THE SOULS OF DISPLACED FOLK:
OAKLAND NOVELIST ROGER PORTER REFLECTS ON HIS CITY’S SOUL by Roger Porter
The Souls of Hood Folk was published
my neighborhood as somewhere where
writer from the San Francisco Chronicle.
humanize my hood. Just like W.E.B. Dubois
five years after I had a conversation with a This conversation took place while I was
an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. The reporter was doing research on an article
that he was going to write concerning
racism on campus and had reached out to me to have a sit down and discuss that
particular topic. I spoke to him about how difficult of an adjustment it was to come
from a culturally rich, predominantly black community, only to be tokenized as one of
the few blacks majoring in English at Cal. He
asked me where I grew up. I told him Deep
East Oakland, not far from Eastmont Mall. He looked at me quizzically and said “Really. That’s where we go to cover murders.” His
response
wasn’t
altogether
shocking to me because I knew my part of
town was known as the killing fields. The Oakland Tribune (now defunct) used that moniker often when speaking of the area
roughly between 73rd Avenue and the San
Leandro border, but when that grizzled 40 something year old white journalist made
that statement I took it as a challenge. In my head, I was like “Fam you are not
going to oversimplify and ultimate dismiss
people get shot—the end.” I needed to
had humanized African-Americans when he
wrote The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. The Souls of Hood Folk was published one year
after I received my MFA from Mills College in 2010.
I was yearning to make the people that
I had gone to school with, played football with, fallen in love with, and had fist fights with, fully realized and three dimensional
in the eyes of my readers. It was important to me to be able to immortalize Deep East
Oakland in literature just like Zora Neale
Hurston had put it down for Eatonville, Florida and like Richard Wright had done
for the Southside of Chicago. I was 28 years old. I was trying to completely change the
game and bring hella grimy ghetto content to my work, but at the same time I wanted to polish it up a little bit and make it palatable for my more educated readers.
That’s why when I wrote the short story
Language Barrier about a teenaged sniper, I decided to filter his thoughts through a third
person omniscient narrator who is highly
skilled at translating the killer’s actions into the language of the civilian. The narrator 67