Black Women's Writing Revisited

16      Alexander ends her essay with wit that is perhaps inspired by Cooper's use of sarcasm in A Voice. She writes that as Cooper creates her self in writing, she forges a space for the "unimagined African American woman intellectual, working and thinking at the turn of her century, and this one" (Black 131). "This one" is somewhat ambiguous because it is not clear whether it refers to the century or to the unimagined intellectual. The richer reference is to the intellectual, to Alexander herself or even to the reader. With those two words, "this one" Alexander condenses, with the skill of the poet she is, the whole framework of ideas about the self, the reader and history that she has been writing about. The writer boldly imagines Cooper writing in the late 1800s imagining another Ph.D. candidate in the late 1900s-that A Voice was written with future generations of black women intellectuals in mind. There again we have the conflation of the reader and the writer through the text-a text wherein the author, in constructing I and I, a collective I, makes room for such identifications.

17      Alexander's writing is not as intergeneric as Cooper's in the same way nor is their use of the collective "I" done with the same implications. Alexander's goal would not have been to mimic A Voice. More to the point is that Alexander reads Cooper in order to be able to imagine her own relationship to writing and to develop her own voice, as she says in the essay. Her reading is autobiography. Her inclusion of this essay in her first collection of essays makes the importance of the nineteenth-century educator to her clear. And in doing so, Alexander constructs a chain of readership across the hundred or so years since the publication of A Voice that links her to Cooper to me and to my readers in a network of textual, anthological existence.

18      In "The World According to Jet, Or, Notes toward a Notion of Race-Pride," Alexander changes register from autobiography through collectiveidentification to the question of group identity. Here the site of collectivity appears to be the shared readership of "a little lozenge of a magazine" called Jet (ibid. 91).[8]Jet is a popular African-American publication founded in Chicago, Illinois in 1951 by John H. Johnson of Johnson Publishing Company. Jet is notable for its small digest-sized format. It was influential in the early days of the American Civil Rights movement, with its coverage of the murder of Emmett Till and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But as Alexander suggests in her narrative the fact that Jet had so many pictures of black people, particularly celebrities, and noted the rare appearance of black people on television documented presence and conferred importance.Alexander uses constructed personal elements strategically in order to explore the individual interiority and the social complexity of the choice that I think she sees the African American community facing between blackness and integrated blackness. Further, she casts a skeptical light on Jet's "romantic language" of race-pride, while also, since it is the subject of her essay, presumably being drawn to it. Alexander creates a persona for the poem, a little girl during the Civil Rights movement, whose sense of identity is animated in ways that she felt were not sanctioned by the wider, more authoritative society around her.

19      In the age of integration, Alexander writes that the magazine, which featured black people who had achieved notoriety in some form, whether in horror or in glory, "seemed to [her] to sound black notes from the lower frequencies,[9]The phrase "lower frequencies" is from the novel Invisible Man. See Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.saying go ahead, hold hands, but know who your people are, and know that it means something crucial-though who could say what-to be of a people" (ibid. 94). Alexander's avoidance of being definitive with the phrase, "though who could say what" is crucial here because it represents resistance to prescriptive didacticism. Alexander's non-didactic, subjective writing encourages open-ended, unproven thoughts, which can yield actual dialogue and insight, writing as she does from inside an ongoing community dialogue that has scholarly, political and personal stakes. Thus, Alexander's abrupt break in thought, "though who could say what," spoken under the breath yet made to stand out with the two dashes on either side, embodies her resistance to submit to traditional scholarly requirements and like her literary models, seek an alternate pathway. It is significant further, not just that there is a "war" of sorts here between the black notes and the idea of racial harmony, but that blackness is associated with the lower frequencies. Here, Alexander aligns race-pride and blackness with a private, visceral part of her consciousness while "hold[ing] hands,"presumably a reference to integration and the Civil Rights movement, is associated with what could be seen as a public performance based on social expectations of respectability. Particularly arresting in that regard is the paragraph where Alexander presents a first-person persona. I stop short of staying that it is autobiographical because the essay is intergenerically critical of a magazine that is about aggrandized constructions of personhood-a black celebrity magazine. Whether it is literally Alexander is less important than the figurative meanings that emerge from her use of the persona and the fact that she would choose to mask her writerly self as a first-person voice at all and to do so in this way. Therefore, Alexander in the persona of a little girl "reading her grandfather's Jet magazines before she could read" symbolizes unattended-to pre-adolescent and pre-linguistic needs for recognition of the self among the black community.

20      It is important that Alexander describes the little girl as "sneaking." It is not that the magazines were hidden exactly, but the way Alexander characterizes their appeal as "sneaking into [her] subconscious" suggests that there was something forbidden yet alluring about them. Twisting a cliché in which a child sneaks peeks at an adult's hidden, forbidden pornographic magazines, Alexander describes herself looking at the pictures in Jet, drawn to images of "a black nation" that lured her into what I imagine as a near-illicit sense of blackness-whole, discernable, essential and bodily-from which integration had distanced, if not alienated her in some ways. She writes, "before I understood the profound difficulties of the enterprise of integration, that low rumble of race-pride was sneaking its way into my subconscious, to the part driven by compulsion, the part that yearned for the world according to Jet" (ibid. 94). It's as if integration was linked to a kind of respectable behavior or false performance while Jet tempted her toward blackness, which was true and raw. Alexander represents her concept of black culture as a pre-linguistic sensuality rather than an intellectual position. But this association does not mean that she views the lure of race-pride as irrational.