Headline: ST. LOUISANS PUT BLACK HERITAGE IN FOCUS : EARLY'S ANTHOLOGY OFFERS A WIDE RANGE OF WRITERS' VIEWPOINTS ON OUR TOWN
Reporter: By Robert Joiner\Of The Post-Dispatch

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Sun., Dec. 6, 1998
Section: EVERYDAY MAGAZINE, Page: D1, Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT

In a bittersweet essay about growing up in St. Louis, writer Debra Dickerson touched some raw nerves. An African-American lawyer who now lives in Washington, Dickerson was one of many who wrote about "Going Home" in the Nov. 30 edition of U.S. News and World Report, for which she works.
   Her remarks were the subject of a Nov. 27 column by Bill McClellan, and her essay was reprinted last Sunday on the Post-Dispatch's Commentary page. Needless to say, St. Louisans are talking about Debra Dickerson, about her ignorance of certain area landmarks and her harsh assessment that the city itself holds little promise for black people, though she concedes some racial progress has been made in the 1990s.

Dickerson's ambivalence about this city may well broaden the appeal of a timely second opinion -- "Ain't But a Place, " an anthology offering a wide range of black viewpoints about St. Louis.
   The anthology's editor, Gerald Early, has pulled together material that reads like missing chapters in the city's history. His selections offer both a main street and a back street tour during which readers discover or rediscover lesser-known people, sites, family traditions and events that helped shape St. Louis.
   The voices we hear along the way include poets Eugene Redmond, Quincy Troupe Jr. and Jabari Asim, activists Percy Green and Dick Gregory, historians Nathan B. Young and Herman Dreer, playwright Ntozake Shange, fiction writers Maya Angelou and Henry Dumas, journalists Lorraine Kee and Gregory Freeman, and many athletes, including Bob Gibson and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Some of the contributors, such as W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, never lived here, though they wrote powerful essays about life in the region. Both commented on the race riot in 1917 in East St. Louis.
   Of that incident, DuBois says that white participants "added a foul and revolting page to the history of all massacres of the world."
   Garvey was surprisingly more restrained, saying blacks were killed simply because they were black people "seeking an industrial chance in a country (in which) they have laboured for three hundred years to make great."

For better or worse, the anthology's contributors who did live here retain a strong attachment to this place called St. Louis (or East St. Louis) and that place's link to black history and the city's general history. Hence, the anthology's title, which are the words of Colleen McElroy, a poet and former St. Louisan.

Early's selections won't satisfy everyone's taste. Like the Dickerson essay, many of the pieces raise disturbing questions and defy conventional perceptions of how blacks view this city and their place in it.

Listen to memoirist Eddy L. Harris recall an incident at a St. Louis party where he and a brother are the only blacks. Harris writes that he "lost the other half of my mind" upon hearing the party host, a liberal, mention how much progress blacks had made, using one wealthy black man, Bill Cosby, as proof.
   Harris tells the host: "Climb into my head .o.o. Climb in and see what it's like to be black. See what it's like to always wonder if what happens to you is happening because of your color. See what it's like to constantly be under suspicion, to always be seen as criminal or deficient. Can you possible know what that feels like? And if a man as fortunate as I can feel that way, can you imagine how the less fortunate must feel?"

Early himself weighs in with a jarring incident, the time a Frontenac police officer stopped and frisked him after getting a report that someone who looked like Early was "lurking" in Frontenac's Le Chateau Village.
   An otherwise mild-mannered Early writes: "There I was, I immediately thought, about to be humiliated before the whites coming in and out of the building .o.o. being reminded that I was a nigger, that I had no business being where I was, that I was a 'threat' to the good white folk of Frontenac."

Readers can profit from such unpleasant pieces -- the "straight, no chaser" pieces -- because they expose this community's flaws, point to areas that need work and give us a deeper understanding of this city and ourselves.

Others writers had warm memories of St. Louis.
   In one humorous essay, KMOV-TV anchor Julius Hunter explains why he loves this city.
   In another, former NAACP leader Roy Wilkins tell of his family's experience on arriving from Mississippi. The family was stranded at Union Station and Wilkins' father was about to give up on getting directions to a friend's house on Papin Street when an elderly white man walked up. He led the family to a trolley and ordered the conductor to give the family members transfers to Jefferson Avenue and show them the way to Papin. Then the man "tipped his hat .o.o. and went on his way."
   Aboard the trolley, Wilkins recalled seeing blacks sitting wherever they pleased and seeing white people sitting in the back seat.
   "The strange sight made them laugh out loud, " Wilkins said of his parents. "Mississippi was obviously a long way behind them. Things were definitely beginning to look up."

Many of the writers do not take as their frame of reference the larger white world. Their excerpts center instead on warm memories of family life. As singer Chuck Berry notes in the piece excerpted from his autobiography: "We made up for whatever we lacked with the wealth of a good family relation and love that we all shared when not fighting."

Early's anthology shatters the myth that St. Louis isn't a place where black writers bloom. This city's black artistic expression usually is measured in its musical heritage -- gospel, blues, jazz and opera.
   Early points to the many signs that the city and region can take credit for being "an important location for African-American letters and culture." As proof, he mentions the ever-growing influence of Eugene Redmond's writers workshop in East St. Louis and to the works of many noted local writers included in the anthology.
   He also notes other forces that indirectly have shaped the city's contributions to black letters and culture. These include the city's strong black educational heritage -- St. Louis was the site of the first black high school west of the Mississippi -- and the rise of such powerful cultural institutions as the Urban League's Vaughn Cultural Center.

Early chose the typical approach in arranging his material, dividing it among autobiographies and memoirs, essays and articles, and fiction and poetry. A more useful approach might have been to divide the material according to themes so that readers could conveniently look for topics that grabbed their attention. Even so, Early helps readers in this process by offering an introduction to each writer's work and explaining why he included it.
   Never before has anyone assembled so many African-Americans of diverse backgrounds and experiences in one place to share their views about this city. Excerpts from the works of even a handful of the contributors make this book well worth the price.

**** 'Ain't But a Place: An Anthology of African American Writings about St. Louis'
Edited by Gerald Early
Published by Missouri Historical Society Press; 515 pages; $39.95 cloth, $24.95 paper

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