African American Women’s Fiction and Murder: From Toni Morrison to Tracy Clark

During the fall of 1999, I attended NYU as a visiting grad student in order to take African American literature–I believe we covered 1880 to 1960ish–with the newly hired, and ever so brilliant, Dr. Elizabeth McHenry.

Every white grad student should have at least one similar immersion experience. We were the minority, and most of us realized during the first class that we had been granted the opportunity of learning about Black writing in the U.S., from people with generations of lived experience to draw on as collective knowledge. Knowledge that they generously shared in ways small (explaining who Madam C.J. Walker was) and large, like describing daily life in a still socially-segregated southern state. A young man told me, as we chatted after class over coffee, that he sometimes stepped off the sidewalk to let white women of a certain age pass him.

I remember discussing Nella Larsen, Ellison, Hughes, Hurston, Wright . . . but I think the course period ended pre-Toni Morrison. With Morrison, I assumed I was on more confident terrain. For a couple of years I’d worked as a research assistant on a book about her novels, written by my dissertation advisor, the extraordinary and prolific and very kind Jill Matus.

But what I didn’t realize in my early twenties was that I didn’t know enough American history, specifically Black American history, to fully understand Beloved or Sula or Paradise. And I still don’t know as much as I should, but I’m learning. #BlackLivesMatter made a big difference, and I’m grateful for the African American Policy Forum and summer school.

This week I’m finishing teaching Sula, which features more than one murder. But I didn’t teach it as a murder mystery because there’s never any mystery. Morrison’s narrator tells us who inadvertently swung Chicken Little into the water and watched him sink, who set someone on fire, or failed to intervene to douse the fire. The larger mystery is why, and that’s rooted in Sula herself. As my class members discussed so enthusiastically last night, she is both self-created and self-owned and entirely a product of her environment, and of generations of traumatizing experience.

We turn to Zadie Smith’s “Now More Than Ever” next, and I look forward to hearing class members’ takes on Smith’s satire about cancel culture, which I’m pairing with discussion of Atwood and Munro. For reasons.

But back to mystery fiction: the Rogue Woman Writers blog/project introduced me to Chicago-based Tracy Clark, and she is a terrifically good writer whose books just keep getting better. I haven’t read nearly enough by Black women mystery writers, so I’m searching for more. I’ve read Barbara Neely’s excellent Blanche series, and a couple of books by Attica Locke; I haven’t yet gotten around to most of these, so they’re in my TBR pile.

Recommendations welcome. And I need to do some thinking about Toni Morrison and the function of murder in her non-mystery literary novels, which bear the whole weight of American slavery and Reconstruction, segregation and the Civil Rights movement.