Fiction in New Orleans


FATE AND NEW ORLEANS FICTIONS

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's debut novel  A Kind of Freedom (Berkeley: Counterpoint 2017) did receive more than a demitasse of acclaim.  It was a 2017 National Book Award Nominee, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a New York Times Book Editor's Choice, a choice commended for shining "an unflinching, compassionate light on three generations of a black family in New Orleans, emphasizing endurance more than damage."  The critical gods and goddesses who cavort in public discussions of fiction can only ensure that we know titles.  Praise alone does not persuade us to read novels.  Word of mouth, the innocent gossip that circulates among select groups of African American and American readers, is often more effective in tantalizing us to read a novel.  As the Tricentennial celebrations of the Crescent City  move forward, one hears virtually nothing about A Kind of Freedom.  Nor does one find it on the shelves of local favorites at Barnes and Noble in Metairie.  Fate is as quirky as the city that care forgot.  What occupies the space where Sexton's novel should be is Jesmyn Ward's justly celebrated Sing, Unbound, Sing, winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction, an import from Mississippi.

Sexton is not alone in being overshadowed by fate.  In the United States it is estimated that more than 400,000 works of fiction are published yearly, and Fatima Shaik, a talented native daughter of New Orleans, also sits in the shadows of a golden time of day in the Seventh Ward.  Shaik's The Mayor of New Orleans: Just Talking Jazz (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book, 1989) and What Went Missing and What Got Found: Stories (New Orleans: Xavier Review Press, 2015) are candidates for recognition in our rituals of remembering what black New Orleans has contributed to the republic of American letters.  There will be more to remember when Maurice Carlos Ruffin's first novel We Cast a Shadow is published in 2019.

Perhaps in the near future if New Orleans becomes as assertive in promoting local literacy as it is in manufacturing disaster for tourist consumption, Sexton, Shaik, and Ruffin will become familiar names in Treme and other wards of our city and in our public schools, where students can learn that achievement is not a cluster of tantalizing grapes.  The "perhaps" depends on our doing the necessary cultural work and forcing New York-flavored fate to sit in the shadows.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 3, 2018

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