Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century - Hardcover

Kenan, Randall

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679408274 ISBN 13: 9780679408277

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

Walking on Water is a profoundly moving and provocative account--both timely and enduring--of the thoughts, the feelings, the lives, of African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era of the nineties, by the highly praised author of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and A Visitation of Spirits.

Traversing the country over a period of six years, Randall Kenan talked to nearly two hundred African Americans, whose individual stories he has shaped into a continent-sized tapestry of black American life today. He starts his journey in the famous, long-standing black resort community on Martha's Vineyard, travels up through New England, and heads west, visiting Chicago, Minneapolis (home of the singer Prince and  of the Pilgrim Baptist Church, with its seven choirs and vast outreach), Coeur d'Alene (skinhead capital of the world), Seattle, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. He moves on to the South, to Louisiana and St. Simons Island, where so many slave ships landed, and ends up at home in North Carolina, telling his own family's story.

Kenan talks to a wide variety of people: to the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West; to the Republican congressman from Alaska, Walter Furnace; to a rising young air force major whose father was lynched in Alabama when the major was a child; to a vocal welfare mom. He interviews a retired railroad conductor, an energetic "child of the dream" majoring in public relations at the University of North Dakota, Atlanta's new Panther-style militants, a bisexual AIDS activist, a twelve-year-old girl who fought the racism at her elementary school with a stunning essay, a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah. He speaks to teachers, retired maids, filmmakers, dancers, entrepreneurs, cyberspace whizzes, lawyers, farmers, painters, and many, many more.

The people we meet--each with his or her own unique slant on black life--are fascinating. And as we listen to them, a multifaceted portrait of the black community at the end of the century emerges, with its diverse and little-known local cultures, its widely varying accommodations to integration, its desire to keep the soul-satisfying elements of black life intact while integrating with the larger society, its many ways of coping with the discrimination that remains: its triumphs, its problems, its optimism in spite of all the odds.

Walking on Water is a richer, sharper, fuller picture than we have yet had of the astonishing experience of being black in America.

About this title

Review

This delicious and diverse sampler of African American life culled from over 200 interviews by author Randall Kenan shows that the American idea of "blackness" is as vast as the United States itself and cannot be pinned down to simplistic sociological clichés. "More than a book of analysis," Kenan writes, "this is my book of soul searching. I am asking who we are." Crisscrossing North America, he visits some familiar settings--Oakland, New Orleans, and New York--and some unusual places (including Bangor, Maine, and Maidstone, Saskatchewan) to discover how everyday black folks deal with issues of race, identity, and nationality. From a black minister in Mormon Utah to a female judge in skinhead country to the state of blacks in the would-be utopia of Seattle, Kenan paints a revealing portrait of a people whose presence and perseverance may forge a better America in the 21st century. --Eugene Holley Jr.

From the Publisher

"In his refusal to claim any special insight into the private dimensions of negritude, with his willingness to grant all of us our human complexities, and through his generosity of spirit that is accepting and understanding of our common frailties, Randall Kenan has fashioned a book that puts aside the "blacker than thou" sectarian arguments of yesterday and studies African-Americans as they live at the end of the century in vagriegated social, economic and political situations. In lonely New England or on Chicago's teeming South Side, he takes the temperature of 'the race,' and tells the complicated truth as he finds it, good news or bad. I salute his compassion and honesty, and am grateful for his ambition, the reach of it and the grasp."
--Anthony Walton

"Here is the best of the documentary tradition--its narrative possibilities realized wonderfully, suggestively by a talented wrtier of fiction who uses his storytelling skills to present a range of Americans to the rest of us, their fellow citizens."
--Robert Coles

"Somehow Randall Kenan has managed the impossible: weaving ethnography and poetry into a wonderful narrative about what it means to be black at the end of the century. Walking on Water astutely comprehends the complexity and beautiful contrdictions in the contour of black life. Reading Walking on Water is an extraordinary sojourn."
--Manning Marable, Professor of History, Director, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University

"[This book] pulsates with the multilayered rhythms of an epic . . . A lush tapestry of place, people, and personal reflection that is much more than the sum of its parts . . . Kenan's masterwork is a panoramic document of African-American life at the end of the 20th century. It is also a labor of love and a majestic offering to the future."
--Salim Muwakkil, Chicago Tribune

"A work of insight and compassion . . . What makes Walking on Waterso unusual is Kenan's willingness to look beyond the usual places, places not exactly known for the density of their black population, like Bangor, ME, and Grand Forks, ND."
--Alan Wolfe, The New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679408274
• ISBN 13: 9780679408277
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 670