The elusive quest Book

I’m just finishing Ta-Nehesi Coates new novel, “The Water Dancer.” It’s a beautiful story, beautifully written. Reading that brought me back to this author - Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930).

Hopkins wrote these novels as serialized chapters, all published one-by-one in a magazine for African American readers — so each chapter can be read independently and ends in a cliff hanger.

Because they were written for a black audience, issues like colorism within her readership are addressed in a way I can’t imagine they would have been addressed if the audience was assumed to be white. The horrible outcomes of white supremacy are understood to be a given in her writing, so when the stories read like morality tales, they are “teaching” black community. Of course, mores have changed a ton since the turn of the twentieth century. So, expect to cringe frequently.

What I think is most amazing and tragic, when I read Hopkins, is the clarity of an historic argument that the great strength in the fast rising black intellectual class of the US at the onset of the twentieth century would have developed into an incredibly strong demographic force had efforts by jealous white bigots not brought down entire city neighborhoods through housing policies, “riots,” and other targeted efforts to destroy black wealth.