Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon

13. Untangling History, Dismantling Fear: Teaching Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta

thirteen untangLing history, dismantLing fear: teaChing tayari Jones’s LEAVING ATLANTA Trudier Harris slavery. reconstruction. lynching. Black codes. The ku klux klan. segregation . Jim crow laws. The great Migration. school desegregation. The murders of emmett till, Dr. Martin luther king, Jr., Malcolm X, and a host of others. The greensboro sit-ins. The atlanta child Murders. These significant historical events—and countless others that are less iconic—have repeatedly found their way into the imaginings of african american writers, including tayari Jones, who, in her debut novel, Leaving Atlanta (2002), steps into the fear and lack of information surrounding the atlanta child Murders to yield an engaging novel about racial violence and childhood nightmares coexisting with attempts to showcase normalcy during extraordinary times. Jones is thus on the contemporary end of a long, long line of foremothers and forefathers who have found their creative imaginings in historical events. indeed, one could just as easily chart a history of peoples of african descent on american soil by reading their imaginative writings as he or she could chart that history through nonliterary sources. From phillis Wheatley, Jupiter hammon, and Frederick Douglass through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century with a novel such as toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), african american authors have found the circumstances of african american existence upon american soil to be just as inspiring as fodder for their creative imaginations as any fertile ground they could till out of totally virgin fields. consequently, a scholar could argue that american history, specifically as it relates to persons of african descent on american territory, has provided the majority of creative inspiration for african americans. 269 270 · Trudier Ha r r is certainly that inspiration begins in the realm of the autobiographical , with formerly enslaved narrators such as Frederick Douglass and harriet Jacobs (linda Brent) penning the tales of their lives during slavery . Whether they documented atrocities during slavery, as Douglass did in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), or documented some and hinted at others, as Jacobs did in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), their primary objective was to bring about an end to slavery. That goal-orientation through literary creation linked Douglass and Jacobs with the majority of writers who followed them in the nineteenth century as well as those in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Writers such as Frances ellen Watkins harper and paul laurence Dunbar in their poetry added their voices in representing slavery and newly freed blacks in the late nineteenth century, while James Weldon Johnson, claude Mckay, Jean toomer, langston hughes, and others treated lynching, migration, segregation, and other historical topics in the first few decades of the twentieth century, especially during the harlem renaissance of the 1920s. in The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man (1912; 1927), Johnson depicts a graphic lynching/burning that leads to his protagonist passing for white; he also includes other depictions of the segregated lives of black people in the southern united states and the general limitations placed on their life possibilities. Both Mckay and toomer join Johnson in depicting lynching, Mckay in poems such as “The lynching” and toomer in “Blood-Burning Moon,” which appears in Cane (1923). hughes, who may properly be called a blues documentarian of all things african american, portrays blacks leaving the south (“one-Way ticket,” “Bound no’th Blues”), caught in the strictures of Jim crow (“Mother to son,” “i, too,” “lunch in a Jim crow car”), suffering afer their arrival on the so-called promised land of the north (“Ballad of the landlord,” the Madam poems, “harlem” [“here on the edge of hell / stands harlem”]), and always finding themselves on the short end of the stick in racial matters (there are dozens of examples in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes).1 richard Wright in Native Son (1940) and ann petry in The Street (1946) both charted the course of migration from the south to the north and the consequences of northern living on black migrants in the 1940s, as did gwendolyn Brooks in her depictions of blacks on the south side of chicago in A Street in Bronzeville (1945), The Bean Eaters (1960), and other Unta ngling History, Dism a ntling Fea r · 271 collections of poetry. restrictions on opportunities that african americans had expected as a result of migration to the north also received treatment...