so, i’m reading this book: The African-American Book of Values…Classic Moral Stories.
it’s sooo interesting…here’s a link with a review or 2:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0385482590/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
one of the stories inside is called ‘New Black Scribe” by Terry McMillan (b. 1951). it grabbed me, in some way…like, every now & then, i come across something that reminds me i am…supposed…to write. even if you’re the last person who ever reads another line i put down…it’s just what i’m meant to do–not because i was taught how, picked it up quickly and did ok–but because i felt an overwhelming need to…capture and translate my tears on paper one day years ago…and when i did, it made sense, it made me lighter…it freed me forever.
i think this excerpt, describing her path to publishing, by an author i will forever admire, echoes my heart about what keeps me falling in love with words…and the memories/stories/history they weave…
NEW BLACK SCRIBE
Terry McMillan
…It wasn’t until after Malcolm X had been assassinated that I found out who he was. I know I should be embarrassed about this, but I’m not. I read Alex Haley’s biography of him and it literally changed my life. First and foremost, I realized that there was no reason to be ashamed of being black, that it was ridiculous. That we had a history, and much to be proud of. I began to notice how we had actually been treated as less than human; began to see our strength as a people whereas I’d only been made aware of our inferiorities. I started thinking about my role in the world and not just on my street. I started thinking. Thinking about things I’d never thought about before, and the thinking turned into questions. But I had more questions than answers.
So I went to college. When I looked through the catalog and saw a class called Afro-American Literature, I signed up and couldn’t wait for the first day of class. Did we really have enough writers to warrant an entire class? I remember the textbook was called Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America because I still have it. I couldn’t believe the rush I felt over and over once I discovered Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and rediscovered and read James Baldwin, to name just a few. I’m surprised I didn’t need glasses by the end of the semester. My world opened up. I accumulated and gained a totally new insight about, and perception of, our lives as “black” people, as if I had been an outsider and was finally let in. To discover that our lives held as much significance and importance as our white counterparts was more than gratifying, it was exhilarating. Not only had we lived diverse, interesting, provocative, and relentless lives, but during, through, and as a result of all these painful experiences, some folks had taken the time to write it down.
Not once, throughout my entire four years as an undergraduate did it occur to me that I might one day be a writer. I mean, these folks had genuine knowledge and insight. They also had a fascination with the truth. They had something to write about. Their work was bold, not flamboyant. They learned how to exploit the language so that readers would be affected by what they said and how they said it. And they had talent.
I never considered myself to be in possession of many of the above, and yet when I was twenty years old, the first man I fell in love with broke my heart. I was so devastated and felt so helpless that my reaction manifested itself in a poem. I did not sit down and say, “I’m going to write a poem about this.” It was more like magic. I didn’t even know I was writing a poem until I had written it. Afterward, I felt lighter, as if something had happened to lessen the pain. And when I read this “thing” I was so shocked because I didn’t know where the words came from. I was scared, to say the least, about what I had just experienced, because I didn’t understand what had happened.
For the next few days, I read that poem over and over in disbelief because I had written it. One day, a colleague saw it lying on the kitchen table and read it. I was embarrassed and shocked when he said he liked it, then went on to tell me that he had just started a black literary magazine at the college and he wanted to publish it (the poem). Publish it? He was serious and it found its way onto a typeset page.
Seeing my name in print excited me. And from that point on, if a leaf moved on a tree, I wrote about it. If a crack in the sidewalk glistened, surely there was a poem in that. Some of these verbose things actually got published in various campus newspapers that were obviously desperate to fill up space. I did not call myself a poet; I told people I wrote poems.
Years passed.
Those poems started turning into sentences and I started getting nervous. What the hell did I think I was doing? Writing these little go-nowhere vignettes. All these beginnings. And who did I think I was, trying to tell a story? And who cared? Even though I had no idea what I was doing, all I knew was that I was beginning to realize that a lot of things mattered to me, things disturbed me, things that I couldn’t change. Writing became an outlet for my dissatisfactions, distaste, and my way of trying to make sense of what I thought was broken. It later became the only way to explore personally what I didn’t understand. The problem, however, was that I was writing more about ideas than people. Everything was so “large,” and eventually I had to find a common denominator. I ended up asking myself what I really cared about: it was people, and particularly African-American people.
The whole idea of taking myself seriously as a writer was terrifying. I didn’t know any writers. Didn’t know how you knew if you “had” it or not. Didn’t know if I was or would ever be good enough. I didn’t know how you went about the business of writing, and besides, I sincerely wanted to make a decent living. (I had read the horror stories of how so few writers were able to live off of their writing alone, many having lived like bohemians.) At first, I thought being a social worker was the right thing to do, since I was bent on saving the world (I was an idealistic twenty-two years old), but when I found I couldn’t do it that way, I had to figure out another way to make an impact on folks. A positive impact. I ended up majoring in journalism because writing was “easy” for me, but it didn’t take long for me to learn that I did not like answering the “who, what, when, where, and why” of anything. I then–upon the urging of my mother and friends who had graduated and gotten “normal” jobs–decided to try something that would still allow me to “express myself” but was relatively safer, though still risky: I went to film school. Of course what was inherent in my quest to find my “spot” in the world was this whole notion of affecting people on some grand scale. Malcolm and Martin caused me to think like this. Writing for me, as it’s turned out, is philanthropy. It didn’t take years for me to realize the impact that other writers’ work had had on me, and if I was going to write, I did not want to write inconsequential, mediocre stories that didn’t conjure up or arouse much in a reader. So I had to start by exciting myself and paying special attention to what I cared about, what mattered to me.
Film school didn’t work out. Besides, I never could stop writing, which ultimately forced me to stop fighting it. It took even longer to realize that writing was not something you aspired to be, it was something you did because you had to.
