Home | Education & Distance Learning Articles | Article

Clarence Major's homecoming voice in 'Such Was the Season.' - Clarence Major Issue

African American Review - March 22, 1994

"Unlike his previous fiction, which was unstintingly experimental Such Was the Season is an old-fashioned, straight-ahead narrative crammed with action, a dramatic storyline and meaty characterization," writes novelist Al Young (19). This is the consensus of reviewers of Clarence Major's fifth novel However, although more conventional and accessible on the surface for readers than his other novels, Such Was the Sawn is actually an exploration on its lower frequencies of the double consciousness of the implied author and of Dr. Adam North, whom the narrator/protagonist calls Juneboy, as both return to their Southern black vernacular roots. Rather than "contagious affection" for his characters, especially Annie Eliza Sommer-Hicks, the black matriarchal narrator/protagonist, Major's homecoming voice is characterized by social and cultural ambivalence.

Set in the post-Black Power and Black Arts era of a black bourgeois 1970s community of Atlanta, Georgia, the narrative of Such Was the Season is indeed rather conventionally structured. Annie Eliza retrospectively tells us about her "killer-diller" (1) week: Juneboy, her estranged nephew, returns as Dr. Adam North to Atlanta from Yale and Howard Universities to lecture at Spelman and Emory on his sickle cell research and to stay with her and his Southern family; Renee, her materialistic, feminist daughter-in-law, announces her candidacy for the state senate at a large dinner party, Senator Dale Cooper, Renee's political opponent and the incumbent, becomes mysteriously sick with a rare sickle cell disease and is nearly assassinated; the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Hicks, Renee's husband and Annie Eliza's hustler/minister son, is involved in a local tomato industry scandal and nearly killed by an abused lover, DeSoto Hicks, Annie Eliza's police sergeant son, hosts the family at the policeman's ball; and Annie Eliza aids Juneboy in his quest to reconcile himself to his Southern past and family, especially his murdered father Scoop, a numbers runner and surrogate father to Jeremiah. Annie Eliza is centered in her racial, ethnic, and regional vernacular culture, but the implied author and Juneboy are respectfully ambivalent about her beliefs, values, and behavior. She is a septuagenarian whose own double consciousness is apparent in her ambivalent reference to Renee as a "nigger" (19), her feeling like a "pickaninny" in the company of some whites, her confession of telling a "pickaninny" joke to her favorite white employer (152), and her disapproval of interracial romance even on television, which she watches compulsively. She also has for many years worn a "blond but kinda red" wig, which may have once looked "real natural" on her, but, as her sister Esther told her bluntly two years earlier, now makes her" |look like one of these here street hussies.'" Defiantly, she says, "I wore my wig all over Chicago, strutting my stuff just as pretty as I pleased" (17).

Is this behavior consistent with Annie Eliza's self-identification as "just a plain down-to-earth common sense person" (16)? Is she more folksy than folk? To be folksy is to be a stereotypical rather than a typical or individual member of the common people. To act folksy is to exploit surface appearances of reality rather than to explore deeper significations of reality. The informality of folksiness distorts and demeans the ways of black folk for personal survival or self-aggrandizement by reinforcing the mythic sense of superiority of white people. What then is the implied author revealing about the ironies and paradoxes of Annie Eliza's double consciousness as an elderly Southern black woman of the 1970s? How are readers encouraged to respond to her voice and world view, which makes little or no fixed distinction between fact and fiction?

The illusory character of reality and the reality of illusoriness are dramatized and symbolized by the manner in which television informs Annie Eliza's consciousness and language. The rhythms of her everyday life, like the rhythms of her black vernacular speech, are punctuated by the integration of the technology of television with the traditional morality - the passions, prejudices, and pride - of hard-working, church-going home-owning lower-middle-class Southern Negro housewives of the 1940s and 1950s who helped to support their families by ironing, washing and cleaning for white folks. Her vibrant, idiomatic dialect illuminates her uncolleged, opinionated, independent, protective, provincial, pragmatic, politically conservative character.

This is particularly true of the sound and sense of her sayings, slang, and sentences, such as her anxiety about her arthritis, stomach pains, and sex life while she watches the soap opera romance of Luke and Laura on General Hospital. "My body was talking to me something powerful," she says. "I sho wont having no labor pains. Specially since I hadn't been nowhere near no man in that respect in many, many years. I ain't had no use for all the bother that goes with being like that with mens. Oh, I tried it one time after Bibb's death, but it didn't work. Just one time. It wont worth it, child. I might as well had a been shelling peas or shucking corn" (12-13). The multiple negation and inherent variability in the use of past and present verb tenses, as well as the familiar direct-address term child, which implies an intended primary audience of her racial, generational, and gender peers, seem appropriate for the speaker's socioeconomic class, age, race, region, and sex.

Later, at Renee's dinner party, the mayor

ast Juneboy what he did and Juneboy told him nicely bout the research he was spose to be doing, he said, into sickle cell anemia. The mayor sounded real interested and ask Juneboy all about it and Juneboy talked up a storm like he knowed everything in the world bout this Negro disease. He used big words too, words like hemoglobin. Juneboy told the mayor some orgarnization done gave him a grant, which is money, and Juneboy let the mayor know that he was spending a year spending his money from the grant peoples at Howard University Hospital. (21)

The only dialectal rules observed here are those of the pronunciation of ask, the regularizing of the irregular past form of know, the loss of the initial unstressed syllable in about, and the completive aspect done gave. Conspicuously absent in Annie Eliza's speech is the usual reduction in Southern black vernacular English of -ing suffixes, as in singing to singin, and only infrequent uses of the uninflected form of the verb to be in a position in which a Standard English speaker would use an inflected form. But the rhythm, inherent variability, and peripatetic style of the literary idiolect seem authentic enough.

As Renee talks about her hospitalized, mentally ill mother Betsy, Annie Eliza's vernacular reflections on Betsy and the blues tradition further illuminate the color, class, sexual, and cultural conflicts of her personal identity:

For some reason when I think of Betsy I see her in that bright pink dress she had when she and Bob was together in that awful place we saw them once. Place called Tiny's Little Red Rooster in Marietta on a dirt road out where some colored shacks stood by a cornfield. Bibb and me went them not knowing what to spect. There was this old sinner man singing nasty songs bout what he was gone do to some gal when he catch her. He said stuff that no child of God could stand to hear: real ugly filth - stuff bout how big his thang is and what he plan to do with it. All kinda filth came outta his mouth. He talked about going up side the woman's head if she spent his money. He sang another song bout how some gal broke his heart but that old nigger never had no heart to break if you ask me. (35-36)

For Annie Eliza, as for many Southern black church-going women of her generation and lower-middle-class status, the blues was the music of sin and sinners rather than a unique secular form of cultural affirmation of the physical and spiritual resiliency of ordinary black people.

Equally revealing of Annie Eliza's character and the moral, intellectual, and cultural ambivalence fostered by the implied author's double consciousness is the pride of the narrator/ protagonist in the material success of her sons Jeremiah and DeSoto. Worried" bout Juneboy's pearance" at Renee's big dinner party, she says:

You see, I didn't want him to embarrass our side of the family. Esther's children never had the privileges my boys had. They didn't have a proper father. I mean, they were sorta raised here and there first by Momma and they no-good father and his crazy sisters. Then Esther took them up to Chicago but she had to work all the time. They didn't come up with good strict home training. That's the only way children learn good manners. (18)

Ambivalent about Jeremiah's wife Renee, she tells Juneboy and us that

1 2 3 Next »

If you would like to discuss any of the issues raised in this article with hundreds of other Education & Distance Learning enthusiasts from around the world, please feel free to visit the discussion forums & post a message.

Discuss this article in the discussion forums now.

Popular Education & Distance Learning Discussions From The Past

INSTANT ATTRACTION by Peter Rodgers -where's Michiko Wada (1 posts)
by Peter Rodgers - Last post on: 02-19-04 10:51
INSTANT ATTRACTION (c) by Peter D Rodgers (20/2/2004) . Instant attraction grabbed my hand, in not yet satisfaction with me, as eyes to eyes prowled hypnotic, shining brilliant like suns in skies. Tongue to tongue with words excited, as we wished for better than we had sung, and burnt hot w... (Read More)

alt.education.distance FAQ (part 1 of 4) (1 posts)
by Rita Laws - Last post on: 12-15-03 01:44
Archive-name: education/distance-ed-faq/part1 Posting-Frequency: monthly Last-modified: 1999/10/25 Version: 8.0 URL: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/education/distance-ed-faq/part1 The alt.education.distance FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) Part 1 of 4 parts FAQ Maintainers: Rita Laws, rlaws@hom... (Read More)

FORENSIC PATHOLOGY Training Videos (1 posts)
by Heather S. - Last post on: 11-01-03 19:39
Hi, You might be intetested to know about these Forensic Pathology Series training videos: 1. GUNSHOT WOUNDS Examination, Interpretation, & Documentation 2. BLUNT FORCE, SHARP FORCE, & PATTERN INJURY Examination,Interpretation, Documentation Available at: http://www.projectile.c... (Read More)

life experience degree (4 posts)
by htat - Last post on: 11-01-04 12:40
I'm looking for life experience degree. Anyone know best one could you please share it to me. I prefer collages from India. Thanks+ ... (Read More)

You must register before posting in the Education & Distance Learning discussion forums. It's free & only takes a few seconds. Please also remember that no advertising is allowed...
Enter The Forums Here