UNAFRAID OF THE DARK
By Rosemary L. Bray
Random House, 282 pages, $24
In the 1920s and early ’30s, during the period popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance, America witnessed an explosion of black art and creativity. It was during this time that such writers as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston emerged and achieved mainstream recognition in America’s most prominent publications and venues. However, although more black writers were being published, many were publishing under the condition that they write about “Negro subjects.” And not just any “Negro subjects” were acceptable. Publishers and patrons were looking for the exoticized black of the famous Harlem speak-easies and jazz clubs, and expressions of folk culture known as primitivism.
Hughes spoke to this issue when he noted the difficulties black writers had in selling work that did not “make our black ghettoes in the big city seem very happy places indeed, and our plantations in the deep south idyllic in their pastoral loveliness. . . . When we cease to be exotic, we cease to sell.” Through the black arts movement of the 1960s and ’70s, up to the present day, black writers have issued similar complaints.
Perusing the shelves of the African-American literature and black-studies sections of bookstores in 1998, I often get the feeling that a lot, but then not much at all, has changed. True, there is more work by black writers out there, and in more variety. True, Toni Morrison won a Nobel Prize. True, publishers are becoming increasingly more sophisticated when it comes to reaching black audiences and marketing books by African-American authors. But many of the old categories and expectations remain. The fascination with the “primitive,” for example, now manifests in the form of testimonials by African-Americans, or by writers of other races about African-Americans, on urban violence and lives of poverty. And then there are the more hopeful narratives about overcoming these tremendous obstacles and successfully assimilating into the mainstream, also known as the middle class. In either case, the stories come off as formulaic and wrought with stereotypes.
So it was with a healthy dose of skepticism that I approached Rosemary L. Bray’s memoir, “Unafraid of the Dark.” Touted as a “success story of overcoming poverty and prejudice” and one that “illuminates important social problems” of today–specifically the negative impact recent welfare reforms will have on the lives of the poor–“Unafraid of the Dark” seemed to contain all of the elements of a “quintessential black life,” at least superficially.
Bray was raised in the 1950s and ’60s on Chicago’s infamous South Side, in the Black Belt–a small, contained area known for the lively social and business outlets it provided for blacks, as well as for the poverty-stricken and overcrowded conditions African-Americans, forced to settle there as a result of segregation, had to endure. The six members of Bray’s family were crowded into an apartment that was part of a once-impressive limestone mansion that had been converted into several small, overpriced apartments and rooms.
In addition to cramped quarters, Bray’s family had to endure the frequent and violent rages of her father, “a hot-tempered husband with an inability to keep an ordinary job and a pathological need to control.” The oldest of four children, Bray often felt the need to try to protect her mother, even when she could not defend herself–a responsibility too great for her young years: “(T)he thing I wanted to do most, I couldn’t do. . . . I couldn’t make peace.”
Bray recalls another responsibility she took on at an early age: helping her mother interpret and fill out the paperwork that would allow her family to receive welfare benefits. As a result, Bray got first-hand experience with the system and developed an intricate and sophisticated understanding of it at a young age. “The government kicked in money for the basics. . . . It was up to everybody to hustle the rest.”
But if you come to this book looking for extensive commentary on welfare reform, you won’t find it. Except for some cursory discussion in the introduction and the epilogue, there is not much concrete information. What Bray does do very well, however, and what is even more valuable than facts and figures, is to show the impact–both positive and negative–that the system had on her family.
For example, in order to receive their benefits under the Aid to Dependent Children program (later known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children), Bray and her siblings had to deny their father’s presence in the household. “Daddy became . . . the person we were instructed to lie about–and we lied about him often, unblinkingly.” Bray also recognizes the impact this had on her father:
“On welfare, my mother joined the ranks of unskilled women who found the state more reliable than their husbands. Daddy joined the ranks of shadow men who walked out back doors as caseworkers came in front doors, who for a slew of reasons lost their last, tenuous grip on the hallowed patriarchal family that was never truly real for African Americans. Barred from the opportunities white men typically had to create their lives from scratch, shut out of every avenue of male dominance that white men routinely enjoyed, black men like my father found themselves without identity as men at all.”
But it is this very system that Bray credits with maintaining her family’s sustenance, making it possible for her to take advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves. Bray’s mother used part of her monthly grant to send the children to Catholic school, because she wanted them to get a better education than was available in Chicago’s segregated public schools. When one of the nuns at the school noted Bray’s potential, she received a scholarship to attend an exclusive private grammar and high school.
As the book progresses, the many layers of Bray’s story unfold. We trace the steps of her journey–the formation of her political and racial identities, her graduation from high school, her acceptance to Yale University, falling in love–coming ever closer to the heart of the story: Bray’s discovery and acceptance of her creative voice during college and the ways she uses that voice to build a career as a writer, to speak out about the issues that are most important to her:
“A year of freedom from my parents had opened my mind to an unconsidered possibility: I might choose a career because I loved it, because it was fun. For the first time in my life, I gave a lot of thought to what I loved. . . . I had decided to change my major to English. I would follow my first love; I would see whether there might be a way to make a living as a writer. “
Upon graduating from Yale, Bray got her first job as a reporter at the newspaper the Day in New London, Conn., and published her first short story in Essence magazine. She went on to work for Scholastic, Essence, The Wall Street Journal and as an editor of The New York Times Book Review. In keeping with Bray’s multilayered narrative framework, as we learn of her development as a writer, we also learn of increasing distance from her family, her father’s bout with cancer and how, finally, she came to better understand and, perhaps, make peace with her past. When she is rejected for a promotion at the Times, Bray summons images of her father:
“Daddy would have been able to put his finger on the throbbing heart of my anger. He would have had more than one story to tell me about a thwarted dream.”
And when those visions prompt Bray to “get off the sidelines” she had been on as an editor to pursue writing again full-time, her faith in her own voice is renewed:
“I was a writer. . . . I had the right to speak because I could speak. I had the duty to speak. . . .”
Once again, she looks back, drawing strength, in part, from her resistance to the forces that sought to destroy her dreams, but also finally appreciating what her family, her father in particular, tried to give her but never quite knew how:
“Daddy . . . was wrong about this dream of mine. I would stay away from no one except those people whose lives were ruled by fear, especially the fear of memory. It was important for me to think and to remember, to envision the world to come, to create that new world wherever I could, to live in it every chance I got. I owed it to myself, I owed it to the children I would have. And I owed it to the man whose bitter life taught me both to appreciate my freedom and to insist upon it.”
I believe in the power of telling one’s story, and I believe that as many stories as possible in a multitude of voices must be told. It is just when our stories get compressed and twisted, made to fit into spaces smaller than our lives, that they are no longer our stories. In this richly told, well-written memoir, Bray pushes beyond easy summations of her life, beyond the boxes and categories; she claims and celebrates her life, presenting her story in all of its many dimensions.
