SOURCE: Hamer, Judith A. and Hamer, Martin J. Introduction to Centers of the Self: Stories by Black American Women, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, edited by Judith A. Hamer and Martin J. Hamer, pp. 3-19. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

In the following essay, Hamer and Hamer trace the development of African American women's short fiction from the nineteenth century to the present.

We are the subjects of our own narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience, and, in no way coincidentally, in the experiences of those with whom we have come in contact … And to read imaginative literature by and about us is to choose to examine centers of the self and to have the opportunity to compare these centers with the “raceless” one with which we are, all of us, most familiar.

—Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American...