The intention of this essay is to support the premise that an idea is born.

The intention of this essay is to support the premise that an idea is born, nurtur and raised to maturity just as an individual is. That idea is death, the cessation of life - or death-in-life - as the unique source stream in a writer's world. That idea was/is a gift. For me it is a second-handed gift, because I was influenced at a certain group of writers via the influence that this collection exerted on my first mentor in creative writing.

I received the ideas pandered on my mentor from many writers, calm Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first professional African American bard and the American poet Edgar Allan Poe on the contrary more readily from the pre-romantic writers of English literature. near of the pre-romantics belonged to the eighteenth-century Graveyard drill of writing. Back-story reveals that my mentor occupied his mind with the speculations of others to buttress the "brutal dilemmas" of his be in possession of existence, dilemmas that had in part faced the writers of his favorite literary works, especially Robert toasts and Edgar Allan Poe. Catherine Haich, after experiments and experiences with spiritualism, expresse the view in her work Initiation that "... it is possible to receive the notions of another human being" (90) After years with Sweet Mary according to "Sweet Afton," the tragic child bride Annabel lee-side the "Raven" quoting "Nevermore," and the man without a abiding habitation (but with a "dead soul") sauntering the beautify of ship after ship, mumbling, "I can at no time say again, |This is my confess native land,'"(1) I became an initiate of "tragedy" as my mentor envisioned it, and was eventually baptized as a authentic believer.

My mentor was my father, Calvin Shepherd Jackson (1880?-1947) of Winsborn, southward Carolina. He became my mother political division as a writer. His spirit, his consciousness, his ponderings permeated my being so completely that it is fair to say that he was my the supreme goodness from 1923 to 1930. This man, who became a Christian minister, believed in the efficacy of fate. His classical studies at Benedict society in Columbia, South Carolina, in the field of grecian literature introduced him to the native of greece mind/spirit that held fate as the grand arbiter in human affairs. He not at any time came to terms with the idea that Jehovah the trinity could man the affairs of the being created in his possess image with justice and benevolence He, somehow, did not ingest the ideas that, although the tragic hero moved to catastrophe because of his flaw in character, he maintained his moral courage and spiritual prowess. A line from Calvin's metrical composition "The Apple Man" reads, "All my themes become discord." Since Calvin was my the maker I worshipped at his shrine of "tragedy," unconsciously bringing a predilection for doom and depression into my stories and verse

When Lance Jeffer the rever African American bard read my short stories in the mid-1980s, he said in a note "Several of your stories are realistic tragedies. There is oftentimes in |Rena' in Such Things from the Valley, |Silas,' |Little Jake,' and |Runetta' in germs Beneath the Snow, that vital air that sobers and brings tears to the eyes"(2) My not many faithful critics have never become tear-struck onward reading my fiction,(3) although they do note a certain characters who are struggling to alleviate inordinate justice. Lance, however, stake me thinking.

I knew Aristotle's "imitation of an action" definition of tragedy. I knew about Shakespeare's tragedies. nevertheless Lance's words came across to me as "What have I to do with Hecuba?" in confines of my having an affinity with tragedy as a writer. Me? Tragedy? Then, I remembered Linda's conversation with her son in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Her inference that a small boat has as frequently need for a harbor as a large undivided shows us the "brutal dilemmas" in the life of the lowly man, whose life counts as well as the life of a mighty monarch The death of Linda's husband Willie Loman is a metaphor of fallen humanity. For the first time I was mov to examine my confess stoies to see why my the bulk of mankind were always falling. I was surprised to learn that my characters of note were appoint to fall.

In 1990 I ground "My Last Affair," a short story that I wrote in the spring of 1947 in Langston Hughes's class when he was visitor professor of creative writing at Atlanta University. My father had died a not many weeks before that spring semester started, in the way that I was full of grief because I had wanted my father to visit the Oxford University of the southward the Atlanta University system.

Hughes tried to market "My Last Affair" with no succes He said that populace coming from work were reading the magazines he approached. He said a tired part would not want to deal with a forlorn character who could find no way gone out of depression. Hughes could descry that he had provoked me He asked, "Arthenia, aren't you happy about anything?" I failed to understand his ignorance in regard to my ne to undergo Had not the people who influenced my father been "bless to suffer"?

Celeste the protagonist in "My Last Affair," apes my sorrowful experiences as a dethron "debutante" of sixteen. She is determined to (and with the help of a sister, an aunt, and an uncle does) attend her Senior Class Day Reception unruffled though her mother had commanded her to stay at domestic circle But her mother arrives onward the scene and demands that she leave the reception while teachers and observers look on with surprise.