Dis//Integration: 2 Novelas & 3 Stories & a Little Play - Softcover

Kelley, William Melvin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593469933 ISBN 13: 9780593469934

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Dis//Integration, a previously unpublished work by William Melvin Kelley, author of A Different Drummer, is a notable and welcome addition to African American literature.

The linked "2 novelas, 3 stories, and a little play" that make up DIS//INTEGRATION follow the life journeys of Charles "Chig" Dunford from his Nanny Eva sermonizing from her front porch, when he is only seventeen, to his peripatetic studies in Reupeo (an anagram of Europe) as a college student, to his unsettled bachelorhood as an English professor at a small Vermont college, where he continues to struggle to finish his life-long study of the Reupeonese author Dupukshamin and find true love.
   Along the way, as Chig's sentimental education unfolds, we meet an array of memorable characters:  John Hoenir, the Hemingway-esque expatriate novelist who takes Chig under his wing; Wendy Whitman, an actress passing for white, who breaks Chig's heart; Merry, his troubled teen-age niece who Chig, in middle-age, agrees to look after; Raymond Winograd, the villainous department chair; Renka Bravo, the alluring dancer who might just make Chig an honest man; and one hundred Africans mysteriously chained together in the lower decks of Chig's homeward-bound transatlantic liner.
    DIS//INTEGRATION is an an odyssey through time in which past and future combine and re-combine to give the arc of a full life.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY was born in New York City in 1937 and attended the Fieldston School and Harvard. The author of four novels and a short story collection, he was a writer in residence at the State University of New York at Geneseo and taught at The New School and Sarah Lawrence College. He was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement and the Dana Reed Prize for creative writing. He died in 2017.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

June 1952

time I surprise people who don’t know me very well by calling myself a feminassist. They wonder how an old bachelor literary historian can espouse such radical views as equal pay for equal work, and even equal pay for comparable work, though occasionally I have trouble with the comparable part. But I more surprise them by assuring them that my feminassistism runs deeper than even money. I genuinely believe that in any way men care to define it, women bear half the responsibility for everything that humankind has destroyed or accomplished.

I didn’t always feel that way. I had a good traditional education. So naturally I started out believing in the superiority of men and never thought to look behind any of the renowned men of history to see if any female lurked there, exerting strong influence. Now I know better. Whether or not we know their names, and even though they themselves don’t always know it, women stand there behind or beside men, contributing equally to humankind’s development.

I owe credit for sowing the first seeds of my feminassistism to my paternal grandmother, Nanny Eva Dunford, whom I met for the first time at seventeen years of age in 1952. We never had any hard evidence establishing her date of birth. She maintained that missionaries had brought her from Africa in 1866 at the age of four. But we always suspected that an 1872 birth date seemed more likely. Still, she could have come from Africa. She seemed to have no European ancestry: both my father (years ago) and myself (more recently) have searched unsuccessfully for a record of her parents. And she did give us the name of the missionaries, a couple named Willson (with two l’s). I had an exchange of letters with the Willson family, but they didn’t give much help. All to say that Nanny Eva knew her Bible as well as any scholar. She knew it cold and hot, Pentateuch and Revelation. Quote a phrase from the Bible and she could cite chapter and verse. If it had multiple citations, she would know that too. “Isaiah quotin David, son,” she would say, amazing me.

Nanny Eva Dunford lived with my uncle GL and his wife Rose in a near mansion high up on a hill in New Marsails. Segregation and all! With little education but with an engaging personality, Uncle GL had already made and lost three fortunes. In 1952, he owned a bar, a record store and a taxi service. So they lived well, even though they could not sip from certain drinking fountains. Irony.

A few days after my father and I had arrived from New York, Nanny Eva and I found ourselves out on the verandah overlooking New Marsails and the Gulf beyond. She looked clean and crisp, chocolate brown and shiny skinned with kinky white hair like a cloud framing her fierce-eyed face. I felt moved to take some photos of her with my little Argoflex box camera. I excused myself and went inside to get it, then returned to the verandah.

“Now, son, Nanny don’want no pictures! Just take that box camera right back inside!”

I told her she looked extremely photogenic and begged her to let me take some pictures, thinking that I might not have too many more chances. She looked strong, but had lived at least eighty years.

“Don’want no pictures took I tell you.” She pursed her lips, squinted. “Don’need none.”

But I needed them, I insisted. Her two other grandchildren, my brother Peter and my sister Connie, had only one faded snapshot of her, taken in the 1930s. We needed something more recent.

“Might break yo camera,” she warned. “Busted every camera ever took a picture o me. Ugly like mud. No Lena Vaughn. So ’less you don’plan on takin pictures afta this . . .” She held the s, hissing.

I promised her I’d only take a few, though I wanted to take a whole roll of twelve. I asked her to sit up straight and smooth her skirt over her lap.

She shot me a fiery glance. “Makin’ me look like a glamour girl? Easy to see you don’have no respect for no women cept as glamour girls.”

I protested, asking her if I’d disrespected her since meeting her.

“Not me, you better not, but our kind, womankind. I done hear what you said last night afta supper. Didn’think Rose n me could hear, but we could hear you bold.” Nanny Eva sucked her tongue. “Bout them five Jewish men startin everythin.”

It hit me. After supper the night before, while the women cleared the table and washed the dishes, pretty-faced Aunt Rose bustling, Nanny Eva doing what she could at a slower pace, the men, Uncle GL and my father and I sitting at the dining room table, had conducted wide-ranging intrafamilial and intergenerational discussions, during the course of which the subject of the Jews came up. Uncle GL stood opposed. I doubt if he’d even met a Jew in his largely segregated life, but he blamed the Jews for the recent World War II. My father objected strenuously. He’d lived in New York City for a quarter century, coming to the conclusion that the Jews meant no harm, and occasionally helped Africamerica. Seventeen years old and snotty-nosed, I ventured an opinion expressed in the hallways of my private school, by students if not faculty, that all Western thought had evolved out of the philosophies of five Jewish men: Moses-Jesus-Marx-Freud-and-Einstein. Now Nanny Eva had taken offense.

“Five Jewish men startin everythin! Zifwomen didn’have no say in the world. What bout blessed Jesus Mama Mary? What the Catholics do widout her? Bet you never wonder why Creator God want to bring in Jesus by Mary, stead o just make him wid mud like he done Adam. Cos it done need a woman. N done forget bout sis Jochebed.”

I had followed her until the last. Lost a moment, my nervous index finger had squeezed off a shot, the first of the roll, which developed slightly blurred, her eyes wide open and eyebrows raised.

“Moses Mama. Saved the world n didn’get no credit fo it. Know why?” Some ideas take time to get through to me. Others come like lightning. Jokerbed (later I learned the correct spelling), mother of Moses, saved the world? Inwardly I scoffed as only a private school brat can scoff.

“Cos men write the story when it all said n done did. So they make it look like men save the day. Women steppin in when the goin get so bad only a woman can save it. Nobody thinkin bout writin it down when Hard Times holdin court. Everybody too busy scramblin. N women the best scramblers, eggs n otherwise. Cos women the first n best experimenters. Now put that box camera away n tell Nanny Eva what you want fo yo dinner!”

I tried to divert her, pointing out that I’d thought she wanted to tell me about Jochebed, the mother of Moses, unless perhaps Nanny Eva really had nothing worthwhile to say about this little-known woman.

Well, I shouldn’t have said that. The heat coming out of her eyes seemed to jelly the air between us. “Nothin worth sayin? Bout Moses Mama? Why son, what the most hard times you ever know?” While I thought of an answer, I took a second shot, the old lady glaring at me, really the top of my head as I bent looking into the viewfinder.

“Ever been a slave? Well, I never did actually be one, but did know plenty was as a girl n they told me all bout it. First off they buyin n sellin you like bulls and cows. Workin a place twenty years n have some roots, a good man n some chilren, then the owner dyin on you n the greedy relations come swoopin down sayin, I want the strong one n I want the cook n I will take that little cutie over there. Now who you think done have the hardest time in slavery? Why the women, son. A man, cept fo the few has some backbone, just thinkin bout...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593469933
• ISBN 13: 9780593469934
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: EDITIONS GALLIMARD; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien