WHAT: J. California Cooper, reading from her short stories and novels
WHEN: Today, 3 p.m.
WHERE: Hayti Heritage Center, 804 Old Fayetteville St., Durham
ADMISSION: Free
J. CALIFORNIA COOPER AWARDS
1978. Black Playwright of the Year
1988. James Baldwin Writing Award, and the American Library Association’s Literary Lion Award
1989. American Book Award for “Homemade Love,” a collection of stories.
'LET'S TALK ABOUT IT' SCHEDULE
All programs at Stanford Warren Library, 2 p.m.
Feb. 20. J. California Cooper’s “Family” with Karen Keaton-Jackson
March 6. James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain” with Lynne T. Jefferson
March 20. Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” with Regina Alston
April 10. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” with Janice Dargan
April 24. Bebe Moore Campbell’s “Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine” with Wendy Rountree
For information, call 560-0268.
By Cliff Bellamy
cbellamy@heraldsun.com; 419-6744
DURHAM — “This is not going to be no long story cause I do not like talking bout this stuff,” begins the narrator of author J. California Cooper’s short story “The Party,” which is included in her 2006 collection “Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns.” Readers familiar with Cooper’s novels and short stories know that much of her work is about the kind of stuff — what she calls life itself — that she discusses in “The Party.”
The story is about a party at a dance club and its consequences for the people who attend the “after party.” (Like other Cooper stories, this one is frank about sex, but without being lurid.) The narrator who observes and reports the party is a college student who meditates on her desire to make better choices in her own life.
Cooper will read from her extensive body of work today at Hayti Heritage Center. The reading is the first event in the Durham County Library’s “Let’s Talk About It” series, featuring discussions of works by African-American authors.
“My books are primarily about life and the fight for survival and the pursuit of happiness,” Cooper said in a phone interview last week from her home in Walnut Creek, Calif. She said she is “a student of the truth,” and she believes that too many people do not hear it. Her books and stories are concerned with the consequences of people’s actions in the world. People make mistakes “and I know if they just changed a little something it would change their life,” Cooper said.
Or, as she writes in the introduction to one of her short-story books: “Freedom is expensive. Your choices can cost you your life. I don’t want you to go around frightened; I would like you to go around aware.”
That theme of choices and consequences, and of people’s need for love, can be found in a number of her short stories: “A Shooting Star,” about a young woman’s early death because of her reckless search for love; and “Success,” about two outwardly successful people who are desperately lonely.
She’s not out to preach, she stressed. “Everything I write is meant to make you think, and if you laugh along the way, that’s part of life,” Cooper said. “But don’t just laugh all the way.”
Her first novel “Family” (published in 1991) takes a different tack. It has the qualities of magic realism, told from the viewpoint of Clora, a slave who is dead but is a disembodied spirit. She enters the minds of her descendants, and follows their lives through the end of slavery and into freedom. The novel is Cooper’s meditation on the connectedness of all humans, however widespread we may be.
Cooper first began writing plays, and won the 1978 Black Playwright of the Year Award. Among her many short story collections are “The Future Has a Past,” “Some Soul to Keep” and “The Matter is Life.” Other novels are “Life is Short but Wide,” “The Wake of the Wind” and “In Search of Satisfaction.”
She wants her words to be understood, she said, and writes in a familiar, everyday, conversational style that seems effortless. Cooper said she does not consider herself a writer in the sense of a Shakespeare or De Maupassant.
The Bible is a strong influence on her work and reading. “Being a bible student,” she said, “I believe there was an Adam and Eve, and I believe there is a Satan because he keeps a lot of things going.” (In her novel “Family,” she writes: “The devil is the busiest thing I know.”) Cooper, who volunteered that she is almost 80, listed other authors whose work she admires or who have influenced her: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pearl Buck, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Isaac Bashevis Singer, “and I loved Balzac — he was wonderful.”
She writes initial drafts in longhand. Characters “love to come when I’m listening to Rachmaninoff or Eric Satie but [the music] cannot have any words to it… I have some characters who will not come unless I’m listening to certain music.”
The character of a blind girl in one of her stories, Cooper recalled, came to her when she heard a piece by Satie on the radio. She lost the character a few days later, but when the radio station played the piece again, the character returned, Cooper said. She called the station to ask what they were playing, and discovered Satie’s music, she said.
She tries to stay faithful to the characters who come to her, Cooper said. Her publisher, Doubleday, has been good about not asking her to edit too much. “I have to keep them from editing too much because I see these people in my brain … and I know what these people said.”
