Posted September 29th, 2009
www.thedefendersonline.com/2009/09/29/the-bermuda-heritage-trail/

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen

The hot sun bounces off of pastel covered walls and white rooftops. The white magnifies the light, enlarges it, brightens everything. I stroll along narrow lanes, sipping cool tea, thinking of my ancestors, some of whom strolled these same narrow lanes, in the same blazing sun, before air conditioning and Frigidaire ice makers. I smell the sea. The lanes are tidy, litter free, and everyone smiles as I walk by. They could be neighbors. On an island of about 66,000, they could be aunties, uncles, cousins. People of the same bloodline, descendants of the original 16 Astwood siblings to live on this rock, one of whom was my great-grandmother.

I am walking the Bermuda’s African Diaspora Heritage Trail, and I am learning about Bermudians and other African Americans who, like me, are connected to this place.
The Tucker House Museum, one of 11 historic treasures on Bermuda's African Diaspora Heritage Trail, houses artifacts of the island's rich and varied black history. Photo courtesy of the Bermuda Department of Tourism.

The Tucker House Museum, one of 11 historic treasures on Bermuda's African Diaspora Heritage Trail, houses artifacts of the island's rich black history. Photo courtesy of the Bermuda Department of Tourism.

On this beautiful stroll through the past, history comes alive. In 1862, Joseph Rainey and his wife, a Philadelphian named Susan, secreted onto a blockade runner and fled the state of South Carolina. Though free, the Raineys had been drafted to hard labor in the Confederate Army. Forced to perform the physically demanding task of fortifying Charleston with other local free blacks, the Raineys chose to escape to a kind of paradise.

While most African-American runaways before and during the Civil War journeyed to Canada, Mexico, Haiti, out west, or to the free states of the north to find freedom, the Raineys sailed east, toward the African continent, from which their ancestors came. They landed at their intended destination, Bermuda, 600 miles from South Carolina’s Gullah Sea Islands and the second most remote place in the world. They settled down in the country, in the town of St. George’s, where Joseph set up shop as a barber and Susan worked as a dressmaker. Together, in the freedom and promise of an island that had emancipated its slave population about three decades earlier, in the parish that had the largest free black population even during slavery, the couple thrived.

Joseph Rainey would go on to become one of the most important blacks in American history. By 1866 Joseph and Susan had returned to South Carolina, and, in 1870, Rainey became the first African American man elected to the US House of Representatives.

Rainey contributed so much to his adopted home that the lane where his shop was located is still called Barber’s Alley. There, in the Tucker’s House Museum, The Rainey Memorial Room contains some of Joseph’s original speeches and other artifacts from his life and work.

The Rainey exhibit is just one stop on the African Diaspora Heritage Trail (ADHT), a self-guided tour of 11 historic sites that celebrate 500 years of African-descended people in Bermuda. Conceived by the late Honorable David Allen, Bermuda’s former Minister of Tourism, the Trail includes slave burial sites, sea-swept caves where runaways hid, and a home owned by a black man before black men were legally allowed to own their own homes.

Pilot Darrell’s House is another rich destination on the Trail. Pilot James “Jemmy” Darrell had earned his freedom by successfully piloting British ships around Bermuda’s treacherous reefs and becoming one of the island’s first King’s Pilots. He built a home at 5 Aunt Peggy’s Lane in St. George’s in 1800 and, less than a decade later, petitioned the British to allow “all coloured people” the right to will their property to heirs. He succeeded, and Pilot Darrell’s House and now his legacy stands for all to see.

Darrell’s success is particularly significant, not just because he created a wealth-building opportunity for all black Bermudians, but also because he did it in 1806, just 15 years after Haiti’s 1791 Revolution, which struck fear in slave-owning communities and led to stricter limitations on free black populations in Bermuda and throughout the Caribbean and the United States. That same year, in 1806, Bermuda legislators passed laws discouraging free blacks and slaves from learning a trade like piloting.

Pilot Darrell continued his activism, helping black Bermudians gain the freedoms to work and prosper, and passed his home down through the generations. It remains owned and occupied by his descendants to this day.

The Trail remembers and tells. True tales like that of Bermuda’s Tony Tucker’s Town claim truth. Now a wealthy and majority white enclave on the island, Tucker’s Town was a black community about 80 years ago, when the land there was, in some cases, forcibly taken from homeowners who refused to sell to whites.

The black graves in Tucker’s Point Golf Club attest to black ownership in a neighborhood where, today, wealthy Americans like New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and former presidential candidate Ross Perot own homes.

Despite this tragedy of lost land and stolen wealth, race relations on the island are generally good. In an economy dominated by international business and a Gross National Income ranked number one by the World Bank, black Bermudians, about 63 percent of the island’s population, enjoy one of the highest standards of living on the planet. International and sophisticated, they fly abroad often for vacation, to study, or to work for a few years before returning to the island.

This global vision is reflected in the Trail.

At the 2001 World Travel Congress in Cape Town, South Africa, the Africa Travel Association endorsed the Trail as a cross-border travel initiative. In 2002, Bermuda hosted the first ADHT (Trail) conference to establish a similar initiative with Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean. Bermuda hosts the ADHT conference every other year, but in October 2009, the conference will take place in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, where Tanzania’s Trail, “Ivory and the Slave Route,” will be launched.

Actor/activist Danny Glover supports Bermuda’s ADHT by chairing the conference some Bermudians are calling the “Africa Homecoming” conference.

For African Americans, walking the Trail in Bermuda can be a kind of homecoming, too. Knowing the story of our island neighbors adds meaning and power to the concept of Diaspora and our shared heritage as people of African descent in the West.

Posted September 11th, 2009
www.thedefendersonline.com/2009/09/11/stormy-weather-the-rich-rough-road-of-lena-horne

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen

As journalist James Gavin spotlights in his most recent book, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne, the music industry critically judges black women dancers by their looks, demanding that they “be red hot and sexy.” Though at least one admits to turning “the occasional trick” to get by, the goal, for many of these women, is “marrying up” to a famous actor, popular musician, or even rising political star.

But Stormy Weather, isn’t about the entertainment industry of 2009, or even 1999. The dancers Gavin writes about who gyrate and shimmy for low pay aren’t booty-shaking video vixens, they’re chorines of the 1930s Cotton Club, each of whom “had to lift her skirt and show her legs” at the audition just for the chance to dance to the tunes of such legends as Duke Ellington.

Walter White, NAACP Executive Secretary acted as queen-maker, muscling MGM to make Lena Horne the African-American starlet of her day. Gavin writes that White selected Horne because “she wasn’t a mammy or a whore; she didn’t growl the blues or speak in Negro dialect. Instead she sounded like an educated, well-bred young lady, one whom a few white families might even welcome in their homes.”

Horne sounded like a lady because she was a member of the bourgeoisie, a grand-daughter of the respectable, activist, and always proper Horne family. The trail-blazing actress’ middle-class background is given sufficient attention in this voluminous biography. Just when a young Miss Horne was about to sign with MGM, Lena’s father, Teddy Horne, entered the office of arguably the most powerful man in Hollywood history, Louis B. Mayer, and said, “It’s a great privilege you’re offering my daughter. But I can buy my daughter her own maid.” Teddy Horne told Mayer his daughter would not “play a maid or a jungle maiden,” and she never did.

In an appearance on the Dick Cavett television talk show decades later, in 1981, Horne would say, “I don’t think Mr. Mayer had ever been approached by a black man like that.”

MGM produced one classic film starring Horne, Cabin in the Sky, in 1943. Her signature film, Stormy Weather, was produced by 20th Century Fox, also in 1943. These are the only two films she ever starred in. The NAACP had helped get Horne in, but couldn’t get her further up. Racist Southern censors, the demands of black propriety, and, Gavin asserts, even Walter White frustrated Horne’s ambitions.

Horne would mostly get bit parts signing a song or two in the MGM productions she appeared in after 1943. Her roles were easily excised by Southern censors who would sooner cut a beautifully elegant black woman from the film than show her to Southern whites, or to Southern blacks. Her name would even be blacked out of movie posters in the theatres below the Mason-Dixon line.

But, according to Gavin, some of the censorship came from the NAACP’s Walter White. In perhaps the biggest professional regret of her life, Horne turned down the opportunity to play the lead in St. Louis Woman, a Broadway stage production written by Harlem Renaissance luminaries Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps. An MGM vice president, Sam Katz, “formed an outside company to mount the show. Horne would play “a femme fatale who sparks a love triangle between Lil’ Augie, a lovable jockey, and saloonkeeper Biglow Brown” in this all-black musical.

In this book, organizations like the NAACP are the vanguard in the ongoing quest for civil liberties and open the door for African-American achievement. Alternately—or sometimes simultaneously—this same organization is so powerful and controlling that the folk who work in front of the camera in black Hollywood, Gavin reports, “can’t get tipsy in public” or “have a sex life that is slightly indiscreet” because of the pressure to be a “symbol.”

Then NAACP President Walter White read the play and declared “that it depicts the principal character of Della as a good-looking but loose woman of the sporting variety whose chief ambition is to have and be had by the gambler with the most money.” Because White had elevated Horne to the level of “something of an idol to her people, a symbol of the highest type of Negro womanhood,” the role simply would not do.

Pearl Bailey got the lead instead. Critics were mixed in their response to the play, which closed after just three months. Years later, Gavin writes, Horne still “groused about how the NAACP had blocked her from doing a show written for her—and how the Urban League had ‘come down hard’ on her for thinking about doing an all-black musical.” But despite growing resentments, Horne maintained her relationship with both.

The NAACP member Horne most admired—and deeply mourned when he was brutally murdered in 1963—was Mississippi field secretary Medgar Evers, who had helped launch Horne’s activism during her 1963 trip to the South to support the movement with former Delta Sigma Theta president Jeanne Noble and jazz artist Billy Stray horn.

Evers’ optimism and personal power, the children Horne met who learned how to protect themselves from jabs and kicks as they planned to picket a local JC Penney’s, and the knowledge that Evers’ home had been firebombed days earlier all moved her tremendously. Prior to this trip, Horne had been part of a group that included activists James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Dr. Kenneth Clark, Harry Belafonte, white film actor Rip Torn, June Shagaloff of the NAACP, and Jerome Smith of CORE, as they gathered to lobby then Attorney General Robert Kennedy to do more on the issue of civil rights. After Mississippi, Horne vowed to deepen her commitment.

Horne, who greatly admired family friend Mary McLeod Bethune, founder and president of Bethune-Cookman College; and had discussed race with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; stood behind the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. She shed tears when Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in 1965. But there was more to Horne than her activism, and the noble and the salacious are given equal treatment in this gripping narrative.

Lena Horne also cheated on her husband, remarried a white man whom she later emotionally abused, probably had an affair with married boxing legend Joe Louis, and definitely was absent from her children’s lives. Stormy Weather, an unauthorized biography, presents a complete Horne: whole and human. It tells how the goddess was made, why she ascended, and what brought her down.

In many ways, Gavin’s book tells the story of black America from the last lights of the Harlem Renaissance to the shining star that is the nation’s first black president. By focusing on Horne, the trailblazer - activist - singer - actor - dancer - icon, her rough road from the indignities of the segregated Cotton Club to an Upper East Side home is made clear. Horne paved that road for actresses like Cicely Tyson, Halle Berry, and Angela Bassett. The reader emerges from this narrative full of gratitude for Lena Horne and so many others for getting us from there to here. The psychological and emotional toll of the journey on even this black woman, who was among one of the most privileged of the 20th century, has been exacting—impacting family, friendships, and, according to Gavin, Horne’s sense of self.

Because so very much that Horne suffered still plagues black people, black entertainers, black women today, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne also makes clear how far we have left to go on that road—and how rough the days and nights can be as we travel along together.

Link: http://www.thedefendersonline.com/2009/08/19/street-lit-kindle-and-the-exotic-other-interview-with-mosaic-magazine-founder-ron-kavanaugh/

Street Lit, Kindle, and The Exotic Other: Interview with ‘Mosaic’ Magazine Founder Ron Kavanaugh
Posted By The Editors | August 19th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | 1 Comment » Print This Post Print This Post

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen

In 1998, Ron Kavanaugh founded Mosaic, a literary magazine that celebrates the work of contemporary African-American and Latino writers. Ten years later, Mosaic still publishes reviews of literary work, interviews with important writers, and art that folk can dig. Recent covers include first time novelist Marlon James, Dark Room Collective Co- Founder Thomas Sayers Ellis, and author of The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Mosaic-Literary-Mag -- Ron Kavanaugh is an important figure in the world of black books and the New York book publishing industry, helping to launch the careers of emerging authors, and celebrating the tradition out of which they craft their work.

Some of the greatest Black writers have appeared on the cover of Mosaic, including Gwendolyn Brooks, children’s book writer Walter Dean Myers , and Gen X writer Tayari Jones.

To help mark the 10th anniversary, Ron talked with me for a TheDefendersOnline.com interview exploring Mosaic, the Street Lit phenomenon, Kindle, and the “exotic othering” of writers of color.

Q: Why did you start Mosaic? What in your background led you to take on this monumental task?

A: It was on the cusp of what I would call the black-medallions era, which I believe Spike Lee fermented with [his films] Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X. That era seemed to be ending and a more academic and professional period was starting. It felt like an ideal time to start a lit magazine.

The original idea was to solely create a slim brochure that would preview new books. It was supposed to be based on Barnes & Noble’s New Horizons brochure that features about twelve new books every month. I figured an entire brochure would go over well in independent bookstores. In 1995, I designed a sample, mailed it to publishers, but did not receive any interest.

I decided to do it online instead in the form of MosaicBooks.com, which I launched in 1996. Two years later I went back to the original idea of a print publication.

Q: What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced?

A: Building capacity remains a challenge. Finding new subscribers; attracting advertisers; hosting readings; and expanding our website’s original content. These are all goals that I believe would lend to Mosaic’s success.

Q: When you started Mosaic in 1998, what was going on in the world of black books? What were the major trends, and what kind of relationship could Black writers expect to have with major publishing houses and with smaller and Black-owned presses?

A: For some reason, things seemed new, almost urgent. And it had less to do with the literature and more to do with the Internet and the access it was granting to previously marginalized communities. I was spending a lot of time at Warner Books (now Hachette) because my partner worked there (yes, I had a partner when I started the magazine), and PEN America had the Open Book committee—led by Elizabeth Nunez, which worked to get people of color into publishing. There were also a lot of young editors—Janet Hill, Melody Guy, Malaika Adero, and Chris Jackson among others—who would later lead their own imprints . It would be a stretch to say we were a clique, but we all knew each other and talked about projects. And there was the start of the Harlem Book Fair, which seemed promising at the time.

Q: There has been an ongoing debate on the emergence of Street Lit over the past several years. Folk like Nick Chiles, Terry McMillan, Martha Southgate, and Linda Villarosa have weighed in, and this month, Elle magazine has published a feature on the topic and Street Lit writer Miasha written by Bliss Broyard. Where do you fall in this debate?

A: I would like to answer this without mentioning Street lit. That’s a straight supply-demand issue and can’t be changed unless we address consumer demand.

I still believe literary writers are going to have to carve out a space where they can create, support, distribute, and monetize their work. This either means we start our own publishing, distribution network, and marketing companies, or stay with the existing publishers and take on the full responsibility of selling/marketing books.

If publishers are going to continue to spend less on marketing then they should give a larger percentage of the revenue to the writer. Major publishers are struggling and I’m sure a new model that gives the writer a smaller, or no, advance and bigger share of revenue will catch on. Publishers are also going to have to change the way they think about book production and distribution. Micro print runs will have to be the norm –50-100 books at a time. There are far fewer bookstores to distribute to, and publishers will probably end the practice of accepting returns from bookstores, which will lead to reduced print runs.

Or, literary writers can self publish. Not as attractive; literally a full-time job. Probably on top of your existing full-time gig. I still believe literary writers will not leave the safe confines of the traditional publishers because it will opt them out of potential book reviews in high-end publications and lessen their award consideration. So smaller print runs, small advances, increased self marketing, and increased profit sharing.

Ebooks may change everything, and lesser-known literary writers will be hurt most. The Kindle currently costs $400. Who can afford this? I bet they tend to be literary readers. I’m making an assumption that the higher your income, the less likely you are to read street lit—your higher income is probably the result of college, parental income and/or guidance, and broader exposure to a variety arts and cultures. So, publishers seeing this continued trend may decide to publish books straight to Kindle. Why not? No printing or distribution costs. The savings may lead to more spent on marketing. It’s hard to do a book signing with a Kindle, but the price point is one-third of a hard cover book, and the publisher can do a micro print run to satisfy the needs of bookstores, which, in several years, may not include Borders and Barnes & Nobles.

I recently bought a Kindle and was initially psyched. There’s an initial excitement that caused me to download a bunch of books—never mind the reason you didn’t purchase them previously had to do with time and not availability in traditional form. Which leads to another issue: don’t think Amazon’s claim of 250,000 available titles includes the ones that you desire. Your best bet would be to make a list of books that you would like to read then check them for Kindle availability on Amazon. You may be shocked to find that there are still many books that have not been transferred to the ebook format.

You can’t share an ebook unless you’re willing to part with your $400 toy. It does a horrible job of rendering the internet so don’t believe the Amazon hype. You can’t take it to a book signing. Could you image someone signing their name across your Kindle screen!

Right now, I don’t think demand is there for people to download Mosaic on a Kindle but if things change I’ll explore.

The new challenge is how literary writers—with smaller print runs and ebooks—will engage the physical space: book club reading, stores (Wal-Mart, street vendors, point of purchase displays) with or without a traditional book.

Another tangent is what are literary writers doing to grow readers? I can go on about this too but I’ll leave it here for now.

Q: Have sales of books by black writers increased because of the Street Lit phenomenon? Has the interest in Street Lit created a ripple effect to increase interest in genre fiction, popular fiction, literary fiction, nonfiction, and / or poetry?

A: I think book sales are trending down across the board. Independent [bookstores] are closing, Borders and BN consistently lose money every quarter. The street lit principle is a hyper independence. All they need is a box of books and wherever they are becomes a point of sale—for better or worse. I have no way to prove this but, anecdotally, I feel that just as many black literary writers are published today as ten years ago. Street lit peeps just talk louder. My greater concern is there may be an entire generation who will not grow beyond street lit.

Also, I’m noticing more black books that do not have an overt racial marketing plan. They come out and the racial identity is somewhat ambiguous. Which raises the thorny issue of can black book sales compete in a we-are-the-world environment.

What I always find puzzling about answering your questions is that no publisher or rating service, i.e. Bookscan or Nielsen, keeps book sales records based on race. So who is actually qualified to answer this question? It’s all anecdotal, and in the end, all assumptive.

Q: Charles Johnson has fueled another debate with his essay, The End of the Black American Narrative. Is there a place for narratives that engage our slave past, or should contemporary writers be exploring new themes in their work?

A: Not sure if “new” is the proper word. Maybe less explored themes.

Q: Michael Thomas just received the Impac Dublin prize, the richest literary prize in the world, for his debut novel, Man Gone Down. Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz was shortlisted for that same award for his second book and first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Can we expect these awards to generate interest in other writers of African descent? How do the individual successes of black writers impact the black writing community?

A: Only negative things stick to black people, specifically African Americans. When Chimamanda Adichie or Zadie Smith win awards, a conversation stirs around the expansive talents of post-colonial African (and south Asian) writers—specifically, specifically writers whose countries [of origin] won independence in the 1960s. Part of that is exotification, but the same conversations don’t seem to take place when an American of African descent wins an award. There’s no longer an exotic cool for African-American writers. Fashion models and white rappers are the new black literati.

Q: Who are some of your favorite authors? List 5 writers who have been published in the last 5 years that you would you recommend.

A: Bernice McFadden, Walter Mosley, Ravi Howard, Major Jackson, Willie Perdomo.

Q: If you were stuck on a deserted island for two months and could only take along ten books to read, which would you choose?

A: Assuming there’s already a refrigerator stocked with quarter-waters and a little camping stove for cooking freshly caught fish—I dig how no one starves to death on Lost –I would bring Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck; Breaking Ice edited by Terry McMillian and John Wideman; Corregidora by Gayle Jones; J. California Cooper’s Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime; The Spirit of African Design (I’ll have plenty raffia to hook that hut up!); Billy by Albert French; Rice by Nikky Finney; There’s No Business like Your Own by Gladys Edmunds; Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promise Land; Glenville Lovell’s Song of Night. I haven’t read her in a while but Charlotte Carter has the Nanette Hayes series (they’re fun books). I read a lot of fiction, which I’m told black men aren’t supposed to do.

Q: You just celebrated the anniversary of Mosaic with a big party and fund-raising effort. What’s next?

A: The next ten years will hopefully see expanded circulation in libraries, adoption as a teaching tool in high schools, and the expansion of original online content.

Other aspects of Mosaic include:

The Literary Freedom Project (LFP), a 501(c)3 tax-exempt not-for-profit arts organization, established in 2004, that supports the literary arts through education, creative thinking, and new media. LFP is the umbrella organization that publishes Mosaic Literary Magazine; develops literature-based lesson plans and workshops; and hosts the Mosaic Literary Conference & Festival, an annual literature-education conference.

Mosaic supplements its editorial content with lesson plans, based on the magazine’s content, and developed for secondary school educators to explore subjects such as history and social studies while emphasizing the importance of literature and reading.

The Mosaic Literary Conference & Festival provides a platform for literature-based creative thinking and knowledge sharing. Educators are invited to participate in literature workshops, which are also presented throughout the year. Click here for additional information.

Looking to the future, Kavanaugh shared plans to “launch a new bi-annual professional-development workshop featuring creative ways for keeping literature and books valuable sources of knowledge and creativity in high school education,” in October, 2009. “Our workshops help educators incorporate literature into existing curricula to further explore course work that focuses on social studies –explorations of history, geography, economics, government, and civics,” he said.

Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning and a founding member of RingShout: A Place for Black Literature. She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn.