|
Urban Legends: Paul Coates and Rudy Lewis
By R. Darryl
Foxworth
When searching
for a good African-American novel at the local
bookstore chain, you may find limited options on the
shelves. Teri Woods, Vickie Stringer, Shannon Holmes,
and Carl Weber are among the authors driving the current
black literary explosion, and though their respective
books sell in droves, they differ greatly in subject
matter and style when compared to that of lauded
contemporary black authors Toni Morrison and John Edgar
Wideman. This “urban fiction” is filled with expletives
and unrepentant descriptions of violence and drugs,
reminiscent of the work of Iceberg Slim and Donald
Goines. And you’re unfortunately hard-pressed to find
other genres besides urban fiction represented in
“African-American” book sections. To many booksellers,
urban fiction is African-American literature.
And this marketing works. When
walking the streets of Baltimore, it is obvious that
Shannon Holmes’ B-more Careful and the latest
Zane books are en vogue—even though the city that reads
them is home to two stalwarts of a bygone era in black
publishing and literature: Paul Coates and Rudolph
Lewis. The two industrious African-American men are part
of a generation that preceded many of the contemporary
best-selling black authors. They are, as the 59-year-old
Coates says, “from the movement.”
That movement is the “Black
Consciousness Movement” that Lewis says “took place here
in Baltimore, between 1967 and 1974.” Before founding
Black Classic Press in 1978, Coates served as
coordinator for the Maryland chapter of the Black
Panther Party. Likewise, Lewis was involved with the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the
Walter Lively-led Union for Jobs and Income Now.
Today Coates primarily publishes
rare, oft-forgotten texts of significance to the
African-American community. The Black Classic catalog
contains seminal works such as W.E.B. Du Bois’ The
Negro, as well as obscure titles such as
Historical Sketches of the Ancient Negro, originally
published in 1920.
These documents are generations away
from highly stylized urban fiction, whose proponents
consider it a new black renaissance, an extension of the
Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance. Of
course, its detractors regard it as trash, replete with
misspellings and grammatical errors, that is unfairly
replacing canonical black literature.
Coates reports that he first
witnessed urban fiction emerge “in the late ’90s. These
writers were writing stories, a lot of the time about
their own lives, fictionalized of course, and began
publishing them. . . . They were telling their own
story, not stories for the community.”
He is quick to point out that he
isn’t one of the people who find contemporary black
literature problematic. “I love it,” he says. “After
reading [urban fiction], people become interested in
their history, and that’s when they come to us. [Black
Classic Press] wouldn’t publish any of that stuff, but I
love to see people read.”
And reading people are. The
commercial success of urban fiction is so apparent that
it has received coverage from such diverse media outlets
as Newsweek, Salon.com, and Black Issues Book
Review in recent months; up for debate is its place
in the annals of black literature. Jonathan Scott, a New
York-based writer and Borough of Manhattan Community
College professor of English, dissents from both
opinions, writing in an e-mail that urban fiction is “a
marketing label used to sell books whereas the Black
Arts Movement came from the civil rights movement and
Black Power. BAM and the Harlem Renaissance were closely
linked to mass movements; urban fiction is a commercial
category of writing with no connection to politics.”
And sell books urban fiction does.
Vickie Stringer, the former cocaine dealer-turned-book
publisher and author, sold 300,000 books in the opening
16 months of her company Triple Crown, getting herself a
distribution deal with Atria Books in the process.
Shannon Holmes’ Bad Girlz sold 50,000 copies in
the first three weeks of its 2003 release.
Coates acknowledges that urban
fiction reaches a wide audience, recalling a panel
discussion that included Teri Woods, the author of books
such as True to the Game and the Dutch
trilogy, who spoke about the large volume of books she
had in print. “We’re happy to put out 10, 15, 20 books,”
Coates says, estimating the number of books his company
produces in a given year. (He declined to give exact
sales and production figures.)
Whereas Coates concerns himself with
the paper and ink world of publishing, Rudolph Lewis
takes advantage of a medium unavailable to his
predecessors: the internet. “I knew keenly that print
publication could not serve sufficiently what I wanted,
namely, widespread dissemination,” says the 57-year-old
Lewis. “Moreover, print publication had a low shelf life
and poor distribution.”
Launched in the fall of 2001, his
ChickenBones: A Journal web site (www.nathanielturner.com)
has amassed a cult following, attracting about 5,000
visitors daily in 2005 and already exceeding 1 million
visitors for the year. Traffic has risen steadily—from
about 500,000 visitors in 2003 to an expected 2 million
this year—and the site, described as a “journal for
literary and artistic African-American themes,” has
benefited from a wide range of contributors. Among them
is Manhattan Community College’s [Jonathan] Scott, who
has written a book about Langston Hughes, Socialist
Joy, currently seeking publication. He has high
praise for Lewis’ internet endeavor.
“ChickenBones has a single-minded
purpose and that’s to uplift and educate black people
and help keep the tradition of freedom struggle alive,”
Scott says via e-mail. “In the age of historical
amnesia, the older writers featured by ChickenBones
remind people that a black liberation movement actually
existed, and that it produced a great variety of writing
and that these writers are still writing.
“ChickenBones is not about the
commercial market,” he continues. “A lot of urban
fiction is awful because it’s written in the hope of
selling millions of copies, whereas ChickenBones is
interested in beauty and complexity, regardless if
anyone reads it.”
But like Coates, Lewis has no ill
feelings toward urban fiction. “So-called urban fiction
is an interesting and curious development,” he says. “It
has not been fully examined, but some of it is good
writing. Technology has made self-publishing affordable,
as a hustle, like hip-hop, which has influenced it
greatly. But it has no ideological center, like BAM and
the Harlem Renaissance.”
Wendell Shannon has a unique
perspective on this matter. The former Baltimore drug
dealer and prisoner is now a 41-year-old entrepreneurial
owner of the Words by Wendell bookstore on West Franklin
Street and a novelist whose next book, Business as
Usual, is the sequel to his 2004 debut effort,
For the Love of Fast Money. He is but one of the
many young black authors nationwide looking to cash in
on the revitalized black literature market, a market
dominated by urban and commercial fiction marketed to a
new generation of black readers.
“I think this phenom is more of
access than the repeat of the Harlem Renaissance,
because in this instance we are self-supportive,” he
says. “In the Harlem Renaissance, many of our talented
writers still depended on widespread approval and
support of races and cultures other than ourselves. It
is unique to be black in America today. Our lives are
beyond comparison. Our survival is different and we have
to adapt to a changing environment. The proliferation of
gangs, uncommon sexual experiences, and drugs are topics
of interest. It is quite simple: The more traditional
black literary stars are too far removed or out of touch
with our everyday, common experience.”
The question thus becomes, is urban
fiction African-American literature? Do the book titles
presently filling “African-American Literature” sections
represent the broad black experience or contain “other
topics of interest” held by black readers?
When City Paper searched the
shelves of a local Borders bookstore, only one James
Baldwin book, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was
discovered, while hardback editions of Toni Morrison’s
Love were selling for $5.99, and neither was
found in the “African-American Literature” section.
Instead, Go Tell It on the Mountain, required
reading for some high-school students, was found in the
literature section; Love in the bargain section.
Stocking the “African-American Literature” section?
Zane, Springer, Woods, and Holmes, with no space for
authors such as Z.Z. Packer or Octavia Butler, the
MacArthur “genius” grant recipient noted for her science
fiction.
As Shannon suggests, however,
“everything moves in cycles.” But where does the black
reader, uninterested in contemporary urban fiction or
detached from the black community’s “common experience,”
go when the bookshelves no longer reflect their
interests? If you’re a Baltimorean, you might want to
give Paul Coates or Rudy Lewis a visit.
Source:
CityPaper
* * *
* *
update 30 June 2008 |
