By Traci Angel
Photograph by Dorothy Shi
Ntozake Shange’s name was Paulette Williams back in 1956, when her family sent her to Dewey Elementary School in St. Louis because she was gifted. It was the first nonsegregated school she attended, and the racism she experienced there was what fired her passion to write.
Today Shange’s award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, is part of a permanent exhibit at the Missouri History Museum, and her 20-year-old book, Betsey Brown, has just been chosen as the 2005 ReadMOre Selection of the Missouri Humanities Council. This annual selection is intended to create literary buzz statewide among libraries, bookstores and reading clubs.
Betsey Brown is a coming-of-age story about an African-American girl living in St. Louis during the 1950s whose days are wracked by the tensions of race. “We thought the issues about school desegregation were still pertinent,” says George Durnell, assistant director of the St. Louis County Library, who serves on the ReadMOre committee.
In adulthood, Williams chose a new name, using words from a Zulu dialect meaning “she who comes with her own things” and “who walks like a lion.” Thus armed, Ntozake Shange began turning her childhood experiences into literary insights. “I used my street, and many of the characters were based on people I knew or conglomerates of people I knew,” she says, adding that, like Betsey, “I did have a young suitor walk around the block with me.”
Shange is finishing a book with Ifa Bayeza that traces the history of black music through six generations of women in the Mayfield family. She credits such musicians as rappers Lil’ Kim, Salt-n-Pepa and Queen Latifah for breaking down artistic barriers. “These are the literary descendants—and, literally, descendants—of woman like me, and they shouldn’t be dismissed.”
