"I been worried sick about you, too, Macon": Toni Morrison, the South, and the oral tradition

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1998 by Atkinson, Yvonne, Page, Philip

I In Chapter Seven of The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois theorizes his ideas about the deep South as he "recounts a mythical journey deep into the recesses of the Black Belt" (Adell 21 ). Other classic African American texts, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, Cane, Black Boy, and Invisible Man, as well as such recent texts as Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident, Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day are premised on the protagonists' struggles with their simultaneous immersion in and escape from their Southern past and the oral tradition associated with it.

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