Southern literature is often celebrated for its "told," rather than
"written," qualities. Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch
storytelling among family, friends, and neighbors, Trudier Harris
looks across the generations of twentieth-century southern writers
to focus on three African Americans who possess the "power of the
porch." In ways that are highly individual, says Harris, yet still
within a shared oral tradition, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor,
and Randall Kenan skillfully use storytelling techniques to define
their audiences, reach out and draw them in, and fill them with
anticipation. Considering how such dynamics come into play in
Hurston's Mules and Men, Naylor's Mama Day, and Kenan's Let the
Dead Bury Their Dead, Harris shows how the "power of the porch"
resides in readers as well, who, in giving themselves over to a
story, confer it on the writer. Against this background of give and
take, anticipation and fulfillment, Harris considers Zora Neale
Hurston's special challenges as a black woman writer in the
thirties, and how her various roles as an anthropologist,
folklorist, and novelist intermingle in her work. In Gloria
Naylor's writing, Harris finds particularly satisfying themes and
characters. A New York native, Naylor came to a knowledge of the
South through her parents and during her stay on the Sea Islands
while she wrote Mama Day. A southerner by birth, Randall Kenan is
particularly adept in getting his readers to accept aspects of
African American culture that their rational minds might have
wanted to reject. Although Kenan is set apart from Hurston and
Naylor by his alliances with a new generation of writers intent
upon broaching certain taboo subjects (in his case gay life in
small southern towns), Kenan's Time Creek is as rife with the
otherworldly and the fantastic as Hurston's New Orleans and
Naylor's Willow Springs. The back and forth, the presentation and
response of porch sitters and porch watchers, says Harris, is a
power wielded skillfully by the best black storytellers of the
South. Through tales of Brer Rabbit, John and Ole Marster, dog
ghosts and other revenants, they have established and perpetuated
an oral tradition that in turn shapes both the creation and
enjoyment of the written word.
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