SOURCE: "Bullins, Baraka, and Elder: The Dawn of Grandeur in Black Drama," in CLA Journal, Vol. XVI, No. 1, September, 1972, pp. 32-48.

Jeffers is an American poet, short story writer, and critic. In the following essay, he analyzes Bullins's honest and unsentimental depiction of the black working class in Clara's Ole Man and In the Wine Time.

There are hellish depths and godly heights in the black experience that await the black artist as he charts our voyage into the future. Coltrane and Bird and Gene Ammons and Sidney Bechet and Johnny Hodges confidently exploit these heights, these depths. In black music there is a heavenly rage and an ecstatic prophecy and a danger and bottomless depth and the presence of juice and viscera that are the nerve and the sinew of experienced oppression, the bowel of the future of black life. The black musician, from the time of...