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BLACK WRITING                      
HAIRSTON

whom freedom-loving Pilgrim settlers promptly reduced to a slave was depicted in Southern literature as he was treated in real life, as a mortal too deficient in human qualities to deserve moral consideration. Thus mainstream literature legitimized the inhumanity of portraying man as a nigger! William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner provides a singular example of how racism has poisoned the mainstream of American literature and criticism. A novel which sought to discredit a remarkable slave's organized revolt against slavery was hailed as a masterpiece. Blessed with a full complement of the peculiarities in the Negro character, Styron's Nat Turner despises his fellow slaves, lives a celibate life but indulges wild fantasies of having a white woman, while having homosexual tendencies into the bargain. To make sure he put this legendary nigger in his proper historical place, Styron dragged in Freudian psychology to validate his racism.

One marvels at the arrogance of the literary establishment, at its cynical disregard for truth and fairness, at its morbid devotion to myths of lily-white virtue. But by his social origins the black writer threatens the tranquility of such puerile fantasizing. Consequently his work is rejected because he dredges up too many skeletons from the riverbed of the American tradition; too many barbarities from the undertow of transcendental purity. For whose words more eloquently detailed the "grand aggregation of human horrors" of American slavery than those of Frederick Douglass? Whose writings more exhaustively examined the contradictions in our social system than those of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois? Moreover, could the social criticism implicit in the writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, et al have been depicted by white authors-writers ignorant of the ways of black folk on the one hand and unwilling to condemn the bigotry of American society on the other? In fidelity to historical truth do novels like Styron's Nat Turner begin to compare with Margaret Walker's powerful antebellum/Civil War novel, Jubilee, as serious literature?

By isolating black writing from the body of mainstream literature, the literary establishment implies that writing depicting aspects of American life from a black perspective is not authentic American literature; that Langston Hughes was less an American poet than Robert Frost; that Chester Himes writes about "Negro" life not about America; that stories written exclusively about black people are not "universal" enough to deserve critical attention. Such presumptions are as preposterous as they are arrogant. They are made

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