Modern Black Novelists [antikvár]

Introduction by M. G. Cooke The very thing that makes it imperative to come to a clear understanding of the condition of black people in America and abroad also makes it hard even to get a clear image. For that condition is markedly changing. Changing, first, from an enforced and confused uniformity to a complex identity in as well as with the group. Thus Addison Gayle, Jr., can write about the "black situation" but properly confesses that he speaks infallibly only for himself and insists that no one else speaks reliably for him.i changing also from a tight subjection (the back of the bus or the hand) to a surging, searching kinesis ("right on!") or a defiant and self-inspiring slogan ("black is beautiful"). Changing, again, in that the black person is less and less imposed upon by "scientific" evaluations and religious or sociological "laws" that supposedly govern his behavior and experience, on the grounds that these lack the moving spirit of human understanding, or "soul." Of course, the importance of "soul" lies partly in its resistance to an unnatural separation of our sympathetic life from the powers of analysis and in its putting the living community of man above the temptations of ego and institutional power. Finally, the condition of black people is changing, most importantly —though perhaps least obviously—in the way it now, after looking for so long like a strange and singular visitation, is coming more and more to seem central and prophetic. The scapegoat has turned into the bellwether, or, if that seems too idyllic all of a sudden, into the weathercock that tells which way the wind is blowing. "The Negro," as Richard Wright observed, "is America's metaphor." The elimination of the principle of the scapegoat, because this principle gives an easy psychic expiation and enrichment as well as material gain through the removal of a curse and the restoration of a bounty, is not simply or swiftly achieved, and remains incomplete. It is, in terms of politics, psychology, and social history, too complex a phenomenon to go into here, yet some of its features can be discerned in the literature on which this collection of critical essays centers. The ^Addison Gayle, Jr., The Black Situation (New York: Horizon Press, 1970). 1