by Caryl Phillips
Phillips's novels (The Final Passage, Higher Ground) are filled with uprooted characters in search of a home—the writer's own key issue. Where indeed is home for a man born in St. Kitts, in the British West Indies, reared in England and educated at Oxford, whose ancestors were African slaves who worked the Caribbean plantations that kept the British wealthy?
In Cambridge, his powerful fourth novel, Phillips brings to life a Caribbean island at the beginning of the Victorian era, the twilight of slavery. Two characters tell his tale. First comes the journal of Emily Cartwright, a straitlaced British spinster sent by her father to take stock of his sugar plantation. Emily, a perfect product of her time, eloquently describes the manufacture of sugar, the slaves' long workday and the cruelties they endure, yet blithely accepts the superiority of her "privileged pigmentation" and with no malice views "Negroes" as a kind of livestock. She sometimes resembles a Jane Austen heroine, except that she never seeks nor attains any redeeming self-awareness.
Next comes the briefer but equally striking autobiography of Cambridge, a middle-aged slave who years earlier had been sent to London, educated and set free. Becoming a Christian missionary, he travels to Africa only to be enslaved again and sold to the Cartwright plantation.
Neither Emily nor Cambridge is entirely at home in any of the worlds they have known. Emily too is a kind of slave. Before she sets sail, her father arranges to marry her off, upon her return, to a much older man, a wealthy widower. As far as Emily is concerned, her father cares only about continuing to "indulge himself in the heavy-pocketed manner to which he has become accustomed." Cambridge clings tenaciously to his Christian faith and tries to reach out to the white Christians around him, seemingly unaware that they regard him as less than human. If Cambridge is both a keen observer and painfully blind, so is Emily. She records in detail the mediocrity of the island whites but reasons that the slaves have dragged them down to their own level.
Phillips brings both his protagonists to dismal ends. He leaves us with Emily's bleak advice, "Do not...grow old in a place that is unkind to you." But have either of them known a kind place? For the reader the pleasure is in the virtuosity of Phillips's prose and the skill of his historiography. And perhaps, in some hearts, in the tears of recognition. (Knopf, $19)
by Toni Morrison
By the 1920s, Harlem was one of the black capitals of the world. A mecca of culture and opportunity, the uptown Manhattan neighborhood was home to more than 15200 blacks, many of them native Southerners, who crowded its substantial brownstones and tree-lined boulevards. In this beneficent oasis, free from the threat of constant racial harassment, Harlem's residents, as Morrison writes in this lovesome tale, felt free to release "their riskier selves."
In Jazz, the sixth novel from the Pulitzer-prizewinning author of Beloved, Harlem is both setting and character; like the music of its title, Jazz is a complex urban story with notable rural roots.
Harlem residents Joe and Violet Trace are transplanted Virginians who by 1926 have lived in New York City nearly 20 years. She does hair. He is a "sample-case man," hawking beauty products door-to-door. Both are in their 50s. When Joe has an affair with Dorcas—the sly, anxious 18-year-old girl who lives with one of his clients—it is a casual scandal. With silk stockings, cologne, candy and other gifts, Joe tries to cast a spell over Dorcas and keep the fast-living teenager from growing bored. When, inevitably, she does lose interest in him, Joe follows her to a party where he shoots her in the shoulder as she dances with a younger man.
It should not have been a mortal wound, but Dorcas dies because she refuses to go to the hospital to avoid focusing official attention on the party and its illegal liquor. Embarrassment and a sense of parental failure keep Alice Manfred, Dorcas's strict guardian, from reporting Joe to the police. But Joe's wife, Violet, appears at Dorcas's funeral intent on disfiguring her rival's corpse with a knife—and thereby earns herself the neighborhood sobriquet Violent.
It might seem unlikely that Alice would then form an audacious bond with Violet, but Morrison makes you understand how a lonely woman who has lost a child can commiserat with a crazy one who has, in effect, lost a husband and a life.
Surprising, violent and demanding are the social truths and personal histories these and other acts in Jazz reveal. Told by several unspecified narrators—the reader must deduce who they are—the novel reaches from bustling post-World War I Harlem back to Reconstruction, recounting hardships and hopes with stunning metaphors and recurring themes of self-respect and familial responsibility. Jazz transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining tune of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious. Read it several times, with feeling. (Knopf, $21)
by Darryl Pinckney
"Nobody sat me down and told me I was a Negro," relates the narrator of this penetrating debut novel by Pinckney, 38, a former Princeton teaching fellow educated at Columbia and now living in Berlin. "That was something I figured out on the sly. Late in my childhood career as a snoop, like discovering that babies didn't come from an exchange of spinach during a kiss." From this provocative opening ensues a sometimes dense, occasionally confusing, but mostly intelligent account of growing up in the post—World War II black upper middle class.
Like the author, Pinckney's unnamed storyteller was born and raised in Indianapolis. He learns from his epithet-spewing grandfather (the old man referred to other blacks as "charcoals," "coons" and "jungle bunnies," among other things) that he is one of the "Also Chosens," a "Negro Firster," as removed by class and complexion from average rural Southern blacks as from average whites, with whom they were expected to compete.
Like some of his fellow "upper shadies" (upwardly mobile blacks) at Columbia in the radical '60s, he learns that even fellow black activists will judge each other by their appearance. "One woman said that at least Afros had ended the agony of the hair question...[but] the youngest woman said that her hair was naturally fine and she had to sweat with a comb until her arms hurt to make it kinky." The protagonist is an astute observer of cultural stereotypes, but he is ambivalent about whether he fits into any of them. Like its hero, High Cotton engages the reader in an unfinished, complicated search for self. Impenetrable in sections, its prose often delivers the beautifully formed phrase well worth wading for. (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, $21)
by Brent Wade
Wade's wry and gripping first novel begins at the end: Narrator William Cunningham, 38, "a high-ranking executive with the Varitech Industries," as the newspaper lags him, is in a hospital bed, "with a gunshot wound to the head, the victim of an apparent robbery attempt."
Wrong. "There was no burglar," Cunningham soon confides. "I fired the shot." But he survived the suicide attempt, he adds, partly because of the excellent emergency services his fashionable neighborhood provides.
As a black man who has risen to white corporate heights, Cunningham never takes that kind of service for granted. He knows his place is precarious, and that knowledge underscores the Idlers that retrace his social and psychological decline. Through these letters to a friend Cunningham abandoned when he learned the friend was gay, Cunningham explains the pressures that led to his current plight.
Cunningham, raised by a grandmother who constantly admonished him to avoid "niggerish" ways, isn't quite so judgmental these days. The marketing job, the Jaguar, the Armani ties—to say nothing of his elegant wife—are in limbo as he retraces his fall from his position "beyond the ivory threshold," a fall that began with a demand for support from Varitech's resident black activist and the threat of a factory strike.
But long before his crisis of conscience, Cunningham exhibits troubling signs. At home he's impotent. At work he thinks too much, dissecting his mentor, John Haviland, and his entourage. There's Lloyd Harrow, the guy who always calls him on the phone, even though he's three steps down the hall. There's Dierdre Rosen, the kneejerk nepotism hire. And Len Townes, the deceptively jolly fatman, ever ready to pounce.
Bill makes awkward chitchat with the boss' secretary, observes the lecherous advances of Lloyd, endures the booming old-boy voices ("You've got quite a wife there, Bill," they say at office parties, or, "I think you're onto something with that wife of yours, young man"). When he is threatened with a sexual-harassment charge, it follows a slapstick hotel-room debacle.
There's no winning and only one way out, and though Cunningham's plight is brutally specific to his African-American conflicts, novelist Wade, himself an AT&T exec, has written a book that transcends its racial theme. At turns horrifying and hilarious, it is a tale of crisis and alienation that will reverberate with meaning for any thoughtful Company Man—or woman. (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $18.95)
by Reginald McKnight
Reginald McKnight writes prose that makes you go hmmmmm. His stories, while neither cynical nor didactic, jolt and jive. Their power comes from a keen array of vividly drawn characters, many of them middle-class blacks, who must ultimately choose between individualism and community, between violence and vitality.
In the title story, Clinton, a smug black junior high school student in Waco, Tex. (one of only three blacks in a class of 30), quickly discovers the dangers of passive accommodation, what he calls "his Tom thing." One day he accidentally bloodies the class bully, Kevin "Oak Tree" Oakley, during gym, and before the inevitable fight, he realizes his only hope of avoiding a serious beating is a large, dull black classmate he usually ignores—and he feels grateful if rather embarrassed when the fellow does indeed save his you-know-what.
For Scott, the protagonist of "Quitting Smoking," danger comes from within. When his girlfriend tells him that she once was raped, Scott, a cabinetmaker's assistant, recalls a night when he and his basketball buddies did nothing about an abduction they witnessed. It is not only an incident he suspects ended in rape but also a memory that triggers introspection and eventually leads to the ruin of his relationship.
Fortunately, there is also humor—much of it based in language—in these tales of angst. To hear McKnight's characters speak is to know them. (In fact, when Roscoe of "Roscoe in Hell" describes his rotund, devilish guide, he sounds like Richard Pryor at the mike: "He's really helped me out down here, and he very hip, too. Stone deaf. But he ugly.")
Time and again McKnight's stories slyly combine a faith in human potential with a tidy and compelling fatalism. The combination makes for a stunning set of stories and reminds us that if ours are the choices, then ours too are the consequences. As a character in the story "Soul Food" puts it, "If the universe expands and contracts over aeons, so can human consciousness." (Little, Brown, $18.95)
- Contributors:
- Amelia Weiss,
- V.R Peterson,
- Sara Nelson,
- Susan Toepfer.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
