J. California Cooper

Cooper, J. California (b. 19?), short fiction writer, playwright, and novelist. Joan California Cooper's birthdate is conspicuously absent from available written material about her life and work. She was born in Berkeley, California, to Maxine Rosemary and Joseph C. Cooper, and she has a daughter, Paris Williams.

Cooper's success as a writer must be attributed solely to natural gifts. She began composing plays and performing them before family and friends when she was a very young child. Indeed, the first glimpse by the public-at-large of Cooper's work was through her plays; she had written at least seventeen by the mid-1990s, including: Everytime It Rains; System, Suckers, and Success; How Now; The Unintended; The Mother; Ahhh; Strangers; and Loners. Strangers earned the 1978 Black Playwright of the Year award and was performed at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts. Loners, anthologized in Eileen Ostrow's Center Stage (1981), is the story of Cool, a somewhat egotistical man of thirty-seven who realizes too late that his inability to commit to the shy but strong Emma results in his own loneliness. Emma tires of Cool's callous neglect and decides to marry someone who is not so self-centered that he fails to notice her quiet strength. Cooper's plays have been performed before live audiences, as well as on radio and public television. She is a prolific writer, who, like Emily Dickinson, took up writing to satisfy a private, personal need; much of her early work was long hidden from public view until her plays began to receive attention.

Cooper is better known for her short stories, whose narrators witness and relate tale after tale with a folksy, homespun wisdom in conversation with the reading audience that brings to mind the relationship between Alice Childress's urban domestic workers, Mildred Johnson and Marge, in Like One of the Family (1956). Cooper has published five short story collections: A Piece of Mine (1984); Homemade Love (1986), which won the 1989 American Book Award; Some Soul to Keep (1987); The Matter Is Life (1991); and Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime (1995).

Like Alice Walker, whose company published Cooper's first collection of short stories, Cooper acts in spiritual communion with certain characters who relate their experiences; as medium, Cooper retells the stories in writing. Her primary characters are usually women who have been victimized in some way by the men in their lives. Cooper's profound messages come packaged in what appear to be simple and straightforward stories; this method is reminiscent of one often employed by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Her writing shares Harper's didacticism, but Cooper's reliance on the Ten Commandments for many of her themes is not as conducive to invoking Christian piety. One story from the collection A Piece of Mine, entitled “One Hundred Dollars and Nothing!”, retells the rise and fall of a boastful but unenterprising man who marries a well-to-do, enterprising woman named Mary. The husband, Charles, feels he has done the nappy-headed, bow-legged Mary a favor by marrying her, and he is fond of telling Mary that, with one hundred dollars and nothing, he could outperform her anyday. Mary endures years of abuse by Charles, and she eventually dies; but, prior to her death, she is able to set into motion events that will leave Charles with one hundred dollars and nothing more. She punishes Charles from the grave. The female protagonists in A Piece of Mine survive, through spiritual (and often physical) transcendence, all manner of abuse and neglect. They emerge with a greater realization of their inner strength, self-actualized.

Homemade Love consists of thirteen short stories about girls who, despite warning and example, fall into the same traps as their parents. “Without Love” is the story of the parallel lives of two friends. Totsy, neglected by her alcohol-abusing mother, is sexually active at eleven and becomes an unwed teenage mother. Her friend Geneva narrates the story of Totsy's early reliance on sex without love and the impact such an attitude has on Totsy's inability to mature and become self-actualized. Geneva, by contrast, combines sex with love and marriage, works hard to achieve a middle-class lifestyle, and grows old and content with her husband by her side as her best friend. Totsy is finally forced by the circumstances of old age and declining health to rely on the son she has never nurtured. Homemade Love simply suggests that homemade love is what nurtures the mind, body, and soul.

Cooper has also written two novels, Family (1991) and In Search of Satisfaction (1994). Family is narrated by Clora, the freed spirit of an enslaved woman who committed suicide. Clora follows the experiences of and watches over her favorite child, Always. Because the narrator exists in spirit only, she is superomniscient, able to enter into and disclose other characters’ states of mind. In Search of Satisfaction echoes the simple message heard in much of Cooper's other work: happiness comes from within. In a note to that novel, Cooper uses the analogy of the three little pigs to make the point that each of us is responsible for laying the proper foundation for our own personal satisfaction. Cooper published The Wake of the Wind in 1998.

The American Library Association's Literary Lion Award (1988) and the James Baldwin Writing Award (1988) are only two of the many prizes presented to Cooper for her writing. Cooper is a person who carefully guards those matters that she considers private. She resides in rural Texas.

Bibliography

• J. California Cooper, interview by Lynn Gray, FM Five (Nov.–Dec. 1985): 1, 12.
• Alice Walker, “J. California Cooper,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 56, ed. Roger Matuz, 1989, pp. 69–72.
• Barbara J. Marshall, “Kitchen Table Talk: J. California Cooper's Use of Nommo—Female Bonding and Transcendence,” in Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, 1992, pp. 91–102.
• Rebecca Carroll, “J. California Cooper,” in I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, ed. Carol Alisha Blackshire-Belay, 1994, pp. 63–80.
• Kristine A. Yohe, “J. California Cooper,” in The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States, eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin, 1995, p. 218.
• Madelyn Jablon, “Woman Storytelling: The Voice of the Vernacular,” in Ethnicity and the American Short Story, ed. Julia Brown, 1997, pp. 47–62

Lovalerie King

writer

Personal Information

Born Joan Cooper, in Berkeley, California; daughter of Joseph C. and Maxine Rosemary Cooper; children: Paris A. Williams (daughter).
Education: Attended various colleges.

Career

Full-time writer, c. early 1980s--. Titles include A Piece of Mine, 1984, Homemade Love, 1986, Some Soul to Keep, 1987, Family, 1990, Center Stage (anthology of plays), The Matter Is Life, 1991, In Search of Satisfaction, 1994, and Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime, 1995.

Life's Work

In 1984, J. California Cooper's short story collection, A Piece of Mine, was the first book to be published by Wild Trees Press--a publishing company set up by African American novelist Alice Walker and her partner, Robert Allen. "Others will now have the opportunity to enjoy Cooper's talent, humor, and insight into character," Walker wrote in the introduction to the book. Praising Cooper's style as "deceptively simple and direct," Walker wrote that "in its strong folk flavor, Cooper's work reminds us of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston."

A Piece of Mine received many positive reviews. Diana Hinds, for example, writing in Books and Bookmen, described it as "an example of how colloquial storytelling can also be beautifully crafted." Since that first break, Cooper has written three more collections of short stories, Homemade Love, Some Soul to Keep, and The Matter Is Life; two novels, Family, and In Search of Satisfaction; and at least seventeen plays. Homemade Love, which appeared in 1986, won the American Book Award. Cooper's most recent short story collection, Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime, was published in 1995.

Cooper was born in Berkeley, California. As a child, she invented stories about her paper dolls. Once she turned 18, however, her mother decided she was too old to continue playing with dolls. Cooper had no alternative but to begin writing her stories down.

The "J" in her name stands for "Joan," "California" is for the state where she was born, and "Cooper" is her father's name. While she has at times moved away from her home state--living for a while in Alaska, and in Texas for seven years--Cooper later resettled in Oakland. Cooper told Emerge that she chose to call herself "California" in imitation of her favorite playwright, Tennessee Williams; some reviewers have mentioned a similarity in their work as well as their names. "You have to have a name, and I wanted something I could give to people. They can have California," she told Emerge.

This protective attitude toward her first name is typical of her skeptical view of publicity. While biographical details on Cooper are scarce, one of the few things that is well known is her unwillingness to allow her privacy to be invaded. "About seven years ago it looked like fame was catching up with me," she explained to the Los Angeles Sentinel in 1994. "Too many people wanted me to do things and wanted pieces of me. That sounds egotistical, but I don't like a whole bunch of people in my life." She claims that only two types of people suit her: the very old, who no longer care about the game of life, and the very young, who have not yet learned to play it. "I love God, and I know he said love people and I do. Just at a distance," she told the Los Angeles Sentinel.

Cooper worked as a secretary for most of her career and has one daughter, Paris Williams, who lives in Northern California. She will not admit her age or the number of marriages she has had-- though she has confirmed that she has been married more than once. She also insists that there are no autobiographical clues in her work, and none of her writing is based on her own experiences. "Everything is fiction because I don't like to write fact," she told Emerge.

A common theme in Cooper's work is women's search for love. Another is Christian morality; in an interview with Emerge, Cooper described herself as "a Bible student." The Christian theme is particularly obvious in the book In Search of Satisfaction, in which Satan appears in every chapter. Pearl Cleage, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, described the book as "an old- fashioned morality tale."

Typical of morality tales, the characters in the book have names that offer clues about their roles--just as Cooper's own name offers a clue about hers. According to Victoria Valentine, writing in Emerge, "Cooper manipulates the naming process (a traditionally symbolic endeavor in the black community) with the implications of some names influencing her characterizations." For example, the mixed-race character Yinyang is a union of opposites, well-meaning but greedy; Ruth demonstrates the faithfulness and obedience of the Biblical character; the Befoes arrived in the town before everyone else, while the Krupts are corrupt. Perhaps most interestingly, one of the characters is called Josephus Josephus, a name he invented for himself; Cooper writes in that novel that "He chose to take the name he hoped his mother had given him, twice, rather than take the name of the cruel owner he had lived under."

Cooper's fiction is often set in another historical period. In Search of Satisfaction, for example, stretches from the late 1800s through to the middle 1900s. "History is fascinating ... because history is people and that's what I am talking about. People," Cooper told the Los Angeles Sentinel. Other works, however, have settings that are deliberately vague: Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime offers no clues about time or geography. "I named this book what I think about life," Cooper told Emerge. "I know life is composed of many more things,... but in the meantime, love is what seems to make a person's world go 'round and it has some love sometime, and some pain sometime." Like her earlier fiction, Some Love also centers on issues of morality.

According to Terry McMillan, writing in the New York Times Book Review, the first rule of creative writing is to show, rather than tell. Cooper, however, "rejects this notion entirely." Instead, her tales are often narrated as monologues, in which one woman tells about a crisis in the life of another woman she knows. Many reviewers have praised her talent in capturing African American speech, while pointing out that the narrators of different stories often sound the same. A typical review of Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime, which appeared in Publishers Weekly, claimed that "Cooper's spirited use of the first person makes every tale engaging, even if the uniformity of voice makes the narrators largely indistinguishable." According to Cooper, who writes her stories in longhand, the characters in her fiction simply appear in her mind and begin telling her stories. "This happens during the rainy season, which I why I never write during the summer," Cooper told Emerge. "With the rain comes these people."

Malaika Brown, writing in the Los Angeles Sentinel, described Cooper as a "lightning bolt of energy and enthusiasm, paced with little excess in about five feet of vertical space." During her promotional readings, Cooper always wears a Polynesian-style yellow and green muumuu. "All my characters fit in there with me," she told Emerge. "I've worn it for every single reading for every book for the last 10 years." In the future, Cooper told Emerge, she plans to write two collections of short stories--one with a religious theme, and one for women who don't know what to do with men. She also plans to write a novel set during the Reconstruction.

Awards

American Book Award, 1986, for Homemade Love.

Works

Writings

• Short-story collections A Piece of Mine, Wild Trees Press, 1984.
• Homemade Love, St. Martin's, 1986.
• Some Soul to Keep, St. Martin's, 1987.
• The Matter Is Life, 1991.
• Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime, 1995.
• Novels Family, 1990.
• In Search of Satisfaction, 1994.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 56, Gale, 1989.

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 20, 1994, p. D3.
• Booklist, August 1994, p. 1987.
• Emerge, October 1994, p. 64; November 1995, p. 88.
• Los Angeles Sentinel, November 23, 1994, p. C4.
• Publishers Weekly, September 12, 1994, p. 83; July 31, 1995, p. 66.

— Carrie Golus