Preface to the Vintage
Contemporaries Edition (2021)
Tayari Jones
In the Reagan years, I was a teenager, more reader than writer, when I
discovered the work of Sapphire. As a college student, I hung out with a
cluster of intense artsy types, sharing battered copies of chapbooks, zines,
and small-press volumes. My good friend Angela passed me a sheaf of
xeroxed pages by an author who called herself Sapphire. What I remember
most clearly was a persona poem from the point of view of Celestine Tate
Harrington, the quadriplegic boardwalk singer who fought the city for
custody of her child. The poem was defiant as the speaker focused less on
the joys of motherhood and more on ownership of her sexuality. Angela
speculated that Sapphire would likely never receive her due in the world of
letters, because she had chosen as her subject the people whose bodies are
stigmatized, whose families are pathologized, and whose very lives are held
up as everything America rejects. “She is a hero,” Angela declared, and I
nodded in solemn agreement.
Imagine our shock and delight in 1996 when the entire literary world
was on fire with the publication of Push—the author had been given a
major advance, the first chapter would appear in The New Yorker, and there
would be a serious book tour. I called Angela, as we were now living on
opposite sides of the country, trying to figure out adult life. “Is that our
Sapphire?” This was pre-internet, so I ran to the bookstore. The slick
packaging was a far cry from the tattered pages we’d passed back and forth,
and the woman in the author photo wore a close crop instead of long thick
dreadlocks, but the fingerprint of an author is her words.
