Volume 42, Number 8 · May 11, 1995
Aristocrats
By Darryl Pinckney
Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood
by Gerald Early
Addison-Wesley, 234 pp., $17.00
Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society
by John Edgar Wideman
Pantheon, 197 pp., $21.00
OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ESSAY
Colored People: A Memoir
by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Vintage, 216 pp., $11.00 (paper)
The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study
by W. E. B. Du Bois
Kraus, 531 pp., $31.00
No Day of Triumph
by J. Saunders Redding
Harper and Brothers
The Big Sea
by Langston Hughes
Hill & Wang, 335 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Dust Tracks on a Road in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writing
by Zora Neale Hurston
Library of America, 1,001 pp., $35.00
The Negro Family: A Study of Family Origins Before the Civil War
by E. Franklin Frazier
Ayer, 372 pp., $10.00
Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class in the United States
by E. Franklin Frazier
Macmillan, 222 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Coming Up Down Home: A Memoir of a Southern Childhood
by Cecil Brown
Ecco Press, 222 pp., $22.95
Pushed Back to Strength: A Black Woman's Journey Home
by Gloria Wade-Gayles
Beacon, 256 pp., $20.00
Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes, the mucky-mucks and the folk. That blacks considered themselves aristocrats because they were descended either from free blacks or from 'quality' whites is bizarre to the post-Black Studies generation, because for blacks to have thought of themselves as 'top lofty' would seem to have required ignorance of how most free blacks had really lived, as well as a certain amnesia about who the main sexual predators of slaves were. But even when occupation and education became central to determining class, the connection between high status and light skin was not broken completely. For the longest time class was spoken of as a matter of whispering Episcopalians, murmuring Presbyterians, shouting Methodists, and screaming Baptists.
Review, 9039 words
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