How We Could Sustain Our Love

That was the question,

   Almeyda,

how we could sustain our love

at a time of cruelty....

It’s hard to keep tenderness

when things around you

   are hard.


—Gayl Jones, “Song for Anninho,” 1981

In 1995, before I made the career turn from publishing to technology, the last book I worked on was a survey of black literature. Sitting at my desk in Detroit, I was hesitant about the assignment because I was neither an expert in the field nor a member of the community. My manager pointed out that I hadn’t been an expert in other projects I had taken on and that the same academic research and editorial approach would directly translate, which only slightly improved my confidence. My concerns were even more abated when we partnered with The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and began building out an advisory board that included Henry Louis Gates Jr. and John Edgar Wideman. The resulting development of “The Schomburg Center Guide to Black Literature from the Eighteenth Century to the Present” was one of my best life experiences.

Paging through my copy this morning, my reverence for these authors and everything I learned from them comes back to me through their names: Achebe, Angelou, Baldwin, Bambara, Baraka, Bontemps, Brooks, Butler, Carmichael, Cesaire, Childress, Chisholm, Cleaver, Clifton, Cullen, Davis, Delany, Derricotte, Douglass, Dove, Du Bois, Dunbar, Ellison, Equiano, Fair, Forten, Fuller, Gaines, Gates, Giddings, Giovanni, Goines, Gregory, Grosvenor, Haley, Hansberry, Harper, Hayden, Howard, Hughes, Hurston, Johnson, Jones, Jordan, Kennedy, Kenyatta, Killens, Kincaid, King, Larsen, Lee, Lorde, Lovelace, Madhubuti, Mais, Major, Malcom X, Mandela, Mathis, McClellan, McKay, McMillan, Morrison, Mosley, Naylor, Nkrumah, Okigbo, Okri, Ousmane, Parks, Patterson, Perry, Poitier, Rampersand, Reed, Robeson, Rollins, Rowan, Sanchez, Seale, Senghor, Shange, Singleton, Smith, Sowell, Soyinka, Thurman, Tolson, Toomer, Tutu, Vanzant, Wade-Gayles, Walcott, Walker, Walrond, Washington, Wells, Wesley, West, Wheatley, Wideman, Wilkins, Wilkinson, Wilson, Woodson, Wright, Yarbrough, and Yerby.

I read the hashtag #ICantBreathe and note that Ronald L. Fair's novel "We Can't Breathe," a coming-of-age story set in 1930s Chicago, won the American Library Association's Best Book Award in 1972. Our current times tragically echo the past.

Literature and art provide the capacity to enter into other frames of reference and experience; it improves our empathy. "Teach them that anywhere people go they have experience," wrote poet Ishmael Reed, "and that all experience is art."

Please read on.

?