Clarence Major's homecoming voice in 'Such Was the Season.' - Clarence Major Issue

African American Review, Spring, 1994 by Bernard W. Bell

"Unlike his previous fiction, which was unstintingly experimental Such Was the Season is an old-fashioned, straight-ahead narrative crammed with action, a dramatic storyline and meaty characterization," writes novelist Al Young (19). This is the consensus of reviewers of Clarence Major's fifth novel However, although more conventional and accessible on the surface for readers than his other novels, Such Was the Sawn is actually an exploration on its lower frequencies of the double consciousness of the implied author and of Dr. Adam North, whom the narrator/protagonist calls Juneboy, as both return to their Southern black vernacular roots. Rather than "contagious affection" for his characters, especially Annie Eliza Sommer-Hicks, the black matriarchal narrator/protagonist, Major's homecoming voice is characterized by social and cultural ambivalence.

Set in the post-Black Power and Black Arts era of a black bourgeois 1970s community of Atlanta, Georgia, the narrative of Such Was the Season is indeed rather conventionally structured. Annie Eliza retrospectively tells us about her "killer-diller" (1) week: Juneboy, her estranged nephew, returns as Dr. Adam North to Atlanta from Yale and Howard Universities to lecture at Spelman and Emory on his sickle cell research and to stay with her and his Southern family; Renee, her materialistic, feminist daughter-in-law, announces her candidacy for the state senate at a large dinner party, Senator Dale Cooper, Renee's political opponent and the incumbent, becomes mysteriously sick with a rare sickle cell disease and is nearly assassinated; the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Hicks, Renee's husband and Annie Eliza's hustler/minister son, is involved in a local tomato industry scandal and nearly killed by an abused lover, DeSoto Hicks, Annie Eliza's police sergeant son, hosts the family at the policeman's ball; and Annie Eliza aids Juneboy in his quest to reconcile himself to his Southern past and family, especially his murdered father Scoop, a numbers runner and surrogate father to Jeremiah. Annie Eliza is centered in her racial, ethnic, and regional vernacular culture, but the implied author and Juneboy are respectfully ambivalent about her beliefs, values, and behavior. She is a septuagenarian whose own double consciousness is apparent in her ambivalent reference to Renee as a "nigger" (19), her feeling like a "pickaninny" in the company of some whites, her confession of telling a "pickaninny" joke to her favorite white employer (152), and her disapproval of interracial romance even on television, which she watches compulsively. She also has for many years worn a "blond but kinda red" wig, which may have once looked "real natural" on her, but, as her sister Esther told her bluntly two years earlier, now makes her" |look like one of these here street hussies.'" Defiantly, she says, "I wore my wig all over Chicago, strutting my stuff just as pretty as I pleased" (17).

Is this behavior consistent with Annie Eliza's self-identification as "just a plain down-to-earth common sense person" (16)? Is she more folksy than folk? To be folksy is to be a stereotypical rather than a typical or individual member of the common people. To act folksy is to exploit surface appearances of reality rather than to explore deeper significations of reality. The informality of folksiness distorts and demeans the ways of black folk for personal survival or self-aggrandizement by reinforcing the mythic sense of superiority of white people. What then is the implied author revealing about the ironies and paradoxes of Annie Eliza's double consciousness as an elderly Southern black woman of the 1970s? How are readers encouraged to respond to her voice and world view, which makes little or no fixed distinction between fact and fiction?

The illusory character of reality and the reality of illusoriness are dramatized and symbolized by the manner in which television informs Annie Eliza's consciousness and language. The rhythms of her everyday life, like the rhythms of her black vernacular speech, are punctuated by the integration of the technology of television with the traditional morality - the passions, prejudices, and pride - of hard-working, church-going home-owning lower-middle-class Southern Negro housewives of the 1940s and 1950s who helped to support their families by ironing, washing and cleaning for white folks. Her vibrant, idiomatic dialect illuminates her uncolleged, opinionated, independent, protective, provincial, pragmatic, politically conservative character.

This is particularly true of the sound and sense of her sayings, slang, and sentences, such as her anxiety about her arthritis, stomach pains, and sex life while she watches the soap opera romance of Luke and Laura on General Hospital. "My body was talking to me something powerful," she says. "I sho wont having no labor pains. Specially since I hadn't been nowhere near no man in that respect in many, many years. I ain't had no use for all the bother that goes with being like that with mens. Oh, I tried it one time after Bibb's death, but it didn't work. Just one time. It wont worth it, child. I might as well had a been shelling peas or shucking corn" (12-13). The multiple negation and inherent variability in the use of past and present verb tenses, as well as the familiar direct-address term child, which implies an intended primary audience of her racial, generational, and gender peers, seem appropriate for the speaker's socioeconomic class, age, race, region, and sex.