To Be Black in America is to Walk with Fury
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To Be Black In America Is To Walk With Fury
A Vintage Shorts Original Selection (An eBook short. 30 pages.)
Twenty years ago, the publication of Nathan McCall’s groundbreaking memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler chronicled a black man’s passage from a life on the block, to the prison yards, to a journalism career that led to The Washington Post. McCall’s survival had been an act of defiance against an American culture and political system designed to keep black men down. Today, from the halls of a revered university, McCall gives thought to how many citizens remain conditioned to racial blindness and can’t see their way out. Our country’s promise of equality continues to ring hollow, as young black men are murdered on our streets and constrained behind bars in no less diminished numbers.
In this timely, intimate essay, Nathan McCall reflects on what it means to stand tall and fashion life on one’s own terms, and urges us to recognize that what will make America great is not growing its wealth or power overseas, but doing right by its people.
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Makes Me Wanna Holler
When Nathan McCall was 10, he played childhood games with neighborhood kids. At 14, the games had changed to gang fights, gang bangs and petty theft. When he graduated from high school, he was a sometime mugger and a father-to-be. And when he was sent to prison at age 20 for armed robbery, he had already shot a man and gotten involved with drugs.
Why did a smart kid from a caring family go so horribly wrong?
In his unflinchingly honest autobiography, Makes Me Wanna Holler, A Young Black Man in America, McCall looks back on his journey from troubled youth to professional journalist and shows that for black people in America the easy answers don’t always apply.
Makes Me Wanna Holler was a New York Times bestseller and won the Blackboard Book of the Year Award for 1995. In praise of the autobiography, noted scholar Henry Louis Gates wrote, “Sooner of later every generation must find its voice. It may be that ours belongs to Nathan McCall, whose memoir is…a stirring tale of transformation. He is a mesmerizing storyteller.”
Them
With the November 2007 publication of Them, McCall makes his fiction debut with a timely and penetrating story poised to generate the same seismic cultural impact as his nonfiction work. In Them (Atria Books; $25.00; Hardcover), he tackles the complex interplay of class, race and economics in today’s urban America.
Them tells the story of Barlowe Reed, a single, forty-something African American whose attempt to buy the rundown house he rents in an historic black neighborhood is confounded by the sudden encroachment of whites abandoning the suburbs for the inner city. When a white couple moves in next door, Barlowe develops a reluctant, complex friendship with Sandy Gilmore, the woman of the house, as they hold probing – and often frustrating – conversations over the backyard fence that Sandy’s husband has installed to impose distance and ensure safety.
Set in Atlanta, Ga., the story centers around a neighborhood called The Old Fourth Ward, made famous as the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr., and once the center of the civil rights movement. As more whites move into the neighborhood over time, conflict ensues. Rather than embracing King’s cherished principles of racial harmony, blacks and whites are drawn into wrenching neighborhood power struggles as they wrestle with alien world-views and the unsettling realities of gentrification.
In the midst of those struggles, Barlowe and Sandy are forced to re-examine their own long-held racial assumptions. Ultimately, they each wind up staking out positions that strain Sandy’s marriage and, increasingly, brings Barlowe into conflict with black neighbors he once counted as friends.
The conflict comes to a head as whites increasingly gain control of the community and blacks lament the transformation of the neighborhood that was once home to the “richest Negro street in the world.”
Them spotlights a vital social issue while delivering a memorable page-turner, reaffirming Nathan McCall’s status as an important voice and establishing him as an immensely gifted novelist.
The Georgia Center for the Book, the Writer’s Institute of Georgia Perimeter College and the Chattahoochee Review recently nominated Them as one of 10 finalists for the 2008 Townsend Prize. Every other year a board of judges awards the Townsend Prize for Fiction to an outstanding novel or short-story collection published by a Georgia writer during the past two years. The award is named for Jim Townsend, the founding editor of Atlanta magazine, and an early mentor to such Atlanta writers as Pat Conroy, Terry Kay, Bill Diehl, and Anne Rivers Siddons. The Townsend Prize consists of a $2,000 award and a silver tray of commemoration.
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What’s Going On
Current Affairs / African American Studies
With the same personal authority and exhilarating directness he brought to his account of his passage from a prison cell to the newsroom of The Washington Post, Nathan McCall delivers a series of front-line reports on the state of the races in today’s America. The resulting volume is guaranteed to shake the assumptions of readers of every pigmentation and political allegiance.
In What’s Going On, McCall adds up the hidden costs of the stereotype of black athletic prowess, which tells African American teenagers that they can only succeed on the white man’s terms. He introduces a fresh perspective to the debates on gangsta rap and sexual violence. He indicts the bigotry of white churches and the complacency of the black suburban middle class, celebrates the heroism of Muhammad Ali, and defends the truth-telling of Alice Walker. Engaging, provocative, and utterly fearless, here is a commentator to reckon with, addressing our most persistent divisions in a voice of stinging immediacy.
“Filled with essays that challenge America’s myths…. His easy reading style unsuspectingly pricks the conscience.” –USA Today
“[These essays] reinforce the moral authority McCall [brings]
to the issue of America’s racial schisms.”
–The New York Times Book Review
“Straightforward, quick-moving [and] erudite.”
–Philadelphia Inquirer