Farewell to Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and Gloria Naylor

By A.J. Muhammad, Librarian III

December 16, 2016

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

This past fall, the world lost two influential African American women writers: Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and Gloria Naylor. South Carolina born Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor was a self described “Geechee” —a term that some considered to be pejorative and refers to the descendants of West African slaves who live in U.S. southern coastal states and islands. This population speaks Gullah (or Geechee), a language that combined West African languages with English. Smart-Grosvenor said she was reclaiming the term Gullah and it was in the subtitle of her seminal 1970s memoir and cookbook Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl.

Smart-Grosvenor’s prose was direct and witty. In Vibration Cooking, she writes, “Food is sexy and you can tell a lot about people and where they’re at by their food habits. People who eat food with pleasure and get pleasure from the different stirring of the senses that a well-prepared food experience can bring are my kind of people.”

Smart-Grosvernor sought to link Africa and North America through food. In a May 1988 New York Times article Smart-Grosvenor described the improvisatory nature of vibration cooking, which can also be compared to other cultural aspects of the African American experience. She explained, “If you live in a culture where a two-and-a-half-pound chicken might have to serve 10 people instead of 4 people, you might have to add a lot potatoes and one of the jars of beans you put up, instead of baking the chicken.” Check out Smart-Grosvenor’s recipe for onion pie that was published in the New York Times this past October.

Like many other notable African Americans from her generation, Smart-Grosvenor lived in Paris in the 1950s, and traveled in the same circles as artists such as James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Maya Angelou. Throughout her long and varied career, Smart-Grosvenor occasionally acted, was a producer and frequent contributor to NPR programs "Seasonings," and "All Things Considered." Listen to an audio segment by Smart-Grosvenor about Daufuskie Island, S.C., and its Geechee inhabitants (“Daufuskians”) from the early 1980s she recorded during her tenure at NPR here.

A few weeks after Smart-Grosvenor passed, Gloria Naylor succumbed to illness. Naylor was born in New York City, but descended from southern roots and was educated at Brooklyn College. She worked a series of jobs before her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, about a community of African American women in a large urban city that spanned decades, was published in 1982. While Naylor was employed as a college professor at universities including George Washington University, Princeton, and Boston University, she wrote follow-up novels. However, it was the 1989 television mini-series adaptation of The Women of Brewster Place, produced by and co-starring Oprah Winfrey, that catapulted Naylor to literary success.

The Women of Brewster Place, which also starred Jackee, Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, Leon, Lynn Whitfield, Paula Kelly, Cicely Tyson, and Paul Winfield, was a ratings bonanza that spawned a short-lived weekly TV series. The novel was such a rich source of material that it was also adapted into a musical theater piece that premiered at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 2007.

Another one of Naylor’s novels, Mama Day, a supernatural tale set on a south coastal island near Georgia and South Carolina, featured the type of characters that Smart-Grosvenor knew well as she documented them through her life’s work. Mama Day also drew comparisons to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and critics also noted the connection to other iconic works such as Dante’s Inferno in the Divine Comedy and the Holy Bible in Naylor’s novels.

Later in her career, Naylor returned to her most widely known book The Women of Brewster Place, to tell the story from the perspective of Black male characters in The Men of Brewster Place. One of Naylor’s last projects was a fictionalized memoir called 1996, in which Naylor herself is a character who contends with being under surveillance by the U.S. government. Listen to Naylor discuss the novel on a 2006 episode of NPR’s program "News & Notes".

Here are titles by Smart-Grosvenor and Naylor that are required reading, viewing, or listening. If you’ve already read these works, share your favorites in the comments section below.

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor