Lesson #6: In Praise of Black Pop Fiction

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Black Commercial Fiction Movement.

In the beginning of black fiction, there was only literature.

That was all that large American publishing houses would publish nationwide. And even in that category it was extremely difficult to get published, because there was a feeling that white America would only buy so many books by black authors each season, and that no black buying audience even existed. So only the very best black authors were published, and it was a given that any fiction published by a black American had literary merit.

Then came The Color Purple. While the book first found an audience among white middle- and upper-class feminists who identified with its depiction of gender politics, as the book gained momentum with first a Pulitzer and then a major motion picture, a black audience formed behind it. A simple novel written at an elementary school reading level (no big words, complicated story or sentence structures), it attracted a whole new, non-traditional reading audience. Suddenly everyday black women, excited to read a book about themselves written in an accessible manner, were buying up the The Color Purple across the country. And once they were finished reading that slim novel, they wanted more.

Into this burgeoning market came Terri McMillan. Smart, astute, and commercially driven, McMillan is rumored to have once told a fellow writer of the Womanist era, "Y'all ladies are good, but I'm not trying to be good. I'm trying to be rich." Waiting to Exhale made McMillan's dream a reality.

In a marked departure from anything on the market before that period, instead of dealing directly or indirectly with issues of white racism, Exhale was set in an insular black world in which white people were little more than an afterthought. Instead of dealing with working-class black life, Exhale's characters were affluent, accomplished, and comfortably middle-class. Instead of being a sophisticated work of literary art with the poetics and weight such as the novels of contemporary Toni Morrison, stylistically McMillan wrote in a simple, motion-by-motion pulp fiction style more like Danielle Steel.

The literary world didn't know what to do with this book: it was smart, but it also had workman-like prose, and was not particularly deep or nuanced. On the one hand, it was clearly a bit of pulp fiction, but on the other hand, it was written by a black person, and almost all mainstream novels by black authors were assumed to have literary merit. McMillan's intended black female audience, however, knew exactly what to do with it: buy it. By 1992, the book had sold 700,000 copies. After a movie was made of the work, those sales creeped up towards 3,000,000. McMillan was rich, and a star. She had not only written a bestseller, she had identified an entirely new audience of black female book buyers that was enthusiastic, armed with cash, and massive.

Hence "Terri's Children" were born. In an effort to cash in on this boom market, publishers started actively seeking the next Terri McMillan, and an entire group of would-be writers stepped up to the plate to give it a shot. Overnight, waves of books with brightly colored, illustrated covers hit the stands, mimicking Exhale's cover. Many of those who still couldn't get published, published themselves, going after that same market. Unable to get into the large chain stores, these self-published writers hand-sold their work at hair salons, churches, and pretty much everywhere that black people congregate. Using these nontraditional methods, these writers were able to sell thousands of books and attract the attention of the mainstream publishing houses, who then snatched them up.

For publishers, it was great deal: each self-published author came to them with a pre-existing audience to take advantage of. Better yet, it was also an audience that had proven that it would buy pretty much anything, no matter how poor the quality. With this group, there was no need to scour the market for the best new writing, then spend a year editing the text, a very expensive process. All the publisher now had to do was find any halfway readable manuscript within the genre, stick a "Terri's Children" style cover on it, and this audience would run to the store with cash in hand. So that's what the publishers did.

In reaction to this commercial wave, an entirely new industry sprouted up overnight. At a time when Barnes & Noble and Borders were effectively closing down small bookstores across America, black bookstores that served this niche commercial market were opening up. In New York, black imprints started popping up at every major publishing house. And the more money this industry made, the more would-be writers came with their books, eager to cash in and be the next big star.

By the time I published Drop in 2000, it had become basically assumed that all black writers wrote Terri McMillan knockoffs. That year, I was introduced at a reading at the Harlem Book Fair with the aside by the MC that, "It's good that brothers are writing books too, because we need to get their take on relationships also." Despite the drop in quality of the black books now being published, the same assumption of literary merit left over from the previous publishing ages was still prevalent, so many acted as if the dominant commercial authors of the modern era were writing on the level of past literary greats (see Lesson #5). This was an opinion shared not just by the writers themselves, or even their readers, but also by some of the editors, agents, bookstore owners, and other industry insiders who were flourishing from the commercial fiction wave.

By the millennium though, nearly a decade after Exhale's success, so many writers had come to McMillan's gravy train that the market was completely oversaturated. Even those writers who found early success in jumping on the bandwagon saw their advances and audiences start to diminish. The market had gone from starving to bloated. Since quality was never an issue, it became nearly impossible for many of them to distinguish themselves amid the now massive crowd. The only thing to do was to look for the next bandwagon. Zane's success as an around-the-way-girl Anais Nin sent many commercial writers in the direction of erotica. The success of Sista Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever proved that "Urban Fiction" or "Ghetto Lit" was the new way to make the big bucks, so a new wave of commercial fiction writers wandered off on that path to the best seller list. For the most part, the groundbreaking era of Terri's Children seemed to be coming to an end.

At the height of this period, I found these commercial books to be trite, cliche-ridden, and unimaginative. Some I found embarrassing, some boring, some unreadable. Occasionally, I came upon a good one in the bunch, but that only made the overall mediocrity of the rest of them stick out even more. Overtime though, with distance, I began to view these writers and their books differently. Sure, the writing in these books was bad, but what I came to realize was that it was never about writing. It was about money. More specifically, it was about class.

At a time when African Americans were moving in record numbers up into the middle-class, the black commercial fiction movement reflected that both in its content and in its very being. Terri's Children never comprised a literary movement: they were part of an entrepreneurial movement. These authors were not really writers: they were small businessmen, looking to identify and serve a consumer base so as to build and maintain wealth. Much like the corporate Hip Hop artists of the same era who rapped about being CEOs and set up their own record labels, many of these writers did the same by setting up their own agencies and publishing imprints.

In the white publishing world, there is a general understanding that there is a difference between commercial and literary fiction, and as such Jackie Collins and Joan Didion should not be judged on the same merits. In the black American publishing world, in part because of our general aversion to any form of criticism, that line has been considerably blurred, and often willfully ignored. This has not only done a disservice to the African American literary canon which has been repeatedly defamed by those who would seek to lower its standards, it has also been unfair to those commercial fiction writers who have succeeded on their own terms, and not been given their just due for that accomplishment.

Judge solely as an entrepreneurial movement, the era of Terri's Children was a very successful and historic one. In a largely stagnant and dying medium, Terri's Children managed to create a new audience where others said none existed. Instead of relying on mainstream publishing's lackluster business model, they created their own, promoting it creatively and teaching the entire publishing industry about how to build an audience for books in the modern world. Terri and her Children effectively proved that black Americans will buy books, books about black people and dealing with issues important to black people, if given the chance to. Most importantly, they proved that we as African Americans can support our own literary world, and that we don't need to pander to a larger white audience in order to be successful.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com