Toward the end of her book’s first chapter, Cheryl A. Wall quotes a line from Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1983) on the work of unrecognized Black women artists of generations past, like Walker’s own gardener mother, who “order[ed] the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty” (34). This skillful work of ordering—plants in a garden, words on a page—enacts, for Wall, a version of the “will to adorn” central to her understanding of the African American essay as a genre. The genre’s other major feature, as she sees it—the “determination to be free”—is not distinct from an essay’s particular diction or style. Rather, Wall shows that the essayistic project of arranging and adorning thought is, for the writers she studies, often one of beauty and of liberation.

This brief sketch of Wall’s indispensable study of the African American essay, On Freedom and...

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