Image courtesy of Hayley O’Malley and reproduced with permission of the Estate of Kathleen Collins.
This is a composition notebook sewn in a classic style: dotted, with a black-and-white cover. Shining over time, the surface is also patterned by a network of surface cracks, wavy markings, and mottled shapes that yellow to gold. At some point, the notebook looked like it was buckling—perhaps crushed at the bottom of a bag or drawer. I could just make out a few words written on the front in blue ballpoint pen: “NOVEL,” confidently in capital letters, and what I was pretty sure was the year “1974.”
The notebook belonged to Kathleen Collins, the black American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and activist whose creative work remained largely unpublished and unproduced before her death from cancer, at the age of forty-six, in 1988. Beginning with the long-delayed theatrical release in 2015 of her feature film, the 1982 independent drama Losing PositionCollins’ work has gained a wide audience that was not afforded to him during his lifetime. Her posthumous recognition was achieved largely through the work of her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, who, aged nineteen in 1988, collected her mother’s letters from her home and stored them in a large trunk. They stayed there for years until he felt ready to sort them out.
When he did, it was a revelation. Nina discovered a trove of typewritten manuscripts, including dozens of short stories, plays, and screenplays, in which her mother had authored highly regarded fictions of black middle-class life. The manuscripts now form the core of Collins’ official archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library; it also formed the basis of two volumes of Collins’ writings published and edited by Nina, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (2016) and Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary (2019).
The notebook in question is now kept at Schomburg, but in fact, it was not among the papers in Nina’s trunk. Instead, it was received by Nina as a surprise gift from a stranger who appeared—and quickly disappeared—in the crowded foyer of New York City’s Lincoln Center one winter evening in February 2015, at the film’s premiere. Losing Position. Nina is approached by an old black man she doesn’t know. “You have to have this,” he tells her, and hands her a manila folder—which Nina later finds out, contains the notebook. The man slips away before Nina learns his name; his identity is still unknown. Their encounters feel as if they were lifted from one of Collins’s fictions, which feature many unlikely or extraordinary encounters between old lovers, friends, and strangers, so improbable that they feel staged.
In the notebook there are notes and a draft of a novel with the title “Blue Barriers”. Its palimpsistic, coffee-filled pages provide a rare and valuable example of Collins’ exploratory writing and revision process, as he turned evocative phrases and fragments of scenery into a draft of the first four chapters of a novel. Mildred, a black American woman in her early twenties living in Paris, begins an affair with a poet. She finds in the “damp chaos” of the poet’s room a temporary refuge from her painful New Jersey childhood, even as her passionate affair with him adds to the anxiety and self-consciousness that are her childhood legacy. The past presses against the present as the unfinished novel jumps between scenes of Mildred in France and as a young teenager in New Jersey, surviving years in the shadow of her father’s job as a mortician in the family home.
Mildred shares most of her biography with Collins. Like his protagonist, Collins grew up in New Jersey, with a father who worked as a mortician; she also lived in Paris with her first husband, Douglas Collins, for several years in her early adulthood. Beginning during a season of personal upheaval, including the breakdown of her marriage toward the end of 1974, “Blue Obstacles” appears to have initiated a decade-long effort by Collins to overcome and understand her relationship with Douglas and her early life.
Across various complete and incomplete projects—including “Scapegoat Child,” a 1979 story republished in 2018 in That Paris Repeatsee which depict scenes of domestic violence are also found in “Blue Obstacles”—Collins uses his fiction as a form of autofictional memory work. He needed, as he wrote in a separate section of his notebook, to “carefully measure every particle that remains in my memory. Weigh it. Sift it. Suck it from the corners. Until it sits still and sways. Like a pool of water inside a globe.” Even in its breezy, fragmentary form, Collins’ meta-artistic reflections on her novel writing represent the striking, poignant prose that characterizes her most mature work.
“The Blue Hurdle” is also an object lesson in the value of unfinished writing. As a repository of aesthetic pleasures and new narrative possibilities, archives of unfinished works encourage us to reconsider the literary past as a story of the creative process—a story in which “completion” or publication is not the sole measure of artistic achievement. Revisiting and reappraising incomplete works by women, in particular, can mean rejecting the attitudes of exclusion—rejection, resistance, and obstruction—that often hinder and limit the public careers of marginalized writers. Collins, for example, was a prodigious talent whose difficulty in getting his work published and produced was not simply a matter of bad luck or bad timing, but also reflected how white the literary culture he negotiated was.
No complete draft of the work originating from “The Blue Hurdle” has yet been discovered. But there is good reason to believe that the notebook material represents an early draft of a novel later entitled “A Treatment for Color Films.” We know that Collins submitted the complete manuscript of the novel to Random House in 1978, which then ended up on the desk of Toni Morrison, who was then working as a press editor. Morrison considered the manuscript “breathtaking,” according to Random House archives, but the book was not published by that press or anyone else. The manuscript appears to be lost, at least for now. In its place is “Blue Barrier.”
You can read an excerpt from “Blue Obstacles” in the Daily here.
Alix Beeston is a writer and scholar based at Cardiff University. He is the coeditor of Women, Sisters, and Friendsvolume of Kathleen Collins’ plays and screenplays to be published by the University of California Press in 2027. A longer excerpt from “Blue Obstacles” will appear in ASAP/Journal.
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