Marita Golden

Oxford Companion to African American Literature:

Marita Golden

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Golden, Marita (b. 1950), novelist, poet, and educator. Marita Golden's works, especially her fiction, present some of the problems faced by contemporary African American women. They also capture the turbulent but exhilarating milieu of the civil rights era with its challenges and opportunities for commitment.

Her first work, Migrations of the Heart (1983), was a well-received memoir begun when she was just twenty-nine. It recounts, for example, her involvement in the black consciousness movement while attending American University as a scholarship student from Washington's inner city. It also describes her life as an expatriate in Lagos, Nigeria, where she lived in the mid-1970s, and the failure of her marriage to the Nigerian architect with whom she had fallen in love as a student at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Her first novel, A Woman's Place (1986), chronicles a fifteen-year period in the lives of three African American women, Faith, Crystal, and Serena, who meet and become lifelong friends at an elite Boston college during the 1970s. After dropping out of college as a casualty of its new open admissions policy and suffering the death of a child, Faith becomes the wife of an orthodox Muslim nearly twenty years her senior. This relationship deteriorates as her husband becomes increasingly jealous and possessive. Crystal, who becomes a professional poet, enters into a rocky marriage with a white documentary filmmaker. This marriage to a white man alienates her from her father and brother. Serena makes her way as a women's rights advocate in a newly independent African nation. The novel employs multiple narrators, including not only the three major characters but also their husbands, children, and parents.

Golden's second novel, Long Distance Life (1989), chronicles the lives of four generations of an upwardly mobile African American family in Golden's hometown of Washington, D.C. The story takes place against the background of the Great Migration, the Marcus Garvey movement, Washington, D.C., history, and the civil rights movement. It begins with the relocation of the matriarch of the family, Naomi, from her North Carolina farm to Washington to better her prospects. The inspiration for this character was Golden's own mother, Beatrice Lee Reid, who left the poverty of Greensboro, North Carolina, for Washington, D.C., in the late 1920s. Golden says, “It's not conscious, but I find that the women in my work find themselves negotiating the tension between personal and political choices and are compelled to leave home to further their self-definition” (Essence, Nov. 1989). Forty years after Naomi leaves the South, her daughter Esther returns there to work in the civil rights movement. One of Esther's sons becomes a physician and the other a drug dealer whose murder is drug-related. The novel employs a third-person narrative interspersed with Naomi's first-person reflections on her life and those of her loved ones. It ends with an eighty-year-old Naomi reflecting that in spite of such tragedies as her grandson's untimely death, she has lived a rewarding, full life and wouldn’t have changed any of it.

Golden's third novel, And Do Remember Me (1992), traces the lives of two African American women, Jessie and Macon. Jessie escapes from a dysfunctional family in Mississippi, where she is a victim of father-daughter incest, into the civil rights movement. She forms a close friendship with the civil rights activist Macon, the only person with whom she can unburden herself about her incestuous past. Jessie becomes addicted to alcohol, but with the help of an activist-playwright lover, she finds recovery and success in a professional acting career. Macon becomes a professor at a predominantly white college, where she tries to help African American students cope with campus racism. This work is suitable for both adults and young adults.

Golden has edited and introduced a collection of essays, Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues: Black Women Writers on Love, Men, and Sex (1993). In her introduction she asserts that if, according to W. E. B. Du Bois, racism is the basic problem of the twentieth century, sex, as revealed in the ongoing abortion controversy and the worldwide AIDS epidemic, may be the ““defining metaphor”” for the twenty-first.

Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World (1994) is Golden's personal account of raising her son Michael in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Washington, D.C. This work shows how it takes not only parents but a support network of friends, relatives, and teachers for the African American male child to make a successful passage to manhood. In 1998, Golden published The Edge of Heaven.

Golden's novels are in the tradition of contemporary African American women's fiction in her heroines’quests for self-definition and fulfillment. Also like characters in such works as Waiting to Exhale (1992) by Terri McMillan, The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker, and The Women of Brewster Place (1982) by Gloria Naylor, they find strength and sustenance in the female relationship.

Bibliography

Thulani Davis, “Don’t Worry, Be Buppie: Black Novelists Head for the Mainstream,” Village Voice Literary Supplement, May 1990, 26–29.
Sharon Malinowski, ed., Black Writers, 2d ed., 1994.
Mary Grimley Mason, American Women Writers, vol. 5, supplement, ed. Carol Hurd Green, 1994.
Susan M. Trotsky, ed., CA, vol. 42, 1994.
Ineke Bockting, “Betrayal, Guilt, and ‘Unreality’ in Southern Civil Rights Novels,” in Twelfth International Conference on Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Frederico Pereira, 1996, pp. 133–144

Phiefer L. Browne

Marita Golden

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novelist

Personal Information

Born April 28, 1950, in Washington, DC; daughter of Francis Sherman (a taxi driver) and Beatrice Lee (a property owner; maiden name, Reid) Golden; married Femi Ajayi (an educator), mid-1970s (divorced, late 1970s); married a public school teacher; children: Michael Kayode (first marriage).
Education: American University, B.A., 1972; Columbia University, M.Sc., 1973.
Memberships: Afro-American Writer's Guild (president, 1986)

Career

Affiliated with the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore, MD, early 1970s; WNET- Channel 13, New York City, associate producer, 1974-75; University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria, assistant professor of mass communications, 1975-79; Roxbury Community College, Roxbury, MA, assistant professor of English, 1979-81; Emerson College, Boston, MA, assistant professor of journalism, 1981-83; writer, 1983--; George Mason University, creative writing program, senior writer, c. 1995; Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, professor, c. 1996--. Member of nominating committee for the George K. Polk Awards; executive director of the Institute for the Preservation and Study of African American Writing, 1986-87; consultant for the Washington, D.C., Community Humanities Council, 1986-89.

Life's Work

Marita Golden has won renown not only for her African American- centered novels, but she also has attracted critical acclaim for nonfiction works whose focus has been her own immediate family. She has written of her experiences coming of age in the post-civil rights era and of her sojourn in Africa, and she has also penned a well- received treatise on the dangers faced by young black men, such as her own son, in urban America. Golden has incorporated many of these same themes into her fiction as well, and the force and fluency of her prose has earned her comparisons to other African American women writers, such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. "Fiercely intelligent, brimming with ethical questions, never overtly political, the novels of Marita Golden have an old-fashioned earnestness about them," declared Washington Post writer Donna Rifkind.

Golden grew up in the District of Columbia's black community. Her mother--a woman whose early life provided the basis for a character in one of Golden's later novels--had left a hardscrabble life in the South behind. Beatrice Reid Golden first worked as a maid, but eventually parleyed her meager funds into a more prosperous existence by means of some creative investments. She married three times, and by the time her only child was born in 1950, the senior Golden had become a landlord who owned rooming houses near 14th Street in the northwest quadrant of the city. Yet, as her daughter recalled in a 1993 article for Essence, Beatrice Golden's third marriage was a rocky one. "Both my parents were gamblers," Golden wrote in Essence. "They played the numbers and won often.... I remember the black Lincoln Continental [my father] bought once and how it sat sleek and somehow fitting before our three-story rooming house, until it was repossessed three months later."

Thanks in part to her father's extroverted, ebullient nature, Golden said she learned from him "that I was worth listening and talking to," she told Colman McCarthy in the Washington Post. As a teen, Golden attended Western High School (now renamed Duke Ellington High School), and was awarded a scholarship to American University, also in the nation's capital. After receiving her undergraduate degree there in 1972, Golden worked for a time at the Baltimore Sun newspaper before heading to graduate school in New York. She earned a master's degree from Columbia University, and took a job in 1974 as an associate producer at a New York City public television station. In New York she met her first husband, Femi Ajayi, a student from Nigeria, and moved with him to his country when they married. After giving birth to a son, Golden left her husband and returned to the United States in the late 1970s. She had found life in Lagos difficult, especially for an American woman, and she wrote of these differences in customs and cultures in her first book, Migrations of the Heart (1983).

Golden settled in Boston as a single mother, and took a job as an assistant professor of English at Roxbury Community College in 1979. She eventually became an assistant professor of journalism at nearby Emerson College, but decided to return to the Washington area around the time Migrations of the Heart was published. Golden followed Migrations of the Heart with two novels--A Woman's Place, published in 1986, and Long Distance Life, published in 1989. A Woman's Place revolved around the intertwined lives of three African American women whose friendship dates back to their student years at a prestigious Boston university. All three choose different paths as educated, self-aware African American women, and all three experience their own particular difficulties.

Golden's second novel, Long Distance Life, became a bestseller in the DC area. A multi-generation family saga, it begins with Naomi Johnson, a character whose journey from the sharecropper South to urban prosperity was similar to that undertaken by Golden's own mother. Johnson's daughter, Esther, comes of age in the 1960s, as Golden herself did, and becomes active in the civil rights movement. She leaves a young son behind in the partial care of his father, a man who will not leave his wife for Esther. When Esther finally returns--radically transformed, carrying a Bible and a journal-- Randolph ends his marriage in order to marry Esther and become a full-time father to their son. Tragically, he dies of a heart attack just before their wedding day, leaving Esther carrying their second child.

The rest of Long Distance Life charts the lives of those sons. The elder of the pair, Logan, becomes a doctor. Several years ahead of Nathaniel, who never got to meet his own father, Logan's years away at college unintentionally rob Nathaniel of a much-needed steady male presence in his life. Nathaniel eventually becomes a drug dealer, though as a middle-class youth he is far removed from the violence and poverty of the world in which he operates. "The economic security his mother and brother provide for him produces a curious boredom," wrote reviewer Nagueyalti Warren about Nathaniel's plight in Black American Literature Forum. Warren praised Golden for her talent for characterization, especially regarding men like the once-philandering Randolph. "In her fiction, Golden creates men who are strong, yet gentle, perceptive, wise, and kind," reflected Warren.

In Golden's third novel, And Do Remember Me (1992), the civil rights movement of the Sixties and its attendant violence again serves as an important catalyst for her characters. Its protagonist, Jessie, is a young woman who flees an abusive home in the Deep South. She becomes involved in the organized efforts at voter registration and desegregation known as the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and in the process finds romance with a fellow activist and future playwright named Lincoln, and a mentor and friend in Macon, an African American woman of a far different background than her own. Over the course of the novel, Jessie moves with Lincoln to New York and becomes a stage actor. Patricia Smith, reviewing And Do Remember Me for the Boston Globe, found some fault with its narrative structure, but noted that "Golden has always been her own artist, crafting clean, straightforward prose that never gets in the way of the story it is trying to tell."

Golden's gift for language took a more personal turn in 1995 with the publication of Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World. The work's origins dated back to a journal she began keeping for her son Michael in 1993 as he entered his high-school years. They lived in Washington, a city whose reputation for violent crime was unparalleled during those years. Golden knew that in her city the leading cause of death among young African American males was homicide--and she also knew that her middle-class life, her college degree, and her safe and loving home were perhaps not enough to keep Michael from becoming a statistic. Even if he escaped physical assault, she realized that as her son grew into a young adult, he would come to "inhabit that narrow, corrupt crawl space in the minds of whites and some black people too," Golden wrote in Saving Our Sons, "a space reserved for criminals, outcasts, misfits, and black men. Soon he would become a permanent suspect."

In the book, Golden wrote of the problems her son faced and theorized as to their origins. She worked in socio-economics and African American history, and compared his life in the United States with what might have been had they remained in Nigeria. The denouement of the book comes with his reunion with his birth father, whom he never knew. Golden hopes in Saving Our Sons that this connection to his past will set Michael on solid ground. Eventually she also decides to send him to a boarding school near Philadelphia, and concedes that even her best efforts might not portend success: "And although I have paved a straight and narrow path for my son to tread, always there is the fear that he will make a fatal detour, be seduced, or be hijacked by a White or Black cop, or a young Black predator, or a Nazi skinhead, or his own bad judgment, or a weakness that even I as his mother cannot love or punish or will out of him," Golden wrote.

Golden returned to the novel format with her fifth book, The Edge of Heaven, published in 1997. Another multigenerational saga, it begins with the third generation, the college student Teresa, as she works as an intern in a prestigious law firm. At home, however, she and her grandmother Adele are preparing for the imminent release of Teresa's mother Lena from prison. Lena, a once-successful accountant, served several years for the murder of Teresa's 11-year-old sister Kenya. The details of the crime, however, are murky, and Golden only slowly reveals what really happened through the course of the story. This was a plot contrivance that New York Times writer Janet Kaye found confusing, but Kaye did concede that Golden "tells an often affecting story of dashed hopes and domestic discord without succumbing to either preaching or melodrama." Washington Post writer Rifkind reviewed it and called it "a departure from Golden's previous novels ... Lena's troubles can be traced not to oppression by the white world but to her eager participation in that world."

Golden is a contributor to Sisterfire: Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry, and edited Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues, both collections of works by African American women writers. She is also determined to help pave the way for a new generation to follow hers. While at George Mason University, she noticed how few African American students were enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program. To help remedy this, she launched the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation with her own funds, bestowing prizes to African American students at the school who submitted fiction to a call for submissions. Later, her project grew into a nationwide competition, and Toni Morrison and other prominent writers sit on its advisory board.

Out of the Foundation and Golden's activism also came an annual seminar for writers at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is a professor. Golden has conceded that while many African American novelists have enjoyed unparalleled success in the 1990s, she asserts "there still remains a kind of divide before of that has yet to be crossed. We tend to get pigeonholed with the types of stories we choose to tell, whereas a white story can be about anything," she said in an interview with D'Lena M. Ambrose in the Journal of Higher Education.

Works

Writings

Migrations of the Heart (autobiography), Doubleday, 1983.
A Woman's Place (novel), Doubleday, 1986.
Long Distance Life (novel), Doubleday, 1989.
And Do Remember Me (novel), Doubleday, 1992.
(Editor) Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues, Doubleday, 1993.
(Contributor) Sisterfire: Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry, edited by Charlotte Watson Sherman, HarperPerennial, 1994.
Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World, Doubleday, 1995.
The Edge of Heaven, Doubleday, 1997.