Black writers have produced an incredible number of short stories over the last century. These stories, a collection of some of EL’s most-loved fiction by Black writers, all published in our weekly fiction vertical Recommended Reading, affirm something we know to be true: that Black people are everywhere. The landscape of our lives is vast, ever-evolving, and no matter where we go and who we are, we always leave a mark. Something that remains a guiding principle in Black storytelling is the breadth of our lives, from one girl’s aspiration to Olympic gymnastics glory, to a boy’s stint living in the Idaho wilderness in hopes of fixing his unruly behavior.
My book, The Geographies of African American Short Stories, explains how the most frequently republished Black writers made character depictions and culturally discrete settings consequential to their compositions. For writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, short stories anticipated their longer works, like Their Eyes Were Watching God and Invisible Man, respectively.
Well-known American short-story writer John Cheever wrote: “So long as we are possessed by experience that is distinguished by its intensity and its episodic nature, we will have the short story in our literature.” Influential Irish short-story writer Frank O’Connor’s suggestion that short fiction is a method for “submerged population groups” to address a dominant community would certainly hold true for African American short fiction. Often the African American short story has served as a vehicle for making brief, to-the-point statements: social, cultural, economic, political, or otherwise.
Notable Short Stories and Collections
Let's delve into some specific examples of compelling African American short stories:
-
"A New World" by Kristen Gentry: This story, from her collection Mama Said, features Parker, who is balancing caring for many women in his life: his ex-wife Claudia, who is recovering from addiction, his 16-year-old niece Zaria, who is giving birth to her first child, and his 15-year-old daughter JayLynn, who has recently started having sex with her boyfriend. While Parker attempts to “make things work” and protect JayLynn from the same fate as Zaria, JayLynn is desperately trying to save her own mother.
Read also: Experience Fad's Fine African Cuisine
-
“Live Today Always” by Jade Jones: The story begins with a work emergency: “The wellness influencer has said the n-word again, but this time there’s evidence.” The narrator, Lee, is a remote copywriter for a public relations firm. During the pandemic, she’s the only Black person in an endless stream of Zoom meetings. Tianah, Lee’s girlfriend, urges Lee to quit because of the toxic, exploitative nature of this specific workplace, but there’s something holding her back.
-
“The First Virginity of Gigi Kaisara” by Gothataone Moeng: This story from Call and Response is about fifteen-year-old Sadi, a girl coming of age in a private boarding school in Serowe, Botswana who sees womanhood as an exciting experiment. Sadi tries on gold hoops, wooden bangles, and various names that may suit her more, like “Gigi.” Curious about men and romance, she chooses a boy from her class to fall in love with, “knowing that love could confer newness upon her, that it could slough from her her origins, which were unmistakably small and rural.” She and the boy, Tabona, save enough of their allowance for a night’s stay at a budget motel and gardens in Mogoditshane.
-
“The Cape” by Dionne Irving: From her collection The Islands, this story is about a married couple in limbo. Mina and Neel try to escape their problems by hiding out in a summer house on Cape Cod. Except, it’s winter, Neel is in recovery after a tragic accident involving fireworks on the Fourth of July, and the problems seem to be clearer than ever. “He always told her that he loved the sound of her voice and she had loved his.
-
“Tumble” by Sidik Fofana: From the debut collection Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, this story follows Neisha Miles, an apartment building liaison tasked to assist a large list of tenants facing eviction. On that list is her childhood friend Kya, who she hasn’t seen in over two years. A former gymnast, Neisha spent her youth honing her skill-striving to become an Olympian. After an abrupt falling out, tensions rise between the two girls when Neisha learns she’s invited to compete at Nationals. Kya and her friends assault Neisha, injuring her with a muscle contusion and fractured wrist and forcing her to withdraw from the competition.
-
“Flip Lady” by Ladee Hubbard: From The Last Suspicious Holdout, this story is an amalgamation of multiple distinct narratives within one southern suburban neighborhood. The Flip Lady gives homemade popsicles-frozen Kool-aid in Dixie cups-to the school kids nearby, but she feels disconnected from the neighborhood and that her watchful eye and generosity is no longer needed. Raymond, her nineteen-year-old son, sees the flips as “unnatural distractions from grief” after his brother Sam’s funeral, though his friend Tony wonders if Raymond is distracting from his own life by living back home. At the same time, a young girl is humiliated after dropping her popsicle. Her classmates ridicule her and dent her new bike, so she seeks comfort in the Flip Lady’s house, only to meet Raymond, who buckles under his need to fix everything.
Read also: The Story Behind Cachapas
-
Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor: The title story from former Recommended Reading editor-at-large Brandon Taylor’s short story collection Filthy Animals follows Milton, a teenage boy who is about to be sent away to the Idaho wilderness in a last-ditch attempt by his parents to fix his unruly behavior. On his birthday, he meets his friends Nolan, Abe and Tate on Glad Hill, where he is quickly drawn into a complicated tangle of intimacy and violence.
-
"When Eddie Levert Comes" from The Secret Lives of Church Ladies: In this story, a woman known only as Daughter cares for her mother who suffers from dementia. Mama insists every day that the soul singer Eddie Levert, whom she idolizes, will be arriving to take her out, a fantasy Daughter indulges even though it reminds her of her mother’s neglect. Daughter’s entire identity has been subsumed into taking care of her mother since her childhood, while Mama prioritized her relationships with men, her sons, and religion over Daughter.
-
“The Mine” by Bryan Washington: Bryan Washington’s tender story collection Lot paints a vibrant multicultural portrait of Houston, Texas in its all complexities. “The Mine” centers on Nicholas, the first African captain of Tibor Holdings gold mine in South Africa. His father was a surveyor of the mine until Nicholas’s brother died under rock-fall. Overcome with grief, his father never stepped into the mine again and reproached Nicholas for refusing to quit his job. But another boy has died in the mine while foreign investors for Tibor Holdings are visiting. Nicholas struggles to convince the other miners, who fear the monstrous Grootslang lurking in the crypt, to retrieve the body.
-
“These Golden Cities” by K. “These Golden Cities” follows a college freshman home for spring break and struggling to find his place between his college life at NYU and old friends in his hometown of Washington, Pennsylvania. Michael envisions new avenues of opportunity opening up for him in New York and abroad in Florence, but also feels compulsively drawn back to familiar faces from high school.
Historical Context and Influential Writers
From its inception, the African American short-story genre has represented a range of styles, events, and experiences and has drawn upon the diversity of African American lives within American history.
Read also: Techniques of African Jewellery
Nineteenth Century Short-Story Writers
Before their emergence as short-story writers, African Americans in the United States launched both an oral and a written tradition in the form of slave narratives chronicling their harrowing experiences and their compelling, never-ceasing desire for freedom. During the nineteenth century, African Americans were encouraged to write only autobiographies or slave narratives, such as Sojourner Truth’s Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828 (1850) and Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in an effort to propel the abolitionist movement. These narratives became the vehicle through which African Americans gave voice to their experiences and entered American literature.
The post-Civil War era saw the emergence of African American writers. Emancipation provided opportunities for education. In 1892, Anna Julia Cooper, a leading lecturer on African American women’s civil rights, who at one time shared a stage with the powerful African American civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois, published A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South. The daughter of a North Carolina slave and graduate of Oberlin College, Cooper encouraged women, both African American and White, to seek education. In addition, when her work appeared, the term “Negro” was in fashion, and the term “Black Woman” in the title of her book surprised many.
Despite writing extensively on a wide variety of subjects, African American writers essentially remained ignored, except for their slave narratives. It was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who utilized African American tradition and myth to write remarkable short stories, were published.
There was one notable exception: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “The Two Offers” (1859) is recognized as the first short story ever published by a African American writer. Harper focused on slavery, motherhood, Christianity, and the role of so-called mulattoes in society. African Americans, she said, “are homeless in the land of our births and worse than strangers in the land of our nativity.” During an era that prescribed that women be angels in the house, Harper’s story brings to light both Black and White women’s vulnerability, while it challenges the accepted social position of all American women.
Chesnutt, recognized primarily for his psychological realism, blazed a path for African American short-fiction writers. The son of free Black parents, Chesnutt spent much of his early life teaching in North Carolina. Unable to cope with the South’s harsh treatment of Black people, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he became an attorney and established a law firm. Although writing was merely an avocation, he published more than fifty short stories and essays, two collections of short stories, a biography of Douglass, and three novels between 1885 and 1905. Historically significant and ironic, “The Goophered Grapevine” represents the first work by an African American to be accepted by The Atlantic. Chesnutt is best known for his dialect short-fiction collection detailing incidents of slavery told by an old gardener, the trickster figure Uncle Julius, to his northern employers.
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins counted herself a novelist, a playwright, an editor, an actress, and a singer in addition to a short-fiction writer. Like many other female writers, Hopkins had been historically overlooked for her literary contributions until she began to receive critical attention. Born in Portland, Maine, Hopkins had won a literary prize for an essay, “Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedies,” by the time she was fifteen. In 1880, her first play, Slaves’ Escape: Or, The Underground Railroad (retitled Peculiar Sam: Or, The Underground Railroad), was produced. Deeply concerned with metaphysics, Hopkins makes such mystical and spiritual phenomena the basis of many of her works.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of former slaves. A well-known poet and novelist, he wrote four collections of short stories. With the encouragement of William Dean Howells, a well-known American novelist, Dunbar became one of the first African American writers to gain a large public following. In particular, his southern plantation stories were deeply admired by American readers. However, the literary reputation of Dunbar has been criticized on the grounds of his use of African American dialect, his degrading stereotypes of African American people, and his portrayal of the Old South in romantic terms.
Charles Waddell Chesnutt
Anthologies: Gateways to Black Short Fiction
I’ve found anthologies especially useful as gateways to short fiction by Black authors. These collections provide glimpses into notable themes and writing styles from different historical periods. Given the widespread use of anthologies in literature courses, editors of anthologies help to shape or reinforce distinct views of literary history. Literary history is not static, and thus, approaches to organizing anthologies change over the course of time.
Here are some notable anthologies:
- The New Negro (1925). Ed. Alain LeRoy Locke: This definitive text of the Harlem Renaissance features a variety of African and African American art and literature.
- The Negro Caravan (1941). Eds. Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Grant Lee: As a presentation of Black literature during the 1940s, The Negro Caravan was a rare and important gathering of writers from multiple genres.
- The Best Short Stories by Black Writers 1899-1967 (1967). Ed. Langston Hughes: This collection presents stories produced by Black writers from 1899 to 1967.
- Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968). Eds. Larry Neal and LeRoi Jones: This anthology was viewed as the most essential assemblage of militant artists during the fiery Black Arts era.
- The Black Woman (1970). Ed. Toni Cade Bambara: Feminist efforts to promote gender equity in literature gained special attention during the late 1960s and 1970s. Consequently, Toni Cade Bambara edited this collection of Black women writers, which signaled a new, groundbreaking moment in the histories of African American anthologies.
- Amistad 1 & 2 (1970-1971). Eds. John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris: This comprehensive collection appeared during a time of unprecedented growth of Black enrollment in colleges and universities. Accordingly, the editors arranged the book while keeping the practical function of teaching in mind.
- The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996). Eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay: This comprehensive, field-solidifying collection has been reprinted in three editions and contains works by dozens of Black writers.
The New Negro
Contemporary Voices and Themes
Today, African American short stories continue to evolve, reflecting the complexities and nuances of Black life in the 21st century. These stories explore themes of identity, family, love, loss, and the ongoing struggle for social justice.
Walter Mosley
Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for television. The Awkward Black Man collects seventeen of Mosley's most accomplished short stories to display the full range of his remarkable talent.
Coming of age in his family's Houston restaurant, a mixed-heritage teen navigates bullying, his newly discovered sexual orientation, and the ripple effects of a disadvantaged community impacted by an affair, a youth baseball season, and displaced hurricane survivors. Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, raw power, and the infinite longing of people searching for home.
The stories in Five-Carat Soul spring from the place where identity, humanity, and history converge. They're funny and poignant, insightful and unpredictable, imaginative and authentic-all told with McBride's unrivaled storytelling skill and meticulous eye for character and detail. McBride explores the ways we learn from the world and the people around us.
In a collection of boundary-pushing stories that are touching, contemporary and darkly humorous, the author illuminates the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship and the concept of black identity in this so-called post-racial era. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters.
As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure-from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama-Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer.
This collection of short stories, set in fictional Cross River, Maryland, includes the tales of a struggling musician who is God’s last son and a Ph.D.
