Notes
notes introduction 1. As far as recent theoretical and philosophical texts that deal with religion are concerned, Jacques Derrida alone has written many volumes. Not many critical texts dealing with novels analyze African American cultural tradition related to the religious and biblical and thus to the black faith that I am concerned with here, though. Dolan Hubbard’s The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination (1994) is one of the few that does. With regard to the treatment of the Christian and biblical in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, see, e.g., Nancy V. Burt and Fred L. Standley, eds., Critical Essays on James Baldwin (1988) and Trudier Harris, ed., New Essays on Go Tell It on the Mountain (1996). Only a few scholars contributing to these volumes talk about the novel’s serious spiritual quest, and some reject the idea that there is one. 2. In connection with the assertion that faithful vision very much applies to life, I make the following argument relating to the Bible’s theology and empowerment of people. It is important to remember that, as well as being a statement of the law, the Bible is a text that embodies all of the contradictions and complexities of life and that emphasizes people living and displaying human shortcomings. The word and plan of God are incontrovertible in the long and short terms. But in the course of the evolution of God’s plan, people have a wide range of opportunity in their actions. Oftentimes , treachery, deceit, and even murder constitute the acts of many people, including those favored by God. His chosen instruments often do bad things, before and after they are chosen. From a larger perspective, human beings are not totally in control, and so no one can determine what will happen. It is impossible to know where human endeavors will lead. God sometimes does not seem to judge or punish evil and uses evil for his own good purposes. One can only say that everything must be part of an ultimately benevolent plan that we do not understand. Nothing is clear in the Bible, however, and analysis only leads to contradiction. But the Bible empowers people in spite of, and in the very terms of, its complexities and contradictions , especially in light of the complex and contradictory doctrine of grace. It empowers them to do good and bad in the process of what they see as necessary, as well as empowers them to see that evil perpetrated against them historically may not serve the intentions of its perpetrators. 205 3. Basically the wordhoodoo is the African American version of the diasporic term voodoo. I deal with the derivation of the word and its uses in later chapters. 4. Among the writers expressing agnosticism or atheistic frustration and doubt are poets Countee Cullen (Benjamin Mays, The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature [1938], 219–20, 227–29) and Langston Hughes (238–39), and novelists Nella Larsen in Quicksand (1928; Mays 220–24), Walter White in Fire in the Flint (1924; Mays 225), and Jessie Fauset in Plum Bun (1929; Mays 225–26). Other notable writers who have expressed negative conceptions of God are W. E. B. Du Bois (Mays 231–34) and James Weldon Johnson (234 –36). Hughes, Du Bois, and Johnson also wrote works that conceptualize God positively or that reflect the important role that God plays in black life. 5. Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) is the only novel I discuss where voodoo/hoodoo is highly oppositional to Christianity. It is, however, still not possible to say that there is not some form of syncretism with Christianity in this text. 6. Ellease Southerland’s Let the Lion Eat Straw (1979) is a structurally straightforward novel that nevertheless reveals the great depth of a black woman’s life. Let the Lion Eat Straw was published during a time when black women’s texts had already begun to appear with revolutionary literary perspectives that were reshaping the black and American literary canons. In many ways Let the Lion Eat Straw’s depiction of a woman of great strength and creativity who largely accepts her place in society does not fit the expectations created by the other new, exciting depictions of women. Alice Walker’s popular and successfulThe Color Purple did not appear until 1982, but Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) had been published and Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls...
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