Guy, Rosa (b. 1925), internationally acclaimed writer of adult and young people's fiction centering on the
African diaspora and cofounder of the Harlem Writers Guild. Rosa Cuthbert Guy is of dual heritage—born in
Trinidad, she grew up in
Harlem, where events in her own life shaped her creative outlook, forming her unforgettable themes and characters.
Rosa and her sister Ameze were left with relatives when their parents
Audrey and Henry Cuthbert emigrated to the United States in 1927. The girls joined their parents in 1932, and briefly the family was united; however, in 1933, Rosa's mother became ill and the children were sent to
Brooklyn to live with a cousin. The cousin was a Garveyite whose politics of black nationalism profoundly affected young Rosa. In 1934, Rosa's mother died and she and her sister returned to Harlem to live with their father who remarried. The girls lived briefly with a stepmother until 1937, when their father died.
Poised on the threshold of adolescence, then orphaned in New York, Guy's experiences breathe life into her works for young people. Guy's maturation process, made difficult by her outsider status in the African American community because she was West Indian, produced a vision that scrutinized both worlds. Following their father's death, Rosa and her sister lived in an orphanage. At age fourteen, Guy left school to work in a brassiere factory in the garment district.
In 1941, Rosa met and married Warner Guy. She was sixteen. While her husband served in World War II, Guy continued to work in the factory but sought creative ways to express herself. A coworker introduced Guy to the
American Negro Theater (ANT). ANT, established in 1940, proved a launching pad for such actors as
Sidney Poitier and
Ruby Dee. Guy did not perform in any of the theater productions but studied acting there. In 1942, she gave birth to Warner, her only child.
When the war ended, Guy moved with her husband and son to
Connecticut. Five years later her marriage dissolved and she returned to New York and resumed her factory job. Again she sought the artistic community, but the thriving theater group had vanished. Another organization, the Committee for the
Negro in the Arts, had replaced it. The committee's purpose was to eliminate racial stereotypes in the arts. Interaction with this group resulted in Guy writing and performing in her first play,
Venetian Blinds (1954), a successful one-act play produced
Off-Broadway at the Tropical Theater.
The committee enabled Guy to meet many artists, some of them writers, including John O.
Killens. Killens and she shared similar aims, wanting to project an authentic black voice in their works. Guy's artistic orientation predates the Black Arts Movement and probably owes a debt to the
Garvey movement. In 1951, Guy and Killens formed a workshop that became the Harlem Writers Guild. With such participants as Paule
Marshall, Audre
Lorde, Douglas Turner
Ward, and
Maya Angelou, the workshop achieved fame long before Guy ever published her first work. Between 1951 and 1970, more than half of all successful African American writers were associated with the workshop.
The workshop and Killens provided the encouragement Guy needed to perfect her craft. In spite of her limited schooling, working, and single-parenting, Guy had no choice but to write. Although she never directly said so, her works seem to indicate that she was, in fact, writing to save her life—or more specifically, writing herself into being. She states that writing “was a driving force in that orphan, out there on the streets … who needed something through which to express herself, through which to become a full-bodied person” (Jerrie Norris, Presenting Rosa Guy, 1988).
Guy's first published works consist of two short stories of which there are no surviving copies. “
“The Carnival”,” reflecting her West Indian heritage, and another her New York experience, were published in a
Trinidadian newspaper by C. L. R. James, who in 1960 was editor.
Bird at My Window (1966), Guy's first novel, received mixed reviews. J. Saunders
Redding's now famous remark was the most negative criticism, claiming that “preoccupation with repossessing a heritage had led to distortion of values and reality … making heroes out of heels” (
Crisis, Apr. 1966). Guy's protagonist, Wade Williams, like her former husband who was murdered, was destroyed by poverty and racism. She dedicated the novel to
Malcolm X, calling him “pure gold salvaged from the gutter of the ghettos.”
The assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther
King, Jr., prompted Guy to embrace another genre. She wanted to know how violence affected young people and traveled South for the first time in her life to interview her subjects.
Children of Longing (1970), a collection of essays, resulted from her investigations. However, the work upon which Guy's reputation as a writer is based is her trilogy for young adults:
The Friends (1973);
Ruby (1976); and
Edith Jackson (1978). The trilogy gives new meaning to the
bildungsroman tradition, including race, gender, culture, and class previously missing from this genre.
Guy's other books include
The Disappearance (1979), the first in a series about young detective
Imamu Jones;
Mirror of Her Own (1981), which focuses on white characters and received mixed reviews;
Mother Crocodile (1981), an adaptation of an African fable for younger readers;
New Guys Around the Block (1983), the second Imamu Jones book;
A Measure of Time (1983), an adult novel that reached number one on the best-seller list in England;
Paris, Peewee, and Big Dog (1984), another highly praised novel;
My Love, My Love, or
The Peasant Girl (1985), a novel based on “
“Little Mermaid””;
And I Heard a Bird Sing (1987), the third in the Imamu Jones trilogy;
The Ups and Downs of Carl Davis III (1989);
Billy the Great Child (1991);
The Music of Summer (1992); and
Caribbean Carnival: Songs of the West Indies (1992), a collection of songs for children; and
The Sun, The Sea, A Touch of the Wind (1995).
Guy's approach to her audience, adults as well as young readers, is sincere and honest. She says “a novel … is an emotional history of a people in time and place” (““Young Adult Books”,” Horn Book Magazine, 1985). Her works expose her own emotional history as the young West Indian woman, dislocated and marginalized, often longing for love and acceptance. We see also Guy's understanding of the African American urban experience. Utilizing her particular emotional history, loneliness, and pain she speaks to readers over chasms of generations and cultures about the experiences of life.
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I ate a lot of Jamaican foods and was exposed to some of the culture and customs growing up, but never felt a pull to explore that part of my background until two years ago when my mother, June, made her first trip to Jamaica. The stories and pictures she brought back of ancestors, relatives and pieces of family history she didn't know existed were inspiring. Listening to her delight in the stories of her trip also made me regret I had never had those conversations with my grandparents.
It was a rich journey of discovery for both us, as we visited the 173-year-old church some of our ancestors built, and walked across the plantation my triple-great grandfather owned, even finding his grave in a tiny tree-sheltered cemetery. As we drove through Spanishtown my mother pointed out the river that my grandfather described learning to swim in the day his brothers unceremoniously tossed him in. But without a doubt the most poignant and emotional moment for both of us was the discovery of the house my grandmother and her seven siblings were raised in. We didn't know it still existed, but it was just as she had described it to my mom. Standing there taking in the house and the land I could suddenly see my grandmother in this place. And with my mother at my side I could also now clearly see my connection to Jamaica. 
