba. Again, the landscape figures profoundly in projecting and displacing the young characters’ fear. Young sharecroppers encountering a civil rights worker and Whites experiencing the mystical force of African American music figure in the subject matter Dumas examined in his short stories, many of which were collected in Ark of Bones, and Other Stories and Rope of Wind, and Other Stories (1979).

Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts movement, also called the Black Aesthetic movement, represented a literary advancement among African Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s. Based on the idea of African American nationalism, the crusade sought to cultivate art forms that champion African American separatism. Thus, the African American writer became an activist. Using the African American English vernacular, African American writers discoursed on concerns of interracial tension and politics. Highly confrontational, many of these writers utilized African American history and culture to illustrate their apprehensions and anger. Brought about by such intellectual leaders as Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Henry Louis Gates Jr., a trailblazing literary critic instrumental in recovering African American works such as Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadow Falls Even There (1859), the first known novel by a African American, the Black Arts movement developed theories of African American literature. Utilizing critical methods such as semiotics and deconstruction, Baker proposed new standards, based on African American culture and values, for the interpretation and evaluation of literature and reconstructed the historical, social, political, and economic elements of African American culture.

Gates’s edited collections of poetry and essays by African Americans, such as Douglass, Du Bois, Washington, Wright, and Ellison, brought attention to African American literary works and demonstrated the verve and vigor of African American culture and its intense desire to be heard. Tracing Caribbean and American culture back through slave narratives and folktales, Gates utilized fashionable critical theory to argue the term “signifyin’” as representative of African American culture. African American writers, he claimed, are involved in an unbroken, interconnected conversation that reflects and interprets African American social and cultural history. The inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon, Gates argues, cannot be ignored. Distinguished by intense self-scrutiny, the Black Arts movement was instrumental in producing such influential works as The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965; with Alex Haley) and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968). This movement highly influenced novelist Morrison, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Amiri Baraka, also known as LeRoi Jones, founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem and emerged as a powerful playwright. When it comes to recognizing the Black arts as a revolutionary concept, no African American writer better articulated the alliance of art and politics. Although the bulk of his art encompassed drama, Baraka also produced a collection of short stories, Tales (1967), which documents the traumatic experiences, suppressed anger, and hostility of African Americans toward the dominant White culture.

James Alan McPherson’s short stories examine love, universal pain, and racial tension. Often, his realistic characters face periods of isolation and the deep, longing pangs of love. Although it could be argued that McPherson’s stories represent the Black Arts movement, there is little doubt his timeless tales move far beyond politics by appealing to all classes and both genders. McPherson, strongly influenced by Ellison, addressed age, race, and class in his first short story, “Gold Coast,” for which he won a short fiction contest in The Atlantic in 1968. The story explores the relationship between Robert, a burgeoning African American writer and Harvard University student, and James Sullivan, the older White janitor who searches merely for human fellowship. A highly skilled and intricate writer, McPherson sensitively perceives human nature in all its myriad light and dark manifestations. Regarding his popular short-story collection Hue and Cry (1969), McPherson, born in Savannah, Georgia, remarked that “it is my hope that this collection of stories can be read as a book about people, all kinds of people: old, young, lonely, homosexual, confused, used, discarded, wronged.”

Despite being criticized during the revolutionary 1970s, McPherson was praised for his ability to see past the color line. In his “A Matter of Vocabulary,” the writer draws upon his personal experience as a grocery-store clerk. Similarly, in other stories he utilizes his own life experiences as a dining-car waiter, a law student, and a janitor for fictional fodder. His first collection of melancholy short stories, Hue and Cry, includes the title story about interracial relationships and “Solo Song: For Doc,” which examines the life of an elderly dining-car waiter, Doc Craft, whose blood runs with the “the rhythm of the wheels.” Never at “home on the ground,” when Doc is forced into retirement he does not know how to cope. Ultimately, he freezes to death in the Chicago train yards. The author puts the American justice system under the microscope in “An Act of Prostitution.” “On Trains” documents the life of a Pullman porter, a African American servant serving out his days on trains during the time of transition from train travel to airline travel in American life. After forty-three years, the elderly porter still serves in the capacity of making passengers comfortable. Throughout the night he sits and waits until one evening a sleepless racist southern woman finally engages his awareness. The title story’s protagonist Margot Payne, however, belongs to the younger generation of African Americans who refused to suffer quietly. McPherson’s literary talent was recognized in 1978 with a Pulitzer Prize for his Elbow Room (1977), which illustrates the author’s symmetrical division between dejection and hope. In twelve stories, McPherson explores the perplexity of individuality and diversity of American culture. In “A Loaf of Bread,” Nelson Reed and his neighbors picket Harold Green for his unfair practice of charging higher food prices to the African American community. While both men see themselves as good people, neither understands the other and thus look upon each other as evil enemies. In “Widows and Orphans,” McPherson attains a similar level of understanding between communities.

The short stories of Alice Walker are noted for their thoughtful and insightful treatment of African American culture. As in her highly popular The Color Purple (1982), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983, Walker’s work expresses with intense clarity the roles women play in the survival of the African American people. In this effort, she utilizes the history of African American people in the United States, particularly in the South, where they were heartlessly enslaved. Walker grew up in Georgia and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York, in 1965, at which point she moved to Mississippi, where she and her White Jewish husband, a lawyer, actively participated in the Civil Rights movement at a time when interracial marriages were illegal in Mississippi. She also began teaching and publishing short fiction. Her short stories examine the relationships between African American women and men and, while strongly engaging the deep spiritual tradition, center particularly on women. While African American men, Walker contends, have had to struggle with racism, African American women have to fight both racism and sexism. In 1973, the author published In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, her first collection of short stories. This collection introduces Roselily, an impoverished mother of illegitimate children, who views her marriage to a African American Muslim as a deliverance from poverty. Most of the female protagonists in this collection represent southern African American women who challenge gender, race, and age. Because of its focus on the violence involved in sexism, some critics came to view it as dissident.

Walker’s second collection of short stories, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981), her most outspoken feminist work, was also disliked by critics, who dismissed it as too controversial. In it, Walker addresses issues raised by feminists in the 1970s: abortion, sadomasochism, pornography, and rape, arguing that personal relationships reflect political issues. “Porn” examines the sexual relationship between a proud African American man and an independent African American woman who makes her own money. Walker explores how the male’s pornographic fantasies and his need to prove himself through his sexuality inhibit him from truly loving and accepting the woman. When the woman realizes his dependence on pornography and the shallowness of their connection, their relationship is destroyed. Walker presents the stories in this collection as an ongoing process; they are not finished pieces. For example, “Advancing Luna” is a tale concerning a young southern woman’s involvement in and her deepening understanding of interracial rape. The author maintains that, because of the historical alliance between lynching and rape, the story cannot be ended and thus Walker stylistically provides the tale with two conclusions. Although very different from In Love and Trouble, her second, more complex collection, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, supports the Black Arts movement’s impulse and establishes with certainty the freedom with which women pursue their individual selves. While the primary female characters in In Love and Trouble carry on and strive, the women in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down are more heroic by intensely and openly confronting societal conventions.

In 2000, Walker published her thirteen-story collection The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. The need to love and be loved, despite the pain and the suffering one risks each time one loves, is the main theme in the book. It contains autobiographical overtones; for instance, Walker’s marriage is the subject of “To My Young Husband.” Walker wonders in a diary entry how their ten-year marriage ended up with their being virtual strangers. Their interracial marriage transcends the personal and becomes charged with political issues, resonant of questions about whether the nation can successfully be multicultural and multiracial. The protagonist of the collection begins compiling her family’s stories when she goes back home to the South for her grandfather’s funeral. She faces the criticism of and even downright opposition of many of her relatives, who believe that she is snooping or disloyally robbing them, as “Kindred Spirits” illustrates. Orelia and John are the protagonists of several stories in the volume. In “Olive Oil,” Orelia must give up her suspicions that her husband is cheating on her and learn to trust him. In “Cuddling,” Orelia feels attracted to another man. In “Charms,” the reader learns the reason behind Orelia’s distrusting John—once he had an affair. In “The Brotherhood of the Saved,” a lesbian woman tries to get closer to her fanatically religious mother.

Twentieth Century African American Women Writers

Women have from the beginning played a primary role in the growth of African American short fiction. In fact, more works of fiction by African American women were published between 1890 and 1910 than African American men had published in the previous fifty years. With the exception of Harper’s tale “The Two Offers,” no short story by an African American woman appeared in print before 1895, when, at last, voices so long stifled were heard. In the outpouring of proud stories that followed, African American women shared their experiences, smashed stereotypes, and recorded the untold story of African American life. African American literature further blossomed, with African American women at the forefront as writers. Besides such immensely popular, award-winning novelists as Walker and Morrison, female short-story writers continue to proliferate. For African American women, storytelling between mothers and daughters, daughters and sisters, sisters and friends is what Marshall metaphorically calls the “kitchen” of everyday experience in a world oblivious to African American women’s lives. As Walker observed, the woman one shares one’s story with as it is happening is someone who is trusted implicitly. African American female short-fiction writers demonstrate how they survived by listening and telling.

Alice Childress, a high school dropout, developed her distinct writing style by breaking rules. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Childress was taken to New York at the age of five. An actor and director, the burgeoning author was a director of the American Negro Theatre (1914-1952). In fact, she won a Tony Award for her Broadway role in Anna Lucasta (1944) and became the first woman to win an Obie Award for best Off-Broadway play. Childress creates accurate depictions of African American life and rejects stereotypes, especially that African American women are responsible for the problems of African American men. “The Black writer explains pain to those who inflict it,” she maintains. Best known for her novel directed at teenagers, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1978), she also gained much positive acclaim for her short-story collection Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (1956), a series of vignettes told from the African American domestic’s point of view. The protagonist Mildred, a dayworker based on Childress’s Aunt Lorraine, refuses “to exchange dignity for pay,” as she quietly battles for human dignity and civil rights. Although others consider her job menial, she heroically declines to be debased.

As a civil rights activist and teacher, Toni Cade Bambara wrote about the concerns of the African American community while attempting to raise African American consciousness. Born Miltona Mirkin Cade in New York City, Bambara published her first short story, “Sweet Town,” in Vendome magazine in 1959, as Toni Cade. She adopted the name Bambara in 1970 when she discovered it as a signature on a family sketchbook. The author worked as a social worker for the Harlem Welfare Center in 1959 and 1960. In the 1960s, she was directly involved in the sociopolitical activities in American urban communities. She published her second story, “Mississippi Ham Rider,” in 1960 in the distinguished Massachusetts Review. After receiving her master’s degree, Bambara taught at the City College of New York from 1965 to 1969. Active during the 1970s in the African American liberation and the women’s rights movements, the writer submerged herself in civil rights issues by lecturing and helping to organize rallies within the African American community, all the while utilizing her personal experiences in her writing. In 1970, she edited and published The Black Woman, an anthology designed to demonstrate the thoughts and actions of African American women in the women’s and Civil Rights movements. In 1971, Bambara edited her second anthology, Tales and Stories for Black Folks, in which is included her own acclaimed “Raymond’s Run.” The author, who interjects African American street dialect in her short fiction to create strong characters, set her stories outside the home, where people are apt to mingle, and in both the South and the North. Most of the stories Bambara wrote as Toni Cade between 1959 and 1970 were published in 1972 in her highly acclaimed collection Gorilla, My Love. The stories focus on the relationships among African Americans in both the urban North and the rural South. The title story, narrated by young Hazel, completely dissatisfied with grown-ups, describes the impact that careless adult words, particularly promises that cannot be kept, have on innocent children. In “Talkin’ ‘Bout Sonny,” the author focuses on the coping mechanisms males utilize to maintain emotional equilibrium. Betty Butler, a social worker, dates Delauney, the father of two girls. At a local bar, Betty and Delauney discuss how their friend Sonny, while in a state of emotional collapse, stabbed his wife. Betty, appalled at first by Delauney’s casual attitude, comes to realize how both men must work hard to repress and contain their sensation of free-floating rage. Delauney fully realizes that although he can understand Sonny, his own anger keeps him powerless.

Jamaica Kincaid was born in Antigua, in the West Indies. Finding her college experience to be a “dismal failure,” the independent-minded Kincaid set about educating herself. Her early stories were published in Rolling Stone, Paris Review, and The New Yorker. Her first short-story collection, At the Bottom of the River (1983), which won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, features the much-anthologized, exceptional story “Girl.” Although on the surface the story reads principally like a list of rules any good mother would provide a daughter: “Don’t walk barehead in the hot sun,” the story also depicts maternal caution and counsel, particularly in the sexual arena. Much in keeping with the modernist movement, in which writers such as James Joyce redefined the borders and possibilities of the short-story form, this rhythmic, emotionally intense story details a young woman’s life in a free-floating narrative without a conventional plot, characters, or dialogue. Kincaid’s next “sister text” collection, Annie John (1985), contains eight stories that span Annie’s childhood in Antigua to age seventeen. The poignant “The Circling Hand,” portrays the author’s theme of mother-child relationships. As a child, Annie trails her mother shopping, doing laundry, and cooking and experiences great anxiety when she wanders outside her mother’s sphere. Ultimately, in the final chapter, Annie leaves her mother and home to take up nursing in England.

J. California Cooper wrote short fiction, novels, and plays. She chose California as her pen name for her native state and in homage to Tennessee Williams, her favorite playwright. A private person, almost reclusive, she repeatedly denied that there is any autobiographical hint in her work, claiming that it is 100 percent fiction. Her first short-story collection, A Piece of Mine, was published in 1984. The protagonist of “One Hundred Dollars and Nothing!” is a man who belittles the achievements of his disabled wife, telling her that he could do better than her with one hundred dollars and nothing else; eventually, the wife dies, leaving him one hundred dollars and nothing else.

Cooper’s stories are often written in monologue form, a woman character telling the life of a woman friend. For some critics, this makes her narrators almost undistinguishable. Common themes in her stories are women looking for love, the celebration of the individual, moral and religious values, evil, struggle, and suffering. Homemade Love (1986) won the American Book Award. In “Without Love,” the narrator tells the story of her childhood friend Totsy, who turns to sex as a substitute for the love her alcoholic mother does not give her and becomes a teenage single mother. Her life is contrasted with that of the narrator, who gets married and works hard to become middle class. Some Soul to Keep (1987) is a five-story collection centered on love, heartbreak and survival. Cooper's other collections include The Matter Is Life (1991), Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime (1995), The Future Has a Past (2000), and Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns (2006).

Twenty-first Century Black American Voices

Like Cooper, many Black American writers who rose to prominence in the late twentieth century remained important literary voices into the twenty-first century. John Edgar Wideman was born in 1941; though a native of Washington DC, he was raised in Pittsburgh, the setting for most of his fiction. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University. He published several short story collections, including Damballah (1981), Fever (1989), The Stories of John Edgar Wideman (1992; later published as All Stories Are True), God’s Gym (2005), and Briefs (2010), a collection of microstories. Wideman became the first writer to be twice awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His numerous other awards include the Rea Award, the American Book Award for Fiction, St. Botolph Literary Award, the DuSable Museum Prize for Nonfiction, the Longwood College Medal for Literary Excellence, and the National Magazine Editors’ Prize for Short Fiction. At the time his first novel was published, most prominent African American voices were advocating for a Black Arts movement, but Wideman rejected this to put his art at the service of political goals.

Damballah is the first volume in Wideman's Homewood Trilogy (the two other volumes are novels), and it examines the lives of the descendants of Sybela Owens, a slave who fled north with her White husband. It reads like a series of letters to Tommy, an alter ego for Wideman’s brother, who was serving a life sentence. The twelve stories in Fever reflect violence, racial problems and identity issues. The Stories of John Edgar Wideman is largely autobiographical. Memories, family histories and storytelling are the main themes. God’s Gym is a collection of ten stories. In “Hunters,” an African American couple is killed by a White gang. In “Are Dreams Faster Than the Speed of Light,” a dying man’s thoughts are compiled through the stream-of-consciousness technique. In “Weight,” the narrator describes his mother’s strength: She is a weightlifter, not at gym but with the burdens life has given her in God’s gym. Interested in chronicling the social and economic inequality experienced by African Americans, Wideman explores in his fiction the difficulties faced by African Americans in achieving positions of power and the sacrifices that those who succeed have to make. Autobiographical elements are often found in his stories, many of which are set in Homewood, the neighborhood in which he grew up.

Edwidge Danticat, born in Haiti, moved to the United States at twelve. She is primarily known as a novelist, but her stories have been acclaimed critically. Her collection Krik? Krak! (1995), recipient of numerous awards, explores the hard lives that Haitians live both in their native country and abroad, suffering the hardships of immigrant life. Because of her boldness in approaching controversial and difficult subjects, Danticat has been compared to Walker. Krik? Krak! contains nine stories and an epilogue, all of them exploring suffering and how the protagonists cope with it, despite their different backgrounds and lives. The collection celebrates individuality and personal reactions to the hardships they experience. In “1937,” a woman is accused of witchcraft. “Children of the Sea” focuses on the Haitians who flee to Florida in small boats; the story collects the letters that a couple send to each other, although none is received. The epilogue, “Women Like Us,” explores the connection between the narrator and her female ancestors.

Danticat’s story “Ghosts,” published in The New Yorker in November 2008, is set in Haiti. “Ghosts” is the name of the radio-show project that the protagonist, Pascal Dorien, has in mind. In it, gang members, such as the ones who frequent his parents’ restaurant, would talk with members of the community to work out their differences. However, his boss steals the idea. The gang, aware that it was Dorien’s idea, goes to the radio station and shoots several people, blaming Dorien, who is arrested. It is eventually the lawyer hired by Dorien’s immigrant brother in Canada and the gang leader’s word that save Dorien. “Ghosts” deals with the corruption of the police and the legal system; drugs; young people’s involvement in gangs; the degradation of the lower classes because of violence, crime, drug dealing, and drug abuse; the loss of Haitian traditions; the pervasiveness of death and violence in Haitian society; and the pain of dislocation experienced by Haitian immigrants to North America, who are pursuing a better life and more opportunities and in the process breaking apart their families.

Thomas Glave, the son of Jamaican immigrants, spent his childhood between the Bronx and Jamaica. An associate professor of creative writing and Caribbean literature, Glave received numerous scholarships and prizes, such as the O. Henry Prize, a Fine Arts Center in Provincetown Fellowship, two Lambda Literary Awards, and a Fulbright Fellowship. As in the works of Baldwin and Wright, race and sexuality are two main themes in Glave’s literary production. Other topics are the cruelties of war, homophobia and violence against gay people, eroticism, and mental trauma. Committed to making Caribbean literature more accessible, he edited Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (2008).

Whose Song?, and Other Stories (2000) deals with many of Glave’s perennial topics. In “Commitment,” two young African American men’s romantic relationship is put to an end because of the death threats issued by the father of one of them. “—And Love Them?” deals with racism and the difficult feelings of a White woman for Black people. The Torturer’s Wife (2008) deals with war-related topics, such as genocide and invasion. Secrets are plenty, including the protagonists’ names, which more often than not are unrevealed. In “The Torturer’s Wife,” the unnamed protagonist, She, is plagued by frequent nightmares in which body parts rain on her house since she learned of her husband’s war crimes. “Between” shows two gay men whose racism is challenged by an interracial relationship.

Another winner of the O. Henry Prize was Edward P. Jones, who earned the honor in 2006 for his 2004 short story "Old Boys, Old Girls." His best-known collections are Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar's Children (2006), which deal with working-class Black life in Washington, DC. Jones also earned attention for his long fiction, winning the Pulitzer Prize with his novel The Known World (2003). Other prominent Black American novelists, such as Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, and James McBride also occasionally published short fiction in 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. A notable trend was increased attention to Black authors of genre fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy; among the most successful was N. K. Jemisin, who published many short stories along with critically acclaimed novels.

As compared to the novel, the short story form receives much less critical notice, and much of the criticism it garners deals with techniques of writing rather than serious criticism of the literary work. However, for many readers, the short story, which often can be read in under an hour, represents a powerful, life-changing literary method that initiates and completes catharsis. The short story as a form is open-ended, ever-changing, and continuously vigorous. The new African American authors using the short story to convey their experiences and literary voices testify to the endurance of the genre and speak to the permanence and vitality of the short story in African American letters in years to come.

Bibliography

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