La Salle Professor Finds African-American Women Writers
“Tell it to Us Easy” in New Short Story Collection

In the library at Purdue University, Judith Musser needed to reach a book high up on a shelf. There was no ladder, and Musser saw a box lying nearby. She then saw it contained issues of a magazine dedicated to publishing on issues related to African- Americans.

Musser, an associate professor of English at La Salle University and resident of Chestnut Hill since 2001 (“I liked Chestnut Hill because of the great neighbors and the many places to exercise my dog,” she said), has edited a recently completed collection of short stories from that periodical in, Tell it to Us Easy: A Complete Short Fiction Anthology of African American Women Writers in Opportunity Magazine 1923-1948 (from MacFarland Publishers).

The book contains all 81 stories that appeared in the magazine that was published through the National Urban League.

 “Copies of the magazine are hard to find,” said Musser, who teaches courses on minority women writers. “In many cases the only available copies are on microfilm.”

Musser, 49, said she wanted to have the stories published, “because scholarship based on the Harlem Renaissance doesn’t take these into consideration. In the context of academic research it’s important to include the “non-traditional” sources.”

She says the book is meant to be a research and teaching tool.  The stories, she says, are a bridge from "slave narratives" to the writings of the Harlem Renaissance authors, such as Langston Hughes. “It also presents another side of the Renaissance,” said Musser, that it wasn’t exclusive to the authors, jazz musicians and performers that became well-known.”

While Zora Neale Hurston got her start with Opportunity, most of the stories were written by women who were not professional writers. The magazine was an outlet for them to tell their stories and what was happening in their lives, says Musser.
 
Musser was surprised at the variety of tales and with the issues they discussed: the Chicago riots and lynching appear in the works, and many of them do not take place in the south. Many tales talk about traveling overseas (where the characters are treated differently than they were in the United States).

She said some of the stories are not well-crafted, but have merit by providing a look at African-American lives in the first part of the 20th century. 

MacFarland Publishers is interested in having Musser assemble a book of short stories from another African-American magazine, The Crisis, which is still published through the NAACP.

A professor at La Salle since 2000, Musser is a native of Elizabethtown, Pa., and earned her B.A. at Gordon College in Massachusetts; a Master’s in Literature from the University of Aberdeen in the UK; and her Ph.D. from Purdue.