Albert Murray: literary reconstruction of the vernacular community - Black South Fiction, Art, Culture

African American Review, Summer, 1993 by Warren Carson

Albert Murray may well be African America's undiscovered national treasure, for in his works he provides a fresh reappraisal of African American culture that is at once instructive, thought provoking, witty, and unapologetic. In the three decades since the height of the Civil Rights Movement in this country, Murray has engaged in a careful reexamination of the black Southern experience and has issued it a clean bill of health. Absent are the pathological and degrading implications so common to the historical and sociological interpretations offered by other scholars. Instead, Murray's theory of the black Southern experience pivots on the wholesomeness of the black community, especially in terms of how well the community prepares its young to cope with the larger society.

Murray has not been an especially prolific writer. In the last twenty-two years he has produced the six or so works that represent his full canon: The Omni-Americans (1970), South to a Very Old Place (1971), Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Hero and the Blues (1976), Stomping the Blues (1978), and The Spyglass Tree (1991). Yet each of these works may be viewed as a variation on a theme that leads Murray closer to a full literary reconstruction of the vernacular community from which he himself and countless other African Americans emanate. It is also interesting and important to note that Murray was well into his fifties when he published his first book-length work; thus his work has the added drive of one who wishes to "go home" in the Odyssean sense of the phrase. The author's perceptions are mature, precise, and not encumbered with excessive sentiment or nostalgia.

Murray begins the examination of black culture that will eventually take him "home" with the thirteen essays that comprise The Omni-Americans. In this collection, Murray takes a close look at the larger picture of the state of black America, especially the psyche, then establishes his bearings and charts the course that this book and his subsequent work will trace. From the outset, Murray makes his position immistakably clear and to the point: His theories, as he points out in the subtitle to the book, are "Some Alternatives to the Folkore of White Supremacy." What is unsettling for many readers is that the author not only challenges those whites who advance such "folklore," but he also castigates those blacks who would likewise believe such tales. For example, in one very delightful essay, "Who That Say, What Dat, Every Time Us Do That?," Murray destroys the Sambo-like image of African Americans - the docile, childlike, unsuspecting character so pitied and so preferred by well-meaning whites. Murray writes, "There have always been [blacks] who not only have always understood all too well what other people have been doing to them all these years, but have also been doing a few things on their own in the meantime" (114). Murray not only blasts the long-held stereo-type, but he ventures further to replace it with the African American tricksterhero, a far bolder and more positive image, but one either unknown by some or conveniently forgotten by others. This myth of the Negro past is of many that Murray debunks.

Still further, and even more decisively, Murray launches a frontal assault on what he calls "the fakelore of black pathology" (97). He engages in battle those black writers especially who would continue to present, to the delight of white folk, the image of the poor, downtrodden Negro as the actual common experience of black Americans. Murray cites in particular the case of Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), which, according to Murray when he wrote his review of Manchild, was |recommended all around as if it were a profound, knowledgeable, and even comprehensive account of ... what it is really like to be a Negro" (98). He dismisses the overwhelming negativity that Brown presents as characteristic of the black experience as Claude Brown's" autobiographical social experience fiction" (102), a personal experience rather than an experience shared by all black people. Murray offers a more balanced assessment of the black experience when he states that "the background experience of U.S. Negroes includes all of the negative things that go with racism and segregation, but it also includes all of the challenging circumstances that make for ambition, integrity, and transcendent achievement" (109). No doubt Murray was recalling his own childhood experience; thus it is the autobiographical impulge that begins to drive him as he disassembles and renders impotent both white folklore and black fakelore, and replaces both with a wholesome counterview of what is was like to grow up black in the deep South.

In response to Northern "social workers, liberals, and other do-gooders" (99) who "describe the black experience as adding up to little more than a legacy of degradation and despair," Murray embarks on a long autobiographical journey with the observation that "it is not quite the same down-home" (190), and points out numerous examples of ethnic pride as they were practiced in his hometown of Mobile, Alabama. These include, but are not limited to, a strong sense of brotherhood and togetherness, a strong concern with full black participation in political and economic activity, a strong commitment to educating youth about the African American past, and a sincere devotion to students on the part of dedicated teachers with a vision - "finders and makers" Murray calls them, "who regarded black students as being infinitely more wonderful than problematical" (202). This is the true black experience, Southern-style, that Murray feels is all too often overlooked by proponents of the "folklore of white supremacy" and "the fakelore of black pathology."