I'm going to go straight out and admit that the first thing that drew me to Sag Harbor is that it is centered around a black kid.
After we finished Black Swan Green and were supposed to start the new novel, I literally sat on my bed and had to repeat to myself, 'Just one more book Tiye. Then you'll be done for the year.' Needless to say, I was not excited to still have more of the same reading and paper writing cycle, and summer felt so close, yet so very far. The thing is, I love to read, it's just that being forced to do so and graded on it takes all the thrill out of it for me and makes the entire process very mentally strenuous. As soon as I read the back cover, though, I perked up. I was actually excited to do school work of all things. Shocking, I know.
The thing is, before this book I think I'd read two books about African-Americans in my entire school career. Freshman year we read Black Boy by Richard Wright, which takes place in the earlier part of the 20th century when Jim Crow and segregation and outright blatant white supremacy could be seen pretty much anywhere you went. Sophomore year we read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, and that takes place in the late 19th century in Africa (and thus is about an African, not an African-American, so I'm not even sure it counts with the point I'm trying to make, but it's the only other book with a black main character so there we go). Sag Harbor make's black book three. Actually, that's a lie -- in elementary school we had picture books about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. and Ruby Bridges during Black History Month.
One thing I'd like to point out about all those books is that they are all set in eras pre- or during-Civil Rights Movement. Sag Harbor is set in the '80s -- my parents generation -- and yet it's the closest to my own generation I've been introduced to in a school setting. This is the first book we were assigned about an African-American that isn't blatantly describing, or written with the sole purpose of describing, segregation and white supremacy.
This is not to say that I haven't read other books about a wider variety of African-Americans that aren't directly connected to the Civil Rights Movement, it's just been in my free time rather than at school, and the numbers still pale (get it?) in comparison to the amount of books I've read about white people. Before anyone comments saying, "Well, if'd you'd taken African-American Lit then your number would have been bumped way up." That is true, and I tried, I just didn't get in and when I wanted to transfer apparently it was full. Also, may I just note that we don't need a class called "White People Lit" because that's already what the majority of them are. Uni is actually decent with book diversity though, as the three books on my list were all read here. Know that "decent" is only three books, but my friend from Centennial said she's read zero books about black kids, so it's better than that at least.
Anyways, Sag Harbor is much more relatable for me that any of the books we're read in the past, regardless of the race of the protagonist. It's just about a black kid trying to have a good summer and live a decently normal life like a normal person. And it's post-civil war; let's face it, as much as I can be empathetic towards Ruby Bridges, I can't actually relate because we have such different life experiences. I guess I’m just trying to say that it would have been nice if there were books about everyday, middle class, black kids from educated families post Civil Rights Movement that I could have grown up reading. Just one.
I've thought about this issue quite a bit, actually, and I'm not sure why schools seem so stuck on teaching pre-civil-rights black literature almost exclusively (although, perhaps too optimistically, given what your friend from Centennial says, I have the impression that this may slowly be changing). It may be that teachers are more comfortable placing racism in historical perspective, a kind of social disease that has been "cured," than looking at the persistent (and often ambiguous) issues in the present day. When I first read _Sag_, I immediately thought that many Uni students would relate to the social and cultural context it depicts, and I decided to add it to the syllabus immediately. In fact, it replaced _A Lesson before Dying_ by Ernest J. Gaines, an excellent and curious twist on the coming-of-age narrative published in 1993 but set in 1940 Jim Crow Louisiana. It was an interesting book in the context of this class, as it explored existential questions of what "coming of age" can mean for someone on death row, but the remote, pre-civil-rights setting did feel less relevant than other books on our syllabus. _Sag_ fits much better--1985 doesn't seem all that distant.
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