Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present

American Visions, April, 1996 by Dale Edwyna Smith

Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present edited by Gloria Naylor (Little, Brown. 1995. $24.95)--"Best of" collections provoke questions: Says who? According to what? By whom? Surely there's a better reason for a book than that all the authors are African American? Naylor's editor's note and rambling introduction (which begins at the beginning of black writing, on "the fertile grasslands of Tanzania ... eons" ago) fail to answer those questions adequately, but there is no question that some of our best black writers are here. There are two selections from the 1960s (Diane Oliver's award-winning 1967 "Neighbors," on the civil rights wars writ small among everyday people bemused by the possibility of desegregation where they live, and an excerpt from James Baldwin's 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone). Other "bests" include Samuel Delany's "The Tale of Gorgik," which looks deeply into the insubstantiality of freedom; Sherley Anne Williams' "Meditations on History," which explores still unexplained mysteries from the slave era from the perspective of both slaves and masters; Helen Elaine Lee's "Silences," which, in language as precise as poetry, confronts irony in memorializing a love affair between two women who "still[ed] touch" when those who might be baffled by their "otherness" were near; and Michael Weaver's "By the Way of Morning Fire," which takes us once again into the cauldron of our collective Origins in the South.

Dale Edwyna Smith is an assistant professor of American history and Afro-American history at Washington University in St. Louis whose reviews have appeared in Southern Review and Belles Lettres. Her last article for American Visions, "Recent and Relevant History Books," appeared in the February/ March issue.