Black Folk Could Fly Read online

  BLACK

  FOLK

  COULD

  FLY

  SELECTED WRITINGS

  Randall Kenan

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Tayari Jones

  A Change Is Gonna Come

  A Letter to My Godson

  PART I

  COMFORT ME

  1.Scuppernongs and Beef Fat

  Some Things about the Women Who Raised Me

  2.The Rooster, the Rattlesnake, and the Hydrangea Bush

  3.Greens

  A Mess of Memories about Taste

  4.Swine Dreams

  Or, Barbecue for the Brain

  5.Chinquapin

  Elementary Particles

  6.Ode to Billie Joe

  7.Comfort Me with Barbecue

  8.Ghost Dog

  Or, How I Wrote My First Novel

  PART II

  WHERE AM I BLACK?

  9.Come Out the Wilderness

  10.Where Am I Black?

  Or, Something about My Kinfolks

  11.Blackness on My Mind

  12.An Ahistorical Silliness

  13.Notes Toward an Essay on Imagining Thomas Jefferson Watching a Performance of the Musical Hamilton

  14.The Many Lives of Eartha Kitt

  Or, Taking the Girl Out of the South

  15.The Good Ship Jesus

  Baldwin, Bergman, and the Protestant Imagination

  16.There’s a Hellhound on Your Trail

  How to See Like Gordon Parks

  PART III

  THAT ETERNAL BURNING

  17.Finding the Forgotten

  18.Chitlins and Chimichangas: A Southern Tale in Black and Latin

  a proposal for a documentary

  19.Letter from North Carolina

  Learning from Ghosts of the Civil War

  20.That Eternal Burning

  21.Love and Labor

  22.Letter to Self

  Editor’s Notes

  Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  TAYARI JONES

  Randall Kenan was an extraordinary writer and thinker, due in no small part to the fact that he was an exemplary human being. He listened as carefully as he spoke. He read even more than he wrote. He was somehow clear-eyed, yet optimistic, reverent of the past, but seldom nostalgic. He was a country boy and a man of the world. I was fortunate to know him as a mentor and friend, but if you are holding this book in your hands, then you are positioned to receive your blessing as well. These twenty-one works of nonfiction offer an experience that is like a walking expedition through a beautiful and intricate landscape, led by a tour guide who visits the popular attractions but also insists on stopping by the ancient cemeteries, telling the stories behind every stone. He will invite you to high tea, also insisting that you stop for a pulled-pork sandwich and, when you get to the pit, the man behind the grill will call him by name. Follow me, Kenan seems to say with every word, every image. I will show you the way.

  For Kenan, all roads lead to—or from—Chinquapin, North Carolina. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to unmarried parents, and at the age of six weeks old, he went to live with his father’s people, who gave him a legacy rich beyond measure. If you are to understand anything about Kenan, you must know this. His origin story undergoes very slight variations in each telling; the difference is in the tone rather than the substance. He was “stolen away” from New York. Or, his grandfather “sent for” him. He identifies himself as “illegitimate,” with irony, I believe. When he describes his grandfather as “kindhearted,” this is deliberate understatement. What remains constant is the fierce love and connection he feels for the family who raised him. The love shared between Kenan and his kin is enhanced by the unbidden nature of the relationship. He revels in the bond the way you might revel in finding romantic love—rejoicing in the wonder and miracle of it all.

  The stories of Kenan’s childhood signal the complexity of the man, and indeed the writer, he would become. Fans of his fiction will see the obvious likeness between the imaginary town of Tims Creek and the very real setting of Chinquapin. But in his nonfiction, we can see the ways that his remarkable early life is yellow bricks on the avenue he would travel for the rest of his days. In Chinquapin, “unincorporated, and rural, largely tobacco fields and cornfields, and hog farms”—he learned that identity could be kaleidoscopic, colorful, and breathtaking, like the aurora borealis he saw over his cousin’s house when he was eleven years old.

  Imagine the boy-Randall and the seeming contradictions of his young life. He was born in the North but raised in the South. His parents were unable to care for him, but his other relatives loved him so much there was a little scuffle over who would be granted the pleasure of his custody. He was so country that one of his earliest memories was a fight with a rooster and his first glimpse into the workings of sexuality was witnessing a rendezvous between hogs. Yet in this same environment, he became an insatiable reader with a particular penchant for science fiction. Born in 1963, he lived a racially segregated life, but came to be an “affirmative action baby,” matriculating at the University of North Carolina.

  With this rich backstory, it may seem obvious that Kenan would become a great writer. However, his early ambition was to be a scientist. Luckily (for us), a biology teacher pulled him aside. “There’s no shame in being a writer,” he said, gently nudging Kenan toward his destiny.

  As his muse, Kenan chose “Blackness,” a terrain so vast, beautiful, and tangled that no writer—even one as brilliant as Kenan—could ever map it out. But the pleasure is in the journey. To get to the heart of Blackness as “an emotional condition,” Kenan mines his own family history, the stories of the dead in a neglected Richmond cemetery, the primacy of basketball, gospel, blues, the Bible, and anything else that involves humanity.

  ___________

  For a man of Kenan’s generation, any quest to understand Blackness would obviously lead to James Baldwin. Despite the obvious parallels between the two men—both Black, both queer, both writers—the two stood on opposites sides of a generational and regional divide. Kenan had to learn to love the work of Baldwin, to see beyond the obvious to access their shared humanity. With Kenan, every route is circuitous and unanticipated. The highway to his fulsome appreciation of James Baldwin passes through the great Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman.

  As comfortable in the cineplex as the library archives, Kenan held great appreciation for pop culture. He was especially fond of the chanteuse Eartha Kitt. While many people remember her for her trademark purr and audacious holiday ditty “Santa Baby,” in her Kenan saw much more. He admired her diva persona—who doesn’t?—but remembers the day she made Lady Bird Johnson cry by speaking about the evils of racism and imperialism. On one occasion, he had the opportunity to meet the star in her dressing room and walked away with a new understanding of Southern hospitality, and Southern identity more generally.

  Who would be surprised that a writer of such vast curiosity and ambition that he attempted to define Blackness would attempt the same with Southernness? His investigation of Blackness sent him on an adventure that allowed him to meet with fascinating folks all over the country. His investigation of Southernness allowed him to eat his way across the region.

  Kenan was a great student of Southern foodways. He studied in the library, reading the reflections of scholars and practitioners. But he also studied the old-fashioned way—with a napkin tucked into his collar and fork in hand. He had strong opinions about the best way to prepare barbeque—though he would eat it whether it was served with or without sauce and whether that sauce was tomato-, mustard-, or vinegar-based. To him, the scuppernong is a perfect grape and one of the great cultural treasures forever lost to humanity is his great-a
unt’s recipe for muscadine wine. From the flavor of that wine, “harsh, sweet, and bracing,” he learned one of life’s great lessons: “You don’t drink life because it’s good for you, you drink life because it’s good.”

  As we end this book, reaching the conclusion of this guided excursion, we realize that we have been gifted a tour of the world, when we thought we were just visiting the South, mostly in this small town of Chinquapin. And perhaps we thought the voice of our guide was the words of a single man, but that one man contains multitudes, much in the way a single drop of pondwater viewed under a microscope is revealed to be a universe.

  The title of this book, Black Folk Could Fly, is a reference to the African American folktale of the Africans who flew back to Iboland after the slave ships arrived on the shores of America. Kenan ends his letter to his godson with a suggestion that he take comfort in this mythology. However, I can’t imagine that Kenan himself longed to fly away. Perhaps the boy-scientist in him would appreciate a celestial view of this planet or an overhead view of the aurora borealis that so captivated him as a child. But Randall Kenan, the man revealed on these pages, was most at home when he was at home. He returned to North Carolina before “reverse migration” was a chic term tossed about on the pages of the New York Times.

  When I met him, the year was 2005. I was a debut novelist and he was the lone Black faculty member at the Sewanee Writers Conference, the premier gathering for writers in the South. He and I were seated in the guesthouse on campus, known as the Rebel’s Rest.

  “How do you stand it?” I asked him, crinkling my nose as though some Confederate dust might somehow soil my red-and-white dress.

  “It’s our home, too,” he said.

  Recently, I found a photo, likely taken that same day. I am leaning over the table, feeding Randall from a ceramic bowl. His eyes are shut and his lips smile even as they close over the spoon. Try as I might, I don’t remember what was in that bowl, but I know that it was Southern and I know that it was good.

  ___________

  Randall Kenan died in 2020. He was laid to rest at the Kenan Family Cemetery in Chinquapin, North Carolina. May his words live on as he rests in peace among his kin.

  BLACK

  FOLK

  COULD

  FLY

  A Change

  Is Gonna Come

  A Letter to My Godson

  One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constants, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able to be willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal.

  —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  Dearest Jailen,

  Nine months before you were born, your grandfather, Mr. John Wallace Brown, died.

  In every aspect but one, he was my father. I first met him when I was five years old, visiting your grandmother’s home in Harlem, USA. He took a shine to me straightaway. Recordings exist of me asking him silly questions. (“Can you eat a thousand biscuits?”) He took the entire family to Chinatown, I remember, and he took me to his gym. Your grandfather had been a boxer, but by the time I met him, in his late thirties, he had become a trainer of other boxers. The gym was in uptown Manhattan in the 150s, a dankish, run-down place, smelling of sweat and blood and smelling salts, but it held my fascination for decades. (A few years before he died, I casually mentioned to your grandfather that I had read the great jazz trumpeter, Miles Davis, liked to box. Your grandfather said, Of course, he knew that. Davis used the same gym. You saw him, he told me.)

  The year your mother was born, your grandfather and grandmother left New York for North Carolina, your maternal homeland. I was ten years old that year.

  Many people had an enormous influence on my mischievous mind—undoubtedly the greatest of them being your great-grandmother, who took me in as an infant. But the impact your grandfather had on me was profound.

  He had been a civil servant for the City of New York for over twenty years, but he dressed like a duke and carried himself like a crown prince (a large part of that coming from the physical grace he had learned as a boxer; part coming from a certain confidence and leonine heart). He was not himself college educated, but he was more curious about the world than most college professors I would come to know, and he was possessed of a wisdom forged in hand-to-hand combat with life. He bequeathed to me at an early age a love of jazz, especially Wes Montgomery, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan, (“the Divine One”). He respected Dinah Washington the way some people respect the Pope.

  He was independent, but not haughty. He believed in decency and courtesy. If someone demonstrated a need, he would lend the proverbial hand, though he was always on the lookout for being taken advantage of. He blamed this innate suspicion and a dogged frugality on being raised during the Great Depression.

  He was not a perfect man. He would be the first to admit to a Tasmanian-devil temper. But I never saw him harm anyone, though I well knew he was more than capable.

  Chinquapin was and is a small, unincorporated village, and the only fire protection is volunteer. Soon after arriving as a full-time resident, your grandfather joined the Fire and Rescue Squad as a fireman. At the time, few of the Black men in the community felt welcome on the force, founded and run by the local white farmers and schoolteachers and plumbers and truck drivers who owned homes in the area. But your grandfather often said: If I expect them to come to my house if it’s on fire, I should be willing to go to theirs. He studied at the local community college for his certification as an emergency medical technician. (I still remember the things he taught me about checking someone’s vital signs; about how to deal with someone having an epileptic seizure; about how to stanch the flow of blood and figure out if a fracture is simple or compound.)

  Most weekends, the Fire and Rescue Squad would hold Saturday benefit suppers selling fried chicken, pork barbecue (a local favorite and specialty), slaw, potato salad, hushpuppies. Friday afternoons men would begin slow-roasting the whole hog in a shed behind the firehouse. This process lasted all night. Often on those Friday nights, your grandfather would be on call there overnight and would help watch the hog. Many times I would stay with him, and we would roast a chicken along with the hog—wrapped in aluminum foil, drenched in a local sauce, spicy and good, placed among the coals. That chicken still ranks as some of the best food I have ever tasted.

  On at least two occasions, in the very wee hours, your grandfather answered calls from accidents involving my classmates. One involving a fatal gunshot wound, one involving a ruinous car accident. Being there, watching him deal with the death of young people, was an odd place for me; the sorts of events that brace the soul and make you ponder your own mortality and the randomness of life. These were people I knew. On those nights, after delivering the bodies to the hospital, your grandfather would be tired but restless, and he would wax philosophical, speaking of many things, trying in his way to make sense of the world for him and for me. He was a great talker.

  Years later, as an adult, I would come to devote many years to traveling and to writing about African American lives, and to a quest toward understanding the meaning of “Blackness,” a journey that continues for me. During these wanderings and wonderings I always return to your grandfather and to the many lessons he taught me, both directly and by example. Of the many things I learned from all the people I’ve written about all across North America, the consonant element about their identity, the thing that forged who they were, what gave them their vision of th
emselves and the world, was this sense of family, those early people who helped shape who they were—this was the bedrock of their identity. Of course this is true for everyone, of any color, but it is surprising how often we let that truth slip from our thinking. Like them, you will need to know a great deal about your past, where you come from, what your people were like—really like—what they thought of you, in order to better understand yourself. You need to know how your own blood lived and faced adversity and of what their character was composed. And though your own journey will no doubt be easier for you than it had been for your grandfather and for me, your path will not necessarily be an easy one. So much of that passage will ultimately depend upon you.

  For many in the world, in their jaded eyes, alas, now and for many years to come, you will be a demon. For the next thirty years or so, you will be among the most despised group in your homeland: the young African American male. The Black male. This will not be a reality; you are much more than that. But, as an idea, this view of you will have great power. The world will, with a great deal of might and resource, try to define you. But you must know better. You must remember you are not a problem.

  These days people can be so trite when discussing the idea of race and its attendant problems. Too many reach instantly for bromides and hackneyed phrases that merely restate positions, rehash old battles, resurrect silly stereotypes. These silly ways of thinking aren’t going away anytime soon, but you need not subscribe to them or pay them much heed. The world is no longer—it never really was—about simply Black and white. Don’t heed people who tell you differently. The old American order of white versus Black is fast changing, and you will have a real opportunity (one of the greatest opportunities in history) to break free of such limited thinking. Many people are threatened by this new and burgeoning reality.