This sensual and languorous autobiographical novel by Alison Mills Newman is a portrait of the artist as a young Black woman trying to find a way back to herself: she is searching for an opening through which her capacities might be unloosened and where her talents will be actualized in accordance with her own designs. When we encounter the unnamed narrator, she has turned her back on worldly metrics of success. She has fled Hollywood, with its saccharine integrationist television sitcoms and promises of ready stardom in Black exploitation cinema. As she soon realizes, the belated invitation to the mainstream — even if as a noble token or as the only Black friend or as a special guest appearance — demands assimilation as the price of the ticket. Her wanderings are devoted to unbecoming a successful Negro; her voyage directs her away from what she has been trained to want and toward other young artists in the Black Arts Movement, who want to be revolutionaries and not “Negro artists,” who want to destroy the racial mountain rather than ascend it.
On an errant path toward the artist she might be, she is disinclined to strive because trying is overrated. The novel might well be subtitled “In Praise of Idleness,” conjuring the spirit of tool-breakers, recalcitrant domestics, shirkers, and strikers. The narrative drifts from moment to moment. Idleness, a refusal of the conditions of work, a refusal to be purposeful or dutiful, to strive or protest, feels liberating, especially after several years of working so very hard. “i be wanderin off sometimes — and when i come back i cannot tell you where i have been, cause i do not even know i was gone.” The full elaboration of experience rather than a pedagogical impulse to explain the Black world or describe it for outsiders enhances the textual pleasure of “Francisco.” Love, communion, intellectual debate, and aesthetic drive are the currents that shape its recursive movement. The drift and propulsion of the story feels like a seventies score, something Curtis Mayfield might have composed.
In this fugue state, she meets Francisco. The novel reads like a series of journal entries about the narrator’s infatuation and love affair with Francisco. While Francisco lives and breathes his work, the protagonist tries to find hers. Others call her lazy and unmotivated, accuse her of wasting her time; her father implores her to go to college and do something with her life. She appoints herself as muse. Yet, if there is breathing room in this love story of the Black Arts Movement, it emerges out of the category confusion about who exactly is the muse. She waxes lyrically about his beauty, his high-heel shoes, the trousers they share. He inspires her, less to make her own work than to believe in his genius. Francisco is the kind of beautiful figure we find exalted on the canvas of a Barkley L. Hendricks painting.
It is here that the gender trouble of the novel arises in the unarticulated crisis of how she and Francisco might find a way to be together and love each other, outside of and liberated from the strictures of the imposed script of heterosexual romance, even in its bohemian variant. The ballad of Francisco and a young woman navigating aimlessness and actualization unfolds with the elusive uncertainty of a latent text not yet able to articulate directly its questions about Black women’s lives and radical aesthetics and what it would mean for her to claim or to nurture her capacities, except in the form of observations and journal entries, except as admonitions from others about her purposeless and otiose existence, except as a chronicle of romance, or Black love as an allegory of what might be (in the parlance of the day, revolution). She expresses doubt when reading an Essence magazine article about the great woman who stands behind the great man: “i don’t know i think it’s not so much behind every great man is a great woman, as much as a great man is a great man and a girl is a girl.”
If the narrator is a muse of sorts, she is a complex one. She wants to do more than stand behind her man, even as she accepts that she takes second place after his commitment to his art. She knows the devotion and the concentration required to make art. There are rare glimpses of her in this state of dedicated creation regarding her music. But mostly she pines for her lover, who doesn’t make love when he works, though “maybe after the film is out and everythin we’ll go away and make love all the time.” Luckily, she is the kind easily distracted: a woman who puts eggs in the freezer, accidentally sets the trash can on fire, paints the refrigerator red, and lounges in bed reading James Weldon Johnson’s “Black Manhattan.”
“Francisco” is an atlas of Black culture in the nineteen-seventies and traces an itinerary from Harlem to Newark, from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, with Frank Silvera, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders, and Melvin Van Peebles as the cardinal points of the cultural map. David Henderson, Joe Overstreet, and Ishmael Reed appear as characters under pseudonyms. The novel is as much a chronicle of Black artists as it is a love story. Sexual exploration and free love define the environment of the novel, yet the narrator’s free-floating desire still seeks culmination in marriage. Her bohemianism has as its telos: husband and children and keeping house.
The vernacular language, the airy colloquial passages, and the fragmented structure defy any straight line of plot, derail the “girl meets great man and great man falls for girl” story, with numerous detours and pleasurable diversions. The text is episodic. Its meter languid and improvised. She and Francisco form one of those too beautiful couples like the dyads moving down the “Soul Train” line. They float on top of the rhythm rather than dance, they ride it like the waves, like the ocean of James Brown’s sound. The sheen of sweat on her skin makes her high brown even more beautiful, and it is hard to know who to look at. Her or him? Who is prettier? He wears high-waisted velvet pants and silver high-heel shoes and turns more heads than she does in her slinky dress. He is sweet, yet unburdened, not at all haunted by the fear or guilty shame of what Baraka derided and embraced as “Negro faggotry.” What is the playa if not a sweetback?
The story is dispersed across parties, film screenings, concerts, small gatherings, hanging with friends, and lots of lovemaking on sofas and in borrowed bedrooms. It is funny and irreverent: “we talked about revolutionists. i hate revolutionists . . . they all turn out to be movie stars in this country anyway”; “i couldn’t think of no black famous man i wanted to fuck. once i wanted to fuck huey newton when i was sixteen, but not no more.”
The wayward protagonist has found a muse in Francisco, or she might have if she allowed his genius to inspire her, or if she made him her second, or if she thought of him as a pleasurable indulgence, an extravagance, and not as essential for life. This brilliant, beautiful young man is at the center of her meditations and reflections about power and Blackness, art and revolution, love and liberation. Given the limits of the time and the world, and the femme self-effacement that is the bedrock of romance and the marriage plot, she casts herself as muse. For Francisco, the terms are otherwise. Women are a luxury, he tells her, and perhaps even an impediment to an aspiring young artist. When he is working on his film, he withholds, he sends her back home, he refuses to make love with her, underscoring the boundary between the first love — his film, his art — and his love for her. How she might be an artist and be with Francisco is the latent question of the novel, yet one too difficult to answer in the singular. It will require a collective response from a generation of Black radical women and artists, from Toni Cade Bambara to Ntozake Shange.
Francisco anticipates Shange’s “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf” and runs on a parallel track to Toni Morrison’s “Sula” and Bambara’s “The Black Woman: An Anthology.” Whereas Sula’s tragedy is that she is an artist without an art form and one who can only sublimate her yearning and want into an ardent desire for an ordinary man, Ajax, made mythic in her eyes, “Francisco” is neither a tragedy nor the blues (an autobiographical chronicle of catastrophe expressed lyrically), but rather a funky jam committed to pleasure and possibility.
The searching young protagonist is certainly endowed with a sense of her artistry. Rather than work for the Man, she prefers to drift, to not get stuck in place, to wake up at noon and make love on her friend’s sofa, to raid her savings. (To fend off the extraction of her talents or the danger of being a sold out afro stoking the fantasies of white psychic life or feeding the insatiable racist appetites of Hollywood’s libidinal machine, she devotes herself to Francisco.) The beauty of “Francisco” resides in this refusal to be dutiful to what she doesn’t want: she rejects the imposed script. The risk is that aimlessness or insufficient devotion to her gifts all too easily yields to a love story about Francisco, where ardor and eros provide the cover for her self-abandonment, but since the novel is neither tragedy nor blues, the heroine escapes catastrophe as she journeys toward a melancholy self-embrace.
The unnamed narrator is a drifting young Black woman who has walked away from success as a rising film and television star to find a means of expression or an opportunity for self-forgetting so that she might exceed the limited horizon of the world’s expectation. To forget or exceed herself takes the form of erotic dissolution and spiritual oblation. This voluptuary tale has a theological undercurrent. The author’s renouncement of the erotic adventure of Francisco in the afterword and testimony about finding God makes this clear. This, too, is in the tradition — Donna Summer renounced that fall and free way of love when she found Christ, as did Al Green. Is every god and goddess of love required to forsake their carnality to enter the kingdom, or to disown the Dionysian for the churchly? Are all the naughty girls and dissolute boys destined to become ascetics and monks? Must passion this intense yield to the divine, lend its force to the sacred? The spectral and the barely discernible devotions become manifest as Holy Ghost, though also borne in Malcolm X’s stance and the Godfather of Soul’s conk. Can I get a witness?
Certainly, the search for ecstasy assumes a secular form; it is very much in the flesh and pussy the valorized term of self-regard, and the slogan of a nascent Black bohemian feminism, with Ntozake Shange wanting hers to get some sunlight, or bell hooks’s fiery self-possession and declaration of struggle — whose is it, anyway? — or Audre Lorde coaxing it to delight with bananas, or Jamaica Kincaid’s anti-heroine luxuriating in acts of autoeroticism and the smell of it in a world incapable of beholding Black women, or the extended reprise of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith bragging about the cosmic force of jelly rolls, or Jessie Fauset’s plum bun proving that even bourgeois women can rock that thing, or Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B authoring its anthem. Not unlike visionaries and mystics, martyrs and saints, the narrator finds a path to liberation through self-erasure or subsumption in sublime experience. If this sounds like a marriage of the sensual and the spiritual, reader, you are on the right track. If sex and self-immolation are tethered, it is because Francisco is a kindred spirit of Paul Humfress and Derek Jarman’s “Sebastiane” or Carolee Schneemann’s “Fuses” or Pasolini’s “Teorema.” In plainer terms, what the young artist reaches for is transport; art and bodily experience provide the vehicle.
Devout self-abnegation recalls female mystics and martyrs for whom the willingness to sacrifice or forfeit the “I” is the pathway to greater knowledge and the divine. “Francisco” is heterodox in its beliefs and tentative in its commitments, so its portrait of a young artist in search of her path yields to female self-effacement and the muse’s desire to live through the genius of her man. It is important to note that Francisco does not demand this of her, rather it is what she offers. He, in turn, helps her to love herself, to love her smell, to love the eruptions of the funk that the bourgeois Black daughter had been disciplined to repel, if not loathe. The tension of the novel is between the femme’s self-abasing love for the brilliant masculine creator and the artist in search of her own form. It is a story of sexual transgression, not because it is scandalous but because it defies the tenets of respectability which have provided the pillars of Black striving. The narrator, literally and figuratively, resides in her father’s house. He is an accomplished scientist who takes for granted his daughter’s soon-to-be achievements in the world, and that her strict upbringing has decided her course. The rules and prohibitions of the father’s house are explicit, and no less ardent is the daughter’s desire to flout those rules, to indulge in acts of intimate trespass; want and reckless desire lead to her lover’s bed, yet for the sake of appearance and the need of propriety she returns to her own room by dawn.
In Francisco, she finds a partner also in the search for liberation; like her, he finds beauty in the Black ordinary and reveres everyday folks and their ways of surviving and enduring the world — sprawling conversations about revolution on a bus ride through the city, sisters sketching designs for a new planet as they fry chicken and do hair, or Black commoners experimenting with ways not to be a Negro in the white man’s world. The extraordinary beauty of Black folks everywhere apparent is inextricable from the what and the how of liberation. Their aesthetic experiment is an experiment in living — how is it that one might be Black and free? She and Francisco learn how not to strive, how not to step onto the path awaiting the Black élite, and instead to yearn for something better and more substantial than money or success or fame.
The freedom to eschew protest or uplift in the search for a zone in which one might enjoy the pleasures of everyday life, from the sonic rootwork of James Brown to an afternoon tryst, where sexual pleasure is inseparable from the veneration of Blackness and the transport and the potentiality of sweaty bodies in a circle. James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” is the ur-text of this possibility: everything was in union with us.
The pace of the narrative, its Black groove, the dissident resonance of free jazz, the pulse and vibration of a liberation-now suite, its all-encompassing eros are a testament of Black potentiality in flux — the shift from revolutionary icons and political parties with armed wings — toward an open-ended and expectant sense that anything might be possible despite the disappointment that the revolution has not yet come to pass. The anticipation and the hope are ubiquitous and set the tone of ordinary life. Despite the celebrity revolutionaries, no one person or party exercises a sovereign claim or copyright to the Black movement against the given, unfolding in the streets, in Black arts, in carnal acts.
The narrator finds a place alongside Black male genius, by loving and nurturing it. Her aimlessness enables her to be what she might need to be and on the ready. Francisco doesn’t make her his muse; fascinated by his genius, she relinquishes herself to him. Fleeing everything she was, she meets Francisco in the throes of this self-abandonment. She has turned her back on everything that she is supposed to want: money, celebrity, fame. She has turned her back on being a representative Negro, on being a daughter of Europe, on loving whiteness, and by so doing, she both finds a friend in her bed and learns to love herself dearly, even as the world fails to love her. Her arms provide a refuge, often the only one possible. So, this no-longer muse learns to keep company with herself. It is the gift yielded by the errant path. ♦
This is drawn from “Francisco.”
