Writing while white … An unprecedented number of black characters inhabit today's mainstream fiction best-seller lists, but few of them are created by black authors

Black Issues Book Review, July-August, 2004 by Earni Young

CALIA H. RUFFIN IS THE LONE BLACK JUROR IN THE TRIAL OF A white man charged with murder in a small town in Mississippi. Miss Callie is certainly unlike any typical black woman you would expect to find in the rural South, where the "coloreds" are kept poor, uneducated and in their place by a less-than-benevolent white power structure.

She could give diction lessons to an English governess, speaks fluent Italian and loves opera. She owes all these attributes to a while benefactor who befriended Callie as a young girl. Callie, along with her husband, Esau Ruffin, is a character in John Grisham's latest page turner, The Last Juror (Doubleday, March 2004), which zoomed up The New York Times best seller list.

Grisham, a native of Mississippi, makes Callie the stuff of legend. She braves racial prejudice to educate her children, becomes the first black woman to vote in Ford County in the '50s and in time the county's first black juror. But in the end, he can't resist casting Callie in the classic role of "mammy" as she serves up lavish weekly meals and words of wisdom for white upstart newspaper owner Willie Traynor.

Grisham, whose legal thrillers have become automatic best-sellers, is one of several popular while authors, including Janet Evanovich, Suzanne Brockmann, Robert B. Parker and James Patterson, who are prominently featuring men and women of color in their novels so much so that far more African American characters are on The Times best seller lists these days than the number of black writers there would indicate.

Meanwhile, a few books by African American writers manage to attract a crossover audience among white readers.

Grisham unintentionally--at least we hope so---portrays Miss Callie as a sort idiot savant, filled with knowledge she is unable to put to use. Her story is told through the disillusioned eyes of a twentysomething white boy.

This ploy allows Grisham to intellectualize any discussion of the racism that dominates Miss Callie's life and the lives of other African Americans in Ford County. It also lets him avoid having to adopt the rhythms of black speech.

White attempts In depict African Americans in literature, no matter how sympathetic, are almost always problematic, says Professor Kimberly D. Blockett, a professor of English Literature at Pennsylvania State University. "They are not as well developed as the writers think they are, and they are always black Americans as seen through the dominant culture's eyes," says Blockett.

However flawed, there is an advantage for black readers in this kind of book. "It gives you a clear idea of how white people perceive us," says Professor Reginald McKnight, who teaches a class on cross racial literature at the University of Georgia. McKnight, who is the Hamilton Holmes professor of literature, is the author of the novel He Sleeps (Picador USA, September 2002).

PERFECT ROLE MODELS

Patterson is another practitioner of cross-racial writing. He has written nine mystery thrillers featuring Alex Cross, a black D.C. cop with a Ph.D. in psychology who also works with the FBI as a profiler. Cross is a widower who lives with two of his three children and his paternal grandmother in the nation's capital. He is a good father, a true Southern gentleman to the ladies in his life. He is the perfect role model for males--white or black,

While Patterson has given Cross a detailed family life and professional resume, there is nothing other than his skin color that makes Cross a black man. Patterson never allows Cross to lapse into internal monologue that would provide insight into what makes him tick outside his professional pursuit of serial killers.

The Cross series is immensely popular and three of the novels have been made into movies starring Morgan Freeman as Cross. Yet after the publication of The Big Bad Wolf (Little, Brown and Company, November 2003), Patterson openly discussed retiring Cross, saying he wanted a change. Alex Cross occasionally encounters cases where his race becomes an issue, but it is never THE issue of the book.

Patterson has created another African American character as part of his Women's Murder Club series. Claire Washburn, the heavyset black female medical examiner for San Francisco, joins three white female professionals to solve crimes that have stumped the system. Patterson has published three novels featuring this team, the most re cent of which is 3rd Degree (Little, Brown and Company, March 2004). Like Cross, Washburn has a stable family and a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to put white readers at ease.

Evanovich released the 10th novel in her series about an inept bail enforcement agent in Trenton, New Jersey, Stephanie Plum, and her equally clueless sidekick Lula, a reformed black hooker, and Ranger, her inscrutable and mysterious, copper-skinned Cuban American colleague, who frequently comes to their rescue.

Most of Evanovich's characters are over-the-top caricatures played for laughs. Her pistol-packing, sex-crazed Grandma Mazur is a hoot. Lula is straight out of central casting--black, fat, bug eyed and ignorant--a supersized Butterfly McQueen in a size 12 miniskirt.