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Chapter Ten Voodoo, A Different African American Experience, and Don Belton’s Almost Midnight In 1986, when William Morrow published Don Belton’s Almost Midnight, African American literature was in the midst of a renaissance, especially among black women writers. In 1982, Alice Walker received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Color Purple, which sold more than four million copies and was adapted into a movie. In 1983, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for theWidow had high visibility. Also in 1983, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place sold well in hardback and paperback. It won a 1983 American Book Award and was later the basis for a television movie. In 1988, Toni Morrison’s Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1989, Terry McMillan’s Disappearing Acts, which sold thirty thousand copies in hardcover, was auctioned off to a paperback reprinter for more than $180,000. McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, published in 1993, was even more successful commercially. It remained for months on the New York Times bestseller’s list and was auctioned off to a paperback reprinter for more than one million dollars. In 1990, Charles Johnson received the National Book Award for Middle Passage, and in 1993 Ernest J. Gaines greeted a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for A Lesson Before Dying. Later, in 1997, Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying would become bestsellers again as a result of the Oprah Winfrey Show’s book club. And in 1993, for the first time, three African American women writers—Morrison (Jazz), Walker (Possessing the Secret of Joy), and McMillan (Waiting to Exhale)—were simultaneously on the NewYork Times bestseller’s list. Finally, in 1994, Morrison became the first black woman and first African American to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. But in the midst of 225 this renaissance in African American literature, Belton’s Almost Midnight was unheralded and went quietly out of print. With the women-focused renaissance in African American literature as a result of the Feminist movement and the reconfiguration of the African American literary canon in the 1970s/1980s,1 a repression took place within African American fiction, especially among post-1960s black male writers. Despite the fact that the 1970s/1980s was a period of growth in African American fiction, the selected texts that were privileged by African American critics were few. Many earlier novels by African American males—such as Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, Nathan Heard’s Howard Street, William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer, Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door, John O. Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder, Charles Wright’s The Messenger, John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am, and others that were popular and critically successful before the 1970s/1980s reconfiguration of the canon—were also lost from the literary histories of African American literature. Likewise, many novels by black male writers that were published after the women-focused renaissance, the Black Aesthetic movement, and the canon reconfiguration but that did not meet the aesthetic, political, and ideological criteria of either were also excluded, repressed , marginalized, or simply ignored. Richard Perry’s Montgomery’s Children and No Other Tale to Tell, Jake Lamar’s Bourgeois Blues and The Last Integrationist, Darryl Pinckney’s High Cotton, and John Holman’s Squabble and Other Stories come to mind. Belton’s Almost Midnight is also one of these “invisible others.” Why was Belton’s novel published and then simply ignored? The history of the critical reaction to, reception of, and subsequent repression of Almost Midnight is complicated and varied. But it is accurate to say that it has been reviewed, represented, and interpreted by mainstream American and African American critics and reviewers as an anomaly, as an Other than reason. Belton’s Almost Midnight is informed by Voodoo, and Almost Midnight, and the heterogeneous Voodoo regime of truth and power that informs it, is defined by mainstream critics as something alien, otherworldly, and mysterious. But it is its Voodoo belief system and vision that allows the text to construct/textualize an African American life and to present a protagonist outside the white/black binary . Almost Midnight and Voodoo constitute another, different site/location to represent of African American life and literature. Because of its Otherness, Almost Midnight does not have any sanctioned, mainstream literary capital. But, its Otherness , its Voodoo representation of African American life effectively disrupts the white/black binary...

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