Alison Mills Newman’s innovative “Francisco” is back on shelves, but it almost wasn’t: “It was a very tender decision for me”
Alison Mills Newman can’t remember exactly what she was doing that day in Berkeley, Calif. — it was so long ago, the early 1970s — when her novel got discovered for the first time. She knows she’d been writing in the kitchen but got distracted and left. When she got back, her boyfriend was talking with their friend, the writer Ishmael Reed. Reed had been leafing through the pages Newman had left on the table.
“Francisco,” recently reissued by New Directions, told the couple’s story in dreamy episodes, a fragmented monologue. It hopscotched from coast to coast, from bohemia to domesticity. The narration rolled from private thought to intellectual squabbles to excitable, overlapping exchanges between new lovers: “we talked about revolutionists. i hate revolutionists. i’m tired of all that who shot john. they all turn out to be movie stars in this country anyway.
When “Francisco” first appeared, “you know, Black novels were pretty conservative,” Reed said. “And when you judge this novel by some of the novels of the past — this is pretty out there. She takes a lot of chances.”That was true of the book’s content, especially its sexual frankness, as well as its unusual form: “Francisco” is a freely lustful text, rhapsodizing over the allure of the narrator’s new man , from the thoughts in his head to his high-heeled blue shoes.
For all the mainstream knew, in the intervening decades, Mills Newman had disappeared. Morrison once told Mills Newman that she had a promising future as a writer, but she didn’t pursue that or really any career — at least not in a deliberate sense. She and Francisco became devout Christians and married. Being a stay-at-home mom to their five children became her main vocation. “It’s treacherous to be raised in America as a Black child,” she said.
The two kept exchanging emails. Mills Newman wavered about the project and what form it might take. Maybe she could find some alternative for the f-word, swap out another expletive and just use “mess.” Eventually, she went to Florida and sat on the beach. She let God talk to her, she said. She thought about Paul before he gave himself to Christ, and how Peter, too, had used profanity before he was renewed.
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