Little Boxes in the Bookstore, Little Boxes Filled With Stereotypes

Disclaimer: Of course this issue has been discussed elsewhere (much more completely and perhaps more eloquently) but this is my personal connection to the issue.

I have always been plagued by categories and boxes. My family was the only black family in the holler where I grew up in Kentucky. My tongue knows the hills. My skin knows Africa. My traditions belong to both cultures. My mind and heart belong to both. My pen belongs to both. The characters in my books often live in rural worlds. They are always African American and they are often fully contemporary.This is who I am. These are the people I write about. It's just that simple.  Right? No. Someone has always tried to fit my work squarely into one box or the other.

My first book Blackberries,Blackberries was published by Toby Press in London, England. When it was available in American bookstores, I ran into every bookstore d hoping to see it there in the new releases or at least in general fiction. I imagined myself there in the W's: Wharton, Wideman, Wilder, Wilkinson. (Not in talent of course just alphabetically.)

In Kentucky my  book was ONLY in the local section. In the southern states it was ONLY in southern fiction. And in everywhere in between it was ONLY in the African American section,. It was almost always wedged in between what I call the Who's-Zooming-Who books. I most often felt like a doting mother trying to rescue the innocent looking model on the front of Blackberries, Blackberries (Debbie Rigaud) from the oiled up (we-are-about-to-get-it-on) models on the covers of the other books. And don't get me wrong those naked model books make a hell of a lot of money and they have their place. There is certainly room for all kinds of writers. But I've found that more than any other category, Black books are ghettoized, usually a wall (a couple of shelves at best). It never matters if it's popular fiction, mystery, erotica, literary, etc. And yes, I'll admit it's getting better but not as quickly as it should. (And I won't even begin to go into the book cover issue. That's another blog! Just GOOGLE and you'll find lots of discussions of this particularly around the Bloomsbury controversy. Also check this blog for an interesting take on UK vs US book covers. )

Some years back, I had the great fortune to be a part of a collective of book warriors when they were starting out. We called ourselves The Kentucky Book Mafia (KaBooM). Aside from sharing and critiquing each other's work, we made it our duty to be subversive in our bookstore approach. We would enter a bookstore, usually alone ,and if a book we knew and admired  had been placed in only one section, we would take a stack of the author's books and place them in: Southern, Local, Women's, African-American, New Releases...wherever we thought readers would best find and purchase the book. Most likely all we did was drive the book store associates crazy. At the end of the night I'm sure all of those books released from their categories were placed back into their respective places.

Of course if we, as writers, are doing the best job we can then our categories will meld away and our books will reach out to others. Crossing boundaries is the magic of good literature. We read to be taken places we've never been. We all want to read something we've never read before.

But if anyone is game, I'm still all for taking over the bookstores across the country and mixing it up a bit. We don't care what the  Book-Powers-That-Be say. Do we? Join me?

My inspiration: (though it has nothing to do with the blog) LITTLE BOXES