PROGRESS IN LITERATURE

"One can no longer write African-American literature, any more than one can currently write Elizabethan literature." Kenneth W. Warren.

  

"Progress in Literature" was an article I was commissioned to write for a book entitled Making Progress: Essays in Progress and Public Policy, edited by C. Leigh Anderson and Janet W. Looney (Lexington Books, 2002). It is reprinted in Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (Scribner, 2003).

  

In that work I argue that technical and thematic progress in literature can easily be demonstrated if we trace, for example, the English novel from the 18th century work of Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe through later practitioners of the form such as Fielding, Sterne, and 20th century writers like Faulkner and Hemingway. The same evolution can be demonstrated for the modern short story, beginning with Poe's almost single-handed creation of the form, and tracing it through a period of formulaic writing circa 1900 to the revolt against that formalism in the work of such writers as D.H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, James Joyce, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, and others. 

There is no question that in terms of craft we are better writers today than most of our predecessors, and much credit for this progress must be given to the more than 300 writing programs that have sprung up since the end of World War II; and to writers themselves becoming teachers while at the same time democratizing and de-mystifying the creative process as it pertains to literary fiction. 

But Ethelbert has asked me to tailor this question specifically to black American literature, a request that should allow me to refine and expand a bit upon "Progress in Literature."

  

Every teacher (or student) of black American literature discovers very early that this body of work was created largely during the periods of slavery and segregation. That is the ground from which so much of it---slave narratives, protest novels---arises. And how could it be otherwise? In What is Literature?, when Sartre discusses Richard Wright in the 1940s, he says, "if an American Negro finds that he has a vocation as a writer, he discovers his subject at the same time. He is the man who sees the whites from outside, who assimilates the white culture from the outside, and each of whose books will show the alienation of the black race within American society."     

The protest novel, as Sartre indicates, was understandably taken to be the form sine qua non for black writing. Famous debates raged over this issue, leading to classic essays like James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel," and Ralph Ellison's "The World and the Jug." Both those black authors (and many others) wished to move beyond the narrow constraints placed upon black writing in the segregation era, although this was the sort of black novel liberal or progressive white readers were most interested in seeing from black authors: the kind, as Sartre says, that "gives society a guilty conscience; he (the black writer) is thereby in a state of perpetual antagonism toward the conservative forces which are maintaining the balance he needs to upset."

But, as I argued in a recent, widely-read essay, "The End of the Black American

Narrative" (The American Scholar, Summer 2008), we are now over 40 years into the post-Civil Rights period. Has black American literature changed? Has it "progressed" in terms of reflecting the new 21st century realities and experiences of black Americans?

Without mentioning my essay, Kenneth W. Warren, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, published a piece entitled "Does African-American Literature Exist?" in the February 24, 2011 issue of The Chronicle Review. He explained that his aim was to "make a claim that runs counter to much of literary scholarship." His claim is this:

"African-American literature was the literature of a distinct historical period, namely the era of constitutionally sanctioned segregation known as Jim Crow...Like it or not, African-American literature was a Jim Crow phenomenon, which is to say, speaking from the standpoint of a post-Jim Crow world, African-American literature is history. While one can (and students of American literature certainly should) write about African-American literature, one can no longer write African-American literature, any more than one can currently write Elizabethan literature."

Warren also points out that, "Writing in 1942 in the short-lived journal Negro Quarterly: A Review of Negro Life and Culture, edited by Angelo Herndon and Ralph Ellison, for example, the upstart young black critic Edward Bland lamented the lack of literary accomplishment among Harlem Renaissance authors in the 1920s: 'One of the outstanding features of the Negro novels that appeared during the twenties was their literary incompetence'."

Obviously, that complaint about techne and craft has been finally put to rest by a very large number of award-winning black authors who are master craftsmen and craftswomen. But the larger issue raised by Warren remains: Is there "progress" in the content of black literary fiction? And, more to point, is it even possible to write "black" literature anymore? As Warren says, "Sever that connection (to slavery and Jim Crow), and works, however accomplished, would settle into the literary universe according to style, theme, genre, or whatever."

 In other words, "black" literature in the early 21st century, the era of President Barack Obama, America's first black president, can be said to have progressed to the stage of being seen now as simply human literature. It was that before, of course, but today it is neither limited to the protest novel, nor does it bear the burden of having to somehow represent and speak for the experiences of an entire people in their liberation struggle. Do John Updike, Stephen King, John Gardner, or Joyce Carol Oates speak for all white people? Obviously not. Nor can it be said today that John Edgar Wideman, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, Charles Johnson, Walter Mosley or any black writer working in 2011 speaks in an all-inclusive, exhaustive way about the so-called "black experience" which, as writer Reginald McKnight once put it, is "as polymorphous as the dance of Shiva."

All American writers, then, can only be be approached today in terms of their individual voices and visions. And the quality of their literary and intellectual performances. That is the basis on which each will be experienced and judged. And isn't that the dangerous freedom---the progress---that writers during the Harlem Renaissance dreamed of having?

       

BLACKS AND BUDDHISM/ BUDDHISM AND BLACKS

When some Americans are in the presence of a person who is black and Buddhist, you can see the cognitive dissonance---the confusion--right there in their eyes as they struggle to process this information that so rudely unsettles their cultural and racial presuppositions. 

Over forty years I've seen people react to this phenomenon with emotions that range from fear to anger, as if they had somehow been personally betrayed, insulted or threatened; and I've seen others who know something about Buddhism delight in this revelation, as if to say, And why not? But just as James Weldon Johnson stated in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man that, "I believe it is a fact that the colored people in this country know and understand the white people better than the white people understand them," so too, I have to say that the vast majority of Americans are very poorly informed about the theory and practice of Buddhism.

Over 2600 years, many branches or traditions of Buddhism have sprung from the bodhi tree. One of these that is especially attractive to black American Buddhists is Soka Gakkai (Nichiren), which claims to have approximately 15,000 black practitioners, among them Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson, Tina Turner, and the jazz great Herbie Hancock. My sister-in-law in Chicago is a practitioner of this school that also attracts a large number of Hispanics. Unlike other Buddhist traditions, Soka Gakkai is proactive and proselytizes, seeking out members in urban areas with large black populations (practitioners urge their friends to join)---this is very different from the image most convert American Buddhists have of Japanese Zen traditions where, for example, stories are told of a spiritual seeker made to sit for a full day or two outside a zendo before he is finally admitted, and then only at first as a visitor. (In other words, you need to show that you really need and want this.)

Soka Gakkai members chant chapters from the Lotus Sutra, and if you have ever been lucky enough to be in a room where they are chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo in unison you will experience anew the elemental power of sound as their collective voices move like a strong, cleansing wind or an ocean wave through every cell and fibre of your body. Although I tilt toward the Theravada tradition, and took a lay person's formal vows in the Japanese Soto Zen tradition founded by Dogen, I have a deep appreciation for the way Herbie Hancock described his practice in a 2007 interview for Beliefnet:

 "The idea of cause and affect, which Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is about, made sense to me," he said. "I'm a guy that's always been attracted to science---and cause and effect is what science is about...The cool thing is that jazz is really a wonderful example of the great characteristics of Buddhism and the great characteristics of the human spirit. Because in jazz we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment. At our best we're non-judgmental. If we let judgment get in the way of improvising, it always screws us up. So we take whatever happens and try to make it work...At the same time---and just think about this---within the life of a human being is the universe. So, we all have the universe inside at our core."

HERBIE HANCOCK

Those words don't sound as if they are coming from a person who sees himself as a "victim," do they? Such a conceptualization poisons the mind and the human spirit. Mr. Hancock, like all Buddhists, is not mired in a past that cannot be recovered or a future that will never come, but instead works to anchor himself "in the moment." And he is not ensnared in what black Buddhist teacher Lama Rangdrol describes as the debilitation, bitter, polarized and cliched "mentality of an angry black man." Added to that, Hancock's comparison of his egoless listening and non-judgmental approach as a jazz musician to the Dharma reminds us that Buddhist practice has much in common with the process we associate with creating art, which demands an openness to all things. (Buddhism, some commentators have pointed out, is a form of artistic practice with your life itself being the material you are shaping.)

What unites black Buddhists, regardless of the tradition they belong to, is the desire to be free. Truly free. The practice of Buddhism is the practice of life itself. Last week I had the great pleasure of reading, then endorsing a book entitled Tell Me Something about Buddhism: Questions and Answers for the Curious Beginner, by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, a black Soto Zen Priest. 

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL

Her book, which includes a foreword by Thich Nhat Hahn, will be published in October by Hampton Roads. In the future when anyone asks me questions about black people and Buddhism, I plan to simply tell them to buy Zenju's beautiful book. She is acutely aware of how we can be enslaved by the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. By the concepts and words that obscure our experience of reality. Just reading her clear, beautiful and inspiring answers to questions about Buddhist practice quiets and calms the mind as quickly as the wood striking wood sound of a han calling us to awakening. (In Japanese Soto Zen a han is a mallet and piece of wood that are struck to summon practitioners to the zendo). Each page is rich in wisdom, as when one of her teachers points out that, "All emotions are from the past."

  

Meditate for just a moment on that.

CHARLES JOHNSON ON BIOGRAPHY AND BRIGHT MOMENTS

In coming, nothing is gained; in going, nothing is lost. Those are words I have heard at Zen memorial services...life and death are events in time with no self attached to them." Posted by Barbara O'Brien on About.com Guide, May 2, 2011.

 

 

 

E. Ethelbert Miller asks "Is anyone working on a biography about you?" I'm happy to say, "No." And I hope no one ever wastes their precious time doing that.

  

I've always enjoyed reading biographies of fiction writers, because I've learned much from them. But I see my own life as quiet, disciplined, boring---and that's exactly way I want to keep it. I've always preferred to restrict Drama to the pages of my stories and keep it out of my everyday existence; and I do love and identify with the way some people call our president "No Drama Obama."  

 

In my teens when I first studied Taoism, I was powerfully impressed by the image in that philosophy of passing through life and "leaving no footprints." We find a similar idea in Buddhism---Shakyamuni was never himself depicted visually during the early days of Buddhism, but instead was simply represented by his footsteps on the Path (or the Way, as a Taoist would say), or so I've read. In other words, we're all just pilgrims passing through this plane. Basically, my life has always been devoted to work and family. That's not the stuff that makes for an exciting, page-turning reading experience.

 

 

However, if someone did squander their time on earth writing a biography of me, and wanted to know what the "defining" moments of my life were, I'd have to say there were a few. One was when I sold my first six illustrations for the catalog of a Magic Product Company in Chicago when I was 17-years-old, and finally got paid for doing art. (I still have one of the dollars from that assignment framed under glass and on my study wall; there were many times when I was broke and hungry and tempted to spend it, but I'm glad I didn't.) 

 

 

There is also what I consider to be my "rite-of-passage" as a young man on the night of my first rank test at Chi Tao Chuan of the Monastery in 1967 when I earned a double-promotion, primarily for my sparring. (Our teacher felt my instinctive fighting style resembled Pau Kua.) I spent a month every night in the basement of my dorm drilling the moves I knew I we would be tested on, for example throwing 45 punches to the front, back and side in 10 seconds---the guys in the dorm used to time me with a stopwatch when I demonstrated that. And it seemed we sparred forever on the night we were tested---one against one, and three against one---all of us pushed to exhaustion. Then beyond exhaustion. I thought I'd be killed in that very rough kwoon in the days before safety rules and regulations existed widely in American martial art schools. (Knockouts were common; one student killed a man on the streets of Chicago after only two weeks of studying there, which is why I decided that was the place for me.) I didn't care about pain because I wanted to study this. And that was the night I learned to "let go" the fear of death or injury---or the fear of anything else in this world. 

 

 

Two other milestones would be the night I met my wife on a hot summer evening in 1968 and a voice in my head said, "This is It, you don't have to look anymore," then the day of our marriage two years later. I count the days our children were born as two "peak experiences." 

 

 

Also the day the president of SUNY-Stony Brook handed me my Ph.D. in Philosophy, the attaining of which had been my dream since I was 18-years-old. And finally, of course, there was the night I received the National Book Award in 1990 for Middle Passage, and had the opportunity to read a tribute to Ralph Ellison, who was at the ceremony with his wife Fanny.

 

  

You don't need a biography for those peak moments; you can do them all in one essay or a short story.

THE UNPUBLISHED WORK OF CHARLES JOHNSON

Occasionally, I'm asked about the six unpublished novels I wrote between 1970 and 1972 before Faith and the Good Thing. I should use this opportunity to clarify some things about them that have raised questions in the minds of some readers, students, and literary scholars.

I came to novel-writing with a background in journalism (my bachelor's degree) and writing for newspapers in Chicago and southern Illinois. Creating copy quickly is something every journalist learns to do, and he (or she) has no problem with filing 3 or 4 stories a week. That was the training I brought to novel-writing. I knew I could write 10 pages a day, 5 days a week (taking a break on weekends to relax, do research and/or rewrite), and thereby produce a 300-page manuscript in six weeks My master's thesis, for example, was written over five days, 10 pages a day; and, later in life, I typically held myself to a 5-page-a-day schedule when writing screen-and-teleplays.

The first of those six unpublished novels had the working title, The Last Liberation, and it was an exploration of Eastern philosophy set in a Chicago kung-fu school like Chi Tao Chuan of the Monastery, the kwoon I trained at in 1967 during the Chicago "Dojo Wars" when I was 19-years-old. The second book was an early version of Middle Passage, i.e., written as the log kept by a white captain on a slave ship (The research for that was done during a black history course I took as an undergraduate). The third novel was a black, family drama. The fourth, fifth and sixth novels were a 959-page trilogy (I was shooting for 1,000-pages but ended it early so my wife and I could spend some quality time together) about the childhood, young manhood, and middle-age of a black musician. He was a pianist. I took lessons on the piano around that time with a black friend who was a musician and in the Music Department at Southern Illinois University; for years we always had a piano in our home in Seattle, first so I could sometimes practice, then for my kids when they had music lessons.

All these early books were written quickly, and before I learned the proper approach for revising literary fiction. (By the way, these E-Channel Posts are, I should note, as close as I ever get to releasing first-draft material, so please be forgiving, especially for the occasional typos Ethelbert and I miss.) Yet, there is a story I can tell about Book Four in this series of what I call "apprentice novels" that might be worth sharing.

Book Four, about the childhood of a musician, was accepted in early 1973 for publication by a new, start-up publishing company in New York when I was only a couple of chapters into writing Faith and the Good Thing. I was faced with a dilemma. Every young writer wants to be published. But what one first publishes is important for one's "career" (Yes, I just used that word even though I dislike it.) There was no certainty I would publish Faith when it was done (or even if I could finish it), but here with one of the earlier manuscripts was a "bird in the hand," so to speak. The publishers liked it because, as they said, it reminded them of the writing of James Baldwin. I felt torn, for with Faith I'd found for the first time the beginnings of my own voice and vision, as well as a way to deploy large amounts of philosophy in a work of fiction. With that still in-progress work, I'd moved far beyond the earlier six novels.

John Gardner was looking over my shoulder during the nine months (October, 1972 through June, 1973) I wrote  Faith (He was the only creative writing teacher I had since Marie Claire Davis when I was a junior in high school), so I asked him, "What do you think I should do?"

His answer was wise: "If you think that later you're going to have to climb over the earlier book, don't publish it."

I say his answer was wise because a debut novel tends to define a young writer. Reviewers look at it, and think, "OK, this shows us what he can do and can't do. Here are his strengths and limitations and, rightly or wrongly, they tell us what to expect from him in the future." It's important, I believe, for a literary writer's first book to be what I call a "performance novel," a demonstration of all the skill and craft he (or she) has learned up to the time of the book's composition. Furthermore, James Baldwin had his own particular vision of life; in 1973 I was developing my individual  and literary sense of the world, with its own vocabulary and grammar. I had no interest in being judged imitative. So, after taking the deepest of breaths, I wrote to the publisher and withdrew that fourth novel (yes, that was painful to do), gambling that Faith would turn out well, which I suppose it did because 37 years later it is still in print.

The world will never see those first six novels I wrote in two years. That's why I call them "apprentice novels"---they were, in my view, simply preparations for the work that would come later.

CHARLES JOHNSON ON FAMILY WISDOM AND WORK

 When I was growing up in the racially segregated 1950s, there was a very common saying among black Americans that I heard over and over again. The saying was this: "A black person will have to work twice as hard as a white person to get half as far."

I remember that when I first heard this from family members, it struck me as being unfair. But then I thought, "Who says life has to be fair?" So I did the math. If I had to work twice as hard to get half as far as my white contemporaries, then I'd have to work four times as hard to break even with them, and six times as hard to truly excel. That meant no days off. No vacations. No partying. Those were luxuries the people of an embattled, oppressed race could not afford. (I recall my late chairman of English at UW, Robert Heilman, once saying to me, "You're always relaxed but you never really relax." I had to laugh because he was right and had figured me out.)

Being a product of the 1950s, I took this "law" of black American life during the era of segregation to heart. (I recall reading an interview with Condoleezza Rice where she said she heard the exact same words from her family members.)  So it had been, I knew, for all the black people I admired like Du Bois, the Tuskegee Airmen, and all my black predecessors in this country. So why should it be any different for me? The harshness of the black reality that gave rise to that formula softened in the 1960s, especially when policies supporting affirmation action were in place, but by that time the racial "law" that applied to being black in Jim Crow America had sunk into my DNA.

 It became part of my make-up because I had great examples of hard-working black men in my life, starting with my father who at one point in the 1960s held down three jobs to support my mother and me---a day job doing construction, an evening job as a night watchman for the City of Evanston, and on the weekends he helped an elderly white couple do repairs on their home. Watching him work this way for our family, seeing his frugality, religious piety, and the simplicity of his pleasures as well as his good spirit as he labored, I just understood that I would always have to multi-task; to embrace the meaning of sacrifice; to work in two or three artistic and/or academic disciplines; and to hold down daily more than one job during my lifetime---and all that without complaint or whining, as he did.  He was a proud man, was my father. And he took pride in his work more than anything else. (Later, I would see that formulation for his life in Sartre's phrase "Existence precedes essence" and the Buddhist concept of karma.) When I was growing up, he wasn't my "role model." He was my hero. Both my wife and I were struck by how much he was like the character played by Morgan Freeman in the film, Driving Miss Daisy. All during my adult life until his death at 81 seven years ago, I thanked him for teaching me "how" to work, and for making me see that a man defines himself, first and foremost, through his deeds.

I remember when Dad and I were working together on something or doing any chore---like unloading items from a truck, for example---and we'd come to the last item that required our labor and sweat. A big smile would come across my father's face when he saw this final item; he'd take his cigar out of his mouth, and he'd say, "That's the one I was looking for."

That's how I feel when I reach the last page of anything I write. Or finish the ink-work on a drawing. Or the last move in a martial form. Or the last bench-press I have to push into the air. Or the last class I taught in a career of 33 years in higher education, with my father's voice whispering up through my memory: That's the one I was looking for.

CHARLES JOHNSON: STAGE AND SCREEN

Over the years some of my stories have been staged, filmed, and adapted for radio. Let me work slowly through some of these things as I look over my curriculum vitae. 

 

The novel Faith and the Good Thing was adapted as a play by Keli Garrett and staged by City Lit Theater and Chicago Theater Company at Bailiwick Arts Center (March 16--April 20, 1995) and Chicago Theater Company (April 21--May 28, 1995). That play received nominations in five categories for the first annual Black Theater Alliance Awards and won the first two: Best Actress (Lydia Gartin), Best Supporting Actress (Lisa Biggs), with nominations for Best Supporting Actor, Best Lighting Design, and Best Play.

 

Among my short stories, "Menagerie" was performed as a play (five amateur performances) at the Ruth Taylor Theater at Trinity University in 1991, directed by Shobie Partos. It was also presented on "Short Subjects" by Symphony Space on National Public Radio, read by Gloria Foster (June 3, 1995) and included in Volume 9 of "Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story," a two-cassette audio tape sold by Symphony Space. My story "A Soldier for the Crown" was also included in 2004 in "Selected Shorts: Handsome and Lonesome," read by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. "Cultural Relativity" was made into a short, funny film entitled "In His Kiss" by David S. DeCrane and shown at the Newport Beach Film Festival on April 17, 2004.

 

 

The story "China" was adapted by film-maker Jeffrey Wray as a one-hour drama that aired on PBS. Wray wrote a fine screenplay for this, but I found his casting and directing to be disappointing so I don't talk much about this adaptation.

 

 

Regarding Dreamer, I've been approached by actor Jon Voight (he wanted to be involved but not to act because he didn't see a role for himself in it) and folks at a New York film company about filming that novel but, as with many Hollywood conversations, the right deal package didn't materialize.

 

 

In the early '90s I sat for four days in a Seattle studio recording the first 3-hour audio-cassette for Middle Passage (Penguin/Highbridge); the most recent recorded book version is narrated by Dion Graham (Griot Audio).

 

 

As for Hollywood, Middle Passage has been optioned three times. First by Tri-Star, then Interscope. On those occasions, first Warrington, then Reginald Hudlin were attached to the projects, and I wrote two screenplay adaptations for those studios. Tri-Star didn't work out for us because their executives wanted to remove the Allmuseri god from the novel, which Warrington and I refused to do. The screenplay for Interscope was the best since we added a whole new act in which we see the sailors on the Republic---but not Rutherford Calhoun---raid the village of the Allmuseri and, after a breathtaking battle, leave their ancestral home in smoldering ruins, then lead the survivors away (along with Rutherford)  in chains. That is not in the novel. The third option was at Warner Brothers, where John Singleton wanted to direct it. Some years ago, he called me out of the clear blue to tell me he'd "finally" found his choice among actors to play the important role of Capt. Ebenzer Falcon, Peter Dinklage.

 

 

I think maybe one day Middle Passage will be filmed, perhaps during my lifetime or after my life is over. It's now 21 years old, in its 20th printing from Scribner, and is taught widely at colleges and universities each year. But Hollywood has never filmed a black epic (As one of my UW colleagues once put it, Middle Passage begins as a picaresque, becomes an epic, and ends as a romance.) And bear in mind this would be a very expensive movie to make well, at least $100 million (and that's a 1990s estimate made before foreign financing became so important for American movies). At that cost, a studio puts itself at risk for that year. And this story presents two, difficult production challenges. First, it's a period drama, which means all costumes, props, etc., must be circa the mid-1800s. (Think of how painstakingly James Cameron worked to get that accurate, right down to the silverware in Titanic.) Secondly, as a sea adventure story, it has to be shot on the water, and we know how difficult the elements can be to work with during a shoot. I would not want to see it done badly (or cheaply) as a film.

 

 

 

However, as we know, once an author signs away his film rights, he has no control whatsoever over how his story will be interpreted or how the film will turn out---it helps if the author does the screenplay and/or serves in some capacity as a "producer," but even that sort of participation is no guarantee he'll be pleased with the final product, for in so many cases the story may be basically seen by a studio as a vehicle for its star or someone the studio executives want to do business with (Remember Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and how Ken Kesey had his named removed from that film?) No one ever sets out to make a bad movie, but it's rare when all the aspects of film-making involved---the right casting, a director with a literary sensibility like Stanley Kubrick, a well-written screenplay, good editing, and funding---come together in a perfect combination to create an outstanding film. To be honest, I think it's something of a miracle when that does happen.

 

CHARLES JOHNSON TALKS ABOUT LIBRARIES

I’ve enjoyed a life-long love affair with libraries all over the world. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that I've lived most of my life in the stacks. For example, as a kid I hauled home armfuls of books on drawing and the history of illustration from the Evanston Public Library. I began writing my first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, in 1972. For that novel I read 80 books on magic and folklore---all of them came, of course, from the library of the college I was attending. The next novel, Oxherding Tale, I began in 1975 when I was working on my doctorate in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After I finished teaching and taking my own classes, I went to the library and speed-read every book on American slavery that they had on their shelves. 

 

 

 

When I wrote Middle Passage, I once again turned to the library in order to immerse myself for six years in the literature of the sea, nautical dictionaries, and even esoteric studies of Cockney slang, which helped me to individuate the language of the sailors on the 19th century slave ship I was writing about. And even before I wrote the first sentence for my last novel, Dreamer, I spent two years at libraries researching the history of the Civil Rights Movement, biographies of Martin Luther King Jr., and critical examinations of his speeches, his sermons, and his intellectual development.  

 

 

I mention these examples because my process as a writer has always demanded massive research before and during the creation of a novel or a non-fictional book, and that would have been impossible without the institutions that preserve human culture, thought, and experience in written form.

 

 

 

During the last 30 years I’ve had the pleasure of visiting one of the oldest libraries in Europe, one located in the little Portuguese town of Coimbra, in a small building with no windows so that sunlight would not damage the rows of manuscripts that dated back well before the Middle Ages. In northern Thailand, I walked shoeless through Theravada Buddhist libraries that preserved classic works of Buddhism on palm-leaf scrolls that were at least a millennium-old. And closer to home, in the special collections section of the library at Indiana University, I had the unusual experience of holding in my hands a Buddhist scroll written on parchment. That day, in that library, I had to wear plastic gloves because the ink used a thousand years ago on that scroll had been mixed with poison. The purpose of that was to kill anyone who did not belong to the monastic hierarchy, and to keep spiritual knowledge and wisdom in the hands of a few.

 

 

 

Until the modern era, it was not unusual for people in the East and the West to withhold knowledge from the common man. This was especially true in the United States after slave rebellions like that of Nat Turner and the Stono Rebellion. Black people were whipped if they tried to learn how to read. Whites feared that if slaves could read, they were more likely to come across abolitionist material and rebel. They would read, reflect, and question their situation. So slaves had to be kept illiterate.

 

 

In 1832, Alabama enacted a law that fined anyone between $250 and $500 if they tried to educate a slave. In North Carolina in 1835, the public education of black Americans was prohibited. Whites in the slave-holding South also feared black people who could write and therefore communicate with each other. One law in South Carolina said this: “Be it therefore Enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That all and every Person and Persons whatsoever, who shall hereafter teach or cause any slave to be taught to write, or shall use or employ any slave as a Scribe in any Manner of Writing whatsoever, hereafter taught to write, every such offense forfeit the sum of One Hundred Pounds current money.”

 

 

 

So I think there is an intimate relationship between literacy and democracy. Between democracy and the free public library especially, which is one of the finest achievements of this country. Like any American, I complain on April 15. But some things are so essential for a nation to call itself civilized---like libraries---that they require a community's collective support through a contribution from each of us (i.e., taxes). The return on that investment, in both principle and practice (as that relates to a nation's level of literacy), is too great to be measured.