Toward an Expanded Canon of Black Literature / Mateo Askaripour. In: Lit Hub January 3, 2019

Nabokov. Faulkner. Steinbeck. Hemingway. Orwell. Heller. Huxley. Fitzgerald. Vonnegut. Dostoevsky. Camus. Milton. As I dragged my finger from title to title, there was something that connected Lolita to East of Eden to The Plague to A Farewell to Arms to This Side of Paradise, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I surveyed the sea of books, stretching across five or six white plastic folding tables, and watched NYU students grab identical copies, check off titles corresponding to their syllabi’s list of required reading, and pay a man who I presumed was Neptune, god of this sea of books covering a few meters of a city block.
But instead of possessing a chiseled six-pack, biceps shredded into god-like definition, and a full, gray head of hair flowing into an awe-inspiring beard, our Neptune wore a stained, white tank top, holey trousers, and a head bearing a few white strands of hair that no doubt had plans of packing up and leaving within a year. When I saw him, he was peeling dirty singles off a roll of wrinkled bills, making change for the students happy to find what they needed for prices cheaper than Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the NYU bookstore.
“Do you have any John A. Williams?” I asked, scanning his wares, content but unsurprised to find Baldwin, Morrison, Ellison, Angelou, Hurston, and Hughes.
I’d heard about Williams months prior. His plots—a Black man trying to succeed in an industry where he was objectified by men and women alike; a Black writer who uncovers a plan to destroy the civil rights movement; the killing of an unarmed Black youth that prompts a civil rights organization to hire a hit man—all reminded me of my own manuscript, which helped me to understand that the longing for success in a white-dominated industry and struggles endured by my own main character was part of a much larger tradition created by giants. Having finally reduced my To Be Read pile to a few books, I felt that freeing sense of allowance that arrives when we drop all restraint and permit ourselves a new purchase.
Neptune stuffed the bills back into his pocket and stared at me. “John A. Williams? No. You’re probably the first person to ever ask me about John A. Williams, and I’ve been here for decades.”
“Really?” I asked. “Why don’t you carry him?”
He palmed his white-stubbled jaw and shook his head. “Listen, I don’t want to sound racist, or anything like that, because, honest to God, I’m not, but someone like John A. Williams just doesn’t sell. Like I said, you’re the first person since probably the early 1990s to ask about him. And I’m not even sure about that.” Neptune, who was certainly not a racist despite starting off with every racist’s go-to opener—“I’m not racist, but…”—lamented about how he didn’t carry a host of obscure Black writers, because, simply put, no one either knows or cares enough about them to request them. If a hopeful seeker would somehow find one of these writers among his stagnant sea, he explained, it’d be rare. “It’s a business,” he said, “and I have to go where the market goes.”
Watch closely. This is how Black writers die. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/toward-an-expanded-canon-of-black-literature/