MAINSTREAM, SHE WROTE : From Footnote to Nobel Prize, Black Writers Share in Toni Morrison’s Triumph

Gather into the mind Over a hundred years of a people Toiling against climate Working against prejudice Growing within an alien framework Cramped, but stretching its limbs And staring against the sun. --A.J. Seymour

At last! Goshdarnit!”

When Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature last fall, I greeted the news with mixed emotions, plus a little envy. But any ruefulness on my part was overshadowed by a grudging satisfaction. That an African American woman had finally won a Nobel Prize was more important than how.

“It was no surprise to me,” said Linda Hughes, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of International Black Writers & Artists. “I take it for granted that many of our people are worthy, but aren’t always recognized as such.”

The voices that are great within us have, by necessity, fought to keep from being stilled--some, like James Weldon Johnson, sublimating blues idiom and the vernacular. Others, like Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes and Melvin Tolson, reclaimed and transliterated black modes of expression. The struggle for recognition has been particularly nasty for American writers of African descent since before Phillis Wheatley, making the formation of groups such as IBWA a propitious inevitability.

While there’s been significant improvement in the past 30 years, the number of African American writers of international prominence can still be counted on two hands and a couple of toes. Regardless of style, region, class, gender or genre, the majority of today’s authors of color remain handicapped by prejudice, educational institutions that dole out information as if it were Krugerrands and the arrogant indifference of a publishing establishment that condescends to recognize black authors only when sociopolitical circumstances, like urban riots, dictate we no longer be ignored.

C. Jerome Woods, editor of IBWA’s forthcoming 1994 anthology, believes that Morrison’s gain is a gain for all black writers but that “as far as I’m concerned, it’s just another drop in the bucket.”

Black literati have monitored the Nobel Prizes (presented since 1901) as well as the Pulitzer and other awards, proclaiming any black recipient a splendid representative and thus justification for demands for equality. Individual accomplishment fuels group pride, despite those who insist they’ve pulled themselves up by their own well-worn bootstraps. For example, I recall little about Ralph Bunche except that he received the Peace Prize in 1950--a fact religiously drummed into me by every Negro elementary and secondary schoolteacher I had. General knowledge of his diplomatic achievement “regardless of race, creed or color” has dimmed. That he, a black man, had won the prize at all always transcended why.

“The mainstream is finally letting us in,” said Ken Wibecan, a longstanding IBWA member, journalist and jazz critic. “It’s always been a source of irritation to me that ‘Great Books’ has ignored black authors.” “Great Books of the Western World” editor Mortimer J. Adler’s standard of cultural excellence excludes W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. And Toni Morrison.

“Winning as an American is very special, but winning as a black American is a knockout,” Morrison said after the announcement of her $837,000 prize. “Most important, my mother is alive to share this delight with me.... It’s not a narrow, personal, subjective delight. I feel it on a very large scale ... I feel like it’s shared among us.”

I give you jewels and crowns for your velurial hair And rings for your ebony hands. I give you the Kings of Benin at your feet And lands to the rim of the world. --Alice H. Jones