I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice and Vision of Black Women Writers.

by Rebecca Carroll

Black women writers share their views on race, gender, and writing

Genres: African American, Feminism

Hardcover

First published October 25, 1994

About the author

Rebecca Carroll is host of the podcast Come Through with Rebecca Carroll, and a cultural critic at WNYC where she also develops and produces a broad array of multi-platform content, and hosts live event series in The Greene Space. Rebecca is a former critic at large for the Los Angeles Times, and her personal essays, cultural commentary, profiles and opinion pieces have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, Essence, New York magazine, Ebony, and Esquire, among other publications. She is the author of several interview-based books about race and blackness in America, including the award-winning Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.

Reviews

[Jalisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

What Morgan Parker did to close the expanded version of "I Know What The Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice & Vision of Black Women Writers" edited by Rebecca Carroll deserves a monument.

She brings lines from each of these writers interviews into a collective chorus that is so beautiful. YES! That is craft. That is depth. That is excellent. She deserves all the awards for that poem alone. I threw the book at the end because it was a pitch perfect ending.

Reading "I Know What The Red Clay Looks Like" right after "The Sisterhood" by Courtney Thorsson was such a good pairing because this brought the texture and interiority I was looking for. This collection presents a breadth of experience that is truly both boundless and interconnected.

In every essay these Black women writers call each other's names and claim their influence and centrality to their own sense of self.

This collection was originally published in 1994 & expanded and revised in 2024 to include the voices of new writers. It includes writers I knew & loved like Pearl Cleage, J. California Cooper, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Rita Dove, etc. and introduced me to writers I wanna explore explore including Davida (Adedjouma) Kilgore, Tina McElroy Ansa, and Gwendolyn M. Parker, and Charlotte Watson Sherman.

I was really intrigued by Charlotte Watson Sherman talking about her work as magical realism and putting Toni Morrison, August Wilson and Latin American and Native American writers in that vein as well. Most of the mainstream conceptualisation I've been exposed to around magical realism makes it seem like a purely Latin American phenomenon, so this broadening really opened my mind up. I'll be thinking a lot about the commonalities and linkages in experience that make magical realism possible. What horrors one must experience that only the surreal can hold. Reading her excerpt from One Dark Body made my heart swell then made me misty eyed. She can WRITE.

The inclusion of excerpts from each person's work was such a delight. It gave a taste of writers that may have been lost to the archives as books go out of print and gave my TBR a run for its money. I want to spend this year digging more into backlist books and I have A LOT of material to choose from in this book.
--
You are the
Daughters of women
Who dipped you whole
In the water's of promise.

You have no Achilles heel.
- Gloria Wade Gayle's, A Poem for Young Sojourners

" Like a lot of black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires" June Jordan, On Call (1985)

[Michael Strode · Rating 4 out of 5]

For as long as I might live, I will continue to tout my jealousy of women writers. Or perhaps it is a thing that lives only so strong in this particular generation for women writers. I use "women writers" in this sense to mean specifically black women writers. There is such a strong, tender, and vital culture of sisterhood that lives amongst them as evidenced by how well versed each of them is in the others' body of work. As I mentioned in an earlier update, if this text is any indication, Toni Morrison is arguably the greatest writer the latter half of the 20th century and the English language ever produced as she received a ringing and resounding endorsement from most every writer in the tome, well known and lesser known names alike.

I was never a fan of fiction as a child or young adult, but in reading not only the selections for this text, but the back story of the authors covered has led me towards the clawing notion that black women hold stories better than any other single grouping of writers that one can consider. That is a bold statement and I am likely to retract soon after this review is written especially as I consider the "immigrant" grouping and the wonderful tales woven of that experience, but for a moment I'll let it stand.

Of the qualities that was oft cited of Toni Morrison was included of course the penchant for magical realism, the astonishing magnificent manner in which she is aware of and wields the English language, and the truth she is able to extract in how she studies every aspect of her stories in the process of drawing them forth, but I think I am digressing from the point.

The brilliance of this text is how well the editor, Rebecca Carroll, was able to capture and convey the truth of these authors. The reason that either they came to writing or writing came to them. The manner in which they communicate with their characters for these are not simply paper bound one dimensional figures, but whole and complete and soul imbued beings with a way about this world and a reason to be acknowledged. The creative means is strong here. The tug and the tussle for attention as if these characters are children reaching forth to know their mother. Yes. I know what the red clay looks like and I doubt I shall ever be able to forget it again. Word to Gammy Kathy. Love you Mama and Mama.

[Trisha Roberson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exposure to many incredible black women writers in three ways: a bio, a self intro, and a peice of writing. I read this in parallel with Pleasure Activism, which also includes a set of interviews with activists of colour, and noted some parallels. These women all noted those who came before and inspired them: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin. My perspectives were shifted in big ways, like by Marita Golden's line "My daughter was a soldier too." And by Gloria Wade-Gayles' poem for young sojourners from Anointed to Fly which I rate 17/10 and makes me bump this entire book rating to 5.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book includes many of my favorite Black Women writers. While I have read many of their books I was most interested in learning their perspectives and how this influenced their approach to writing. I was not disappointed. I’ll continue to seek to learn.