Oreo (20 page)

Under the banner of the Black Arts movement that emerged as the cultural
component of Black Power politics of the 1960s and 1970s, African American writers and
artists struggled to define and practice a distinctive black aesthetic that departed from
traditions based in the history and values of European cultures. The Black Arts movement was
fueled by the desire to use art to recover—or, if necessary, to create or reinvent—an
authentic black culture based in the particular historical experience of Americans of
African descent.

Like the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, the Black Arts movement resulted in an
outpouring of music, art, and literature, and inspired many educated and middle-class
African Americans to re-evaluate and to identify themselves more closely with the vernacular
culture associated with the black proletariat. At its best, the Black Arts movement
stimulated a creative exploration of the folk, popular, and fine art traditions of a
community in which diversity and unity, innovation and preservation are interactive forces.
At its worst, in their eagerness to purge black identity of all traces of Europe, some
critics and theorists proposed narrow prescriptions for black art that resulted in formulaic
expression from some artists. Even this served to provoke others to question and transgress
the limits, while the thorough exploration of blackness not only contributed to the
collective self-knowledge of African Americans, but also helped to redefine the culture of
the United States as a hybrid multicultural gumbo rather than a white monocultural melting
pot.

Paradoxically, as much as it was concerned with defining the cultural distinctiveness of
African Americans, the Black Arts movement also helped to create unprecedented opportunities
for the creative expression of African Americans to enter and influence “mainstream”
American culture. Sometimes the more “black rage” was vented in the work, the more the
writer was celebrated in the mainstream culture. In addition to this tense interaction of
political, aesthetic, and commercial impulses, another contradiction that the Black Arts
movement posed for authors was the idea that black Americans possessed no authentic
literature or language of their own. Writers wrestled with the dilemma that they were
severed from the spoken languages and oral traditions of their African ancestors, and had no
intrinsic connection to the language and literature of their historical oppressors. The
English language itself was perceived by some as a tool of oppression. The more fluent in
standard English, or other European languages, the more immersed in established literary
culture, the more likely one might be accused of forsaking one’s own traditions, or
abandoning the black community—by writing works it could not comprehend, or enjoy, or draw
upon for inspiration in the coming revolution that radical activists envisioned.

Fran Ross’s novel,
Oreo
, was published in 1974, when the Black Arts movement had
reached the height of its influence. Yet, as its title signals,
Oreo
does not claim
to represent any singularly authentic black experience. More eccentric than Afrocentric,
Ross’s novel calls attention to the hybridity rather than the racial or cultural purity of
African Americans. Ross’s playfully innovative novel displays a discursive spectrum engaged
in by African American characters who express themselves in a variety of languages and
dialects, including standard English, African American vernacular, and Yiddish.

Compared to more familiar works of African American literature, this book might seem at
first glance bizarrely idiosyncratic, but precedents for it do exist. In certain respects it
bears a striking resemblance to a text that was published in 1859, but not widely read until
it was rediscovered and reprinted in 1983. The first known novel by an African American
woman, Harriet E. Wilson’s provocatively titled
Our Nig
is the story of a freeborn
woman of color, the indentured servant of a white Northern family who is treated little
better than a slave. Like Wilson’s novel, Ross’s
Oreo
challenges received opinion about
African Americans. Oreo is a character whose linguistic and cultural competence allows her
to travel between two distinct minority cultures, while enjoying the resources of the
dominant culture and exploring her own identity. Both Wilson and Ross have created
intelligent African American female characters whose strategic placement within the white
household allows them intimate knowledge of America’s family secrets. From a position at the
intersection of black and white, both Wilson’s Frado and Ross’s Oreo articulate
astute critiques of America’s hypocrisy about race. The two novels share other features. In
each story, a young, attractive, plucky, defiant biracial heroine, in the absence of
protectors, learns to defend herself against the physical aggression of hostile antagonists.
Both authors employ innovative narrative strategies, resulting in complexly discursive,
generically hybrid texts. Both novels were originally published in small first editions that
were largely ignored; and because their works found few receptive readers in their lifetime,
both authors remained virtually unknown until their books were rediscovered.

Frances Dolores Ross was born June 25, 1935, in Philadelphia, the eldest child and only daughter of Gerald
Ross of Littleton, North Carolina, and Bernetta Bass Ross of Petersburg, Virginia. Her
father, a welder, died in an automobile accident returning home from work in New Jersey in
1954. Her mother worked as a store clerk after attending Saint Augustine College in North
Carolina. Fran Ross, whose childhood nickname was “Frosty,” is remembered as a precocious
bookworm, an artistically inclined doodler, and a spirited athlete by her two younger
brothers, Gerald Ross, Jr., and Richard Ross. Their maternal grandmother, Lena Bass Nelson,
was employed as a cook for the Irish-American family of Arthur J. O’Neil, a Seagram’s
Company vice president. Fran Ross and her brother Gerald often spent weekends at the home of
the O’Neil family, helping “Big Mom” when her employers had large dinner parties. During
school vacations, Fran also occasionally accompanied her grandmother to the O’Neil summer
home on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The Ross family lived in Philadelphia in a
Pearl Street house owned by Lena Bass and attended Mount Carmel Baptist Church.

As a child, Fran Ross often heard Yiddish spoken by the family of Samuel Koltoff, the
Russian Jewish immigrant proprietor of the next-door corner store. Another Jewish family,
the Millers, employed her brother Gerald in their neighborhood “five and dime” store. Ross
attended George Brooks Elementary School and Shoemaker Junior High School. A few days before
her sixteenth birthday, she graduated with honors from Overbrook High School, where the
student body at the time was predominantly white and Jewish. Her brother Gerald’s classmate
Wilt Chamberlain played varsity basketball in the same high school. Ross herself, a lifelong
sports fan, played basketball at Camphor Memorial Church Center and with the Varsity
Pantherettes at Richard Allen Youth Center. In high school, she was a member of the debate
team, literary club, and art club; her interests included literature, drama, and cartoons.
She received a full college scholarship and graduated in 1956 from Temple University with a
B.S. degree in Communications, Journalism, and Theater. Ross sought work as a journalist and
was employed for a time at Curtis Publishing Company, home of the
Saturday Evening
Post
. Finding it difficult to get suitable employment in Philadelphia, she moved to
New York in 1960. There she worked as a proofreader and copy editor at McGraw-Hill and later
at Simon and Schuster, where, among other things, she proofread the first book written by Ed
Koch, the mayor of New York City.

Oreo
, Ross’s only novel, was released by Greyfalcon House in 1974. Although Ross
never published another novel, she continued to work as a freelance writer and editor, while
living “a bagel’s throw from Zabar’s in a terrace apartment on Riverside Drive in the same
building as Jules Feiffer” (
Essence
, 70). Ross wrote pieces for
Essence
, a
magazine for black women, as well as for the feminist humor magazine
Titters
, and
published a facetious article on black slang in
Playboy
magazine. Ross’s freelance
activity supplemented her income as part owner and vice president of a mail-order company
that produced educational media.

In 1977, on the strength of her published novel and a few sample television scripts, she
interviewed for a job as a comedy writer for the controversial and short-lived
Richard
Pryor Show
. Encouraged by the producer Rocco Urbisci, Ross had hoped that income from
television work might allow her to complete a second novel; but with the expenses of her
move from New York to Los Angeles, she barely broke even on the venture. Having given up her
New York apartment, Ross was distressed to learn that the star had misgivings about
committing himself to a weekly television schedule and submitting to network censorship of
his outspoken humor. At an emotionally intense meeting of the show’s creators, Ross found
herself pleading with the reluctant Pryor to go ahead with the network program, arguing that
he could make an impact as a socially conscious black comedian. Although Pryor’s associates
Paul Mooney and Urbisci collaborated with the comedian on other projects after the show was
canceled, Ross scrambled for work at other studios. She soon discovered that she was even
more of an anomaly as a black woman comedy writer in Los Angeles than she had been as an
editor and author in New York. She submitted sample scripts and tried unsuccessfully to
interest network executives in her idea for a pilot program featuring an African American
character. Rather than pursuing her only offer—a possible job writing for the
Pryor
Show
’s competition,
Laverne and Shirley
—she returned to New York, where she
continued to work in publishing and media until her death on September 17, 1985.

A black and white photograph of the author on the back of the novel’s original dust jacket
shows a youthful-looking black woman with full lips and a kinky Afro hairstyle, wearing hoop
earrings, a necklace of large beads, and a garment that might be a dashiki. The epitome of
Afrocentric style, the author’s portrait seems to engage in a lively dialogue with the
novel’s title and the eye-catching cover design created by Ann Grifalconi, an award-winning
writer and illustrator of multicultural books for children, and the publisher of the
original
Oreo
. The artwork features a cropped Nefertiti-like image of a smiling
black woman wearing a star of David pendant. In the photograph, Ross poses in front of a
sunny window, holding eyeglasses and a pencil in one hand, gazing skeptically at the camera,
as if daring the photographer to try to capture her soul, as if challenging the reader to
solve the riddle of
Oreo
. Although the author herself warned readers that the book
is fiction rather than autobiography, the novel does incorporate or allude to a few
circumstantial facts that are known of Ross’s life, including her education at Temple
University (where Oreo’s parents meet), her journey from her Philadelphia birthplace to New
York City (like her heroine’s odyssey), and her work in advertising and mass media (where
Samuel Schwartz, Oreo’s father, earns his living).

Oreo
is one of a very few works of satire written by African American women.
Historically, black women are far more likely to be the objects rather than the authors of
parody and satire. Like William Melvin Kelley’s
Dunsfords Travels Everywheres
(1970), which also combines vernacular dialects and literary invention in a Joycean romp
through language, Ross’s
Oreo
languishes in the purgatory or limbo of innovative
works by black writers that have been overlooked in the formation of the African American
literary canon. Although it is notable for its satirical response to the racial and sexual
politics of the 1970s,
Oreo
apparently failed to find its audience, possibly
because in the process of commingling two ghettoized vernaculars, African American and
Yiddish, the novel also draws on material that both black and Jewish readers might find
offensive, perplexing, or incomprehensible. Ross’s double-edged satire includes a Jewish
immigrant who retains a voodoo consultant named Dr. Macumba; a reverse-discrimination tale
of an all-black suburb where a local ordinance is selectively enforced to keep white people
from moving into the neighborhood; a black radio producer’s script of an advertisement for
Passover TV dinners; a joke about the heroine’s odds of inheriting sickle-cell anemia and
Tay-Sachs disease; and a fight in which Oreo beats a predatory pimp to a pulp while wearing
only a pair of sandals, a brassiere, and a mezuzah. Ross frequently confronts her readers
with conventional stereotypes encoded in familiar jokes. In
Oreo
, the stereotype is
often made more conspicuous by an unexpected twist or inversion, forcing into consciousness
the underlying assumptions of jokes about sex, race, and ethnicity.

With its mix of vernacular dialects, bilingual and ethnic humor, inside jokes, neologisms,
verbal quirks, and linguistic oddities, Ross’s novel dazzles by deliberately straining the
abilities of its readers, as if she wrote for an audience that did not yet exist. Relatively
few people in 1974 would have possessed the linguistic competence, multicultural literacy,
and irreverently humorous attitude toward racial and ethnic identity that Ross demonstrates
and expects of
Oreo
’s ideal audience. The more that today’s readers have come to
learn and understand about America’s cultural diversity and the less constrained by narrow
definitions of identity, the more likely we are to comprehend and appreciate Ross’s satire,
which seems to have arrived ahead of its time.