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South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature

College Literature, Winter 2005 by Williams, Jessica

Harris-Lopez, Trudier. 2002. South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press. $24.95hc. xv + 230 pp.

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Once again Trudier Harris-Lopez lives up to her reputation of offering insightful and unlikely interpretations of African American literature. Indeed, she does "go south" in South of Tradition by offering inventive concepts that cleverly challenge the more traditional approaches to reading numerous African American literary works, both southern and not. Harris-Lopez's purpose is clear in the title: to investigate the ways that "geography" (as an African American coming from a history of Southern culture and politics) shapes identity, as well as to offer readings that are just "below the line of what would be considered the norm" (viii). As promised, she takes readers on a journey "along one scholar's divergent pathway from the mainstream of interpretations of these authors and texts" (viii). This collection of previously unpublished essays focuses on works spanning several decades and locales of the twentieth century, ranging from Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on the Road (1942) to Brent Wade's Company Man (1992). What makes this collection so compelling is the investigation into the social and political values of the South that inform each piece. With unlikely comparisons and interesting textual readings, Harris-Lopez explores the culture, language, and folklore of African American literature as she exposes its underlying operatives. All of the essays employ constructs of sexuality, architecture, religion, or culture that are often unique to the South to explain the motivation of particular characters within each literary work.

The book opens with an essay on The Color Purple (1982) written in an attempt to find humor and strength in a novel that seems, to Harris-Lopez, to offer only pain. Harris-Lopez offers a reading of Celia, Sofia, and Harpo that identifies the humor and lightheartedness in the novel that may be difficult for some readers to locate. In fact, she attaches her ability to find humor in this novel of pain to "the duality in the African American worldview-the belief that humor can lie at the heart of pain" (17). In chapter two she explores Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1953) in an entirely different light. With a look at racial and sexual identity through the use of color imagery, HarrisLopez concludes that the main character, David, is neither redeemed nor affirmed in his sexuality and compares his feelings of disgust at being homosexual with that of being Black. David's relationship with Giovanni is a metaphor for a kind of master/slave relationship, and when David is with Giovanni he makes his descent into the "black 'cavern'" of his sexuality. "New Invisible Man" introduces another character with a racial identity crisis, Brent Wade's Billy Covington in Company Man. With intriguing, and perhaps unexpected, parallels to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), HarrisLopez argues that Company Man is a modern day, recurring struggle, essentially identical to that of Ellison's character. Plagued with issues of self and race, Billy reminds readers that a battle with race and identity continues.

Zora Neale Hurston, like Billy Covington, also fights her own battles of identity as an African American female writer in Dust Tracks on the Road. In "Zapping the Editor, Or How to Tell Censors to Kiss Off without Really Trying," Harris-Lopez contends that Hurston breaks with form to protest the fact that she is made to write an autobiography that otherwise may not have been written and that was obviously not as successful as Hurston's other works. Harris-Lopez makes a strong case for rereading Hurston's autobiography with a more open mind, one that considers Hurston's authorial choices. Harris-Lopez seems to be saying that Hurston's inability to refuse writing the autobiography is countered with non-autobiographical form and distinctive, yet not stereotypical, Black qualities of her character and others. Furthermore, as a form of revolt, Hurston incorporates characters who resemble the publisher and editors who forced her into a work she wasn't ready to write. It is these mythic characters of Hurston's work in Dust Tracks that argue the standard response that she simply wrote a poor piece of literature.

Although the essays are linked by a variety of topics-racial and sexual identity, Christianity, folk and cultural traditions-one thread is especially noteworthy: an acute understanding and strong attachment to magic, folklore, and mythical creation within the culture of the novels and their characters. Indeed, the latter half of South of Tradition contains essays that rely heavily on a discussion of myth and folklore in the characters of each work analyzed.

Harris-Lopez's fifth chapter seems to act as a sort of transition into the latter half of the book, building a bridge between Hurston's autobiography of her life in Eatonville and Raymond Andrews's mythical place, Appalachee. Harris-Lopez challenges expectation and thought with her reading of Ann Petry's The Street (1942) when she argues that the geography of the buildings and of the women's bodies determines their destinies. One chapter in particular makes a case that the creation of a mythical place and setting within a southern novel, much like that of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, offers a "space where the real gives way to the possible" in African American culture (95). "Necessary Binding" recognizes that the characters of August Wilson's plays all have a history or experience with prison and that furthermore, those experiences with confinement and prison shape their perceptions and actions. The use of a physical manifestation of place takes HarrisLopez's work "south of tradition" and offers a non-traditional look at the work of a variety of authors: Petry, Hurston, Andrews, Ellison, and Walker.

South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature

College Literature, Winter 2005 by Williams, Jessica

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