lecture on 47

Among the various members of this audience there are many, many historical cultures represented. Irish Catholics, Russians, Chinese. There might be some Scandinavians or English, Japanese or Mexicans. For every group there's a culture and a history. Some of you might be well versed in the history of your people or your particular family trees. But even if the specifics of your cultural and historical heritage are not at your fingertips you know that they exist: you could call a family member or a take a class in the language that your ancestors spoke. You could get into a plane and fly to the country of your forbears' birth and find out where you came from and what impact your culture has had on the world.

Most of you take these truths for granted. Yes I'm Irish, Jewish, Norwegian, French. Now and then you see a movie like Braveheart or Mozart and have a moment of nostalgic realization. Maybe you descend from some great scientist or warlord. Maybe your great, great grandfather witnessed some important historical event.

If you're like most modern day folks you don't think about it all that much. You live today in this world. You work and love, raise children and vote for dubious leaders.

But the underlying confidence and pride you have in your historical identity is an unseen foundation for your cultural, political, and social identity. It's not only that you are a citizen of your country today but your racial history has played a part in the development of that world in which you are, hopefully, a productive and respectable member.

Now imagine all of that history washed away. No homeland or old country, no language spoken by an aged aunt who died some years ago. No history or historical significance in the lives of your people. No people really in the sense that they came from a specific group that formed over the millennia of human history.

There are people who look like you and talk like you. But those people, on the whole, do not appear in history books and literary fiction, on governing commissions or in halls such as this one.

Instead of an old country there is a continent made up of lands that were divvied up and named by European and Middle Eastern conquerors. The nation of your ancestors' birth was long ago wiped away. And even if your land was still there you would have no way of knowing that you were from there. This because your nameless ancestors were ripped from their lands, robbed of their languages, separated from anyone who shared their historical knowledge, and punished, sometimes killed, for being devil worshippers when they practiced old religious rites.

If in the modern day you become curious and want to know where you come from the only information available to you would be about the torture, degradation, and enslavement of a section of humanity that suffered from morning to night every single day of their short and, on the whole, joyless lives.

Imagine that the only photographs left of your ancestors were people in chains with scars writhing across their backs like fat serpents. Imagine that your people were property like cows or chickens or dogs.

As you find out more you know even less. Because even when these brutalized ancestors were freed they still were not equal to other people who had a past. They couldn't vote or demand justice or even hold their head high when other real citizens walked by.

Imagine that your people spoke the language of the people that enslaved them, that you spoke this language with no other viable alternative.

Imagine what tomorrow would be like without a yesterday to inform it.

Now imagine being asked to study this negative space that is your past. Imagine re-experiencing generation after generation of humiliation and misery; of looking at this tragedy and saying, "You see that? That's what I come from."

This is the problem that my new young adult novel - 47 - takes on. My project is to inform young people about the only history that they can claim, with all the terror and hopeless that attends that history, while, at the same time, trying to present hope and the possibility of love of self and self-respect.

Many black people in America shy away from reading about slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and racism. The ugliness and the pain seem unremitting. Why do you ask me to identify with these pitiful and wretched lives? They silently ask.

It's a good question.

The answer is, of course, that one must embrace her past in order to create her future. How else can we make moral decisions? How else can we resist becoming the very scum that made us?

To overcome the resistance that many young and old blacks have of looking deeply into our past I have come up with a creation: A historical novel that uses the tools of mythology and science fiction to create a scenario that allows the reader to identify with a main character who will rise above all others; a character who will be a triumphant hero amidst the travesty of slavery.

I have created a suitable companion for my slaveboy protagonist - a boy named Tall John who is really an alien being who has come to understand that his star-flung fate is inextricably intertwined with the destiny of our hero. Tall John himself is a reflection of an old slave myth about a spirit named High John the Conqueror. High John, the myth goes, came from Africa to confound the white masters and to ultimately free the slaves.

By blending these various genres I am able to create a compelling boy's adventure story that forces our boy hero to confront the terms of his life: These terms are manifest in three words - master, freedom, and nigger.

This YA novel is a story about overcoming the impossible odds stacked against the slave and realizing that who I am and what I am is for me and only me to decide.

This book is not only written for the young black reader. The history it reveals is the history of all young English speaking North Americans. This history allows all of us to deal with the holocaust of our past and the hope of our future.

    Originally delivered at the 2005 American Library Association conference