Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (review)

REVIEWS Wall, Cheryl A. Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage , and Literary Tradition. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005. xii + 309 pp. Cloth: $49.95. Paper: $19.95. Cheryl Wall's Worrying the Line is an important study of contemporary women writers that integrates notions of artistry and modality associated with African American vernacular music with the textual strategies of writers seeking to subvert, revise, and extend the American and African American literary traditions. For Wall, black women writers represent the multidimensionality of cultural identity by reconstructing family genealogies through the variety ofavailable oral, visual, and written records of existence. What Wall describes as the "blues trope" (7) for the book is the idea of "worrying the line," a technique whereby singers in the African American blues tradition, as described by Sherley Anne Williams, make use of "changes in stress and pitch, the addition of exclamatory phrases, changes in word order, repetition of phrases within the line itself, and the wordless blues cries that often punctuate the performance of the songs" to emphasize , clarify, or subvert meaning. Wall extends this trope to the techniques of the writers under discussion to subvert, revise, or extend notions of familial and literary lineage, which gives voice to previously unimagined or unheard race, class, sexual preference, and gender-informed stories. The trope, she acknowledges, is directly related to the "repetition with a difference" (16) that characterizes Henry Louis Gates's discussion ofsignifying in The Signifying Monkey. Wall sets these stories in the context of the American literary tradition as a whole, and the black male American literary tradition more specifically—since both form part ofthe literary tradition in which women write—but most specifically in the context of how the particulars of women's lives, including the lives of the blues singers who have been used as models of behavior by various writers , affect those traditions as well. Wail's study provides discussions of works by Lucille Clifton, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker that are rigorous, discerning, and broad ranging. In her chapter "Reconstructing Lineage, Revising Tradition," Wall explores the differing trajectories of quest stories that emerge from the explorations of written and oral origins of black literature in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Audre Lorde's Zami. Here Wall sees worrying the line as "a trope for reconfiguring lineages and for new ways ofwriting that configuration ." W. E. B. DuBois' The Souls ofBlack Folk is posited as an important literary ancestor for Morrison (and African American writers in general), among other works like The Odyssey, The Old Testament, Invis- 252Reviews ible Man, Go Down, Moses, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Similarly , the discussion of Lucille Clifton's Generations explores in a similarly discerning and insightful way the aesthetic, political, and spiritual affinities between Clifton and Walt Whitman as Clifton worries her African American genealogy out of Whitmanian epic through the juxtaposition oftext and photographs. Of course, the influence ofimportant female literary ancestors like Zora Neale Hurston are delineated as well, most fully in the outstanding chapter on Walker's The ColorPurple and in conjunction with the work of Richard Wright in the excellent chapter on In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Wall is at her most concrete, specific, and effective in her discussions of Jones and Walker, employing blues history, subject matter, stylistics, and criticism to demonstrate how crucial the blues are to these works. There are a few issues that might benefit from a bit more explanation and exploration. Although Wall identifies worrying the line as an element of the blues tradition, it clearly operates in other African American vernacular music as well. Wall discusses this subject in relation to Praisesongfor the Widow, but that is chapter eight ofa nine chapter book. An in-depth discussion of the subject early on would have informed the discussions of some of the other works as well—perhaps even sparked some more complete discussions. Wall makes it clear that the blues has provided the impetus for a number of the writers under discussion, but a discussion of the relationship of techniques among African American musical genres, including those sometimes (problematically) separately...