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READ INTRODUCTION“No more auction-block for me,/ No more, no more;/ No more auction-block for me,/ Many thousand gone” – from the Negro Spiritual, quoted in the epigraph to Ronald L. Fair’s ‘American Fable’
In his Introduction to Library of America’s reprint of Many Thousand Gone, praised by The New York Times as “one of the most beautifully written books” of the 1960s, W. Ralph Eubanks, currently at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, writes:
“What if Black people in an isolated corner of Mississippi were removed from the influence of three wars (the Civil War, WWI and II), migration, and modern broadcasting? What if slavery had not ended there in 1865 but persisted for another one hundred years into the 1960s? That premise stands as the basis of the nightmarish tale Ronald L. Fair weaves together in the pages of his first novel.”
If you are familiar with the following publishers: Carlton Press, North Carolina Haiku Society, St. Andrew College Press, Les Hombres Press, Red Moon Press, WorldTech Press, Mountains and Rivers Press (and Blair), Wet Cement Press, and Cuttlefish Books –, then you are likely to be the owner of all nine books and chapbooks of poetry published between 1982 and 2023 by North Carolinian Lenard D. Moore.
Writing and experimenting with many literary genres, Moore (b. 1958) is probably best known for his work with (African) American versions of traditional Japanese forms, like haiku and tanka. And this year’s publication of A Million Shadows at Noon (Cuttlefish Books, 2023) – a haiku sequence commemorating the historic, if somewhat controversial, Million Man March of African American men on October 16, 1995, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. – marks 41 years of effort.
What is all this about Mona Lisa and Nat King Cole? At least part of the answer can be found in the poem Nat King Cole Babies and Black Mona Lisas, in what we could call the first volume of Mona Lisa Saloy’s ongoing chronicles of Black Creole culture in New Orleans, Louisiana: Red Beans and Ricely Yours (Truman State University Press, 2005).
Nat King Cole (1919-1965) from 1956 to 1957 hosted NBC, the National Broadcasting Company’s The Nat King Cole Show, the first nationally broadcast television show hosted by an African American. It was cancelled after just one season for lack of sponsors, few sponsors willing to be associated with a Black entertainer. (“Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark” – Nat King Cole).
Short lived. But long enough for a number of ‘Black Mona Lisas’ to be born to parents listening to jazz pianist-turned-singer Nat King Cole’s version of the 1950 #1 hit on the pop-charts. And Saloy remembers “Nat King Cole singing to me,” thinking Mona Lisa was his lover, like Sweet Lorraine.
In the essay Remembering Ronald Fair, published in Common Reader, 29 September 2020, author Cecil Brown (the bestselling novel The Life and Loves of a Jiveass Nigger (1969) and Stagolee Shot Billy (2003), about the legendary ‘badman’) remembers encounters with Ronald L. Fair and argues that” the Black expatriate’s novels, Hog Butcher and We Can’t Breathe, are more timely than ever.”
He quotes Chicago critic and editor Richard Guzman’s reaction on his website to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020: “Another ‘I-Can’t-Breathe’ incident.” A phrase Richard Guzman borrows from the title of Ronald L. Fair’s 1972 novel We Can’t Breathe, Fair’s most autobiographical, rich with details about the lives of transplanted Black southerners (like Fair’s parents) and that of their children who grew up in Chicago during WW II and after.
In Much Ado About a Name, his Appendix to the 1933 edition of The Mis-education of the Negro, historian and polemicist Carter G. Woodson ridicules a “highly educated” Negro much concerned as to what the race should be called: Africans, Negroes, colored people, or what?
“If others will agree to call Negroes Nordics, he thinks, he will reach the desired end (solving the race problem) by taking a short cut … Many of this class suffer mentally because of the frequent use of “offensive expressions” in addressing Negroes. When dealing with them, then, one has to be very careful. For this reason our friends in other races have to seek guidance in approaching us.”
The Liberation Narratives CD is Nicole Mitchell’s gift to her mentor and friend, poet, publisher, and educator Haki R. Madhubuti and his Third World Press. Ten poems by Madhubuti, read by the author, is set to music by composer and flautist Nicole Mitchell and her Black Earth Ensemble.
Originally commissioned by the Jazz Institute of Chicago, as an artist-in-residence at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts 2016 to 2017 Nicole Mitchell worked on developing and performing this suite of music for Madhubuti’s poetry. Recorded live at the Logan Center, the CD Nicole Mitchell and Haki Madhubuti: Liberation Narratives was released by Third World Press/black earth music in 2017 as part of TWP’s celebration of its first 50 years of publishing.