Edited by Charles Johnson and John McCluskey Jr. Indiana University
Press, 1997 Bloomington and Indianapolis 188 pages Hard cover: $19.95
Reading Black Men Speaking is not unlike the dichotomous
soul-troubling and spirit-affirming experience of attending all-day
Sunday or Wednesday night church services. The book is a gripping
litany of sermon, scripture reading and spirituality. It is strident
and unembarrassed by its message, urgent in its delivery, somewhat
daunting in the tenets it proposes, and clear in its mission.
This book is a test of faith. And within all tests exists a tacit
assertion: “If you are up to this, you will succeed. If not, you will
learn more from your failing.”
Like a month of Sunday sermons and songs, the mission of Black Men
Speaking is divulged in parts — structurally and rhetorically,
selection by selection — each contributor offering his take on what
has been the bane and/or benefit of his experience.
The introduction provides more than enough statistical evidence and
emotional angst to justify the necessity of such a book. The
introduction is, in some ways, a separate essay that is both a more
formal departure from the contents that follow and a worthy foundation
on which the urgency of the contents firmly rests.
As for the selections, Charles Johnson and John McCluskey Jr., the
book’s editors, have gathered a wide range of contributors who use a
variety of formats to make their points. Issues of ownership of culture
and heritage join with pleas to own up to responsibility as fathers,
brothers, sons, and pillars of the community. The sometimes reductive
and accusatory impressions toward African American women are
accompanied by expressions of reverence and gratitude for elements of
Black matriarchy.
The book may lose a few readers with some of its extreme or
exclusive perspectives. But it will win others through the range of its
approaches and its sheer candor. It is nothing if not honest. Right or
wrong, for better or for worse, the honesty of these men provides a
tone that may be missing from the recent wave of writing on the African
American man.
