Rails Under My Back - Hardcover

Allen, Jeffrey Renard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374246262 ISBN 13: 9780374246266

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

Synopsis

An astonishing debut novel, exploring the bonds, boundaries, and bondage of an African American family.

Rails Under My Back is a daring work of art that reveals its family theme in a stunning depiction of its paradoxically opposite: abandonment.

In this multifaceted, brilliantly colored, intensely musical novel, Jeffery Renard Allen tracks the interwoven lives of two brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is always full of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving the remaining family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic consequences. The multiple effects of the comings and goings are devastating: these are the almost mythic expression of the African American experience during the past half-century.

Rails Under My Back ranges, as the characters do, from the City, which is somewhat like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many "inner" and "outer" locales. One image that holds the family together is that of the railroads taking them from place to place-from the South to the North, from their living to their working quarters, from one form of bondage or freedom to another. The McShans and the Joneses somehow prevail, in their bigger-than-life way, and their story has extraordinary literary, religious, and historical power. Allen's voice is unforgettable.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeffery Renard Allen was born in Chicago in 1962. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has lived in New York City and taught at Queens College since the fall of 1992.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A powerful first novel that uses the railroad as a complex metaphorof hopeful reunion but also of separation and dispersalin telling the multi-generational stories of two closely related black American families. Brothers John and Lucius (``Lucifer'') Jones marry sisters Gracie and Sheila McShan, and both couples settle in an unnamed fictional big city that's an imaginative amalgam of New York and Chicago. In a vigorous, jazzy, stop-and-start style that deftly mixes crisp declarative sentences with fragmented dialogue and vigorous expostulations (and that intercuts present and past scenes with brief spasmodic flashbacks), Allen dramatizes both the sources (their families' histories) and the consequences (their children's fates) of the separate paths the Jones brothers follow (``Lucifer and John, brothers in the skin, but no closeness''). The novel both begins and comes to a climax with the streetwise ``business'' that engulfs Gracie and John's embittered teenaged son Jesus, whose temperament contrasts (as do his father's and uncle's) revealingly with that of his cousin Hatch, a soulful youngster bent on becoming a blues musician. The bulk of the story stretches forward and backward (often without helpful transitions, but always bursting quickly into vivid clarity) to focus on various members of the two families' several generations. Most compelling are: stern matriarch Lulu Mae McShan; hardworking, stoical Sheila and religion-bound Gracie; Sheila's daughter ``Porsha'' (Portia), who seeks escape from the city's snares and delusions in a commercial world of ``beauty'' and in her headlong affair with a handsome stud significantly nicknamed ``Deathrow''; and the flickering figure of John Jones, a troubled Vietnam vet and wanderer who cannot remain faithful to his wife or their kinwith devastating results memorably shown in a long, harrowing denouement. An exciting and rewarding successor to the legacy of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Allen worked eight years on this novel, and the result is a very impressive creation: the work of an unusually gifted, disciplined, and more than promising writer. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0374246262
• ISBN 13: 9780374246266
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352