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American Literature 73.3 (2001) 661-662



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Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin. By Deborah McDowell. New York: Norton. 1996. 364 pp. Paper, $13.00.
Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography. By Robert B. Stepto. Boston: Beacon Press. 1998. 204 pp. Cloth, $23.00; paper, $14.00.

Henry Louis Gates’s memoir Colored People (1994) precedes Deborah McDowell’s Leaving Pipe Shop and Robert Stepto’s Blue as the Lake, but all three are written by African American English professors who have become scholars of prominence. The Gates volume is (arguably) more a “how I got to where I am” narrative than the other two, if only because the narrative foregrounds the mature consciousness of the sophisticated academician. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Gates narrative, while focusing broadly on the author’s maturational experiences, seeks to render a sense of the quality and character of his whole life but emphasizes his (somewhat) triumphant graduation from high school and his movement toward college and a spectacularly productive academic career. McDowell and Stepto, on the other hand, seem more intent on telling broader stories of their lives, in which consciousness of a future career trajectory is present but relatively muffled.

All three writers follow a long-standing tradition of African American autobiography, whose most familiar points of reference are Douglass’s Narrative and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. McDowell’s and Stepto’s memoirs belong among those of a later group of academicians and creative writers: [End Page 661] W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Sterling Brown, to name a few. These African American autobiographies have as their subject, or subtext, the story of success against the odds. It seems inevitable. Sammy Davis, in fact, called his autobiography Yes, I Can; rare are those who prove, “No, I Can’t.”

What kind of autobiographies are these recent works by Gates, Stepto, and McDowell? A clue may be found in the subtitle of Stepto’s Blue as the Lake. All three present “A Personal Geography,” which distinguishes them somewhat from the tradition of African American memoir in which a socially oppressed, downtrodden figure, through exercise of will, overcomes great odds. That is not how these writers see themselves and their lives.

McDowell’s Leaving Pipe Shop is a tale, beautifully written, of growing up in a black working-class neighborhood in Alabama. Its subtitle, “Memories of Kin,” shifts the narrative’s focus from McDowell to her family, where it remains, for as she conceives her existence, she is the medium through whom a composite narrative is rendered. The story is by no means about her rise against great odds to the position of prestige and distinction that she holds today. Certainly the story is not about outstripping her siblings or even rising above her parents. Her father seems to have been her first mentor, and in the most significant ways, she never sees herself surpassing him. She quotes Etheridge Knight in one of the book’s epigraphs: “I am all of them; they are all of me.” The fact that she narrates the story places her at the center of it—rather than her greater facility to see and understand.

Stepto’s memoir, his “personal geography,” is more intensely focused on himself, but not in the sense that his effort is a “Narrative of the Life of Robert Stepto,” and certainly no “Up from the Chicago Suburbs.” His African American forebears overcame great odds, which he does not encounter. He has problems, but they don’t come about because he is socially oppressed. His problems are personal and existential—those that beset individuals simply because they exist. His difficulties with his father—which seem the most oppressive of those he faces—have nothing to do with race, except in the most distant and indirect way. His father seems to have a difficult personality; he is a man whose distance and evasion would put off any son. Stepto’s life is not, nor is it intended to be, representative...

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