African American women writers of the 1980s were arguably the beneficiaries of cultural and political phenomena that held sway during the 1970s and 1980s.One of the major tenets and accomplishments of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s was the validation of Black voices that came from within Black communities, drew upon the culture of Black communities -- especially the use of music and the vernacular -- and posited the validity, reality, and truth of that culture.Black women writersof the 1980s provide a logical progression from those communal assertions of value and freedom to extending the possibilities for such expression.This chapter considers the contributions of writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, Octavia Butler, Gloria Nayor, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison as writers who extend and liberate creative and cultural possibilities initiated in earlier decades.

Throughout its tenure on United States soil, African American literature has reflected a combination of History written with a capital “H” and history written in the lower case of everyday folk, that is, the masses of unlettered black folks for whom orality was the primary mode of cultural conveyance. Given the fact that many enslaved Africans were not allowed to learn to read and write, indeed that many states had laws forbidding such learning, it is not surprising that vibrant oral traditions developed among those who suffered through American bondage. Moreover, as Chapter 1 in this volume suggests, indigenous Africans derived from equally rich oral cultures on which they were forced to rely and upon which they could build. The space of oral narrative and folk arts and crafts became as much a part of African American history as academy-derived accounts of enslavement. From this perspective, African American folk traditions, both oral and those deriving from their interactions with the physical culture – such as quilting and basket-making – provide as much of the truth, that is, the history, of African American lives as any researched study. We can therefore speak of the factual history of oral tradition as persuasively as we speak of the factual History of researched/recorded/written traditions. As a people given to orality because of their circumstances in America, African Americans are thus heirs to dual histories, so to speak – that for the ear and that for the eye. When such orality influences written texts, it becomes eye for the ear while more fact-based Historical materials remain eye for the eye.

Background and Composition

GO Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin's first novel, was published in 1953. It had a long and extensive history of composition, extending across two continents and at least three countries. Baldwin had conceived the idea for the novel in the early 1940s, when he was about seventeen. He would write and rewrite it over the next ten years. An autobiographical composition, the novel takes its subject matter from the troubled relationship between Baldwin and his stepfather, David Baldwin. Little Jimmy was almost three years old in 1927 when his mother, Emma Burdis Jones, married David Baldwin, who legitimized his existence by adopting him. But the legal embrace did not mirror an emotional embrace. A history of racism and religion informed David's interactions with his adopted stepson. The elder Baldwin had come to Harlem from Louisiana, where he had been a preacher. Having less status, but being no less devout in Harlem, he held his family to strict interpretations of biblical texts. Wives were to be obedient and children were to be helpful but invisible; neither was to challenge the authority of the father who, following biblical injunction, was head of his household.

David Baldwin frequently took out his frustrations on the young Jimmy. He considered his stepson ugly and remarked that James had the mark of the devil on him. James's successes at school, which earned him the approval and applause of his white teachers, only exacerbated David.

THE black women Richard Wright depicts in Native Son (1940) are portrayed as being in league with the oppressors of black men. Wright sets up an opposition in the novel between the native and the foreign, between the American Dream and American ideals in the abstract and Afro-Americans trying to find their place among those ideals, between Bigger as a representative of something larger and freer, indeed more American, than the limitations of the black community and the black women as representatives of a culture and a way of life that would stifle such aspirations. Wright thereby creates a paradoxical position for the black women in the novel. By preaching subservience, especially in the acceptance of and training for menial jobs, the women act in ways that are antithetical or “foreign” to individual black development, but commensurate with or “native” to what whites want for blacks. The women provide a contrast to Bigger, who, in his desire to break out of the confines of racism, adheres to American individualism: in his most idealistic conception, he is “native” to the best of American traditions and “foreign” to Afro-American subservience. While the dichotomy between native and foreign might be oppositional, it is one that serves, from the women's point of view, to support the status quo.