Episode 208: African American Fiction


Welcome back to our book group podcast: Reading with Libraries! This week we are discussing African American Fiction.

We discuss different genres of books each week, which is both fun and useful to library people doing Reader’s Advisory work. There are so many book genres out there that it’s tough to be an expert on all of them. So we pick a new genre each week to chat about and hopefully provide you with some insight into what may be an unfamiliar genre!

We want this to be fun – like a book group! And beverages are an important part of any book group. As we start each episode, we will be enjoying our beverages; and as you – the listener – are also members of this book group, you should also have a beverage!

Our book group is very inclusive; there are no “right” or “wrong” books here! We just like to read and chat about books, and want you to share what you are reading too! All of us will take away at least a title or two that we want to read at the end of our time together!

Who is joining us this week? This week we are excited to welcome guest host Amy from the Great River Regional Library! Thank you for joining us for our discussion about the genre of African American fiction!

 

Beverages:

We have guests, we have our genre. We just need our beverages. Fortunately, we all came prepared with something to sip while we talk about our books. Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages. Each beverage will have a recipe or a link on our episode page, so you can try them yourself!

Molasses Water

  • 1 quart water
  • ½ cup dark molasses
  • ¼ cup lemon juice
  • 5 sprigs fresh mint

Procedure

  1. Mix water, molasses, and lemon juice together in a pitcher, stirring well to make sure molasses is thoroughly mixed in.
  2. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours, or until well chilled.
  3. When ready to serve, press the mint against the side of another pitcher with the back of a spoon.
  4. Then add ice and pour in the molasses water.
  5. Serve chilled in glasses.

 

Hibiscus Tea
Hibiscus is a plant native to West Africa, and its flower petals are used to make a tea called bissap—a hospitality drink that remains popular in several countries to this day.

  • 2 quarts water
  • 3/4 to 1 cup sugar (depending on how sweet you would like it to be)
  • 1 cup dried hibiscus flowers
  • 1/2 cinnamon stick (optional)
  • A few thin slices ginger (optional)
  • Allspice berries (optional)
  • Lime juice (optional)
  • Orange or lime slices for garnish

Put 4 cups of the water and the sugar in a medium saucepan. Add cinnamon, ginger slices, and/or a few allspice berries if you would like. Heat until boiling and the sugar has dissolved. Remove from heat. Stir in the dried hibiscus flowers.

Cover and let sit for 20 minutes. Strain into a pitcher and discard the used hibiscus flowers, ginger, cinnamon, and/or allspice berries.

(At this point you can store ahead the concentrate, chilled, until ready to make the drink.)

Add remaining 4 cups of water (or if you want to chill the drink quickly, ice and water) to the concentrate, and chill. Alternatively you can add ice and chilled soda water for a bubbly version. Add a little lime juice for a more punch-like flavor.

Serve over ice with a slice of orange or lime.

 

 

Kola Nut Tea
Kola nuts contain caffeine, which may explain their popular use in energy tonics. Native to Africa, the nuts of this towering tree are also a traditional medicine having aphrodisiac, stimulant, and cardiotonic properties. The kola nut was once the main ingredient in cola drinks, and rumor has it the the closely guarded trade secret formula of Coke contains kola extract.

Use 1 teaspoon of powdered kola to each cup of water, adjusting the amount to suit your own caffeine tolerance. Bring to a gentle boil and simmer covered to 10 to 15 minutes.

 

 

Pineapple Ginger Juice

  • 2 cups water
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 4 ounce ginger chopped
  • 7 cups hot water.
  • 1-2 cups fresh pineapple juice
  • Juice of freshly squeezed lime
  • In a large bowl, mix ginger and hot water. Let it sit for about an hour or more. Using a cheesecloth or fine sieve, drain the water and set aside.
  • In a medium bowl bring to a boil 2 cups water and sugar. Simmer until sugar has dissolved. Allow to cool
  • Combine ginger water, juice and simple syrup stir and serve over ice (add rum if you like)

 

Genre Discussion:

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent.

The genre began during the 18th and 19th centuries with writers such as poet Phillis Wheatley and orator Frederick Douglass, reached an early high point with the Harlem Renaissance, and continues today with authors such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Walter Mosley being ranked among the top writers in the United States.

Among the themes and issues explored in African American literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and equality.

As African Americans’ place in American society has changed over the centuries, so, too, have the themes of African American literature.

Before the American Civil War, African American literature primarily focused on the issue of slavery, as indicated by the popular subgenre of slave narratives. At the turn of the 20th century, books by authors such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington debated whether to confront or appease racist attitudes in the United States. During the American Civil Rights movement, authors like Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation and black nationalism.

Today, African American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature, with books such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Colour Purple by Alice Walker, and Beloved by Toni Morrison achieving both best-selling and award-winning status. http://cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/a/African_American_literature.htm

Suggested Reading Lists:

Our Book Discussion:

Now we are set with our genre, our yummy beverages, and have some good background information. Let’s get to the book discussion! Here are the books we discussed, and a few extras we didn’t get a chance to mention:

  • The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Brown Girl Dreaming (Newbery Honor Book) by Jacqueline Woodson
  • Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts
  • Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson and Hudson Talbott
  • This Is the Rope: A Story from the Great Migration by Jacqueline Woodson and James Ransome
  • Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Each Kindness (Jane Addams Award Book (Awards)) by Jacqueline Woodson and E. B. Lewis
  • The Poetry of Jazz by Benjamin Boone & Philip Levine
  • Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon
  • The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
  • Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet Book 1 by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze
  • If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
  • I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin and Raoul Peck
  • Here Comes the Sun: A Novel by Nicole Dennis-Benn
  • Joseph’s Big Ride by Terry Farish and Ken Daley
  • Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
  • The Mothers: A Novel by Brit Bennett
  • Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou
  • The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
  • Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo by Zora Neale Hurston and Deborah G. Plant
  • Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth by Richard Wright
  • Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies by Dick Gregory
  • Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

 

Some book titles, with discussions from Goodreads.com:

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia — a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo — to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

 

Shadow Blade (Shadowchasers #1) by Seressia Glass

For Kira Solomon, normal was never an option.

Kira’s day job as an antiquities expert, but her true calling is as a Shadowchaser. Trained from youth to be one of the most lethal Chasers in existence, Kira serves the Gilead Commission dispatching the Fallen who sow discord and chaos. Of course, sometimes Gilead bureaucracy is as much a thorn in her side as anything the Fallen can muster against her. Right now, though, she’s got a bigger problem. Someone is turning the city of Atlanta upside-down in search of a four-millennia-old Egyptian dagger that just happens to have fallen into Kira’s hands.

Then there’s Khefar, the dagger’s true owner-a near-immortal 4000-year-old Nubian warrior who, Kira has to admit, looks pretty fine for his age. Joining forces is the only way to keep the weapon safe from the sinister Shadow force, but now Kira is in deep with someone who holds more secrets than she does, the one person who knows just how treacherous this fight is. Because every step closer to destroying the enemy is a step closer to losing herself to Shadow forever. . . .

 

 

Jazz Hardcover by Toni Morrison

It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, “when all the wars are over and there will never be another one…At last, at last, everything’s ahead…Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff.” But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among people who had train-danced into the City, from points south and west, in search of promise.

Joe Trace–in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband–shoots to death his lover of three months, impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas (“Everything was like a picture show to her”). At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, herself a hairdresser–who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, and who talks mostly to birds–tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse.

In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present, and future, a mysterious voice–whose identity is a matter of each reader’s imagination–weaves this brilliant fiction, at the same time showing how its blues are informed by the brutal exigencies of slavery. Richly combining history, legend, reminiscence, this voice captures as never before the ineffable mood, the complex humanity, of black urban life at a moment in our century we assumed we understood.

 

 

The Crossover is a 2014 children’s book by American author Kwame Alexander and the winner of the 2015 Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award Honor.[2] The book, which is told entirely through verse, was first published in the United States in hardback on March 18, 2014 through HMH Books for Young Readers. The story follows two African-American twin brothers that share a love for basketball but find themselves drifting apart as they head into their junior high school years. They also run into many obstacles that they must overcome.

 

Derrick Barnes Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut

The barbershop is where the magic happens. Boys go in as lumps of clay and, with princely robes draped around their shoulders, a dab of cool shaving cream on their foreheads, and a slow, steady cut, they become royalty. That crisp yet subtle line makes boys sharper, more visible, more aware of every great thing that could happen to them when they look good: lesser grades turn into As; girls take notice; even a mother’s hug gets a little tighter. Everyone notices.

A fresh cut makes boys fly.

This rhythmic, read-aloud title is a celebration of the way boys feel when they leave the barber’s chair.  

 

March: Book One (March #1)  by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin  (Co-writer), Nate Powell(Artist)

Congressman John Lewis (GA-5) is an American icon, one of the key figures of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper’s farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington, and from receiving beatings from state troopers to receiving the Medal of Freedom from the first African-American president.

Now, to share his remarkable story with new generations, Lewis presents March, a graphic novel trilogy, in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and New York Times best-selling artist Nate Powell (winner of the Eisner Award and LA Times Book Prize finalist for Swallow Me Whole).

March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis’ lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis’ personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.

Book One spans John Lewis’ youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall.

Many years ago, John Lewis and other student activists drew inspiration from the 1950s comic book “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story.” Now, his own comics bring those days to life for a new audience, testifying to a movement whose echoes will be heard for generations.

 

 

Jerry Pinkney In Plain Sight

Sophie lives with Mama and Daddy and Grandpa, who spends his days by the window. Every day after school, it’s Grandpa whom Sophie runs to.

“Here I am, Grandpa!”
“Ah, Sophie, how was your day?”

As Sophie and her grandpa talk, he asks her to find items he’s “lost” throughout the day, guiding Sophie on a tour through his daily life and connecting their generations in this sweet, playful picture book illustrated by Caldecott Medalist and Laura Ingalls Wilder Award winner Jerry Pinkney.

 

Leo and Diane Dillon           Jazz On A Saturday Night

If you have ever been lucky enough to hear great jazz, then you will understand the pure magic of this book. Leo and Diane Dillon use bright colors and musical patterns that make music skip off the page in this toe-tapping homage to many jazz greats. From Miles Davis and Charlie Parker to Ella Fitzgerald, here is a dream team sure to knock your socks off. Learn about this popular music form and read a biography of each player pictured-and then hear each instrument play on a specially produced CD. What’s the featured song? “Jazz on a Saturday Night,” written and recorded to accompany this book.

 

 

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us for this discussion of African American fiction on our Reading with Libraries podcast! Special thanks to Amy for joining us as a fantastic Guest Host! We will be back next week with another genre, more guest hosts for our book group, and more books to share and discuss.

Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries – which is surprisingly fun! – subscribe to our podcast Linking Our Libraries.

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!