Leave Your Expectations at the Door

The Colored American Magazine: Selected Short Stories, 1900-1909 is a sprawling compilation of story-preaching, sociology, morality tales, bible transmutations, and evolving folklore.  A valuable glimpse at early strategies for approaching the Black American experience, its cumulative effect is to feel the tricky double responsibility of art-as-uplift.  How to balance the need for entertainment and advancement?  'Literariness and catharsis?  Presentation and representation?  Or is there even a "responsibility?"  To work to hard to find evidence of either pole bars full and open access to the text.  This is why, taken as a whole, this anthology operates more as a comprehensive Survey of Thought and Experience. Less snapshots than organic, multi-cellular organisms that defy the historical expectation of scholars who would annex each unit into an ideology.   Most of the writing is very informal, sometimes anecdotal, even at-the-bar or in-the-confessional confidential.  It is a very worthwhile source for a not very thoroughly chronicled or understood period of American Literary History.