writer/publisher/American Creed

The Writer/The Publisher/The American Creed

"These are critical days when, more than ever, men seem to become captives of their personal ambition for wealth, social position and influence, and when their adventures in power politics and in finance politics, both at home and in the international field, also make them captives." 

Pat Jackson, c. 1940, quoted by Murray Kempton in Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).

In 2019, everywhere, the writer is free,  and everywhere, the writer is in chains.  So too is the publisher, although the self-publisher may be an exception; the final objective of the publisher is profit.  Both the writer and the publisher genuflect, in different degrees, before the American Creed  ---  a principle abstracted from the American/Racial  Contract.  Everywhere in what we misapprehend as reality, we discover implacable chaos. Thus, time and culture do make captives of us all.

In the field and function of publishing, the tyranny of the numerical majority flourishes, much to the disadvantage of the writer who happens to belong to a numerical minority of one sort or another. The reader/consumer is captive to angels and demons of desire.  The only escape is  a refusal to purchase and read publications, and the reader/consumer will have none of that.  The necessity of art and communication  precludes that option.  But publishers should be aware that many reader/consumers are indeed cognizant of manipulative designs, the ethics of the New Jim Crow in the United States of America. Reader/consumers are not hopelessly dumb regarding the metaphor of incarceration that is more a web than a metaphor.

It is noteworthy that allusion to combinations of  Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin constitute a web.  Clever spiders, American  publishers spin webs inside of webs inside of webs.  Many writers are trapped by the idols of the market and the tribes, and many African American writers ---many not all --  are trapped to affirm and confirm that exquisite suffering is indisputably "normal."  The spiders are less than anxious to have the entrapped find the "hidden normal," which might be narratives of African American women and men who use racial wisdom, kick the odds, and become relatively successful professionals  The spiders mythologize that the "hidden normal" is a fluke or a post-truth.  Thus does the web choke intelligence.

 Roxane Gay obtains a degree of fame for celebrating the joy of being  female and fat and, one dares assume,  medically-challenged.  She is not obligated to push back  against Wright, Ellison and Baldwin, but astute critics note the friction between her writing and that of Sapphire in PUSH (1996).  Publishers know sisterhood of the imagination  is powerful.   On the other hand, Kiese Laymon does push back, despite having delivered what the prurient  American Creed hungers for ---a feast of the excruciating pain of being American, black, male, fat, and targeted --in Heavy (2018).  Having read Black Boy, Laymon " wondered if black children born in Mississippi after Wright would have laughed, or smiled more at his sentences if he imagined Mississippi as home" (138). He  wondered how Baldwin's The Fire Next Time might "read differently had the entire book, and not just the first section, been written to, and for, Baldwin's nephew" (144)… if  "Baldwin would have written to his niece" (144).

There is more pulling than pushing in Toni Morrison's anointing Ta-Nehisi Coates as the writer who "filled the intellectual void that plagued [her] after James Baldwin died" and in Coates' appropriation of the title of a superb poem by Richard Wright, Between the World and Me (2015). And the publisher/spider must be  pleased with  surprise that many reader/consumers have warmly embraced and become intellectually empowered by Maurice Carlos Ruffin's satiric  first novel We Cast A Shadow (2019), a book that, among other things,  retrofits fragments of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The web endures and prevails and pre-veils, of course, but it fails to obliterate eternal truths that germinate in the souls of African Americans.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            February 13, 2019