Tyehimba Jess, _Olio_

A LITERARY CONSTELLATION is forming around the founding period of professional African-American entertainers--one of the stories in John Keen's Counternarratives is about Bob Cole (creator of A Trip to Coontown), and then there is Amaud Jamaul Johnson's Darktown Follies, and then there is this--a big book both in its dimensions (235 8" x 10" pages, some of which fold out to be even larger) and in its ambitions.

Jess creates the voices of a panorama of professional African-American performers in the generation or two after emancipation. We hear from the sacred side (the Fisk Jubilee Singers) as well as the secular, from the relatively forgotten (conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy) as well as the famous (Bert Williams), from high culture (Sissieretta Jones) to broadest of the broad (Ernest Hogan). Running throughout, like a spine, are interviews conducted by one Julius Trotter with people who knew the impossible-to-categorize Scott Joplin.

(Trotter is an actual historical figure and really did conduct such interviews, but I would guess the interviews included here are largely the work of Jess, perhaps based on the actual ones.)

Keen, Johnson, and Jess may all have been drawn to the topic because performance plays so looming a role in all African-American lives, in minute-by-minute, second-by-second choices of what kind of blackness to enact in emerging circumstances. I mean--we all have to perform, really, every day, but as an older middle class white man, while I do have to "perform" when pulled over by a traffic cop, my life will likely not be at stake in how convincing my performance is.

Jess also stages the dialectics within African-American performance. If the paying audience is going to be largely white, as it seems to be for most of these artists, do you give the people what they want, exploiting their prejudices, and thereby perhaps making a lot of money, or challenge those preconceptions, possibly changing minds but probably also making less money?

What I will remember longest about the book, I expect, is Jess's formal ingenuity in staging those dialectics. The book is full of criss-crossing sonnets that read one way if you go down the left margin, another way if you go down the right margin, and yet another way if you read all the way across left-to-right and then down, in classic fashion. The sonnets about the McKoy sisters up the ante--I'm not sure I can even count the possible ways they could be read. And then there are the pages one could (though I did not) detach at a perforation and re-configure os Möbius strips....