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Journey to the center of a race

Randall Kenan talks about the seven-year odyssey that led him from Martha's Vineyard to Alaska in search of the truth about black life in America.

Review by Fetzer Mills Jr.
www.salonmagazine.com

(SALON) -- Prize-winning African-American novelist Randall Kenan ("A Visitation of Spirits") was once dubbed "our 'black' García Márquez" by Terry McMillan, but his new nonfiction book, "Walking on Water," is heavy on the realism, skip the magic. Kenan spent more than four years on the road interviewing black Americans from Louisiana to Alaska, the West Coast to the Northeast and all points in between, including black enclaves in Canada. Part travelogue, part sociological, political and historical study, "Walking on Water" is both broad and deep, an unusually sensitive portrait of black America at the end of the 20th century.

He writes, "The truth is there are over thirty-six million ways to be black, from the curious guy who raises pigeons on the roof across the street from me, who wears the same jacket 365 days of the year, to the Tennessee mountain minister who teaches Greek and Latin to high school students, to the NBA player from Lake Charles, Louisiana, who loves his mother to death, to the matriarch of an apple orchard in Washington State who hates to see her children go off to school, to the crack addict in some Philadelphia alley, with a hard-on and thirty-seven cents to his name, just wanting to stay up and UP, to the congresswoman, to the cowgirl, to the fisherman to the dogcatcher, to the young lovers, at this very moment, engaged in that ancient act that will undoubtedly bring, nine months hence, yet another brown-skinned girl or brown-skinned boy into this world, into this country, into this city, into this block, into this building, into this room where they shall learn their own uniqueness, and, one fine morning, say softly, I am."

"Walking On Water" is written with a journalist's eye, a novelist's flair for language and a rare candor. Salon spoke with Kenan about the state of black America in his top-floor apartment overlooking the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis.

"Walking On Water" is not just a minor diversion from fiction. You spent seven years of your life on it. What inspired you to undertake such a massive project?

I don't like fiction that is polemical, that tries to prove or solve something in a political arena. These questions I felt could only be dealt with through nonfiction. This is something I've been interested in all my life. I've seen books written about certain regions or cities or a particular element of African-American life, but I've never seen anything done on this scale before. It's something I've wanted to read and something I think should exist. But when I set out to do it I had no idea it would take almost eight years to complete.

Researching this book you went into a whole lot of very different black communities. You were in the Northeast on Martha's Vineyard, in Vermont and Maine; in Creole country down in Louisiana; on the West Coast in San Francisco and Seattle; up in Alaska; the Midwest. These are all very different areas, culturally, geographically. You also interviewed blacks from all walks of life, from Dorothy West on Martha's Vineyard to a black prostitute in Salt Lake City. Within this large variety of black communities, what did you find people had in common and what were their differences?

One of the things that got me on the road was this habit that most of my black friends and teachers and students and employers have, when we're speaking amongst ourselves, of saying "we." And at some point I began to ask myself, "Who is this 'we'? Is there such a thing as 'we'?" Especially in the era after the civil rights gains of the '70s, there were a lot of changes in the material lives of black folk. But I didn't see the rhetoric, the language, the terminology catching up with it. By going to the places where black people had lived for a long time and talking to them, I wanted to see if such a community still existed, if there was still such a thing as "we" or if that was an anachronistic term.

Did you find an answer to that?

What I found ultimately was that black folk in this country, as political beings, still find a need for a "we" to exist. Because I don't care if you're a multimillionaire basketball player, a fisherman in Louisiana or the matriarch of a New England family, there still comes a time when your existence as a black person in this country can be threatened. Organizations like the NAACP, the Urban League, PUSH, anything like that, exist for a reason. And that is a very strong element of African-American identity.

At the same time, but a little murkier, are all the cultural elements. Now, I think those things have changed, in the '70s in particular. Television and mass media helped to disseminate cultural icons that were often very market-driven, from hip-hop music to hairstyles, clothing styles. Which is not the way it was before segregation ended. For instance, in Salt Lake City there are black Mormons. You have black kids growing up who are descendants of the men and women who came west with Brigham Young. So, they have a real black culture in Salt Lake City. At the same time there's someone back in Washington, D.C., or New York City telling them who they are. It's a very odd cultural dynamic we're going through.

NEXT: Why are blacks expected to "give back to their community" when no one else does?