Full Exposure

You could call some of them tenement tales. Others, historic strands of slave narratives intricately braided into fiction.

Still others addressed even grittier themes: the ravages of racism. Alcohol and drugs. Hustlers and numbers runners. Splintering families. Superwoman matriarchs. The scrap-ends of lives. These were the manuscripts reflecting black America that most often found themselves clothbound.

Dictated for decades by tastes and hunches of a largely white publishing world, it wasn’t so long ago that the universe of black letters--fiction particularly--seemed cramped, a slender Cliff Notes summary of the African experience in America.

This is not to say that many of these stories weren’t eloquent, textured or aching to be told. They were, however, a dogeared passage detailing but a small segment of the journey.

But now the spotlight is trained yet again on black authors, particularly women, telling all manner of stories from their varied corners of the diaspora.

To trace this most recent flash point, or filament, most look to a moment in 1992, when the publishing world finally sat up and took note: Titles penned by three black women--Toni Morrison (“Jazz”), Alice Walker (“Possessing the Secret of Joy”) and Terry McMillan (“Waiting to Exhale”)--stood firm in Top 10 slots on the New York Times bestseller list.

It was evidence difficult to ignore. And the latest “phenomenon”--as the publishing world madly tagged it--gained flesh and form. But for black writers and readers, it confirmed what had long been a given: If you write them, they will buy them. In hungry droves.

African Americans spend about $160 million yearly on books, according to a recent Gallup survey. But now as the decade takes firmer hold, what gets lost in all of the cant and numbers--books sold, advances pulled down, bestseller list standings--is movement toward a more panoramic and thus inclusive look at the black experience.

The last boom, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, gave rise to the protest and witness novel, penned by a chorus of resonant baritones. But as the civil rights fervor diminished in the late 1970s, so did publishers’ interest in works by black American authors who picked at the scab of racism.

Although there were other ripples, winds shifted dramatically to women with Walker’s gale-force bestseller success with “The Color Purple” (Harcourt Brace, 1982), which helped prop open the door. A decade later, McMillan threw it wide open.

And women’s words have become the skeleton key.

Though critics cite omissions and shortcomings, this wave of fiction has birthed something more lasting than the advances and screenplay options, says Cheryl Woodruff, executive editor of Ballantine / One World: “I think their diversity and range of imagination and voice shows the public we’re no longer identical twins.

“Here we have the works of people who are driven by the dictates of their own muses.”

*

Growing up, many black readers learned to play catch as catch can. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, glimpsing a dust-jacket photo on a library shelf or resonant title on a high-school reading list was a moment for celebration.

The choices were limited: Another painful integration tale or an across-the-ocean adventure? You choose.

“I realized growing up I didn’t read a lot of black authors,” says Tracy George, a publicity manager at Addison-Wesley. “I remember distinctly when my mother bought me a set, ‘Little Women,’ the Brontes. She didn’t find a lot of [black] books at my level. They just weren’t being published.”

For many post-civil rights babies, it was the step across the college classroom threshold that opened windows on worlds that were a little closer to home--if not in content at least point of view--discoveries that were like tremors.

But the odd story, or the token author, only whetted the appetite.

Scrubbing old backdrops, shrugging out of outmoded characterizations, black authors today seek to articulate their breadth. And a few publishers, finally, are beginning to fall into step with them.

Many examining this cycle believe publishing’s tentativeness is borne of lack of exposure.

In the past, “to be oversimplistic about it,” says Amistead Press Executive Editor Malaika Adero, “publishers look to what sells in other media and then make decisions about what doesn’t sell based on their limited knowledge. For blacks, it’s pathological lives in communities called ghettos. Editors and publishers are limited by their own worldview so they often look for works that reflect [that] instead of being open.”

Instead of braving new ground, Adero says publishers “try to imitate each other. So what works at this house--like a Terry [McMillan]--every house tries to find another instead of looking for something new.”

*

Truth be told, resistance and censoring doesn’t all come just from without. There are pointed wranglings within the race, too, about “appropriate stories” and the “proper” place to air them. It’s an issue that becomes ever more complex as African Americans seek to identify themselves on their own grounds and terms.

And it’s part of what’s fueling the debate over “Push” (Knopf, 1996), the debut novel by a California-born, New York-based poet / performance artist who conjures the mother of all unconstrained black superwomen with her attitudinal signature--Sapphire.

Her protagonist’s (Clarieece Precious Jones) first unadorned words serve as ammunition for both sides of the debate: “I was left back when I was 12 because I had a baby for my fahver.”

Tracey Sherrod, who bid on the book for Henry Holt and believes it carries an imperative sociopolitical message, fits the controversy into context: “The black middle class doesn’t want to admit that Precious exists. They want to walk away and ignore it.”

But this unsettling woman / child vision, who grew out of Sapphire’s years in Harlem watching a parade of Preciouses move in and out of her classroom, was a figure she could no longer ignore. “I did have one student who was 32, who didn’t have literacy problems, but she mentioned that she had a daughter--’for her fahver’--who was 20. All the air in the room went away. That stays with you. A fact that goes into your writing.”

In this slim, dauntless novel, Sapphire sees Precious’ odyssey toward language, and thus toward self-definition, as a edifying urban parable:

“Black people start to think of ourselves as reading scores, statistics. This girl [Precious], she’s 18, on public assistance, two kids, reading on a junior high level, HIV-positive. She doesn’t look so good on paper. But when we see that she’s made a remarkable climb. She uses the resources in her neighborhood. . . .”

(After the birth of her second child, she enrolls in an alternative school and learns to read and write.)

“That’s why the novel stays in Harlem. Harlem is rich in programs and resources.”

Although the novel’s undergirdings stress self-reliance--a cornerstone plucked from the black power movement--Sapphire says she wasn’t sure how black readers might receive the novel, which is a harrowing ride with few rays of light.

“Part of me was somewhat concerned,” she says. “But I had a tremendous amount of faith. I told an audience in Washington, D.C. that if keeping it quiet was the answer then we wouldn’t have the problem. What’s done in the dark has got to come into the light.”

It’s not so much the predicament Precious is born into that Sapphire wants readers to reckon with. Rather it’s the greater symbol of those who remain rooted in her universe--from the black nurses in the hospital, to teachers like Miss Rain who lead Precious across a tremendous divide.

“I think we can regain a deep sense of self-esteem if we aren’t just showing black people as victims,” Sapphire says. “I’m so tired of the white missionary routine. You go up there and clean up your own mess. You can be part of the problem, but you can also be part of the solution. And we don’t have to tear down the country to do it.”

Precious’ ability to ultimately grow to love herself is at the crux of the collective struggle--falling in love with self and accepting the many shades of it.

And perhaps for those very reasons, works such as New Yorker journalist Andrea Lee’s “Sarah Phillips” or April Sinclair’s latest, “Ain’t Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice,” walk minefields with black readers. Many resist the former--a quiet novella about a middle-class, preacher’s daughter turned expatriate--because it does not conform to preconceived notions about black womanhood and blackness. The latter novel disturbs others because it addresses in point-blank fashion the often taboo subject of sexual orientation.

“People don’t understand the burden of the race,” explains book publicist George. “You will be dismissed if it’s not ‘black enough.’ ”

Or perceived as pandering to what is viewed as stereotypical notions of blackness. The vise of collective and unfortunately limiting definitions create a creative Catch-22 that leaves publishers, writers and readers caught in a disconcerting balance.

“Publishing is after all a business and tends to stick with themes that sell,” George says. “Based on the success of other books many black authors may feel that they have to write down and out stories or now Terry McMillan in order to be published.”

*

Terry McMillan hears an incessant echo trailing her countrywide. At lectures and readings and luncheons she’s greeted by women who stand up and pronounce, hand on hip: “ ‘I’m going to be the next Terry McMillan.’ ”

“No. No, you’re not,” she lectures. “The world already has Terry McMillan. You’re going to be the next you.”

It’s no wonder they aspire.

“Waiting to Exhale,” the flame that brought discussions around black male / female relationships from simmer to rapid boil, also lit the fuse setting off the explosion of “sister circles,” (women’s reading groups) who “You go, girl”-ed Bernadine, Robin, Gloria and Savannah all the way to the big screen.

But even with her blockbuster success, McMillan finds herself constantly wedged into too-exact pigeonholes--asked to perform the universal, thus the impossible.

“I take myself seriously, but not too seriously,” she rasps during a recent book tour. “But because I’m a pop fiction writer and because it has mass market appeal, people are constantly trying to compare me to Danielle Steel and Judith Krantz. They can’t figure out where to put me. I’m not imitating anyone. I do have a writing style; I liken myself more to a black female Ring Lardner.”

Even though her newest book has hung strong for nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, early criticism of “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” (Viking), McMillan’s semiautobiographical sun-drenched postcard about a 42-year-old black woman’s Jamaican encounter with a man half her age, sparked ire in the author.

“I’ve read a few reviews where they say race is not a motivating force in my work and that’s not what fuels it. So when the little critics say, ‘Oh she’s gone soft on us. She’s written this fairy tale. . . . She’s only touched on things . . . poverty in Jamaica or the drive-bys.’ What? Do I have to write a whole book about this . . . so that I could prove that I was very cognizant of the problems? I don’t have to prove s--- to these people. I know exactly what is going on in my community in America.”

What critics forget is that even if race or racism isn’t the main thrust of the narrative, the fact that the characters are black and the story occupies a black milieu, filtered through the eyes of a black writer, it is yet and still a black story.

“I like to think about my fiction as a video camera placed on our emotional lives for a very finite period of time,” McMillan explains. “The picture speaks for itself.”

*

The freedom to write without political or social constraints is something that writers of color don’t take for granted.

“What Terry’s success gave us was permission,” says Bebe Moore Campbell, author of “Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad” (Ballantine / One World, 1996). “I don’t always have to write about The Problem. It was really a wake-up call for the publishing industry to expand their horizon if they chose to.”

With that freedom in mind, Sheneska Jackson made this promise to herself when she sat down to tap out her first novel, “Caught Up in the Rapture” (Simon & Schuster, 1996): “I’m not going to write another slave book.”

An L.A. native, she decided to try her chances at fiction after hearing McMillan read at a local college several years ago.

“I don’t think it would have clicked to me the same way if it was Jackie Collins up there,” she recalls. “For a long time I thought the only way to be recognized was if you were writing about something on the cotton plantation.”

Jackson wanted to address urban realities--the scar of gangs and drugs--but at the same time reflect the upscale lifestyle open to her characters by virtue of their social position. “I wanted to put it in ‘90s terms,” Jackson explains. “Bottom line. We wanted to see our own self on the beach.”

Diane McKinney-Whetstone, author of “Tumbling” (William Morrow, 1996), a bebop era saga set in a kaleidoscopic South Philadelphia neighborhood, says it was nothing less than a luxury “to write fiction that did not touch on or embrace themes that dealt with racism and oppression that needed to be central to the story.”

For women writers in particular, it has been a shining moment of vindication.

“We proved that the erroneous assumption that black people don’t read was a lie,” says Faye Childs, a novelist and founder of the 5-year-old Blackboard, which tracks the sales of books written by African Americans.

“You think only white people were buying Stephen King or Jackie Collins? . . . There wasn’t a lack of interest in African American fiction, there just was so little out there.”

*

But there are many who believe that this boom in black books, and publishers’ hunger for them, is conditional on style and content.

In the most recent issue of QBR: The Black Book Review, publisher Max Rodriguez takes note of this concern among his readers: “Where are the seminal pieces that mark the passage of time in the life of a people? . . . Which of today’s books will become tomorrow’s required reading?”

The concern here, Rodriguez continues, “is that formulaic publishing inevitably backfires. We will stop buying the same old book with a new cover and publishers will say the market has bottomed out and print fewer titles. We are hungry for new stories! Give us more breadth.”

Inglewood’s Eso Won Books co-owner James Fugate would like to see more politically driven fiction and less family crises and sex on his shelves: “Just a good story.”

For editor Sherrod’s tastes, more breadth means more integrated settings, more meditations on gender and sexual orientation--filling out the corpus of literature. “I’d like to see some day-to-day working folk stories, not downtrodden. I’d like to see more just popular interest, housewife literature.”

L.A. poet / fiction writer Wanda Coleman couldn’t agree more.

“With white writers there are a lot of gray areas,” she says. “There are commercial writers, literary writers, genre writers. But if it’s black and it holds a pencil--that’s the category.”

Coleman, whose new book, “Native in a Strange Land” (Black Sparrow), is due out later this year, began writing because she believed in the power of language to change things. “But to me there is nothing wrong with trying to be successful. Why not be a good commercial writer? But when your book is equated with my book simply because we’re both black, [that’s] the only bitch I have.”

Elizabeth Nunez, director of the annual National Black Writers Conference, has been looking at trends and mediating heated discussions on this very topic.

“I think what [McMillan’s] book did was alert the publishers that there was a market. But they are not discriminating. There’s no substance, no content with some of these books. We have some mercenary writers out there, taking things out of context and just putting it out there without artistry, without meaning and that’s dangerous.”

Black people, Nunez says, have to stand up and say that they want something more: “We have to put more demands on publishers while publishers are listening. Now that we’re in the door, you have to do something.”

Sapphire will be reading from her new novel, “Push,” at:

* Phenix Information Center, today, 7 p.m. 379 N. E St., San Bernardino; (909) 383-2329.

* Eso Won Books, Thursday , 7:30 p.m. 900 N. La Brea, Inglewood; (310) 674-6566.