Tina McElroy Ansa

Ansa, Tina McElroy (b. 1949), fiction writer, essayist, and journalist. Tina McElroy Ansa was born in Macon, Georgia, and educated at Mount DeSales, a Catholic school in Macon, and at Spelman College in Atlanta. Early in her career, she worked primarily as a journalist. She freelanced and worked for the Atlanta Constitution and for the Charlotte Observer (N.C.). She has also conducted writing workshops in Georgia at Brunswick College, Emory University, and Spelman College.

Ansa's best-known work is her fiction. She may be considered a southern writer, for her fiction clearly draws on the physical landscape, specifically the middle Georgia setting, and the mores and folkways that shape the psyche of the American South. Unlike much of southern fiction, however, her tales are devoid of the subtextual exploration of the undercurrent of dysfunction and perversion that exists in the South. That is not to say that her fictive worlds are without dysfunction or moral conflict. Her fiction, however, confronts such problems openly in the worlds of the texts. Her novels and short fiction reflect the positive impact of her having grown up in a middle-class family in the racially segregated South. The South portrayed in her fiction consists of a supportive, closely bonded, and self-sufficient African American community that renders itself impervious to the horrors of southern racism. More specifically, her fiction explores some of the dynamics of the African American female experience.

Ansa's two major works are her novels Baby of the Family (1989) and Ugly Ways (1993). Both make use of traditional folk beliefs and the conventions of the ghost story. Ansa's fiction avoids self-conscious polemic and the predictability of protest fiction. The soundly middle-class McPhersons of Baby of the Family and the Lovejoys of Ugly Ways enjoy affluent existences and are relatively unharassed by racism and overt, brutal sexism. The dilemmas faced by these families stem from internal family issues rather than external forces.

Upon its publication, Baby of the Family was named a Notable Book of the Year in 1989 and 1990 by the New York Times Book Review. The novel won the 1989 Georgia Authors Series Award and was cited by the American Library Association as a best book for young adults in 1990. Set in the fictive town of Mulberry, the novel depicts the coming of age of Lena McPherson who, like Ansa herself, was born in the late 1940s with a caul, an indicator, according to folk belief, that a child is endowed for life with psychic powers. Unfortunately, her mother, Nellie, discounts folk tradition and inadvertently subjects Lena to a childhood of frustration and fearful experiences. What thus becomes Lena's affliction, however, is countered by the affluence and strong emotional support of the McPherson household. Buffered by the family's love, Lena escapes being overwhelmed by her difference from her peers. Simultaneously, because of her connection to the supernatural, Lena acquires information about African American traditions and roots necessary for her spiritual coming of age. The novel, therefore, suggests that the ideal existence for African Americans is one that embraces traditional American success while respecting African American traditions.

Also set in the fictive middle-Georgia town of Mulberry, Ugly Ways portrays southern African American women confronting problems of life in the 1990s. Since its publication the novel has been widely reviewed and has been at the top of the African American Best Sellers/Blackboard list and on best-sellers lists compiled by the Quarterly Black Review of Books and the African American Literary Review. In the novel, Ansa subverts the image of the African American family dominated and sustained by the strong African American matriarch. In this novel, the three successful Lovejoy sisters, Betty, Emily, and Annie Ruth, who have gathered in Mulberry for the funeral of Mudear, their mother, confront the neuroses that prevent them from fully enjoying life. The barrier to their sound emotional health has been Mudear's emotional absenteeism, psychologically abusive behavior, and her refusal to care for them physically. The story is told from each sister's point of view with Mudear's recalcitrant spirit furnishing commentary and supplying her own story throughout the narrative. Situated, then, in an African American context, Ugly Ways is a cautionary tale that suggests the need for reasonable alternatives to the traditional roles assigned to mothers.

In 1996, Ansa published a third novel, The Hand I Fan With, which depicts an adult Lena as a successful businesswoman engaged in a steamy affair with a ghost she has conjured up. This novel has been well received as all of Ansa's fiction. Her works are widely read and taught and bear the hallmarks of enduring American classics.

Carol P. Marsh-Lockett

novelist

Personal Information

Born November 1949, in Macon, GA; daughter of Nellie McElroy; married Jonee Ansa (a filmmaker), c. 1978.
Education: Received degree from Spelman College, 1971.

Career

Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta, GA, began at copy desk, early 1970s, became news reporter; Charlotte Observer, Charlotte, NC, editor and copy editor, late 1970s-1981; free-lance journalist since 1982; writing workshop instructor at Brunswick College, Emory University, and Spelman College since 1982; in 1989 Ansa served as director of the Georgia Sea Island Festival, a celebration of African American culture.

Life's Work

Acclaimed author Tina McElroy Ansa has written several novels that have managed to simultaneously break new ground in African American literature while continuing to draw upon its rich inspirations. A former journalist, Ansa has lived with husband, filmmaker Jonee Ansa, on St. Simons Island, Georgia, since 1984. The area offers a strong, generations-old African American community that has welcomed the writer and provided fertile historical ground upon which she draws.

Ansa's own family also yields a large dose of material for the characters and settings in her novels. She grew up in Macon, Georgia, and remembers sneaking into her parents' bedroom to read the books on her mother's nightstand. An avid reader, her mother inadvertently introduced her daughter to the works of D. H. Lawrence and others, but when Ansa enrolled in Spelman College, her own tastes were expanded even further, she told Emerge writer Paula L. Woods. "When I read Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men, I thought to myself, 'You mean I can write about my people, the way we walk and talk, how we live and love and it can be literature?!'"

After college, Ansa was hired by the Atlanta Constitution; in her new job at its copy desk, she was the morning edition's first African American female on staff. She spent eight years at the paper in various positions, including entertainment writer and news reporter. In the late 1970s she was hired by another noted Southern newspaper, the Charlotte Observer, and served as copy editor and editor. In 1978 she married filmmaker Jonee Ansa, and their honeymoon trip would be a fated journey. They drove to St. Simons Island, one of Georgia's coastal Sea Islands. The area had once been a plantation, and remarkably, was still inhabited by the descendants of slaves. "It called to me," Ansa wrote of that first encounter in "Sea Island Daughter," an article for Essence. "As our car neared the shores... I heard a voice say clearly: This is where you belong." It would be another six years before she and her husband would settle there, which she termed "a decision that I celebrate and give thanks for every day, because here in the Sea Islands, the cradle of African culture in this country, I have found the peace and acceptance of home."

The older citizens of St. Simons would often share fascinating details of their history with Ansa, including their folklore. From older women who had once been midwives she learned about certain beliefs and rituals, including ones relating to childbirth and supernatural abilities. This provided the kernel for Ansa's first novel, Baby of the Family. Published in 1989, it tells the story of young Lena McPherson, born in the late 1940s to Nellie and Jonah McPherson in a private black hospital in the fictional Georgia town of Mulberry. Lena comes into the world with a caul over her eyes, a ghostly-appearing membrane--part of the fetal sac--and one the midwife considers an ominous sign. She gives Nellie a tea to drink made from it, but Nellie throws it away, regarding such folklore as silly and old-fashioned. Yet her daughter, the youngest McPherson and only girl, does appear to be different.

From an early age Lena sees ghosts--children in portraits reach out to her, she meets a slave on the beach when she is only seven. Lena's gifts, however, lead her into increasing isolation as she grows both older and more fearful of her powers; she feels misunderstood by many, including her own family. Her grandmother, who returns to have a talk with Lena on the day the matriarch is buried, explaining to her how blessed she is to have been born with such a gift. "Through Lena's story," wrote Shirley M. Jordan in American Visions, "Ansa shows us that it's only through self- acceptance that we can uncover our distinctive 'powers' and effect positive change in our personal lives and the lives of others." The New York Times Book Review also appraised it favorably. "The novel offers dense rich scenes of black Southern life, scenes felt deeply by the characters who act them out," noted critic Valerie Sayers. "Tina McElroy Ansa tells a good quirky story, and she tells it with humor, grace and great respect for the power of the particular."

In Ansa's second novel, 1993's Ugly Ways, she recounts the story of an altogether different family. Mudear Lovejoy has just passed away, and the woman's three grown daughters come together to bond and share her memories. Unfortunately, many of their recollections are less than fond. "Although her daughters have succeeded professionally, Mudear has left them emotionally starved by harping on both their individual flaws and her absolute certainty that men are not to be trusted," wrote Deirdre Donahue in USA Today. "Ansa explores the origins of this cruelty by revealing Mudear's own hard life." As her daughters sit on her porch and drink liquor out of their mother's finest glassware, Mudear hovers above and refuses to journey onward to the spirit world. "She is selfish and insensitive and has no real barometer inside to tell her that her behavior is hurtful to her children," Ansa explained about Mudear to Essence's V. R. Peterson.

Ansa asserted she crafted such an unlikeable character as a response to what she felt had become a fixture in contemporary African American literature: the strong, warm, wise, mother figure. "After a while these kinds of characters become ciphers," Ansa explained to Peterson in Essence, "so the Black mother isn't a person." Ansa has spoke of the influence her own mother has had upon her fiction, however. She even gave Baby of the Family's mother the same name as her own; Nellie McElroy is in her seventies and adamant that she was not the role model for the cussing Mudear of Ugly Ways. Instead, Ansa asserts, as a writer she has been greatly influenced by her mother's richly eloquent vocabulary and sometimes infamous descriptive talents. In Essence article about writers' influences and inspirations, Ansa cites her mother's own voice. As she herself grew into adulthood, Ansa explained, she realized she often invoked her mother in conversations. "I assumed all women did," she wrote. "Perhaps that is why I had not noticed for all these years that my mother's center is exactly from whence my voice as a writer first sprang."

In 1996 Ansa's third novel was published. The Hand I Fan With brings back Lena McPherson, still living in Mulberry but now a successful forty-five-year-old real estate company owner. Having difficulty in forging a relationship with a man, Lena casts a spell that brings "Herman" into her life, a ghost whose real age, had he lived, would have been around 100. Herman provides the soul- stirring physical passion that Lena needs, but also points her down an equally fulfilling spiritual path. Ansa admits she had some reservations about the premise: "I didn't want [Lena] being saved by a man," she told Woods in Emerge. "But then I stopped and thought we all need saving right now in this world. We could all use...someone to guide us, to help us, to ease us along life's path."

Works

Writings

• Baby of the Family, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.
• Ugly Ways, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993.
• The Hand I Fan With, Doubleday, 1996.

Further Reading

Sources

• American Visions, October 1990, p. 38-39.
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 22, 1996.
• Elle, November 1994, p. 68.
• Emerge, October 1996, p. 75.
• Entertainment Weekly, October 25, 1996, pp. 108-109.
• Essence, March 1990, p. 48; December 1993, p. 54; May 1995, p. 193; July 1995, p. 49, September 1996, pp. 100-101.
• New York Times Book Review, November 26, 1989, p. 6; October 10, 1993, p. 20.
• USA Today, September 9, 1993.
• Additional information for this profile was provided by Doubleday publicity materials, 1996.

— Carol Brennan

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