African-American storytellers are finally having their say. More books by, for and about black people are available now than during any past decade of my life. Fantasy. Christian fiction. Self-help. History. Potboilers. Adventure travel. Memoirs. Science. Love, and -- oh -- careless lovemaking, in all its brown-skinned beauty.
This news is of interest not just to African-American readers and dollar-hungry booksellers and publishers, but to thoughtful readers of every stripe who explore culture through the written word. Many in literary circles are trying to assess what fuels this hot '90s market, and how to stoke the flame. They struggle to name it: It is a boom. An explosion. A deluge.
I have witnessed two great explosions of African-American authorship. The protest drumbeat of the 1960s filled my childhood, when Black became Beautiful. I came of age during the 1970s, when writing women dared -- in flashes of brilliance.
The 30 years since have ushered into print more black authors than were published during all the preceding 70 years, according to the editors of the "Norton Anthology of African-American Literature" (Henry Louis Gates Jr., et al. W. W. Norton, 2,665 pages, $53).
The '90s will be remembered for another kind of revival. Many in the book industry trace it to June 1992. That month, Terry McMillan ("Waiting to Exhale"), Toni Morrison ("Jazz"), and Alice Walker ("Possessing the Secret of Joy") soared together on the New York Times best seller list. What happened next in the publishing world was a feeding frenzy: Black became Bankable.
Just don't call it a literary revival. This is not the new Harlem Renaissance. I am still waiting for the next heyday of black bards and catalysts and radical thinkers. I am still waiting for breakthrough books to seize the contradictions of our time and lay them bare with arresting clarity.
Fortunately, there is plenty to read while I am waiting.
"This is the first time in history that African-Americans are permitted to read about themselves in a vast number of ways -- to see ourselves as people who love each other, and live interesting lives, or even who eat a certain way," says Faye Childs. "We have more to choose from than ever before -- books about people who live and love and romance each other as we do."
Childs, an author, nudged the burgeoning market from her office in Columbus, Ohio, in July 1991. She founded a best seller list of books by black authors. Today, her list appears in Publisher's Weekly and Essence magazine.
Today, the list has cachet: "# 1 Blackboard Bestseller" shouts the new trade paperback cover of Colin Channer's debut novel about love, "Waiting in Vain" (One World, 346 pages, $17.95).
"I don't think there is a parallel to this time," says W. Paul Coates, founder of Black Classic Press, the Baltimore publisher of rediscovered cultural works. To him, the black-interest book market is beyond deep and wide. It is at flood stage.
"You have an oversaturated market," he says.
It is small, but lively. Ken Smikle of Chicago-based Target Market News, a frequently quoted analyst of black buying power, estimates that African-Americans spend $290 million a year on books. That's a little more than 1 percent of the $23 billion in American book sales in 1998.
What's for sale? Keyword African-American in Amazon.com turned up 450 titles. Category search "People of Color" culled more than 1,000. A more comprehensive selection of thousands of books waits on the shelves in Baltimore at Everyone's Place, an African-American bookstore -- one of at least five in the metro area. Meanwhile, black book catalogs are sprouting on the Internet.
"I have stepped in to fill a void," said Joseph A. Phelps. His five books and on-line African-American Bookshelf showcase blacks in the military (www.japhelps.com).
He is on the front lines of writers who have carved out niches within the niche. Some genres affected include novels and relationship fiction; self-help and spiritual guidance; history/slavery; and the family bookshelf. A good example in the last category is "The Black Parenting Book: Caring for Our Children in the First Five Years," (Anne C. Beal, M.D., et al. Broadway Books, $20, 416 pages, paper), which tells how to explain racism to children.
"Today's literature reflects the economic and social progress wrought from Malcolm, Martin, urban unrest, open-door policies and affirmative action," writes Max Rodriguez, in "Sacred Fire: The QBR 100 Essential Black Books" (John Wiley and Sons, 256 pages, $22.97).
"Accommodation and demand, protest and personal introspection mark this current period of African-American literature."
(QBR is the Quarterly Black Review -- the older of two book review journals on the market. The newcomer is the glossy Black Issues Book Review, launched this spring by the publishers of the journal Black Issues in Higher Education.)
Many of these books are first novels, and many are products of self-publishing and small publishing houses. These books vary in quality from the very finest to amateurish. Many live or die by word of mouth promotion, sister to sister, brother to brother. Still, readers are not finding all they want on African-American themes.
"From my personal standpoint, we need more books that are going to help the quality of our lives," says Denise Wright, owner of Essence of Thoughts bookstore on Washington Boulevard in Baltimore. "There need to be more true-to-life stories that show "how I made it" -- those hope stories that tell you to hang on when the times are rough. And where are our local authors? I think the [Iyanla] Vanzants and the Susan Taylors are great but the local authors also have stories to tell."
Also, despite some progress, publishers still cater primarily to women. A recent cover story in Black Issues Book Review tracked down men's book clubs, authors of thrillers that feature African-American leading men, and dozens of book-buying guys. They have the education, disposable income and time to read and they are waiting for their turn.
"Everybody thinks those folks who use country, down-home sayings and are always getting into trouble are interesting reading," said Dan Holly, a Raleigh, N.C., newspaperman and first-time novelist. "But that doesn't relate to normal, ordinary middle-class lives."
Holly's novel, "Sometimes You Get the Bear" (August Press, 360 pages, $14), is a semi-autobiographical tale of two African-American brothers. One is a successful professional. One is an addict.
Holly tried to attract mainstream publishers, and grew frustrated at the negative response. So he took his novel to a small, black-owned publishing house. The first run was 3,000 copies. Word of mouth has propelled the novel up the East Coast.
Now book agents are offering to pitch it to Hollywood -- if he will rewrite it with a white character in the lead.
Holly's experience raises many of the questions debated in African-American literary circles as the market for these books evolves.
Will provocative or critical or controversial voices pass through the filters of agents and editors and marketing gurus? Or will they be cut out, toned down or shushed up -- so as not to interrupt the commercially viable love stories?
Will the mainstream publishing industry hire more African-American book editors and executives? A 1996 federal survey, still widely quoted, found only 3.4 percent of book editors were African-American.
Will African-American publishers and booksellers survive the competition to ensure a future place for alternative and outside voices?
Most importantly: From among the hundreds of writers now able to get into print via the mainstream or the small publishers, will a literary vanguard emerge?
To fulfill its potential, African-American literature "must be careless as to what the white critic might think of it," as was written by William Stanley Braithwaite in a 1924 essay reprinted this year in "The Crisis Reader: Stories, Poetry and Essays from the N.A.A.C.P.'s Crisis Magazine" (Sondra Kathryn Wilson, editor, Random House, 422 pages, $14.95).
Literature, like any art form, is a vessel into which a culture pours a legacy to leave for future generations. It must be honest and harsh and unfettered to play its role in the advancement of society and the inheritance of memory.
I'm hoping that what I've witnessed in the '90s is the adolescence of a new African-American book market. I'm hoping the best is yet to come.
Jean Thompson is The Sun's assistant managing editor for staff development. She has been a reporter at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the Hartford Courant and -- for 11 years -- The Sun. She collects papers and photographs about African-American history.
Pub Date: 07/25/99