Francisco


 
 
 
 Francisco
 
 
 
 
 
 Copyright © 1974, 2023 by Alison Mills Newman
 Foreword copyright © 2023 by Saidiya Hartman
 Francisco was first published by Reed, Cannon & Johnson Communications Co. in 1974.
 All of the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
 All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
 First published by New Directions as NDP1554 in 2023
 Manufactured in the United States of America
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Mills Newman, Alison, author.
 Title: Francisco / Alison Mills Newman.
 Description: New York, NY : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2023. 
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022050524 | ISBN 9780811232395 (paperback) | ISBN 9780811232401 (ebook) 
 Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. 
 Classification: LCC PS3563.I4235 F73 2023 | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20221026 
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022050524
 New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
 by New Directions Publishing Corporation
 80 Eighth Avenue. New York 10011
 
 
 This book is dedicated 
 to Nikki, Ted Jr., Morgan, 
 Mom, Dad, and May Ninth
 
 
 Foreword
 This sensual and languorous autobiographical novel by Alison Mills Newman is a portrait of the artist as a young black woman trying to find a way back to herself: she is searching for an opening through which her capacities might be unloosened and where her talents will be actualized in accordance with her own designs. When we encounter the unnamed narrator, she has turned her back on worldly metrics of success. She has fled Hollywood with its saccharine integrationist television sitcoms and promises of ready stardom in black exploitation cinema. As she soon realizes, the belated invitation to the mainstream — even if as a noble token or as the only black friend or as a special guest appearance — demands assimilation as the price of the ticket. Her wanderings are devoted to unbecoming a successful Negro; her voyage directs her away from what she has been trained to want and toward other young artists in the Black Arts Movement, who want to be revolutionaries and not “Negro artists,” who want to destroy the racial mountain rather than ascend it. 
 On an errant path toward the artist she might be, she is disinclined to strive because “trying is overrated.” The novel might well be subtitled “In Praise of Idleness,” conjuring the spirit of tool-breakers, recalcitrant domestics, shirkers, and strikers. The narrative drifts from moment to moment. Idleness, a refusal of the conditions of work, a refusal to be purposeful or dutiful, to strive or protest, feels liberating, especially after several years of working so very hard. “i be wanderin off sometimes — and when i come back i cannot tell you where i have been, cause i do not even know i was gone.” The full elaboration of experience rather than a pedagogical impulse to explain the black world or describe it for outsiders enhances the textual pleasure of Francisco. Love, communion, intellectual debate, and aesthetic drive are the currents that shape its recursive movement. The drift and propulsion of the story feels like a ’70s score, something Curtis Mayfield might have composed. 
 In this fugue state, she meets Francisco. The novel reads like a series of journal entries about the narrator’s infatuation and love affair with Francisco. While Francisco “lives and breathes his work,” the protagonist tries to find hers. Others call her lazy and unmotivated, accuse her of wasting her time; her father implores her to go to college and do something with her life. She appoints herself as muse. Yet, if there is breathing room in this love story of the Black Arts Movement, it emerges out of the category confusion about who exactly is the muse. She waxes lyrically about his beauty, his platform shoes, the trousers they share. He inspires her, less to make her own work, than to believe in his genius. Francisco is the kind of beautiful figure we find exalted on the canvas of a Barkley Hendricks painting.
 It is here that the gender trouble of the novel arises in the unarticulated crisis of how she and Francisco might find a way to be together and love each other, outside of and liberated from the strictures of the imposed script of heterosexual romance, even in its bohemian variant. The ballad of Francisco and a young woman navigating aimlessness and actualization unfold with the elusive uncertainty of a latent text not yet able to articulate directly its questions about black women’s lives and radical aesthetics and what it would mean for her to claim or to nurture her capacities, except in the form of observations and journal entries, except as admonitions from others about her purposeless and otiose existence, except as a chronicle of romance, or black love as an allegory of what might be (in the parlance of the day, revolution). She expresses doubt when reading an Essence magazine article about the great woman who stands behind the great man: “i don’t know i think it’s not so much behind every great man is a great woman, as much as a great man is a great man and a girl is a girl.”
 If the narrator is a muse of sorts, she is a complex one. She wants to do more than stand behind her man, even as she accepts that she takes second place after his commitment to his art. She knows the devotion and concentration required to make art. There are rare glimpses of her in this state of dedicated creation regarding her music. But mostly she pines for her lover, who doesn’t make love when he works, though “maybe after the film is out and everythin we’ll go away and make