Reviewed by Opal J. Moore Breeder and Other Stories by Dr. Eugenia
Collier Black Classic Press, 1994 Baltimore, Maryland 188 pages
Hardback: $11.95
I have stored up tales for you, my children My favorite children, my only children; Of shackles and slaves and a bill of rights.
Dr. Eugenia Collier has recently retired as chair of the English
department at Morgan State University in Baltimore, ending a
distinguished and dedicated career as professor of African American
literature. She is now contributing to that body of literature.
In “Breeder and Other Stories,” a collection of seven tales,
Eugenia Collier elaborates on the destructiveness of American slavery
upon African peoples and their families and, predictably, draws
connections between past and present conditions. With the exception of
the final tale, “Dead Man Running,” the stories are rendered from a
female or woman-centered point of view and strive to describe the
psychological and emotional losses of Black women and the resultant
damage to their children. “Dead Man Running,” told in the voice of an
anonymous omniscient narrator, closes the book with the story of the
teenager, Jazzy, caught up in a drug deal that ends in murder. As a
concluding story, it appears to represent the culmination of our
pageant of slavery — missing fathers, grieving mothers, and death.
Much recent fiction by Black women has focussed upon telling the
largely unrecorded stories of the lives of enslaved Black women.
Contrary to some critical commentary, the purpose of the best of these
works has not been to present the Black woman as martyr or as an icon
to redemptive suffering, but rather, to address Toni Morrison’s
observation that despite the factual accounts of slavery and the lives
of its former inmates, “there was no mention of their interior life.”
So much contemporary writing about slavery and the men and women
caught in that web of economics, power, and pain suggests the need to
understand more about the interior lives of our forebearers — more
than the much rehearsed tales of whippings and humiliations. There may
be a need to understand and accept the feeling parts hidden by veils of
polite or politic speech, especially the neat language of the law so
carefully crafted to obscure the human aspects of the confrontations
between life and jurisprudence. These realities, so long hidden,
omitted or obscured through renaming (as when rape becomes property
damage) can soon be denied and forgotten. Even when the facts of
official records are revived and reviewed, where is the story of the
interior life to be found? How is it to be revived and (re)viewed?
The stories offered in Eugenia Collier’s collection, in their best
moments, take us to the feeling parts of the history of slavery that we
simultaneously clutch to us and revile.
