skopia
At a 1979 feminist conference that had sidelined Black and lesbian women, Lorde said the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. These essays turn anger and difference into working instruments.
Sherman McCoy, a Park Avenue bond trader who calls himself a Master of the Universe, takes a wrong turn into the Bronx. A boy is struck, and Wolfe feeds him to New York.
Du Bois took the first Harvard doctorate given a Black American, wrote The Souls of Black Folk, and helped found the NAACP. Lewis won Pulitzers for this volume and for its sequel.
Angelou grows up in Stamps, Arkansas, under Jim Crow and behind her grandmother's store counter. Raped at eight by her mother's boyfriend, she stops speaking for five years and reads her way back.
Hughes wrote the blues into American poetry, plain-spoken and syncopated. He asked what happens to a dream deferred, and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry built A Raisin in the Sun from his answer.
A white child points and cries, Look, a Negro. Fanon takes that instant apart to show racism lodged in the skin itself, and half a century of Black thought has worked from it.
Hunger runs through Wright's Southern boyhood: for food, for books, which he gets by forging notes on a white man's library card. He sets down Jim Crow's cruelty without a word of self-pity.
A Zulu parson goes to Johannesburg to find his son and learns the boy killed a white man who fought for black South Africans. Paton's fifteen million readers made apartheid a world scandal.
Henry Townsend was bought out of slavery by his father and came to own more than thirty slaves himself. Jones wrote the novel that forced American fiction to hold Black slaveholders in view.
Celie is fourteen, writing to God because there is nobody else to tell. Walker took her from there to a life she owns and won the first fiction Pulitzer given a Black woman.
Branch follows Martin Luther King from the Montgomery bus boycott to Birmingham, moving between black church basements, the Kennedy White House, and the FBI, and ten years become full American history.
Writing to his teenage nephew, Baldwin remembers preaching in Harlem and dining with the leader of the Nation of Islam. He spares white America nothing and refuses to hate it.
Fanon was a psychiatrist from Martinique who joined the Algerian revolution and died at thirty-six. Colonialism deforms the mind of the colonized, he argues, and violence undoes it. Revolutionaries read him as instructions.
Baldwin buries his father on his nineteenth birthday while Harlem riots, and winters as the only Black man in a Swiss village. He turns his own life into an argument about America.
Du Bois named the double consciousness of seeing yourself through white eyes and called the color line the problem of the twentieth century. The chapter on his firstborn son's death is unbearable.
Malcolm X was a Michigan boy, then a Harlem hustler, then a convict copying the dictionary, then a speaker no one in America could ignore. He was still changing when he was murdered.
Marlow steams up the Congo to retrieve an ivory agent gone strange upriver. Conrad found empire hollow, and the novelist Achebe's charge of racism has kept the book under argument ever since.
Huck runs off down the Mississippi with Jim, who is escaping slavery, and the moment he decides he would rather go to hell than turn him in is the hinge of American fiction.