“The Invitation” Author: Clifton Taulbert
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Pages: 206
Price: $25.95 (Cloth)
Clifton Taulbert has become one of America’s most successful and prolific African American memoirists, working many of the same veins as Maya Angelou. Taulbert’s first book, “Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored” (1989), tells the story of his childhood, in poverty and segregation in Glen Allan, Mississippi, deep in the Delta, in the 1940s and fifties. He recounts how he and the other children of that time and place were nurtured by community. It takes a village, they say, and in Taulbert’s case, the village stepped up and did the job. Grandparents, aunts, neighbors, everyone shared what they had and helped the children to thrive. Expectations were high, and the children grew up with self respect and optimism, in spite of the dreadful economic/social conditions. That volume was followed by a number of others: “The Last Train North” (1992), “Watching Our Crops Come In” (1997), and perhaps his most widely known, “Eight Habits of the Heart” (1999).
With “Eight Habits” and the many speaking tours that followed from it, Taulbert became a nationally successful motivational/inspirational speaker, but not in the ordinary sense of energizing individuals to reach their maximum potential at the office and rise in wealth and corporate rank.
Taulbert’s concern is not with building careers, but with building communities.
Using the experiences of his childhood, he implores listeners to work at community, developing in their own places, however humble, attitude, dependability and reliability, friendship, brotherhood— which is friendship with people who are not just like you, high expectations, courage, and hope.
Taulbert was on the lecture circuit in Philadelphia in 2000 when a middle-aged white woman called out to him and offered an invitation. Would he come to Allendale, South Carolina, and hold his community building workshop?
Taulbert accepted and the experience, recounted here, proved to be a little different and more stressful than he imagined. Allendale reminded him all too much of Glen Allan. It too was cotton country. Whites owned nearly everything. Blacks worked in whites’ homes and in the fields. Had life in South Carolina changed at all? The laws were different, but were the lives of black folks different? Taulbert’s childhood inner self, Little Cliff, was suspicious and uneasy. What were the motives of these well-to-do white people?
Matters became more intense when Taulbert was invited to be a house guest at a grand plantation home, Roselawn.
Entering this beautiful antebellum mansion actually triggered in Taulbert a kind of cultural anxiety, a discomfort approaching PTSD.
It took him back even beyond his childhood.
“I felt slavery all around me,” he writes.
A similar “flashback” had possessed Taulbert at Melrose Plantation in Natchez on an earlier occasion. Both these great houses brought memories of Linden Plantation in Glen Allan where all his people had labored for generations. Despite his maturity and his many accomplishments, he could not help feeling out of place.
How much, really, was different?
Camille Cunningham, his aging hostess, and the mother of the woman who had invited him to Allendale, had an agenda, but what was it? Did Miss Camille have secrets? Was she making amends for some events in the past or helping to form a better future for Allendale?
Miss Camille turns out to be a good-hearted and gracious woman in every way, but Taulbert, and therefore the reader, never does quite learn what she wanted from these encounters.
Most important, however, was the invitation itself, and Taulbert urges all his readers, black and white, to take courage, and “extend your hand across the barriers of the past.”
Taulbert has an open, confiding prose style and those coming to this book without having read any earlier works will have few complaints.
For those familiar with his life story, however, there is a distressing amount of repetition and the book seems padded out. Taulbert summarizes his workshop talks in South Carolina, which were in fact the material that comprised “When We Were Colored” and “Eight Habits” and other works. I guess this recapitulation is an inevitable pitfall for the professional memoirist, but it is nevertheless tedious for the readers Taulbert has deservedly accumulated over the years.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
