reach beyond the strong
by Angela Spivey

ou wander the maze of Greenlaw Hall — the flat-topped, 1970s brick building where Carolina keeps its English professors — to find her door. Unlike the others, hers stands unadorned. Only a white card, a room number, and her name.

Her name means a lot. She is: one of the most widely read scholars of American literature, coeditor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, coeditor of The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology.

Quite a list. Scary. But knock on that door. When Trudier Harris-Lopez answers, her voice is deep and booming. She looks at you directly, expectantly. Oh boy.

.: Trudier Harris-Lopez. Photo by Paul Dagys; click to enlarge. :.

Harris-Lopez tells you that she is a teacher, an African American scholar, and, not least of all, a Southerner. She is also someone who isn't afraid to look closely at and critique the literature of her own culture — point out emerging stereotypes, places where things may be getting too safe.

You are a white woman who has read only the obvious writers — James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, a little Alice Walker. You ask some questions, listen, then ask some more. You try to keep up.

arris-Lopez has filled book after book with her ideas about literature. In her latest, South of Tradition, she exposes taboos in African American literature — subjects or character traits that many black writers have avoided. Black women characters, for example, are almost never promiscuous or even irresponsible. They mother their own children and then some. And with some exceptions, black writers don't portray incest or homosexuality, or they only allude to it.

Why? "There's a whole mythology that they're writing against," Harris-Lopez says. That mythology includes, for instance, the idea that black people are oversexed. That black women possess an animal magnetism irresistible to white men — slave owners. That black men are violent.

So it's natural that writers would, consciously or not, try to counter those stereotypes, she says. One overcompensation — the strong black woman. She serves God, cares for her children, and makes up for men's shortcomings. Often physically big and strong, she doesn't need relaxation, or sex, or a confidant. This type is so prevalent that Harris has written a book about it — Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature. A classic example is Tante Lou (in Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying), who's raised countless godsons on fried chicken and pralines. When she orders an adult godson to do something, he can't refuse. There's also Velma Henry (Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters), who does the work of seven people, and Pauline Breedlove (Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye), who knocks out her abusing husband with a frying pan.

t first, showing these kinds of women was a breakthrough. "When you look at Mama Lena Younger and what Lorraine Hansberry did with her in 1959, that's certainly to be applauded on the one hand because you've finally got a black woman on stage, on Broadway, who looked like a whole lot of black women out there in black communities," Harris-Lopez says, talking about A Raisin in the Sun. "But on the other hand, if after a while you just keep putting her there, and you don't have other things, then you've lapsed into stereotype again."

Some writers have ventured outside the stereotype. Harris-Lopez points out that before 1970, black women characters couldn't "go crazy." No matter what, they managed. But by 1973, for example, in "Really, Doesn't Crime Pay?" Alice Walker writes of Myrna, who "cultivated her nervous breakdowns." And, by the 1980s, writers such as Toni Cade Bambara and Gloria Naylor were expanding the portrayal of the strong black woman by giving her otherworldly powers — she can talk to ghosts, create lightning storms, or die and then watch over the living. And in Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler writes of Lauren, a black woman who has a healthy interest in sex but no desire to have children. But Lauren doesn't completely defy the stereotype; she has the physical strength of a man and watches over four brothers and sisters.

Harris-Lopez calls for writers to expand their reach even more. For instance, she still finds few truly equal friendships among black female characters. Most of these women need nobody. She wants to see writers give such characters a chance to "look across" at someone, rather than always looking down. "I think to keep portraying them as always strong takes away a portion of their humanity," Harris-Lopez says. "It's the complexity of character that I'm angling for."

Harris-Lopez can understand writers' inclination to create black characters who "put the best foot forward." Take her intense, negative reaction to The Color Purple, back in 1982. When you ask about it, she says it's ancient history. She has talked about it plenty. But still.

Harris-Lopez has said that to criticize The Color Purple is often seen as deserting the black woman writer. But she didn't let that stop her. She felt that The Color Purple played to many of the historical stereotypes. "There didn't seem to be any space for relief from this violence, sexual violation, sexual abuse," she says. "I was hoping that black writers had enough of a sense of connection to black communities that if they were going to present that kind of ugliness, it would be balanced out with some kind of goodness."

The book, she said, was "a loaded gun in the hands of those who were already inclined to malign black people."

eople often assume that black writers' stories are more than just stories. That they speak for the race. "Any writer can go out there and write whatever he or she wants," Harris-Lopez says. "But the consequences for doing so are dramatically different if you're an African American writer." Once, a twenty-something man said to her, "I'm so glad we read The Color Purple because now I know how black people in Georgia lived in the first few decades of the twentieth century." Harris-Lopez shakes her head. "There were these folks who were reading it as a documentary of black people's lives."

"I was concerned with this larger issue of what writers should and should not do in relation to their communities. Even using the word 'should' in connection with a writer is problematic. And I recognize that."

Today she has tried to see other sides of that book. In South of Tradition, she highlights the use of humor in The Color Purple. She was inspired by lively exchanges with her students, some of whom were bent on proving her wrong. "So I assigned myself the task of going back and saying, 'okay, can you see something else?' It was also a good opportunity to let students know — you are a reader, and when the teacher says something in the classroom, you can challenge that."

You've exhausted your questions about literature. So you ask about her connection to the South. Her emphatic answer is a surprise. "The South is where I belong," she says. Her upcoming book of personal essays, Summer Snow, includes an essay by the same name that explains. "'Summer Snow' deals with this whole notion of how rare it might seem for a black person in the South to say, 'I embrace the South, and all that means, as well as I embrace my blackness,'" she says. "So it's about like snow falling in Alabama in July."

She continues. "My father's blood is in the soil in Alabama, and just because George Wallace was governor of Alabama doesn't mean that I don't still claim that soil."

She mentions her 1984 book on lynching. Not exactly a pretty topic. "But what am I supposed to do, say 'I'm not related to that at all?' Because those black people are culturally, communally related to me, even if they are not biologically related to me. But embracing that soil, embracing that history doesn't mean that I embrace the violence, doesn't mean that I embrace the segregation," she says. "The South is where I feel most comfortable."

By now, you are more comfortable too, in this office with her. Harris-Lopez does indeed have decades of writing experience, a resonant voice, a piercing eye. But she also has a laugh just as deep as her voice. You hear it when you ask a naive question. "Oh child," she says. "That's asking me to write a ten-volume book."

.: Trudier Harris-Lopez. Photo by Paul Dagys; click to enlarge. :.

things you won't find on her resume

he loves action movies, finds them a release from all that internal work of grading essays and writing. "These movies are transcendent," she says. "I let my frustrations be taken out through the feet of Jean Claude Van Damme or Jackie Chan."

When she was in eighth grade she wanted to be a physical education teacher. She gave up that notion for good her first year in college, when a girl "about half as tall" as Harris-Lopez (who is 5'10") outran her.

In high school, she was hooked on reading True Stories and True Confessions magazines — even during class. "I had the reading habit. I didn't have anyone guiding my reading," she says. When she reached college, she found teachers and mentors who introduced her to "the good stuff" — in addition to traditional literature, philosophers such as Machiavelli and Marx and Engels. "I discovered that writing was fun," she says. That's when she decided to teach literature.

South of Tradition was published in October 2002 by The University of Georgia Press. Summer Snow will be published by Beacon Press in April 2003.

Angela Spivey is the associate editor of Endeavors magazine.
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