Voices Carry

Is it a problem, asks Lawrence Hill, that many of the most famous and enduring fictional accounts of African Americans have been penned by whites? A solution to this trend of ignoring African-American writers is to incorporate memoirs into the body of Civil War literature into the curriculum:

What’s striking about such narratives is the immediacy of expression. These authors have a fundamental point to make, one of such personal urgency that the reader can hardly turn away. Between each line breathes a voice that seems to whisper: “This is my name, this is when I was born, this is who I am and how I have lived, and I am going to assert my own humanity by setting my story down on paper.” If we are to persuade bookstores, reviewers, librarians, and curriculum writers to look for fresh literature touching on the African-American experience, and prevail on teachers to exercise more imagination than merely shoving the old pile of school editions of To Kill a Mockingbird at yet another class of yawning students, it may be memoir that does the trick.