[Article] "The Book I Didn't Want to Read But Had to Share" by Cyrus Webb

by Cyrus Webb

Each year I easily read 200 books or more of various topics either for my own reading enjoyment or because of individuals coming on the radio show Conversations LIVE. Over the years I have gotten comfortable enough in myself that I decide quite easily who I choose to feature and whose book I will take the time to read and share with my growing audience. I understand the responsibility that comes with the platform that I have, and so I do the best I can to share things that are entertaining, thoughtful and will be great conversation pieces with others.

Bestselling author Tony Lindsay is someone who over the past decade I have come to look forward to reading every time he releases a book. His fiction has always taken the reader to places we're not used to going and his non-fiction has been poignant enough to make readers reflect. In 2016, however, he announced the release of his latest offering ACORNS IN A SKILLET: Stories of Racecraft in America. Now anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that conversations about race are not the norm for me. Not because I think they shouldn't be discussed but it normally happens in situations where the individual's personal experiences and passion lead the discussion rather than individuals actually trying to connect with one another over what is being said.

For this reason when I first got the book in the mail I read the back of the book and that was as far as it went. What was Tony wanting to achieve with this collection of stories dealing with race? Was it something I would feel comfortable discussing? Would I enjoy enjoy the book and his direction? All of these were questions I pondered, and because of the thought of what it could be I neglected reading the book for months.

In hindsight I realize that my reaction to the very fact that Tony Lindsay---someone I respect---had written a book dealing with race is exactly part of the problem that exists. The truth be told I didn't even give it a chance to speak for itself. I had made a decision based on what I THOUGHT it MIGHT be about rather considering what it actually was.

Now that I have read the book I can say that it is something that not only deserves my attention but has to be shared. What he has done is laid out situations that are all too real based on perception, bias and the idea that we can't understand or appreciate someone who is different than us.

Take a look at my Amazon review here and then I invite you to try ACORNS IN A SKILLET for yourself. I think you might find as I did that it time well-spent with a book.


Cyrus Webb is the host of Conversations LIVE radio show and the Editor-In-Chief of Conversations Magazine. He can be reached at cawebb4(at)juno(dot)com or at www.cyruswebb.com. 

[Article] A Profile of Cyrus Colter by Tony Lindsay

Cyrus Colter’s ‘A Chocolate Soldier’ was published in 1988; during a period in African American literature when some critiqued that Black males were being bashed, portrayed in a negative light, by Black female fiction writers. What Colter did during the controversy was write a Black male protagonist, Meshach Barry, who had a Black male hero, Rollo Ezekiel Lee – called Cager throughout the text. By creating two Black male characters, with flaws, that took the lead in the text, Colter writes Black males with human frailties that were not demonized due to their defects of character. The reader meets Meshach, a complicated character indeed, at a reflective phase of his life; he was contemplating his memoir.

            The storyline of the novel is Meshach, an educated minister, college professor, former convict, and recurrent mental patient arguing with his beloved daughter over writing his memoir. The daughter is afraid that Meshach revisiting his past will lead to him having yet another mental breakdown. The proposed memoir would center on him remembering and recollecting the events and facts of the murder his college friend, Cager, committed. There was no mystery in the work regarding Cager committing the murder; the story centered on why he murdered. Why would a once stellar student commit such a brutal murder? And Meshach tries to estimate the part he played in Cager committing the crime; this reckoning of events and facts unraveled into the plot of Colter’s ‘A Chocolate Soldier.’

            The childhoods of both Meshach and Cager was presented in the work and added the necessary depth to understanding the many whys that occur to the reader while engaged in the novel. Colter not only juxtaposed the life of Cager against Meshach but Cager against several support characters including: a university president, college professor, barkeep, female lovers, and the eventual murder victim - a rich white donor to the school. Through these conflicts it became apparent who the chocolate soldier was, and the war he fought was with an old and experienced adversary, racism in America.

            During Meshach’s accounting of the past the reader experiences the preacher, professor, convict, and mental patient lives that he lived. The growth, development, doubt, and frustrations of each life was witnessed, and this added literary weight to novel. The craft employed to demonstrate how racism along with the personal demons yielded such a complicated character, as Meshach, required a writer of exceptional skill.         
    

Both Meshach and Cager were faced with the obstacles that Black men living within a predominately white society of their era faced: Jim Crow restrictions, overt racism, Uncle Toms, and the plaguing desire to be treated as an equal by those who saw them as less. This was the war Colter had them both fighting – against racism and self, but the question the novel raises is how much of self is shaped by living in a racist society, how many of one’s character defects are caused by living in a hostile society.

A reader leaves Colter’s expertly crafted ‘A Chocolate Soldier’ with the stark reality that a racist society affects those targeted by unjust prejudice policies, and to survive in the system one may develop character defects that may harm others. With all of its well-crafted prose ‘A Chocolate Soldier’ serves as a simple warning against the damaging effects of racism. 

Tony Lindsay is an award-winning author and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. He can be reached on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tony.linssay2.

Tony Lindsay Presents... Author Nathan C. Heard

Writers are introduced to the craft of writing through a variety avenues: reading, experience, teaching, and mimicking. Writers often copy the skill sets of those they admire. It has been argued that all these inroads are necessary in the creation of a writer. Through the classic 1968 novel, ‘Howard Street,’ it becomes obvious that Nathan C. Heard travelled all these roads.

The setting of the novel is Newark, NJ. In an area coined Howard Street; modern black vernacular represents the area as the ‘hood. A place were pimps, muggers, gangs, thieves, prostitutes, crooked cops, rapist, and the disillusioned roamed. An area of the city where society had turned a blind eye, on Howard Street innocence is exploited. The naive are hardened to the disillusioned. Weakness is prayed upon like chicken for wolves. The golden rule was considered a weakness, “A man can’t fool with the Golden Rule in a crowd that don’t play fair.” There was no fair play in the novel, no silver lining or happy ending only the fatalistic reality of those surviving through the exploitation of others. To write the starkness of the harsh and brutal existence, empathy does not suffice; one must experience this life style to write about it as Heard did. The reader leaves ‘Howard Street’ knowing it was based on first hand experience.  To write such explosive text, to capture the nuisances, the attitudes of those who survive the life style, one must learn how to convey the consciousness of a “streeter.” Heard acquired this skill through reading.

He read Baldwin, Ellison, Wright, Baraka, Hughes, Mailer; it was the reading of these greats that shaped ‘Howard Street’ into the pillar of street lit that it has become. Any writer who decides to write in the genre would be well served by reading this work. As Heard recognized, one must read those that came before. To be able to relay an experience effectively a writer must see it done. A motif of the text is sibling rivalry; the two brothers Lonnie (Hip) and Franchot (Shots) are in constant conflict throughout the novel; through their relationship Heard examines the never-ending conflict between “squares” and “streeters” or the exploiters and exploited, or the “lames” and those “living the life.” With words he illustrated what was important to each, what each valued and how these values were in conflict; this cold not have been accomplished if he had not seen in done in text prior to writing ‘Howard Street.’

After reading the greats, Heard horned his craft further by reading writing craft books; this acquired knowledge eventually led him to teaching positions at California State University and Rutgers. As a writer, Heard quickly acknowledged that mimicking the greats would only get him so far; it was through being taught the skill of writing through the crafts books that he felt empowered enough to share his work.

‘Howard Street’ reflects the pensive, concise, caring work of an experienced observant writer; the work confronts topics of: police brutality and corruption, segregation, street life, family, white liberalism, homosexuality, the black church, the power of community, addiction, prostitution, the duality of black males, peer pressure, pimping, and the destruction of innocence. There are no innocents that survive ‘Howard Street’ that is the most disturbing reality of the text. The reader hopes for one surviving lamb but all are devoured. The novel, ‘Howard Street’ is not a tale of redemption, few are redeemed; it is a hardboiled reality based tale that lays bare the socio-economics of a hustlers’ life. It is a must for any student of literature.

Tony Lindsay is an award-winning author and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. He can be reached at tonylinsay7045@sbcglobal.net or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tony.linssay2.

Tony Lindsay Presents... A Portrait of Maya Angelou

Ghana became the home of many Black expatriates in the nineteen fifties; after the developing African nation garnered its independence, many Black Americans seeking refuge and a homecoming immigrated there. From 1962 through 1965, Maya Angelou settled there as well. She recorded those years in her 1986 memoir titled All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. The work was more than Angelou’s simple accounting of her years spent in Ghana: what was offered was the experience of a single mom rearing her son in a foreign land, the reality of an African homecoming for Black Americans, and the linking of Black Americans to their African roots.

Early in the memoir, Angelou defined home as being with her son. She considered time spent with her son as being at home. When they were together, they were home; Angelou, “we had been each other’s home and center for seventeen years.” (5) This idea of home revolving around her son shifted in the work when her son grew into a man. Learning how to adapt to one’s center or home changing was a single mom dynamic that peppered the entire memoir. How she adapted provides sage advice for any parent. With her home or center changed, Angelou like the other Black Americans that lived in Ghana sought a home.

Angelou categorized the Black American immigrants into four groups: whole families who largely supported themselves through farming and teaching, those sent by and supported by the American government, business people who were looking for ground floor opportunities, and writers and artist who had political opinions; she called this last group “a cadre of political émigrés.” She considered herself part of the political group whose “members were impassioned and volatile, dedicated to Africa, and Africans at home and abroad.” (23) 

Despite there being different immigrant groups of Black Americans in Ghana, Angelou felt that they were all lumped into one group by Ghanaians, “American Negros.” This bothered her because she expected to be considered a long lost African sister who had returned home. The reality of being thought of as merely an American Negro brought disillusionment, “At least we wanted someone to embrace us and maybe congratulate us because we had survived. If they felt the urge, they could thank us for having returned.” (22) There was no homecoming parade Angelou or the other artists, but for those who claimed to love Africa, as her group did, Ghana had work.

Angelou’s day-to-day life in Ghana was steeped in African culture and tradition, and she did not miss an opportunity to relate the culture and tradition of Ghana to her Black American upbringing. In the memoir, she laid the two cultures side by side allowing Ghanaian tradition to be seen in Black American culture. From the phrase “Auntie” to the community preparing a meal for a visiting stranger, to the village raising a child, the sameness in both cultures was witnessed. Throughout the memoir, Angelou linked the two cultures, and she did it without formality; the sameness was shown through her workday, through her dating, through her getting her hair done; there was no parade when Black Americans return to Africa, but Angelou wrote the living culture embracing what she called, “Revolutionist Returnees.” (119) Again, there was no formal celebration for the returning Black Americans, but Angelou wrote the African life enveloping them day-by-day. 

It was not until the end of the text that Angelou linked herself to Africa; throughout the work the linking was for the all-inclusive American Negro of which she was part, but at the end the reader experienced Africa wrapping her arms around Maya Angelou. A recurring thought that bothered Angelou throughout memoir was the anger and envy she felt for Ghanaians and all Africans for the selling and abandonment of the Africans that were sold into slavery.  At the end of the memoir, she faced these emotions head on, and experienced a healing that can be passed on to the reader. All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes is an excellent memoir that portrays the political and social climate of Ghana in the 1960’s, and the reader gets to be up-close and personal with one of America’s greatest writers, Maya Angelou. 

Tony Lindsay is an award-winning author and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. His book ONE DEAD DOCTOR was chosen by Conversations Book Club as one of its Top 100 Books of 2012. Lindsay was named Conversations Author of the Year 2012-2013.  His latest book EMOTIONAL DRIPPINGS is available now on Amazon.com. He can be reached on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tony.linssay2.

Tony Lindsay Presents... Ralph Waldo Ellison

In American literature, there was a period between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement; the Black writers of this period are referred to by the historian Lawrence P. Jackson as the “Indignant Generation.” One of the leading writers of the era was Ralph Waldo Ellison.

Largely respected for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, Ellison wrote other fiction during the period as well; his short stories were gathered and edited by John F. Callahan in a posthumous collection titled Flying Home. The thirteen stories of the work reflect the development of Ellison’s literary style along with his use of themed stories, and any student of literary technique will be well served by the collection.

Ellison experiments with point of view in the four warm hearted coming of age and friendship stories with the protagonists, Riley and Buster, two young Black boys who: brag of the conquest of Mister Toussan (Toussaint Louverture), survive the Depression with creative pastimes and diligent parents and sports heroes, learn that all actions have consequence, and that one man’s witch could be another’s vixen.

In the story, “A Party Down at the Square,” Ellison creates another boy protagonist. This time the youth is white, and he is enticed into witnessing a killing, the burning alive of a Black man. The town gathered in the square for the “party.” Ellison reduced the victim, the Black man, to what the crowd and the boy saw; the Black man was no more than “a barbecued hog.” However, Ellison interrupts the celebration with a cyclone that causes a plane to crash, and a woman to be electrocuted, but despite the catastrophes the boy and the town’s people returned to the “party.” The boy did manage to generate a simulant of respect for the Black man when he broke free of the burning ropes with his last breath, “That Bacote nigger was some nigger.”

Ellison employed another boy child character in “The Black Ball.” John, the protagonist and the loving father of the boy works as a maintenance man. Ellison expertly built tension around the father and son love while juxtaposing Jim Crow restrictions with unions; causing John to understand that working without a union was working behind the blackball.

The titled story of the collection, “Flying Home” is the lengthiest story in the work; dealing with Jim Crow, classism among Blacks, self-worth, and community belonging are some of the apparent themes covered in this multi layered story. The protagonist can be easily interrupted as a Tuskegee Airman who felt he had elevated himself above Jim Crow restrictions and the more ignorant of his brethren. Ellison used reality as a sounding board for the character and the reader by having the character in out of consciousness pulling empathy from the reader, and at the same time reducing the character’s pompousness by having him depend on those he viewed as less than himself.  

  The stories in Ralph Ellison’s Flying Home exemplify the artistry of the writer and the pain of the era he wrote in. The stories are a must read for any serious student and writer, and a pleasurable read for anyone who enjoys good stories.    

 Tony Lindsay is an award-winning author and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. His book ONE DEAD DOCTOR was chosen by Conversations Book Club as one of its Top 100 Books of 2012. Lindsay was named Conversations Author of the Year 2012-2013.  His new book EMOTIONAL DRIPPINGS is available now on Amazon.com. He can be reached at tonylinsay7045@sbcglobal.net or on Facebook atwww.facebook.com/tony.linssay2.

Tony Lindsay Presents...James Alan McPherson

James Alan McPherson’s short story collection, ‘Elbow Room,’ won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1978. He was the first African American to win the Pulitzer for fiction. The collection is composed of a dozen practical and reality based stories with each causing the reader to evaluate the everyday. The stories are easily read, but yet the themes are profoundly expressed.  One quickly understands why the collection garnered serious literary attention.

The characters in the collection stand from the page and walk into the imagination. None of stories have a predictable ending, and ironies vine through and around the lives McPherson created. Issues of societal perceptions: race, sexism, and caste span through the work with the touch of a writer who lives and observes.

One of the most startling character descriptions in the text refers the scared face of a woman:

"The scar still fascinated me. It was a wicked black mark that ran from her brow down over her left eyelid, skirting her nose but curving over and through both lips before ending almost in the center of her chin. The scar was thick and black and crisscrossed with a network of old stitch patterns, as if some meticulous madman had first attempted to carve a perfect half-circle in her flesh, and then decided to embellish his handiwork. It was so grotesque a mark that one had the feeling it was the art of no human hand and could be peeled off like so much soiled putty. But this was a surgeon’s office and the scar was real. It was as real. It was as real as the honey blond wig she wore, as real as her purple pantsuit. I studied her approvingly. Such women have a natural leaning toward the abstract expression of themselves. Their styles have private meaning, advertise secrete distillations of their souls. Their figures, and their disfigurations, make meaningful statements. Subjectively, this woman was the true sister of the man who knows how to look while driving a purple Cadillac. (119-120)"

This except is from “The Story of a Scar” a passionate tale of forlorn love, prejudice, and jealousy, but the prejudice is not the prejudging of a race but of image and appearance. As with every story in the collection, the reader is taken to an unexpected end and coaxed into looking at everyday life a bit different.  ‘Elbow Room’ is a must add to any fiction collection.      


Tony Lindsay is an award-winning author and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. His book ONE DEAD DOCTOR was chosen by Conversations Book Club as one of its Top 100 Books of 2012. Lindsay was named Conversations Author of the Year 2012-2013.  His new book EMOTIONAL DRIPPINGS is available now on Amazon.com. He can be reached at tonylinsay7045@sbcglobal.net or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tony.linssay2.

Tony Lindsay Presents... Novelist Leon Forrest

There is genre fiction, and there is literary fiction. Within these two categories are groups; in part, genre fiction consists of mystery, romance, science fiction, chick-lit, street-lit, western, thriller, and the list continues to grow. The components of literary fiction are less in number but just as vast in scope: historical, magical realism, stream of consciousness, speculative, allegory, satire, and pastoral. Writers of literary fiction employ tropes or figurative devices in their work that go beyond the popular metaphors or reoccurring similes that are common genre fiction.

Magical realism, perhaps the most demanding category of literary fiction, is used by few writers successfully. One who has succeeded in being considered a magical realist is novelist Leon Forrest.

In his work, Two Wings to Veil My Face, Forrest writes the slave history of an African American family. He weaves the story through two protagonists: a grandson -Nathaniel Witherspoon and Great-Momma Sweetie Reed the grandmother. The masterful story telling begins with the stressful situation of the family at the funeral home to view the deceased grandfather.

In this section of the text, Forrest displays through painstaking imagery the complex relationship between the father-Arthur Witherspoon, the son/grandson, and a self reliant - spirit talking to Great-Momma Sweetie who refuses to attend the grandfather’s, her one hundred and seventeen year old husband, funeral.
Through this couples marriage, which starts when Great-Momma Sweetie is fifteen and Jericho Witherspoon is fifty-five, the reader witnesses slavery after the Civil War, the interdependent relationship of post slavery master and slave, the harsh truth of freedom bringing Union Soldiers, and the fragile lives of women of the era.
What Forrest does through magical realism . . . is make unbearable human situations bearable in the pages of Two Wings to Veil My Face. Relationships between the characters in this novel, in actual life, would have mind shattering repercussions. Only a magical realist can have an abused daughter visit an abuser father on his deathbed seeking solace and understanding. Only a magical realist can cause a reader to accept a barren wife of forty years raising a husband’s child from an adulterous affair. Only a magical realist could cause a reader to believe that a slave broke his master’s back for sleeping with his woman, and another slave healed the master and brought him back to life.

What is unacceptable in reality, through Leon Forrest’s literary craft becomes real in Two Wings to Veil My Face - one Leon Forrest’s five novels.
 There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden (Random House, 1973)
 The Bloodworth Orphans (Random House, 1977)
 Two Wings to Veil My Face (Asphodel, 1984)
 Divine Days (Another Chicago Press, 1992)
 Meteor in the Madhouse (Northwestern University, 2001)

Tony Lindsay is a writer and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. His latest book ONE DEAD DOCTOR was chosen as one of Conversations Top 100 Books of 2012. Lindsay was also voted Conversations Author of the Year 2012-13. He can be reached at tonylindsay7045@sbcglobal.net or on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tony.linssay2.

Tony Lindsay: Conversations' Author of the Year, 2012-13

by Cyrus Webb

Choosing the Author of the Year for Conversations over the past few years has been one of my greatest challenges, however, it also allows me the opportunity to share my thoughts on the wordsmiths that are delivering some of the world's greatest work. Past honorees have been Andrew Neiderman, John Saul, Wahida Clark and most recently Stuart Woods. All of them have been guests of mine through Conversations, and they all have shown themselves to be incredible at telling a great story.

For 2012 there was one author that consistently kept coming to the forefront of my mind because of the impact he was making, and it is for this reason that Tony Lindsay, author of titles like URBAN AFFAIR, ONE DEAD LAWYER, ONE DEAD PREACHER and now ONE DEAD DOCTOR (one of Conversations Top Books of 2012), is Conversations' Author of the Year 2012-13.

I first interviewed Lindsay some six years ago for Conversations Magazine. I was a fan of his that really wanted to share his story with our readers, and he was gracious enough to work with me in making it happen. We met face-to-face for the first time in 2008 when Conversations Book Club hosted him in author events in Mississippi and Louisiana.  It was great to spend some time with the storyteller, and get to know more about what motivates him as an author.

The gift that he has is one that I think is universal, but you will hear many talk about him in the singular vein of being a great "urban fiction" author. Being one that is not huge on such titles or generalizations, I would rather think of Tony Lindsay as a man that is able to tell a story in such a way that he can gather readers of various genres together around his work. He is definitely not a one-note. You might think you know him by reading books like STREET POSSESSION and URBAN AFFAIR, and then you might hear someone speaking about CHASIN' IT or MORE BOY THAN GIRL, and you will definitely get a different flavor of his literary palette.

In 2012 what struck me was that I was just getting the opportunity of digesting the lessons from his latest book of short stories called FAT FROM PAPA'S HEAD when ONE DEAD DOCTOR hit the market. Once again Lindsay was able to take us into the life of David Price and the issues he faced, reminding us of how much fiction can gave a true commentary on the events of our lives.

I hear people say if you are a fan of author Donald Goines you will like Tony Lindsay. That may be true to some, but it is not my experience. For me, Goines doesn't capture a world that speaks to me like Lindsay does. If anything, Tony Lindsay is the Donald Goines of my time. His words lift up and off the page into the reader's mind and heart, leaving an imprint that makes it almost impossible to keep it to yourself.

It is my pleasure to honor Tony Lindsay in this issue of Conversations Magazine and throughout 2013. His is a talent that the world deserves to know.

To discover him for yourself, look up his books at www.amazon.com.

Tony Lindsay Presents..."A Look at Gayl Jones"

In 1975, Gayl Jones’ first novel Corregidora was published. The heart wrenching work was edited by Toni Morrison. The storyline centers around a family derived from rape, incest, and prostitution. The rawness of the narrative is without equal. In the work, there is a conflict between what is erotica and what is empathetic prose, and this leaves the reader uncertain; either one should be sexually stimulated or cry tears of sorrow, or scream in anger.

The novel opens with the protagonist, Ursa Corregidora, being stalked by a jealous husband who throws her down the stairs and causes her to lose her “womb.” Within the tale Gayl Jones constructs, this introduction is mild compared to the agony and ecstasy that follows. Nothing that occurs in the novel is expected.
  
“I knew you was gonna come out a girl even while you was in me. Put my hand on my belly, and knew you was gonna be one of us. Little long-haired girl on my lap. You come out baldheaded though. They just kept looking at me, Mama and Gram. I knew they hated me then. Cause you come out all baldheaded. White skin before you got the little pigment you got now, and baldheaded. They hated me, but then your hair start to sprout, and get real long. I used to put a little ribbon on your head so people would know you was a girl . . . I knew you’d be a girl. I knew my body would have a girl” (117).

A talent of Gayl Jones’ is to being able to place a reader in the moment of the scene; one is dropped into the life she creates and forced to fin for ones’ self. Corregidora is 185 pages of family trauma, love, sex, and survival.


Tony Lindsay is an award-winning author and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. His new book ONE DEAD DOCTOR is available now on Amazon.com. He can be reached at tonylinsay7045@sbcglobal.net or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tony.linssay2. 

Tony Lindsay Presents... "A Look At James Baldwin"

At the pinnacle of his career, and during the height of The Civil Rights Movement, James Arthur Baldwin's 'The Fire Next Time' was published. The book arrived after the success of Go tell on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, and Giovanni's Room. Baldwin had established himself as an essayist, novelist, playwright, and columnist . . . a writer. 'The Fire next Time' had been published in parts in both The New Yorker and the Progressive in 1962. At this point in his career, James Baldwin had America's ear and what he chose to tell her made history.

The work, 'The Fire Next Time' is divided into two parts; the first being a letter of advice to Baldwin's nephew, also named James his namesake, on how to survive within the racist climate of America in 1962. He titled the letter "My Dungeon: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation." What was startling about the letter is that during a period of proposed integration and assimilation Baldwin advises:

If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand: and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. (8)

One should remember the "letter" was written in 1962. Here Baldwin speaks to the equality of men based on knowing themselves; if his nephew knows from whence he came the lies of white superiority would be of little affect on his development and survival; not bad advice for any man during any time.


Tony Lindsay is an award-winning author and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. His new book ONE DEAD DOCTOR is available now on Amazon. He can be reached at tonylinsay7045@sbcglobal.net or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tony.linssay2.

Tony Lindsay Presents... "Sterling Plumpp"

To refer to him as a Jazz or Blues poet would limit the scope of his pen; although, he is a Jazz and Blues poet.

To refer to him as a Black Arts Movement poet would restrict poignancy of his prose; although, he is a Black Arts Movement Poet. To say he is English professor would curtail the didactic verbiage he has used to mold the minds of young scribes for decades; although, he is Professor Emeritus from the University of Illinois. Perhaps, Poet in the Greek will do.

Sterling D. Plumpp is called a poet’s poet due to his use of vernacular, syntax, and word choice. A word, a line, a stanza, a poem of Plumpp’s will send a readers mind in various directions.  ‘XVI. Sixteen’ from Ornate With Smoke takes one on such a multi tenet journey.  

XVI. Sixteen
Worlds collide inside my axe
each time
I solo

I learn to speak
tenor on the page

I learn
other saxophone languages
even those from under foot
notes of Tranes
I did not yet ride

So I
come to you asking
if I can be a bird
house boy bumming
rides from your solos in
to kitchen
pots and pans some
body’s great grand
mother played when her sweet
daddy done
done her wrong

Bumming
rides into yesterday
with two or three stops in tomorrow
or bumming through midnight today
with two or three stops into day
breaks a thousand years ago

Can I be a bird
house boy with a pen
to blow his years clear of
the leaves memory sheds in autumn

I play
cynanide rhythms
for hurricanes

I do
rag
I do
rag
I do
rag on line
I do
rag
I do
rag
I do rag time

Because I
con breaks

I
con breaks
I
con breaks
I
con breaks

and
I do
rag
I do
rag
I do
rag time

The dedication of Ornate with Smoke reads, “For Fred Anderson: improviser.” Anderson was a Jazz saxophonist who died in June 24th 2010. The work was published in ’97, Anderson got to appreciate the book and hear the notes Sterling Plumpp wrote for him.

Tony Lindsay is an award-winning author and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. His new book ONE DEAD DOCTOR is available now on Amazon.com. He can be reached at tonylinsay7045@sbcglobal.net or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tony.linssay2.

Tony Lindsay Presents "Gwendolyn Brooks: 'A Street In Bronzeville'"

In her first published collection of poetry, 'A Street in Bronzeville', Ms. Brooks transports the reader to the south side of Chicago during the nineteen forties to an area in the city referred to as the "Black Belt." This Black Belt area would give rise to Chicago's culturally rich south side, and later become known as Bronzeville which was where Gwendolyn Brooks lived and wrote.

When "A Street in Bronzeville' was published Ms. Brooks lived at Six Twenty-three East Sixty-Third Street in Bronzeville. From her autobiography, 'Report from Part One,' she writes "If you wanted a poem, you had only to look out of a window."

This farming of poetic material from her Bronzeville community is apparent throughout the collection. She was a poet inspired by her community. A writer is often advised to "write what one knows," Ms. Brooks was the epitome of that advice. She took the everyday people of Bronzeville and the occurrences of their lives and gave them literary merit by representing them in formally structured poetry.

In the heart wrenching poem 'the mother' the reader is forced into the internal sufferings of a mother who has aborted her children.

'the mother'

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air,

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breast they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, you mar-

riages, aches, and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine?-

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I

Loved you

All.

In the ballad 'of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery Miller' Ms. Brooks exemplifies the death of "a plain black boy."

'of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery Miller'

He was born in Alabama

He was bred in Illinois

He was nothing but a

Plain black boy.

Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot.

Nothing but a plain black boy.

Drive him past the Pool Hall.

Drive him past the Show.

Blind within his casket.

But maybe he will know.

Down through Forty-seventh Street:

Underneath the L,

And-Northwest Corner, Prairie,

That he loved so well.

Don't forget the Dance Halls-

Warick and Savoy,

Where he picked his women, where

He drank his liquid joy.

Born in Alabama.

Bred in Illinois.

He was nothing but a

Plain black boy.

Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot.

Nothing but a plain black boy.

Gwendolyn Brooks was a poet who loved her community, so much so that she made it the center of most of work. Her first published work, 'A Street in Bronzeville' is a must read.

Tony Lindsay is an award-winning author and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. His new book ONE DEAD DOCTOR is available now on Amazon.com. He can be reached at tonylinsay7045@sbcglobal.net or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tony.linssay2.