Erasing Gender, Reading RaceDown from the Mountaintop: Black Women's Novels in the Wake of the Civil RightsMovement, 1966-1989 by Melissa WalkerReview by: Elliott Butler-EvansNOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 221-224Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1346012 .

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Erasing Gender, Reading Race

MELISSA WALKER, Down from the Mountaintop: Black Women's Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 1966-1989 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. viii + 226, $26.00.

In a provocative and controversial departure from recent critical approaches to African American women's novels, Melissa Walker employs an interpretive strategy in which particular situations depicted in the novels of some Black women are read as being significantly related to larger issues of civil rights. Selecting eighteen novels written over a twenty-three year period, Walker explores the textual strategies by which certain Black authors "have focused and composed their narratives directly to the civil rights movement-its issues, events, and consequences" (2). Her concern is with the manner in which each of the novels evokes and represents black history and addresses the three questions she views as central to the civil rights movement: Where have we been? Where are we? Where do we go from here?

She therefore reads the primary ideological project of each novel as being focused on the status of the African American struggle for equality at specific historical mo- ments. Regardless of the apparent subject matter of the novel, Walker suggests that there is a repressed subtext that addresses "larger" issues related to the civil rights movement. The narratives of private lives are viewed as "linked to particular episodes in the struggle for racial justice" and readers are encouraged "to seek out the connections between private lives and their public contexts."

Walker has chosen for her study a wide range of novels from Margaret Walker's Jubilee to Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar. Included also are informative and interesting readings of works that have been neglected critically. Her approach primar- ily involves examining the relations between the political conditions of African Americans at the time of the historical period or setting of the novel and the dominant views toward civil rights legislation at the time of its production. Hence, in the first chap- ter she argues that in Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), narratives "set in the final years of slav- ery and its immediate aftermath," the representations of character and setting are de- termined by the "focus of the historical perspective." She explores the manner in which the plot of each novel links the private narrative with larger kinds of public action re- lated to civil rights. The "optimistic" conclusion of Jubilee is interpreted as the result of the novel's being "mostly a story of the 1860s for the 1960s." Walker argues that the op- timism that she holds characterized developments in racial progress in the mid-1960s was similar to the views towards racial progress in the mid-1860s so that "Vyry's condi- tion at the end of Jubilee is similar to that of her counterparts a hundred years later" (24). Williams's Dessa Rose, she argues, does not address the public issue of civil rights be- cause "... in times like these when rectifying the evils of racism has long been dropped from the public agenda, there is little to do other than pursue the kinds of freedom that come with personal success" (33). Finally, Toni Morrison's Beloved, with its recuperation of the past, openness, and indeterminacy, is an invitation to re-explore African American history for solutions to the current racial crisis.

This critical approach generally produces original insights but sometimes generates

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222 NOVEL WINTER 1992

uneven results. One consequence, for example, is the somewhat awkward formulation that characterizes the second chapter of the book in which Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple are discussed as novels that evoke the 1930s and 40s in their settings. An attempt is made to relate the discord in the earlier phases of the civil rights movement to the state of racial politics at the moment of publication of the two novels. Yet Walker's discussion of the Morrison novel does not seem to illumi- nate that argument, and her assertion that Walker's Color Purple "inadvertently speaks to the values of the audience dominant [during the early 80s] ... an audience listening for reassurance that seeking economic prosperity and personal gratification are [sic] valid enterprises" (73), while arguably convincing, needs further elaboration and sup- portive evidence.

Similarly, in the book's third chapter, "Harbingers of Change: Harlem," the attempt to establish a link between the Harlem Renaissance, the significance of Harlem as set- ting in three novels (Louise Meriweather's Daddy Was a Number Runner, Alice Childress's A Short Walk, and Rosa Guy's A Measure of Time), and the Civil Rights movement is also problematic. The strength of this chapter is in its thorough reading of the three novels, none of which has received the critical attention it deserves. Yet the at- tempt to equate the Harlem Renaissance with broader based political movements is questionable. The argument that these novels, "set in the Harlem Renaissance and its immediate aftermath[,] leav[e] readers with uncertainty about the future of characters, and by exploring how the civil rights movement relates to the Harlem Renaissance, in- vite consideration of what might be the next stage--in the wake of the modern civil rights movement" (77), seems somewhat contrived and forced.

The readings of Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Toni Morrison's Sula as novels that cover the period from 1919-1965 consists of detailed examination of those narratives as being concerned with "change in the lives of isolated individuals whose personal dramas are initially played out on the fringes of history but eventually collide with historical events during the civil rights movement" (110). While the chapter moves away somewhat from Walker's thesis, it provides strong, nuanced readings of the two works.

Arguing that the four novels discussed in the fifth chapter (Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Kristen Hunter's The Laketown Rebellion, and Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo and Betsy Brown) were set in communities in which the civil rights movement "never made national headlines" and "feature[d] protagonists who enjoy[ed] middle class privileges and [were] practically exempted from the indignities of racism" (130), Walker quite capably discusses the depiction of the emergence of a black middle class structure of feeling in Hunter's and Shange's novels and its impact on the civil rights struggle. Walker shows through very careful reading, how these three largely ne- glected novels significantly addressed issues of civil rights politics, particularly class is- sues as they related to that struggle.

Equally impressive and strongly supportive of her critical approach is her reading of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Morrison's novel, Walker argues, represents "a new kind [of historical novel], a palimpsest in which the partial erasure of the fictional text reveals the historical one" (132). She then shows how Morrison's fiction is always in- formed by historical consciousness. Drawing upon the novelist's interviews and other writings, she argues that in Solomon, Morrison "subtly makes history shine through into

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REVIEW I ERASING GENDER, READING RACE 223

the fiction, ... quietly calling attention to the great public events and the people who brought them about, just below the shallow world of the characters' private lives" (135). This observation is followed by very deft readings of the text in which the imbrication of the private and public is illuminated, and especially, the Guitar-Milkman conflict is viewed in terms of its symbolic significance as suggestive of the non-violence/violence, King-Malcolm X, integrationist/separatist debate that was central to the civil rights struggle in the 1970s.

In her readings of novels in the sixth chapter (Alice Walker's Meridian, Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, and Toni Morrison's Tar Baby), Walker focuses on those works that she locates as belonging to the "post-movement," "pre-Reagan" period-a historical moment that she dates from the mid 1970s. Through an examination of inde- terminacy-or what she refers to as "ambiguity"-as characteristic of Meridian and The Salt Eaters and the construction of the conflict between Son and Jade in Tar Baby as metaphors for emerging class and caste differences among African Americans as well as the struggle for reconciliation between black and white Americans, Walker argues that such works reflect and reproduce the politics of the period. She argues that these works are representative of narratives written in the "wake of the [civil rights] move- ment," reflecting a moment when Black writers are re-examining the past and attempt- ing to formulate responses to an uncertain political future.

In the "Afterword," Walker concludes her study by reading The Temple of My Familiar as potentially embodying a new political vision in which the personal and the public are fused to work for political change. The novel, she argues, in addition to ad- dressing increasingly complex racial problems also comments on "industrial pollution, the drug problem, cardboard-if not teflon-presidents, the nuclear threat, and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome ..." (201). The broadening of political concerns, as well as the exploration of personal growth in the lives of individual characters, sug- gests to Melissa Walker that Alice Walker is structuring a new political vision in which the personal and the public are conflated but "the 'how-to' of personal and public change remain problematic" (206).

Walker's ideological concerns and focus are quite clear and generally remain con- sistent throughout the work. For her the major issue is to demonstrate "how these eigh- teen novels published since the peak moments of the civil rights movement relate to the movement and to the historical contingencies that fostered it and led to its decline" (12). What she explores is somewhat akin to Fredric Jameson's concept of a "political unconscious" in which an uninterrupted narrative (here, the civil rights movement) constitutes the repressed or subtext of each of the novels she examines.

Walker's study, however, is not without its problems. There are certain controversial issues that require more reflection than she provides. Her foregrounding racial politics leads to subordination and marginalization of issues related to the politics of gender. Hence, the work assigns issues related to gender to the realm of the "private" and con- structs them as inconsequential. Inasmuch as this work does not address issues related to women or gender politics, the choice of narratives written by women seems totally arbitrary. Eighteen novels written by men would arguably produce the same interpre- tive results. Moreover, in her attempt to construct a narrative of the civil rights move- ment, Walker also conflates the civil rights and nationalist movements, seeing the latter as simply a disruptive moment in a coherent civil rights narrative.

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224 NOVEL I WINTER 1992

Other problems related to methodology are also evident. At moments in the text, the possible interpretation,is attributed to an idealized reader who is knowledgeable of the history of the civil rights movement; at other moments, such as in her treatment of Toni Morrison's works, the interpretation is justified by extra-textual evidence that indicate the author's intention; and at still other moments, specific interpretations seem to re- flect no more than Walker's biases and taste. Moreover, while there is an attempt to explore the relationship of narrative structure to the ideology of the novels, the book is largely not informed by narrative theory-with the exception of a fleeting reference to Frank Kermode's concept of "narrative anarchy." Much more could have been done in this area.

Nevertheless, Down from the Mountaintop is a significant contribution to literary criti- cism in general and the criticism of African American women's narratives in particular. It is a refreshing reminder that the narratives of African American women are overde- termined and that racial politics, along with issues related to gender and class, while often seeming totalizing, structures and informs such narratives. This study clearly en- riches the current dialogue about African-American women's literature.

ELLIOTT BUTLER-EVANS, University of California at Santa Barbara

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