dered complex, largely because misery, reflection, and responsibility
are configured into a dynamic whole. What this means to the project at
hand is that I began to recognize that the end result was of little
importance. What matters is the process -- an investment in acts not
destinations.

It is this sensibility that I have gleaned from the works of Ralph
Ellison and that can be found in the works of Ernest J. Gaines and
James Alan McPherson. To be sure, there are other writers whose work
has been influenced by Ellison's literary personage. But, as I argue
here, what attracted me to the triad of Ellison, Gaines, and McPherson
was that each has found creative ways to situate their Southernness, to
posit circumstances that, in the popular view, indicate despair and
squalor as the site of cultural vitality. The other, perhaps less clear,
aspect of this is that this study works in a smaller unit of literary history.
Though they are not peers, Gaines and McPherson are, in literary
terms, contemporaries. As such, I hope it is clear to readers the debt
this study owes to those previous foundational endeavors in African
American literary studies: to name but a few, Houston Baker The
Journey Back, Robert B. Stepto From Behind the Veil, Barbara Christian
Black Women Novelists, Michael S. Harper and Robert Stepto Chant of
Saints, and of course even further back, Sterling A. Brown's and Ulys-
ses Lee's seminal anthology, The Negro Caravan. I cite these particular
studies for no reason other than to suggest that each in its fashion
attempts to cover large units of literary history.

In that sense, Wrestling Angels into Song can be said to make much
smaller claims (though, I think, no less important ones), if only because
I have not attempted to be comprehensive: my interests in ancestry are
much more tightly focused. When I began this project as a dissertation,
neither Gaines nor McPherson had received much in the way of critical
attention; the former had become a representative figure in the sense
that his writing is often used to portray life in the South (as evidenced
by the three films based on his fiction) but the latter had only been
mentioned in the chapters of several books (most notably Keith Byer-
man's fine study, Fingering the Jagged Grain) and some scattered articles.
And few scholars had begun to consider either writer's work in terms of
how he addressed matters of citizenship or, for that matter, the issue of
how to "place" them. It has not been my intention here to suggest that
Gaines or McPherson should be neatly "boxed." If anything, in reading
their work one finds that they resist this impulse with great fervor. But
I did want to find new ways to read them, and in doing so to begin to see
African American literary production in terms that were not so mono-
lithic. For it is most certainly the case that as McPherson and Gaines
were making aesthetic choices other writers were as well. That those

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