SOURCE: "'I Wish I Was a Poet': The Character as Artist in Alice Childress's Like One of the Family," Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 14, 1980, pp. 24-30.

Harris is an educator. In the following essay, she discusses Mildred, Childress's narrator in Like One of the Family, and her position in oral and written African-American literature.

When they are creating their works, black American writers can draw upon two equally strong traditions. They have available to them the rich European and American written tradition and the equally rich African and Afro-American oral tradition. They can incorporate the written forms representative of the best of Shakespeare or Henry James as well as the oral forms of the anonymous slaves who told their tales to each other at the ends of many fourteen-hour days of picking cotton. Written and oral forms both have their distinct features, and when they are combined, they...