Writing for the New Yorker in 2018, Kathryn Schulz describes William Melvin Kelley as “the lost giant of American literature.”[1] In 1962, the twenty-four-year-old Kelley, a Harvard dropout, made a remarkable debut with his critically acclaimed novel A Different Drummer. As Schulz reports, “it promptly earned him comparisons to an impressive range of literary greats, from William Faulkner to Isaac Bashevis Singer to James Baldwin. It also got him talked about, together with the likes of Alvin Ailey and James Earl Jones, as among the most talented African American artists of his generation.”[2] Following his debut success, Kelley published four more books over a span of six years: Dancers on the Shore (1964), A Drop of Patience (1965), dem (1967), and Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970). But then he never published another book. “How did he disappear?” Schulz asks.[3] This is the question I had on my mind on July 30, 2015, during an interview with Kelley at his Harlem home.
I had written to Kelley out of the blue in late July of 2015.[4] “Dear Br. Davenport,” he responded four days later, “I guess you just better come here with a recorder and talk to me.”[5] He left me his phone number, and we spoke on the phone the next day. “Come visit me in Harlem, the center of the world,” Kelley said.[6] He asked that I bring him cranberry juice—he suffered from kidney disease and had lost his leg.[7] He had weathered acute health issues since at least 1998 and was probably lucky to be alive.[8]
Kelley lived in a garden-style apartment with his wife, Aiki, and their chihuahua, Gordita. Seated in the living room surrounded by works of art, Kelley and I spoke for nearly four hours. Far from the recluse I had imagined, he was warm, generous, and comical. Kelley had the gift of mimicry and adopted perhaps a dozen voices: his grandmother, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, a Rastafarian, an elite Brit, Mark Twain, a BBC radio host, as well as Southern and French accents.
As I came to realize, William Melvin Kelley had not disappeared after all. Kelley, who referred to the post-1965 years as an ongoing period of “dis//integration,” had chosen exile on multiple fronts. “I left America because they killed Malcolm. I knew that the movement was over,” he said.[9] In fact, he left the US for a decade, from 1967-77. During these years he spent time in France and Jamaica and converted to Judaism. Deported from Jamaica in 1977 for overstaying his visa, he chose to live in “voluntary poverty” in Harlem until 1989 when he began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in the Bronx.[10] He taught there until his death in 2017.
Experimenting with phonetics, linguistic abstractions, and typography in dem (1967) and the Joycean Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970), Kelley recorded the ongoing sense of “dis//integration” through what Kinohi Nishikawa calls his “typographic imagination.”[11] As Nishikawa describes, Kelley “manipulated the appearance of his books’ pages to denaturalize readers’ perception of voice, speech, subjectivity, and race.”[12] Following the Joycean Dunfords Travels Everywheres, the publishing industry ignored him. As Nishikawa explains, “Simply put, he could not convince agents or editors that he had another book in him. Manuscripts were returned with tepid feedback, and correspondence with people who had once touted him became strained.”[13] Kelley believed he was reaching his artistic apex, but tastemakers disagreed. Although he never published another full-length book, he never stopped writing.
Without a publisher, and perhaps also sensing that in Dunfords Travels Everywheres he had stretched language farther than publishers wanted it to go, Kelley added videography to his artistic repertoire in the 1980s. He described himself as profoundly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson.[14] Aiki Kelley wrote that he was a “friend and disciple” of Bresson.[15] In 1988 Kelley wrote, produced, and starred in the experimental Excavating Harlem in 2290, a film about archaeologists in the future and their speculations about life in twentieth century Harlem. He also kept video diaries of day-to-day life in Harlem. To his recollection, he gave at least 138 hours of his video diaries to Emory when he gave them his papers. Emory digitized these diaries and then returned them to Kelley. Aiki Kelley then invited film editor Benjamin Oren Abrams to review the footage. This footage became the source material for The Beauty That I Saw, a fifty-three-minute film that premiered at the 2015 Harlem International Film Festival.
Six weeks after our interview, Kelley invited me to the premiere of The Beauty That I Saw. He reserved the seat next to his for me. I was astonished by the film, a visual memoir of life in Harlem during the height of the crack epidemic. The film won a Harlem Spotlight Award in recognition of the best local documentary film. As I left the premiere, I promised Kelley I’d send him a manuscript of the interview to edit. We were going to review it together to make any necessary clarifications; however, we never had the opportunity.[16]
On February 1, 2017, William Melvin Kelley died at the age of seventy-nine. Fifty-odd years before, he had revealed to an interviewer his hopes for his career. “Perhaps I’m trying to follow the Faulknerian pattern, although I guess it’s really Balzacian when you connect everything,” Kelley said. “I’d like to be eighty years old and look up at the shelf and see that all of my books are really one big book.”[17]
Kelley’s books have been reissued in recent years, largely to positive reviews, and Dis//Integration: 2 Novelas & 3 Stories & a Little Play was posthumously published in October of 2024. There seems to be something of a Kelley renaissance occurring. This interview, which is believed to be the last one he ever gave, has never been published before now. I hope it may be of some help to readers and scholars.
AMD: So, let’s talk about the new one.
WMK: You want to do that first?
AMD: We can do that one first, or we can start from the beginning. Whatever you want to do.
WMK: I don’t know. Trying to think of…
AMD: We can start with education, if you want, and literacy.
WMK: Well, that’s a good segue, because the new novel is about an African American man who has spent most of his life with European Americans. You know, one of the first people to be really integrated. So, like me, you know, my early street life was with Italians, and then, first grade, they put me into Fieldston. I passed some foolish test. I think that I was—the enigma about me was—interesting. That is to say that I didn’t speak like an African American. I spoke more like a lower-class Italian American, or a New Yorker…I didn’t have an accent.
AMD: Yeah, you sound like a New Yorker.
WMK: Right. [Etonian accent]: Well, when I was studying English, I really tried very hard to acquire a British accent which is called Received Pronunciation. R.P. is the language system that they modeled for Henry Higgins, whose name was Daniel Jones. It helped George Bernard Shaw to lose his Northern Ireland accent so that he could penetrate further into English society.
AMD: Yes.
WMK: So, I learned that method. And every day in Jamaica I’d listen to the BBC. The BBC would come on and say: [BBC broadcasting voice]: “BBC World Service. The news read by Lindsay MacDonald.”
AMD: You have a gift for these voices.
WMK: I love voices.
AMD: Which comes through in your writing.
WMK: Yes. Where was I?
AMD: You were young. You were in the first grade. You were speaking—
WMK: Oh, yes. I was speaking like Rocky. [Child’s voice]: “Come over here, Billy!” [Rocky voice]: “Yeah, wuzz happenin’ over here?”
WMK (cont.): I was bigger than everybody, because I was a year older. I did first grade twice. And I was smart. My reading was already getting bad. In other words, one of the aspects of that education was that you’d have to get up and read in a circle—
AMD: Is this a definition problem, or is this just a slow—
WMK: Well, I always explain it as a resentment problem.
AMD: Resentment?
WMK: Because I was always only interested in drawing, painting, and art. And I didn’t—I was not drawn to writing. I had radio. I loved radio.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: If I had a choice between playing out in the winter, and sledding, and snowing, which we used to do with my friends, or being inside, listening to the radio, and eating Campbell’s soup—I loved the radio. I’d go out and play a little while and say, “Okay, fellas, I’ll see ya!” And then back into the house, take off my shoes, take off my galoshes. And I used to listen to the same shows every day. And one of the things it taught me as a writer is how to plot. And how a story is constructed, you know—the three acts, and the conflict. And so that’s what I learned from radio. I learned to write from radio. Emphasis on dialogue. But I didn’t want to read. And, in fact, I pretty much got away—I was very charming—so I got away with not reading or being able to read…Any of the long books that were—I read Dickens. I loved Dickens. I loved Tale of Two Cities. I loved Great Expectations. That’s still one of my favorite books. But the Russians—if I had to read Crime and Punishment—straight to the College Outline Series. I’d get the plot summary and write the paper. I was a good writer already. My father was a writer.
AMD: That’s right.
WMK: He had a nice, great essay style. A real newspaperman. He patterned himself on newspaper writing and George Bernard Shaw. I didn’t understand it. I went up to his library, when I was—even all my life—and at the top would be Frank Harris. That I never had the guts to read. You know that? My Life and Loves by Frank Harris?
AMD: No.
WMK: It’s pornographic. This English writer decided to tell everything, including the fucking and everything…And all of Shaw! I could never quite figure it out until years later, when I was in my thirties, and I realized that Shaw had a fabulous style. You could learn to write just from reading him. I’m not sure whether he [WMK’s father] was attracted to Pygmalion, but I was.
AMD: Attracted to what?
WMK: Pygmalion.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: And I saw that on TV one night. Used to have movie shows. Had them twice a night. They’d show the same movie on Channel 9. They’d show Pygmalion with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. And then I was always already interested in voice by that time. And so, when I saw that, you know that story, right? It’s My Fair Lady. It was so right, so true. Because going from class to class, place to place, I had to acquire those accents.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: And it wasn’t hard. I just spoke back to the person the way they spoke to me. And then later on I got the tools for that when I went to acting school and learned phonetics. And once I learned phonetics, then I could see exactly where my mouth was supposed to be.
AMD: Now, I hear that your journal that you’ve written in since 1959—
WMK: Yes.
AMD: —is written in the phonetic style.
WMK: Yeah, up until about, I guess, the nineties.
AMD: Is that true?
WMK: Yeah. That was about keeping my soul together.
AMD: Keeping yourself—
WMK: You know, Joyce says about the English language—he says to the Englishman, “My soul frets in the shadow of your language.” And by that what he means is that you came to Ireland, and you imposed this language on us.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: And you always will do it better than we’ll do it because it’s not really ours.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: Except he’s actually being ironic.
AMD: Sure.
WMK: Because he was the best writer ever in English, except Shakespeare.
AMD: When you’re saying it’s mostly—that you wrote in phonetics in your diary—mostly…to do what? I missed the last word. To practice?
WMK: To deny the culture.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: In other words, when you have phonetics, it doesn’t even have to look like—it doesn’t look like—English. And so your mind is now looking at a different language.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: And, in fact, if I was king, I would institute the forty-six letter phonetic alphabet, make every African American learn it, and begin to communicate totally in that language. Take it away from him—give us another one. I think that’s one of the things that’s wrong with most of the Indian languages now: they make them too hard to learn. Whereas with the phonetic alphabet, I could learn any language. If I went to France and wrote in phonetics rather than French, I could understand how to pronounce it immediately. And then I would have to be able to translate from that into French.
AMD: Did you get interested in phonetics only when you went to acting school?
WMK: That was the first time.
AMD: Okay.
WMK: We’re kind of off the point, but, anyway, that’s the way my conversations are anyway. I was in the theater at Harvard. Harvard happened to have a semi-professional theater. We got a certain amount of money from the Harvard student government. Every house, I think, had enough money to be able to put on one play every year. Some houses were more—you know what I mean by “houses”?
AMD: Yeah, sure.
WMK: Some were more ambitious than others, had more money. There were several millionaires involved in theater at Harvard. For a production they might even get the producer credit, and they’d put up a couple thousand more dollars to make a great set, to have great costumes. So, I was working with Leverett House, which was way out there. I don’t know how I got involved with them. They were poor, but they were actors. I guess I was introduced to Leverett House by a casting call for A Streetcar Named Desire. And, even then, since I didn’t think race was too much, I went and tried out for it. I was about, maybe, five years too soon in terms of getting the part of Stanley. But the director realized I was a good actor, so he put me in a minor role, which I did very good in. There are some scenes where he’s playing poker with the guys, with Stanley, and it worked out for everyone…
AMD: You had good timing.
WMK: Yeah. And at the same time, I was in some kind of musical with another, what was it called, Drum and Fife? It was kind of a lesser Hasty Pudding theatrical organization. They put on one musical every year. And one of my hidden weapons going all the way back to first and second grade—in second grade I had an absolutely pure soprano voice.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: “Put him in this chorus.” That kind of voice.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: “Let him sing the solo at Christmastime.” I never did because my parents always held me back from it. But my mother played the piano. A real Creole. Didn’t know anything about blues. Played show tunes.
AMD: Yeah, Gershwin.
WMK: Yeah, Gershwin.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: Cole Porter. And we would go to Macy’s and buy the sheet music and come back home and she’d play them, and I’d sing them. All these popular songs that I knew. And I guess this fits into my education: one day Mrs. Mirsky at Fieldston said, “Does anyone know a song that they would like to sing?” And one kid [stands up and croaks; child’s voice]: “Twinkle twinkle little star…” And I get up and I start to sing, [Frank Sinatra voice]: “What is America to me? / A name, a map, a flag I see / A certain word, democracy! / What is America to me? // The house I live in / A plot of earth, a street…” Frank Sinatra.
AMD: Yeah, man.
WMK: I revered Sinatra. Because I was an Italian!
AMD: Sure! From the Bronx!
WMK: I was an Italian! And the guys used to love it! I would learn Sinatra songs and, on summer nights, we had a vacant lot near us, with overgrown grass and a couple of rocks in a circle, and we’d be out there, and I’d sing [Frank Sinatra voice]: “Put your dreams away for another day…” So, I had that, and they gave me a number, and I brought the house down. “Encore, encore!” I got to be a little theater personality there. I directed a play. I’m writing about that now. ‘58 or ‘59, I directed a little Gogol play, which was presented as being a comedy, but there was nothing in it. So, I was smart enough with the theater to know, oh, fuck it, I’ll paint their faces.
AMD: You’d do what?
WMK: Paint their faces. So, the good guy had a green face, the villain had a black face, and someone else had a red face, some guy had an orange face. And then the set designer caught on and she put it against a stark background. It was all right. I give it a B. But even then, the Boston Herald and all the newspapers in Boston would come over and review those shows. One of the directors said, “Come on, let’s do Othello. We’ll get Mikel Lambert.” She’s an actress to this day. And I read with her. And I had all the passion. I had all the juice, you know, of Othello. But I sounded stupid. [Rocky voice]: “To be or not to be. That is the question. Whether to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…” You know, like that. He said, “Wow, this would be great.” And I think I’d already decided to take a term off…So, at that point, they said, “Come on, we need to do something to get rid of the Bronx accent.” I said, “Yeah, sure, I can work on that.” So, they said, “We have a place to send you.” They sent me to an acting school. They sent me to one of the courses taught by an old actress from back in the thirties and forties and fifties, and she taught us phonetics. Once I learned phonetics, well, it was a whole other way to look at English. So, when I was coming back from Jamaica in the seventies, I’d known such freedom in Jamaica, freedom of my soul that I’d never known in America. And so, I said, how can I preserve this? I’d already been writing in phonetics, but how do I preserve this in my heart? And so, that’s when I began to keep the journal in phonetics. So, that’s why I began the journal.
AMD: So, you don’t have phonetics in Dancers on the Shore.
WMK: What, the use of phonetics?
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: Well, no, you can’t use phonetics—
AMD: But you do have it in dem in the preface and at the very end, with the dream sequence. A little bit.
WMK: Yeah. Yeah, a little bit.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: Yes. But not really.
AMD: How much does it figure into the new one? Does it at all?
WMK: Well, that’s why I got to Joyce. Because what Joyce did without changing characters—Actually, George Bernard Shaw left money for a foundation or something to develop a new alphabet, but the English language, it never caught on. He had the same idea, that we have to get away from the old spelling. You know, like, in phonetics, enough is the sound of ɪ, n, ʌ, f. Phonetically, it’d be four sounds. As opposed to E-N-O-U-G-H. Or all of the words with O-U-G-H as an ending. There’s though, there’s through, there’s enough, there’s rough, there’s bought. All those have…it’s one of those things that makes English hard to learn. The spelling is totally inconsistent, whereas with phonetics it’s absolutely logical at every moment. So, I was into that. I had written pretty much standard books, if you will, until the sixties came along and I really wanted to write dem. This leads to the book. Strangely enough, I almost recognized it without recognizing it that I usually write about white people. A Different Drummer is about white people. dem is about Mitchell Pierce. And this new one is about Chig Dunford, Charles Dunford. There’s some stories about him in Dancers on the Shore, and now this is him growing up and working only with white people, you know, either as…well, whatever. He’s at the end of his life, he’s—well, he’s in his later years. The last story—he’s fifty—is about his working at a university in Vermont where he’s the only spook for miles…I taught up there for a tiny bit of time. It happened that the security guard was an ex-Philadelphia cop, a brownskin man, and one night I found myself alone with him and I said, “Hey, man, where’s the black community?” [WMK adopts the security guard’s persona: he smiles big and pumps his thumbs back at himself, as if to say, “You’re looking at it!”]
AMD: Oh, shit. That’s good.
WMK: That’s good, right?
WMK: I think Vermont has the least African American people of any state. But I call it Dis//Integration. Because what I’ve experienced is, for one reason or another, white people never let you in. Maybe your family. Maybe your father. But it’s rare that they’ll let you in. They’re always going to say something that—even if they don’t mean it—will embarrass you, or illustrate their racism, or whatever. Because racism is a disease…unless you are aware of the fact that you have really been cured of it. And the only way you can really be cured of it is to give up race. Give it up altogether. Don’t even think about it. Don’t even think about people in those terms. I mean, I see you for the mixed person that you are, you know, whereas it’d be very easy to see you as white.
AMD: Sure.
WMK: But then you get back to culture and class and education. And all that stuff. Race defines people by language, by religion, and by environment. If the ideas of race had come first, and then the slavery, that would be one way. That’d be another way. That’d be even honest. But the slavery started, and then they said, well, we better come up with some reason.
AMD: To keep all the lower-class people from coming together.
WMK: That’s exactly true. That’s another way to look at it, too. That’s right, because they suppressed anything like that, you know, where poor white farmers tried to get together with the slaves. That’s what the KKK was all about. They were formed to overcome that movement…
WMK (cont.): Where were we? So that’s where I started to work on my accent. Became aware of it. Because, basically, what it is—I think I can probably teach somebody out of most language impediments. Because, like, there are some little girls who learn sugar, or something like that. And then they add the ʃ sound to something else that they’re saying—there are all kinds of things that develop like that…For a minute I said, well, maybe that’s what we should do: we should all learn the British accent and let them deal with that! Because British accents have power. I mean, if I call on the phone [Etonian accent]: “I’d like to be in touch with so-and-so, I’d like the latest times of the planes taking off…” You can hear them scurrying back there to get those times together.
AMD: You did that in Jamaica?
WMK: Well, that’s when I started to do it. Then I would do my ordinary American accent. And that’d be, like, I’d get less respect, and not as quick. And then I’d get down into [Southern drawl]: “Hi, y’all, I’m having a great time in Jamaica. Oh, this is fabulous! We all black folks together!”
WMK (cont.): You’d get less of a reaction…[Jamaican accent]: “Me want to know, mon…” And I studied that one, too. And you can grade the different reactions right to the accent. On the phone now I do it, too. And now, also, you have all these other people who aren’t even in America, some of them, and so we can make a choice about whatever accent should I be using. Even in an Indian accent, you know, they treat you with respect, but if you talk in an American voice, eh, they couldn’t care less.
AMD: So, your characters—they are these voices that are in your head all the time?
WMK: Radio.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: Radio.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: You know, they always did be in my head, from the beginning. Me in my little bed, in my little room, listening to The Lone Ranger. The beginning, Lone Ranger and Tonto riding along. They had gunfire.
[Gunfire]: BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!
[Hums theme music]
[Narrator voice]: “Over the hill, five bullies are harassing a cute little ranch girl…”
[Lone Ranger voice]: “You better back up off of that girl, stranger.”
[Perpetrator voice]: “Yeah, and who’re you?”
[Gunshot]: PING!
WMK (cont.): Lone Ranger would hit you in your hand! Never killed a man, but he’d hit you in the hand, shoot that gun—PING!—right out of your hand, with his left hand for God’s sake! Because he had two guns! What a fabulous hero.
[Lone Ranger voice]: “Well, Tonto, what do you think we should do now?”
[Tonto voice]: “Well, Kemosabe, I think we must integrate, we must spy on these people…”
WMK (cont.): And all that. Then at the end, usually somebody plays poor. The Lone Ranger would put on rags and dirty up his face. He’s sweeping up…
AMD: It’s like the “Indian” in dem.
WMK: Yeah.
AMD: [Mitchell Pierce (in dem)]: “Hey, chief, you got a dime?”
WMK: Oh, yeah, sure. That’s why I put that in the beginning. Yeah, yeah, you got that metaphor…So, yeah, where was I? I was at a crossroads between two things. I was beginning to talk about writing.
AMD: Well, you were taking a term off from Harvard.
WMK: Yeah, so I went back to school. But during that time, I began to think about it: I loved painting. Too expensive. Loved theater, loved being on stage. Even when they had a faculty show, I’d usually sing a song. I loved being on stage—I would’ve done it—and writing. But writing was a cliché, since my father had been a writer. But, you know, actually, that’s not so bad. I mean, all over—like, say, Italy—you become your father’s profession. There’s nothing wrong with that. Only in America do they think, well, your father is a shoemaker, you don’t want to be a shoemaker. You don’t want to take five generations of shoemaking experience and use that. Instead, you want to be a…disc jockey. Why?
AMD: But, I mean, it’s not even a cliché with you, because you kind of just blew it out of the water. I mean, he’s a writer, yeah, but he’s a journalist. And then you take these lessons from [John] Hawkes and [Archibald] MacLeish.
WMK: We’ll get to that. They’re the ones I always say are my strong influences. I was already pretty developed by the time I got to MacLeish. MacLeish told me one really good thing, and I’ll tell you about that. But besides my father casually looking over my shoulder at anything I wrote, and making little corrections here and there, my grandmother was the one. Because in an African American family, in every generation, one of the cousins, sisters, brothers, is identified as gonna-be-the-storyteller. And all the old folks pour everything they can into that one kid. It’s probably you, right?
AMD: It is, man. I know for damn sure.
WMK: They identify him. [Older woman’s voice]: “He’s the one! Sit him down! Tell him everything…”
AMD: She taught you everything while she was—
WMK: —teaching me how to sew.
AMD: Right, and you dedicated Dancers to her.
WMK: Yeah…This is something I made. This is my little blanket that I can take when I go to dialysis. All right, you see, this bag, fine stitching.
AMD: That’s you?
WMK: Yeah. Secret of the bag—
AMD: It’s reversible.
WMK: That’s right.
AMD: You could even use it as a pillowcase if you wanted to.
WMK: Yes, you could. That’s right.
AMD: Nice. I’ve never seen anything like that.
WMK: I made that one. I made this, too [holds up a blanket].
AMD: So, your grandmother is telling you stories and teaching you how to sew?
WMK: She’s sitting there and starts threading needles. And I thread the needles. [Grandmother’s voice]: “No, thread it like this, William…” What I realized was she was teaching me this skill that’s three generations deep. Because, actually, her mother had to have taught her how to sew. In slavery, they were lightskins, but they had these skills. And she lived on that skill when she came up here. Somebody had gotten her an introduction or something, and she was working her way up and down Fifth Avenue, going into people’s houses once a week and darning socks…Know what that is? You make a little thing. You got to really weave it. It’s amazing. Everything—lifting hems, lowering hems. Then they would go to Macy’s and, because they didn’t want to spend for the original dress, they’d get the pattern, and Nana could make it up.
AMD: You called her Nana?
WMK: Yeah.
AMD: She was from Georgia?
WMK: She was from Georgia.
AMD: And her father went to Harvard?
WMK: I’ll tell you about that in a minute.
AMD: You’re not even the first man in your family to go to an Ivy League institution!
WMK: Yeah, well, if you count the white ones…
WMK (cont.): You know, I’m sure he’s chagrined. Oh, he was a son of a bitch. He was probably a rapist. Bad guy. Bad, bad, bad guy. It’s like…You know, in every family history there’s a—just a sad incident. You know, I see this kid, fourteen years old. She’s had a baby. And the owner takes the baby from her and gives it to his sisters to raise. After all, she was their niece! And then he sold this little fourteen-year-old girl to New Orleans without her baby.
AMD: That’s what he [WMK’s white great-grandfather, Colonel Francis S. Bartow] did?
WMK: Yeah. And even my grandmother would say that after the [Civil] War everybody came home but her mother. She never did come home…
WMK (cont.): Okay, but where were we?
AMD: We were getting to the new novel.
WMK: Oh, yes. That’s not a novel. It’s a series of two novellas, three short stories, and a play.
AMD: And Chig Dunford is the main character?
WMK: Chig is the only character. Told from different points of view. One or two of them from Chig’s point of view. One or two of them in third person. And in the first story, because I wanted to show that he’s anchored to African American people, it’s told in what I call African American Creole. What people call Black English. But it really is African American Creole because I wasn’t trying to imitate any specific voice. I was trying to use the rules that I had studied about the language and create the language out of the rules—the various possibilities of what African American language is and what it does. So, I use the verb “to be” in that particular way. Never use it in the present tense, use it in the past tense. Like, “Where those boys at?” In the present, you don’t use “to be.” You don’t say, “Where are those boys?” or “Where is those boys?” You say, “Where those boys at?” Now, if the answer comes back, “Those boys up the corner,” that means they went and left here ten minutes ago and are up at the corner but they’re coming back. Whereas if the answer is, “Those boys be at the corner,” that means, “Those boys are at the corner every day.” They’re there habitually. And it even gets down to smaller things, too: “My grandma be giving me sugar.”
AMD: “My grandmother gives me sugar every day.”
WMK: Yeah. “How do you eat your cereal?” would be the question, and the answer comes back, “My grandmother be giving me sugar.” Whereas the other answer might be, “My grandmother give me sugar,” which means every so often you get some sugar. It’s not habitual. You don’t get it every day. Then the ability to turn nouns into verbs. Like, this woman said, “Me can future my son…” Then the propensity to shorten everything. So, the word might start out “rebuke” but becomes “buke.” It starts with “disrespect” and comes out “dis.” And all those things. Doubles: “He’s tall tall,” or “He’s sweet sweet.” Or, “I did do it.” We don’t think of it as our language, but it is. If you’re English, you say, “I did it.” But if you say, “I did do it,” that’s African American…We double. Like a negative. We—everything’s negative. “Don’t nobody go there no more,” as opposed to, “No one goes there anymore…”
AMD: Sure. Now, did you have to learn this?
WMK: I learned it by observation. There’s one woman in Detroit named Smitherman.
AMD: Yeah, Geneva Smitherman.
WMK: Yeah, Geneva.
AMD: I was trying to think of her because of everything you were saying—
WMK: Right, I learned a lot from her.
AMD: Reading her or meeting her?
WMK: Reading her.
AMD: I did, too.
WMK: And then I was reinforced by what I was hearing. Wherever I was going—wow, look at that, a perfect use of that “be”! “He always be wanting to have sex with me.” I’d overhear that! And that means this man is madly in love with this woman. As opposed to, “He want to have sex with me.” The guy doesn’t have a shot. So, there’s all these distinctions.
AMD: But your family didn’t talk like that.
WMK: No, no slang for me. Well, that’s the thing! I’m growing up in the Bronx. I got the Italian accent. They sent me to Fieldston. I begin to have a little bit of a Jewish accent, and every Saturday my father takes me to Harlem.
AMD: For what?
WMK: To hang out. He had some friends that he knew down there…Actually, one of them had a cemetery, which he gave to African American people when he died. Willed it to them. But he was running it—he was a Jewish guy—running it as a business. And he had this cemetery land in New Jersey and African Americans would be buried there. And so, you had some respect, or whatever, as opposed to, you know [white man’s voice]: “Dig a hole, put ‘em there…” And I would just sit in the window and look at everyone walking by in the street.
AMD: That’s kind of what you do with your video camera.
WMK: Yeah.
AMD: Same damn thing.
WMK: Yeah, well, that’s why I was so thrilled with finding that place—
AMD: On 125th Street.
WMK: Yeah. The Studio Museum used to be across the street, up Fifth Avenue. I don’t know if you remember that. And we went up there one day, me and my little girl, the youngest one—there was only two, and they’re three years apart—and I came out, and I looked at this building. It was red brick then. They’ve painted it yellow since. And I said, “Let’s try over there.” And we walked across the street, and went in there, and perfect situation for us: had a drunk super. The only thing bad about it was the heat was inconsistent.
AMD: You said you had a drunk super?
WMK: Yeah, a drunk, so he didn’t give a shit. I gave him—I’d say, “Oh, I’ll give you twenty dollars,” and then he’d leave us alone. So, we went all the way up there. It’s a great place. You can see it, you’ll see. We lived there thirty years, at least.
AMD: So, on 125th Street, you have Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, sharing an apartment together, a studio, for eight bucks a month, overlooking, I imagine, a very similar—
WMK: Oh, yeah, sure. And Langston [Hughes] lived up the street, on Fifth Avenue, two blocks up. As a matter of fact, I used to go and visit him there. When my first book came out, he wrote me a lovely little postcard, and said, “Come down for high tea,” which either was gin and tonic, or tea. And so, I went down. I loved him. He’s a beautiful man.
AMD: I’m just finishing [Arnold] Rampersad’s biography of him.
WMK: Oh, yes…So, I met Langston. He was there. At a certain point, Langston actually asked me to make some order out of his basement. He had everything down there. Every book, everything. And I did. I went down there, and he paid me whatever, about two dollars an hour. His papers were sent to Yale. I bet you there are still some of his papers that I wrapped up. I dutifully wrapped them up into things, and tied them up. I’m very good at that. So that was good.
AMD: So, Hughes is a good man. And he’s good to you. He writes you a good letter. But with [Ralph] Ellison it’s the opposite?
WMK: The only time I met Ellison he was drunk…And I don’t know why it was, but I was never ecstatic about Invisible Man.
AMD: I’ve seen you say that somewhere. You didn’t find anything useful in it.
WMK: No. Everything he wanted to do, someone else was doing it better. You know, if you want a surrealistic, satirical turn of mind, go to Kafka. You want to hear real language, go to Twain. I guess people were impressed by the length of it, what it seemed to be about. It’s plenty smart, you know. Albert Murray—they were good friends. And, you know, I had very high standards about my fiction. It came from Hawkes. So, anyway, actually, getting back to my grandmother, she was the real influence. She was telling me all this family history. And so, I just knew I had these stories to tell, and I could tell them. The better a writer I got, the easier it was for me to tell them. Or, it wasn’t going to be a struggle to tell them, or to use parts of it. It’s basically my musings on what the white side of my family must have been about…
AMD: The white side?
WMK: Yeah. So, I have this basically—my grandmother was white, and, well, my mother was dark white. In other words, they would take her for what she was: a Latina. I have pictures of her I can show you. She was a good woman…Her name was Jessie Garcia. She starts telling me these stories, going all the way back to [Colonel Francis S.] Bartow. And it’s very interesting because she makes these turns. I always wondered how she made that turn into meeting her husband, Narciso Garcia. I mean, you talk about Creole! She was a real Creole from Savannah. I define Creole as being—you can identify them as white, but four generations back there’s an African. It takes about four generations to like totally breed it out. You’re not married, are you?
AMD: No.
WMK: If you married a white woman, your kids would be white.
AMD: Sure.
WMK: But if you marry a black woman, your kids would be black, you know. So, basically, we have Bartow, the Southern Colonel, and Ouidette Badu, and then you have the daughter, Josephine, and Josephine hooks up with Nicholas Marin, perhaps a Sephardic Jew, from Barcelona, we’re not sure what, because suddenly then the family becomes Catholic. And what I have to find out is was Bartow a Catholic? Or, was it Marin, who was a Jew masquerading as a Catholic? Then she [WMK’s grandmother, Jessie Marin (daughter of Josephine and Nicholas Marin)] comes North and marries Narciso Garcia and has four children. As a matter of fact, one of my uncles [Calixto Garcia] was an epic athlete. He played for the Harlem Rens. That was the best African American team in the teens, twenties, thirties. And he pitched—played baseball. He was a pitcher. He was so talented that he broke his right arm and learned how to throw with his left. Uncle Six. They called him Big Six. He was six feet tall. Man, that was tall. My Uncle Louis, his brother, was called Little Six. Uncle Louis was five-foot-eight or something like that. He was his catcher. So, somebody, a scout, sees my Uncle Six pitching and goes to Connie Mack, you know, the legendary owner, and says, “I got this great Cuban pitcher.” Cubans were in baseball—the white Cubans. I guess the first Latino who was dark was Roberto Clemente, but before that there was a bunch of—Lefty Gomez and others. So, Connie Mack offers my uncle a contract.
AMD: He’s never seen him?
WMK: He saw him. My Uncle Six says, “Well, actually, I’m not a Latino, even though my name is Calixto Garcia”—in so many words—“I’m not Hispanic,” or “I’m not really Cuban,” or whatever. “My father named me after the Cuban general in the Spanish-American War.” (He was the head of the rebels, and a famous man: A Message to Garcia is a famous bit of writing about him.) “But my mother’s mother was a slave.” So, Connie Mack says, “I don’t want to hear that shit. Just keep your brownskin wife out of the way.” She was from Guyana.
AMD: The wife.
WMK: Yeah. Aunt Iris. I don’t know if you know anything about Guyanese. But they’ll argue about anything.
AMD: I teach a couple.
WMK: Yeah? Argue about anything. Very, you know…Because things are reversed there: the brown-skinned people are affluent, the African people are in the middle class, and the Indians are the lower class. I had a driver a couple mornings ago, and I kept trying to tell her, if you drive me up to the fourth floor, I will give you a ticket and it will allow you to come out of the building without paying. And she was so pissed, argumentative, she drove off without the ticket, so she had to pay six dollars. So, she took me this morning, just the luck of the draw, and she said, “And you owe me six dollars.” And I said, “I’m going to give you your six dollars.” She couldn’t give it up even then! She had to argue and argue. So, the Guyanese. So, Aunt Iris, she did not want to be in the shadows. And she didn’t like the idea of him traveling all over the East Coast. The games went only as far as St. Louis. She didn’t want that, so he turned that down.
AMD: Bearden did the same thing.
WMK: Who?
AMD: Romare Bearden.
WMK: Really?
AMD: And Connie Mack—same person, actually—wanted him to pass for white.
WMK: You ought to meet Quincy Troupe. Quincy Troupe’s father was reputed to be the best shortstop in the Negro Leagues, Quincy Troupe Sr. That’s an athletic family. His son is playing basketball in Europe now…Oh, I tell you what. I started telling you this story. So, anyway, my grandmother is filling me with all these stories, and I had a choice to make. And I said, I have a typewriter, so I can just go on writing. And then I won’t have to wait for a production team or the money for a set or whatever. Now, when I was in high school, my English teacher was named Papaleo.
AMD: Right. And there’s a character named Papaleo in—
WMK: I always put him in there—Joe.
AMD: And he wrote for The New Yorker.
WMK: Well, he wrote stories. Fiction writer. And he wrote about the quiet Italians. You know, the quiet majority of Italians, hard-working, loving America, loving the opportunity of America. But Joe saw that one of the problems of being an American is how much you’re going to give up to be an American.
AMD: How much you’re going to give up to be an American?
WMK: Yeah, yeah, you know, because Italians really aren’t white. What would you call your Protestant American women? You know, they like their women to be more demure, and funny, and whatever…They were good girls, the Italian girls. I never got to know them very well, because when I hit that age everybody in the society—it seemed like—was into a brown-skinned girl: “You have to talk to brown-skinned girls.” You know, “You got to be a Negro.” And that’s exactly what I did. I found a—I’m not sure which piece you read, but anyway…Yeah, because if you read “Shades,” that’s when I went over to the African American neighborhood, went to an African American church, looking for girls.
AMD: No, I didn’t read that.
WMK: Well, there are two I wrote. One is called “Breeds,” and one is called “Shades.”
AMD: Yeah, I read “Breeds.” I didn’t read “Shades.”
WMK: I think you read it, yeah.
AMD: “Shades” is a barbershop?
WMK: No, “Shades” is to say, you know, what is it that we are? We’re just all different kinds of shades. We always identified as Negro, even though it was absurd. And Jessie [WMK’s grandmother] identified as Negro, whereas her sister was passing.
AMD: What happened to her?
WMK: Well, she never got married. She attained a pretty high order in nursing. I left the country in ‘67, so during that time that I was out—that was ten years—my grandmother died, one of my cousins died, you know, several people died. I can’t remember how long Aunt Lottie lived. She was definitely around for my…I think she probably saw me graduate from Fieldston. I don’t think she came. I can’t remember when she died. I’ll have to find that out. Her name was Charlotte. And we didn’t even know her—I didn’t know her. But as I look back, I can see that—she lived down by the Bronx Zoo, in the Italian neighborhood down there—she was always a little nervous when brown-skinned me and my brown-skinned father showed up. And she didn’t like my father, anyway.
AMD: I’m surprised she even let you guys show up.
WMK: Well, she loved my mother. There was no way she could reject my mother. And I was so smart that she was engaged with me. I was really smart. And the Creole thing—I don’t even know if she thought of herself as a Creole…the Creole thing is very broad. If you look at it the way it was in New Orleans, you had people like Jelly Roll Morton, who vehemently defined himself as a Creole. I think his mother was a real lightskin, but his father was probably a little darker. I suppose it came out of a cultural mixing, if you want to call it that, but it was more a viewpoint. It was like my mother and my grandmother, for one reason or another, and not necessarily in a hierarchical way— although probably to a certain extent—they just felt themselves to be better than other African Americans. They could definitely admire, say, a Paul Robeson…But in terms of the blues, I never heard the blues in that house. However, my best friend who lived on the next block, his father was a fireman. He had a lot of Indian in him, too. Looked like an Indian. Beautiful, brown-red skin and real curly hair…He had a great [music] collection. He had The Ink Spots, Nat King Cole, Lionel Hampton, and Mills Brothers. I never saw any Bessie Smith, but they had all the other brown people. And I loved their music, and that’s where I was introduced to brown music, especially Nat King Cole. He was just so cool. He could look out at the audience and play the piano. He never looked at the keyboard. He had huge hands…not unlike Monk in a strange kind of way. That’s when I got introduced to that. That was in the forties. And at the same time, parallel, Sinatra, Vic Damone, the Italians. All the Italians, but primarily Sinatra was my choice. I guess one of the things that attracted me to Sinatra was that he sounded like me, except when he sang his pronunciation was so beautiful. You know, say, a Cole Porter song would call for a rhyme and he [Sinatra] would make that word rhyme! You know, he’d say “been” in his songs. He’d never say “bin.” You know, he would always say “bin” when he was talking—“I bin here, I bin there,” you know—but he would always in the song say “been.”
AMD: Yeah, right, I see what you’re saying.
WMK: And he pronounced his final R’s properly. From my phonetic viewpoint, I could see he wasn’t able to say T-H-R and roll the R, he would still say “th-rough…”
AMD: So, you were saying you consider yourself a, in terms of—
WMK: Well, it’s like I was saying, you know, I think we’re so obsessed with getting acceptance and recognition from the Protestant white people, the WASPs, and they always rebuff us, and they always cheat us, and I think we should just go make other alliances. And I know in my heart I make my alliances with the Albanians, the Italians—
AMD: And the Jews.
WMK: And the Jews. Well, especially later with my own Judaism.
AMD: How did that come about?
WMK: Now we’re moving to Jamaica.
AMD: Okay, okay, let’s do that. And then I want to get to the reception of your books.
WMK: All right. Okay. In 1965, they killed Malcolm. Four days later, my oldest daughter was born. So, that birth and that death are totally linked in my mind, you know. February 21st. No, first my kid was born, and then they killed Malcom. And I was just about to join up. Seriously. Go get a card, pay dues—whatever it was I had to do to be in Malcolm’s organization, I was going to do it. Because he had, at least for the time being, wanted to make a political organization and take the Islam out of it…
AMD: Are you thirty by this point?
WMK: Twenty-seven. In ‘67, I was thirty.
AMD: Shit, you weren’t messing around.
WMK: Oh, I bloomed really young. I was in a competition with Françoise Sagan. She published her first book at eighteen, and so I was going to publish my first book at eighteen, and I always felt a little disappointed that I was twenty-three. But, see, that was one of the things about the education: I set my sights high. I wasn’t just going to be an ordinary writer. I was going to be a Melville. I was going to have Twain in the great beyond come up to my table and say, [Mark Twain voice]: “I read your book, young man, and it’s a very good book.”
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: Yeah.
AMD: Hughes did that for you.
WMK: He did. Langston did, and I loved him, too. And, as a matter of fact, his kindness to me gravitated me toward him, because even though he was my father’s friend, I always found him a little simplistic. But then when I got to know him and I saw that this guy writes plays, he writes music, he writes blues, he writes books, he translates Spanish poetry, he translates French poetry—this guy is a genius.
AMD: And a similar background to you. He grows up essentially in a white world.
WMK: Well, that’s probably true, too. And he made that allegiance. And he was just a nice man…Nobody could ever say, definitively if he was or wasn’t gay, and I don’t think even Rampersad could say definitively. There wasn’t any evidence either way. And there are definitely men who decide not to have women. And the world will think that maybe they’re gay—that may be the hidden story—but, because of physical ailments, I’m beyond sex. And I can see how, in fact, you don’t have to have it. You can live without it. Put it into your mind: you’re not going to go nuts if you can’t fuck somebody.
AMD: Put that energy elsewhere.
WMK: Yes. You talk about productive? Langston was productive! Langston was at it all the time. I once asked him whether or not he had read Faulkner. He said, “I’m too busy writing to read Faulkner.” And I believe it. I don’t believe that he took a lot of time out to read. He read what he had to read. He definitely translated other people, so he had to read them. And there were ideas he had, probably, that echoed American writing, European writing. But I don’t even know what, say, his strong influences would be. I don’t even know, if I had to guess…I know he was interested in Russia and he went there, and he might’ve read them, but I can’t definitively say…
WMK (cont.): So then I had these things going at Harvard. I had the theater going. I had the painting going—[AMD reaches to pick up a wooden board so that WMK can set down a glass of juice, but WMK shoos AMD away; WMK, in a Jamaican accent]: Can’t you see, mon, this me board where I chop me herb? Can’t put ‘im glass on it.
AMD: For real, though? Chopping herb on there?
WMK: Yeah, yeah. You got to do it that way. Take it and chop, chop, chop. That’s one thing a Jamaican man knows how to do. Keep a knife sharp. Got to have a knife sharp enough to be able to chop herb, mon…So I went away, and I acted for a while, and then I came back second term of my junior year. Took Hawkes’s course. I was very lucky to get into it.
AMD: He didn’t let Updike in.
WMK: Is that true? That’s very interesting. He had us write something about an older person that wasn’t necessarily a parent. But I said, fuck it. I had just gone through my mother’s death…I wrote about that, and it came out in a torrent. He liked me—he liked me right from the beginning. I liked him, too. I used to walk him home from Cambridge, up toward MIT. I would walk him to the corner. He really liked me, and I liked him, too. Right away…
WMK (cont.): So, I took Hawkes’s course and said, okay, no more acting. I’m going to write…Oh, no, that was sophomore year. Then I went to acting school, and I was out for the beginning of junior year, and I came back, and then I totally devoted myself to writing. I didn’t do any acting anymore. And, as lucky as I was, I was successful right away…
WMK (cont.): And then I worked my way up the English—the creative writing ladder. I had Ted Morrison, whose wife was Robert Frost’s mistress, or at the very least, his typist. And I was being very surreal. He absolutely didn’t understand a thing I wrote, but he would dutifully punctuate it all perfectly. So, I learned all about punctuation. I always say that Ted Morrison taught me punctuation. Then there was Monroe Engel—he’d written a couple novels…But I began to get into this strange realm where in a way I was better than my teachers. At the very least, I had more excitement and enthusiasm in my writing than they did.
AMD: I could totally see that.
WMK: They were very middle-class writers. Engel had a house on Block Island, and he got shipwrecked one time. Spent like forty days at sea. So, he was writing about that. But Hawkes—I must say, this is after Joe Papaleo. Joe Papaleo was a straight-ahead, Hemingway-style writer, a little bit more poetry in his writing, but essentially a real realist about Italian life, which I guess is why he could get into The New Yorker…The Italians weren’t quite writing about the Mafia then, but they were writing about—there’s a story written by an Italian [Pietro di Donato], I don’t know what his name is, but the story was Christ in Concrete. And there was a man—I think he was an Italian worker, and he may even have been buried in concrete, but that was that type of writing…Hawkes says, “Most people say write about what you know, but I’m telling you, make it all up. Don’t write about what you know.” And that gave me license to just—
AMD: Do whatever the fuck you want.
WMK: Yeah, yeah. And, in particular, to write about the South, even though I’d never been there.
AMD: Right, with the first one [A Different Drummer].
WMK: Well, I had gone once in high school years, in ‘52. My father said, “C’mon, I want to show you the South.” So, we drove around, basically drove down East, and got to Memphis and Chattanooga; that’s where his family was. Then we came up through Chicago; there was another bunch there. And then we went to Indianapolis; there was a sister there. And then we ended up in Philly, and there was one sister there. But it was the South, it was Chattanooga. We kind of stayed there. It was weird, you know…
WMK (cont.): I was pretty developed by that time. MacLeish helped in terms of high aspirations, and the possibility of making money from my aspirations. The one thing he gave me was—the first thing that I wrote about, in A Different Drummer, was the white folks waking up the next day and finding that all the black people had gone, and wondering about that. And I’d actually started that story in high school. Then, in Hawkes’s class, I wrote a story about, basically, Tucker Caliban destroying his farm animals, his horse, and his house, and smashing the grandfather clock, and everything like that. And at a certain point, I said, oh, this will be the end of my novel, this scene where this man burns all this stuff. And MacLeish said, “No, that’s your first chapter.” All he had to do was say that and whoa—the whole thing opened up to me and I could see it. Then I had just kind of skimmed, well, actually, The Sound and the Fury. But, actually, I got a record of Faulkner reading from The Sound and the Fury, and it had that construction of various people telling what they knew about the aspect of a certain situation. And I said, oh, I could use that. You know, various people, and what they might know about Tucker Caliban, and then they explain this. Of course, I always felt that African American people would know immediately. You don’t have to be told why. C’mon, it’s been four hundred years of oppression, and it’s time to finish this shit! Now, actually, I’m not quite sure where I got that idea. I know I didn’t get it from Douglas Turner Ward. Because our things came out at about the same time. Either I was in Harlem one day and I overheard two people talking, saying, “Why we follow these people all the time? Let’s just take a bunch of trucks, go down South, load everybody up, and bring ‘em back—”
AMD: Or Hughes.
WMK: Or Langston…
WMK (cont.): So, I’m not quite sure where I got that idea. But it was a very natural idea for me. I guess a lot of people would have thought that I was selling out in some kind of way. But when I went down South, my uncle, he was rich. He was rich for a black man in the South. He had the taxi service. He had the pharmacy. He had the record store. He had a bar—his brother had a bar.
AMD: This is Chattanooga?
WMK: Yeah. And they were making money. They were living in a big house up on a hill, outside of Chattanooga. I don’t know whether it was an African American community up there…And I was beginning to develop this idea that it was good that we were separated. Because we had to do things for ourselves. We were too used to having other people do things for us, and us not really valuing it, because we didn’t get it ourselves. That’s one thing the Jamaicans know: when it came time for them to get free, they went and got free. And they know that. In his bones, every Jamaican knows that. And they know what it is to be free. Did you ever live out of the country?
AMD: Down in the Caribbean?
WMK: Anywhere. You could go to Africa. You yourself could go to Ireland—well, I’d favor some place of your origin. I’m not quite sure how much a trip to Africa would do for you; I think you got to live there. Because you don’t really start to understand what’s happening until about the third year. And then you can begin to isolate the American, and what’s left is really you. So, you know, I’d say go to Ireland. I think that would be fun.
AMD: I think it would be fun, yeah.
WMK: Because when people find out that you’re Irish, for God’s sake—do you know what town your family came from?
AMD: Where Joyce’s father is from. Fermoy.
WMK: Oh, you got to do that. Because you’ll be able to isolate your American.
AMD: Yeah. And that’s what you were able to do.
WMK: They may not accept you, but people are kind. I mean, I don’t think the Jamaicans ever quite took me as a Jamaican, but after a while, even though my nickname was “American,” I don’t think they thought of me as being American. There was a man there who’d spent most of his life in Cuba, to work and stuff like that, and when he came back everybody knew he had been born and raised in Jamaica but still everyone called him “Cubano.” There was just something that he had missed. And they accept that. After a while I began to tell people that I had been born in Jamaica, but my parents had moved to America, and then I came back once I became a father because I wanted my kids to grow up in Jamaica. And they accepted that.
AMD: Especially if you put on that accent.
WMK: That’s a story, actually. Did you ever see a movie called The 13th Warrior? Stars [Antonio] Banderas and was written by Michael Crichton. It was a very astute book for a European American man to write, because he was writing it from the point of view of an Arab, an Egyptian, a rich Egyptian, who has been run out of Egypt and is exiled to the North and beyond the Romans, beyond everything like that. Finally ends up with the Vikings. And it’s an interesting comparison between this sophisticated Arab, who could read the Quran, expert horseman, has a little horse—you know, his horse is totally different from the big, hulky Nordic horses—and a curved sword, and they tease him and shit like that. And then one night he’s sitting with them and—it’s a beautiful scene, it’s all about language—and they’re sitting around the fire, and all of a sudden, the way they did it, every so often, there’s a word of English in there and this guy is able to suddenly understand. You know, if you listen to a language long enough, then suddenly you understand it. And that was exactly what happened to me…My bones were such that I could smoke good, so I could get as high as any Rastafarian…
WMK (cont.): No, really, I love herb! And I could sit there and smoke the chillum pipe.
AMD: It’s called the chimmy pipe?
WMK: Chillum. The Rastafarians call it a chalice. And so, at first, I went there, I had to go across the cemetery—I’m just writing about it now.
AMD: You’re just writing about it?
WMK: Yeah. I’m trying to put my essential Jamaican experience into about twelve pages. I don’t want to just go on and on and on, because I can go, you know? I could write a whole book about it…But I didn’t even know that there was herb in Jamaica. I love herb! I’ve loved herb since, like, 1960.
AMD: That was in Cambridge?
WMK: Yeah, yeah. I went to a party over in Scollay Square. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Boston, but that’s where all the stripteases were. I went to a party with an African American guy, an actor, who studied the Method. We had that in common. Sometimes when I had a part in a play, he would rehearse it with me, and he was good. He had been a junkie when we first met. But then I think he was clean, but he could have fooled me—definitely. I never saw him nod out or anything. So, I went to a party with him, and there was herb there, and I was like, “Oh no, I couldn’t do that!” I totally rejected it. Then the next chance I had to use anything like that was I got peripherally involved with Leary’s Experiment, and the drug that I drew at somebody’s house was some mescaline, which, I guess, that comes from peyote. A beautiful high. And I said, whoa, this is it. I had been looking for an alternative to drinking, because I hated the hangovers. If I had more than three drinks I was on my way to a hangover. And then after that I guess I came back to acting school, and I met a girl in acting school. I smelled her smoking—someone was smoking in the reaches of the theater. And from then on, I was basically devoted to herb. But when I was thinking about going to Jamaica, I was thinking, I am going to get my kids out of this. I’m just not going to see another generation of my family have to deal with this bullshit. I don’t care what they feel about it or anything like that, but why follow me around in the store? Why follow me in the store? Why do you cringe when I get into the elevator? A white woman clutches her purse when I get into the elevator and my thing is, I’ll turn to her and say, “Isn’t it just a wonderful day?” Totally disarm her…So, through Paule Marshall, the writer, her house, I can’t remember when, somewhere in ‘55, ‘54, somewhere in there, I met this Jamaican writer named John Hearne. And he was a real Creole. Spoke impeccable English. But he just looked kind of like, not unlike Malcolm X in that he was mariny, as we used to say. He used to write political novels about Jamaican politics…which was, well, tremendously conscious. But useful. I guess he was in competition with a writer named Peter Abrahams who had left South Africa for Jamaica, and he was writing political novels. But, actually, the three best writers in the Caribbean working at my time were the Mighty Sparrow, and Bob—Bob was starting to emerge at that time—
AMD: You’re talking about writers?
WMK: Marley, yeah. Writers.
AMD: You’re saying the best writers were Mighty Sparrow, Bob Marley—
WMK: And a Guyanese writer named Wilson Harris…Harris wrote these mysterious novels about going off into the jungles in Guyana and encountering ghosts and Indians. He lived in England, him and his wife. I think he’s alive—I haven’t heard if he’s dead. Derek Walcott was very good, but Wilson Harris…I guess you could say that he was more American. He’s more like Twain, whereas Derek Walcott’s aspirations tended toward the English.
AMD: Sure.
WMK: So, Hearne got me a job at the University of the West Indies, and I was teaching creative writing up there, and because I was teaching writing up there, I got a three-year visa. Because I had just decided to go. We were living in Paris at that time, and I noticed that my older daughter was beginning to become French. You could see it developing in her, you know, with her sways, and her mouth starting to form in certain ways in order to be able to pronounce the French Rs. It was amazing sociologically to witness, you know? And I said to myself, wait a minute, I’m not going to bring myself away from American racism only to be implicated in French racism…You know, whereas in France, we’re in the middle, and it’s a relief…At the bottom are the Arabs and the Senegalese. Even to this day—now it’s starting to change—they’re living around Paris in these awful project kind of buildings. That’s where their trouble comes from with the French. But there was always [in a French accent]: couleur. It’s always there. They were very good, though—the French are serious. They’re serious about African American writing. I hooked up with this guy. He’d written biographies of Chester Himes, Richard Wright—I mean he knew Chester Himes and Richard Wright, their writing, backwards and forth…I like Richard Wright. My favorite book of his is The Outsider, which is based on Crime and Punishment. It’s great, actually. This guy is riding the subway, his life is in turmoil, his wife is after him, he’s got a girlfriend who is pregnant, he’s working at the post office even though he’s better educated than that…And the train he’s riding in has this tremendous crash and everyone is dead. He happens to lose track of his overcoat, and he wanders around in a daze…He has to walk out of the subway; no one rescues him. And the next day everyone thinks he’s dead. He’s free of all his commitments, his debts. He’s dead now. He comes to New York and he gets involved with a Communist who wants to use him to advance the Communist cause and the Communists purposely put him into a house with a Nazi to spark some kind of incident. One day he comes home, and the Nazi and the Communist are having a fight, a terrible, hate-filled fight, and the leg of the table has been torn off and—this guy’s name is Cross Damon—and Cross Damon picks up the leg of the chair and kills them both. That’s it…And then the prosecutor is a hunchback. And because he’s an outsider, he recognizes Cross Damon as an outsider, and eventually he comes to know that Cross Damon has killed these two guys…but he’s dead and so they can’t do anything about it. They don’t have the proof…So, it looks like he’s going to get away from the Communists. Because they don’t understand Cross Damon, they just kill him, they send an assassin. And one of his last words—the prosecutor leans over to him and asks, “What was the worst bad thing?” And he says something close to actually being—it was like being invisible. And I liked that. That was the first book Wright wrote after he left America. Then there was another interesting one that kind of gave me an idea. He wrote a novel about a guy who gets locked out of his hotel room naked and a woman walks into the hall and sees him naked and gets so afraid that she backs up and accidentally falls out of a window.
AMD: Oh, Jesus.
WMK: And so he’s trying to live with that guilt, of whatever happened to her. It was all white characters…So yeah, I started to see Jesi [WMK’s daughter] getting French. And there was another little girl across the hall, and they spoke nothing but French to her and after about three or four months she could speak some solid French…Jesi’s French was superb. A beautiful French accent, a Parisian accent, everything like that. And I could see it and think, oh shit. I had the example of Richard Wright’s kids: they were in a bad way, in terms of culture.
AMD: He had a white wife?
WMK: Yeah, a Jewish woman.
AMD: So, you hightailed it out of there?
WMK: So, yeah, I left America because they killed Malcolm. I knew that the movement was over, and then I heard that King was killed. Martin Luther King got killed by a bullet that had been on its way for ten years. It was going to happen, you know. King started talking about economics and money, but really they turned against him when he started being anti-Vietnam. It was all right for him to be an African American complaining about African American matters, but God forbid that he should comment on the nation. You weren’t supposed to be so disloyal, like Muhammad Ali…
WMK (cont.): So, you know, I just flew over to Jamaica—I guess I’m getting back to the herb now: the first guy I met in Jamaica was kind of like a hippie. His wife had a job. They were living very well; they had a maid. He was the first guy who supplied me with my first herb in Jamaica…In Paris we smoked kush. But we also smoked hashish. Twenty francs or something. That was what was cheap…So, okay, I was in Jamaica. I was going through a hole in the wall across the cemetery to go up to the first part of the property. There was a supermarket and that kind of stuff up there. But I had to cross a cemetery or go around it. And one day I was going through the hole in the wall—I had never really seen anybody there. I knew there was this entrance to something back there. And there was this big brown guy there with a big spliff in his hand. I got a whiff of it, and it was beautiful herb…I said, “Wow, that smells good…” He gave it to me, and I took a couple of puffs. And I said, “Can I get some more of this?” He said, “Oh, sure. Come down.” He met me in Ambrook Lane. Trenchtown. Basically, these little villages built up around…this one happened to be attached to the garbage yard…men who worked with sanitation. This guy named George Price led me to a guy named the Rasta. I never found out the Rasta’s real name. He looked like Bob Marley, clearly mixed with something. Very handsome guy. Totally devoted to Jah Rastafari. So, I began to just go…And then after a while they’d pass me the chillum pipe…and then they’d ask me to chop some herb for them. Never said anything. I took a total anthropological attitude with it. Totally not involving myself with anything I saw. When I was in Paris, I knew a guy who was a prince. A real prince, I saw it validated in the Times as the head of tourism to the government. But when I was going to Jamaica I said, “Prince Akema, I’ve never been to a black country before. What should I do? How should I be?” He said, “When you get to Jamaica, just go and sit under the table…Stay under the table, stay under the table, and stay under the table some more. And someday some man will come to you and say, ‘Hey, man what are you doing under the table?’ And then you can emerge from under the table.” In my case it was—instead of telling me to get out from the table—they told me I was too quiet. [Jamaican voice]: “American, you too quiet. A man must make a noise!” But then when I began speaking, they said, [Jamaican voice]: “No, no American. Speak Jamaican, mon!” And because I was understanding it now, because I had been hearing it for so long, I began to talk in Jamaican. That’s when I realized there was no he or his but ‘im. No she or her but ‘im.
AMD: Are you writing this whole time?
WMK: Not as much. Because I had to spend time hustling, and, also, the things that I wrote that I thought I’d be able to publish in America were so against the stereotypes of what Jamaicans were—it was about the way they really were, and the way their politics really was—that I was basically met with disbelief. They would say, “Oh, no, this couldn’t possibly be true.” They would say that Michael Manley is going to convert the Jamaicans to Castro-style—shit like that, but if you know anything about Jamaicans—
AMD: They’re an independent bunch.
WMK: Each one of them. I once watched a guy try to cut off the legs of his pants to make a pair of shorts. He cut and he cut and [WMK gestures to show that the pantlegs weren’t even]. I said, [Jamaican accent]: “But, mon, the shorts not even, mon.” He says to me, [Jamaican voice]: “Every spoil is a style, mon!” Which is profound! Every spoil is a style! Every spoil is a style, mon! I said, “You’re absolutely right.” So, the Rastas—I’m going to spend time with them. And every so often somebody picks up a Bible and reads a Psalm. They were deep into the Psalms. Because you can memorize them. I loved Psalm 91. And the Rastas loved 37. It’s a beautiful Psalm. If you ever got into a situation where people are just pissing you off—37: “Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass…” But Psalm 68—Psalm 68 was important because Psalm 68 uses “Jah.” And then that led me into Judaism. When they say “Lord” in the Bible, they’re not talking about Jesus, they’re talking about Yahweh. What the Jamaicans call Jah. And that puts the book in a whole different light. They’re not talking about Jesus; in the end, it’s about Jesus. But throughout the book, it’s about Yahweh. When they get to Leviticus, they give the diet. You know how I grew up around Jews and everything like that? I thought the diet was in the Talmud. But here it is in the Bible. And then in Deuteronomy, it comes up again. The same diet. Differently worded to some extent, but, basically, the same diet: what to eat, what not to eat, fins and scales and cloven hooves, and them that chew the cud, and all these definitions. I guess it’s a simple thing, but I said to myself that those old guys, these men inspired by Yahweh, they tell you this twice. This is important. So, I tried the diet. And if I tell you I got smarter, like, as soon as I decided to give up pork and shellfish and stuff I like, like lobster and stuff like that—I got smarter. So now I’m reading the old King James Version, and I’m understanding it…The next thing you try to do is to try the Sabbath. This is important. It’s the fourth commandment, you know, it’s equal to thou shall not steal, and thou shall not murder. It’s got to be important to do. Then when Passover came around, we kept Passover…Then finally we decided to keep Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. We thought we might end up going to synagogue, but the Jews in Jamaica are so rich it’s sickening. Because they’ve been there for a long time. Since 1492…They’re all Portuguese. They’re all Portuguese names. Instead of like Weinstein and Einstein, you know, they were named Rodrigues and whatever…So, I wasn’t quite sure about the Jewish calendar, so I said, okay, I’ll follow it literally. And it says the first month you have the New Year. And then fourteen days after the New Year you have Passover. And then the seventh month you have the Day of Atonement, which is very interesting because the Jews do it the other way around: they have the New Year. But then after the New Year they have the Day of Atonement. And then they have the Passover…
AMD: Wait, so who’s saying that…? What was the first one?
WMK: The first of the year, followed by Passover.
AMD: Yeah, who does that?
WMK: The Bible. The Torah.
AMD: But Jews here, they have—
WMK: The Jewish calendar.
AMD: —Rosh Hashanah, and then—
WMK: Yeah, exactly. That’s right, Rosh Hashanah, and then all the other holidays. So, we just started to follow that: so our Passover is January. And our Day of Atonement is in July, which makes it longer, because the sundown isn’t until 8:30, as opposed to 6:30.
AMD: You’re speaking of just your family who is adhering to this calendar?
WMK: Yeah. The whole thing has spread to the extent that all seven of us still believe. It’s at that point now, though, where the young ones, the kids don’t know about it…But the girls really grew up in it. And, well, they keep it alive, you know. My youngest daughter has a hard time with the Sabbath, because she figures that that’s the day she’s got to work for herself. So, she works Saturday or Sunday. But what I found was, if you gave up the Sabbath, then somehow or another…If you gave up that day, if you say, this is the Creator’s day, and I’m just going to read the Bible and rest—that’s what it basically instructed you to do—then the Creator makes some shit happen on the other days. The things that usually happen on Saturday, they happen on Wednesday. So, you can give up that day. It’s like a sacrifice.
AMD: Sure.
WMK: And He rewards you by getting everything else done on the other six days that He gives you. It’s just the same, like, when you give up pork bacon, He gives you turkey bacon. It’s just as good. I used to love shrimp cocktail. And what I found was, if you take a big old can of sardines, and mash it up, and grate carrot in it, it tastes just like shrimp cocktail. Got the same chewiness, the same sweetness. You can always find a substitute. And, over the years, everything that has been forbidden by the Levitical Laws has turned out to be poisoned: catfish, poison; clams, crawling around on the bottom of the sea, eating oil, poison! They don’t even look the same. You know, when I was a kid, I used to summer in Maine. And the lobsters were so pristine, and they looked so beautiful, and they turned bright red when you boiled them…and you could just sit down there on the ocean eating this beautiful lobster. And so, okay, you give it up, but that’s what you learn from it. Food can never—a Jamaican will say, “A man will sell his soul for a plate of food.” And you know you’ll never be put in that position, because you know you can go twenty-four hours without eating. There was a guy named Bobby Sands, an Irish guy, who decided to starve himself to death, in protest, in prison—it took him sixty days! Poor guy. So, like, any selfish, stupid American who can’t live until the next meal, you know—you don’t have more strength than that shit? I got to like being hungry…And then Jah—Well, then our fortunes totally turned. And suddenly now we were dead: didn’t have any visa, didn’t have any passport. I moved to the country to further avoid immigration, although I’m sure they had their eyes on us. I read the Bible, cover to cover. And I read Ulysses, cover to cover. And I finished Finnegans Wake…Because I had started Finnegan’s Wake…Joseph Campbell, who’s a great—he taught at Sarah Lawrence eventually—his wife, Jean Erdman, had written a dance account of Finnegans Wake called The Coach with the Six Insides. And I was lucky enough to see it on PBS. And it totally fit into my intellectual pursuits at the time, because I was trying to find a way to respectfully render spoken African American.
AMD: Yeah, and not in dialect.
WMK: Yeah. Right. What I didn’t know was that the two greatest white writers who were able to do that were Twain, who perfectly understood all the accents of his period and time—when Huck spoke and when Jim spoke—
AMD: I love that Jim called Huck “honey” by the way.
WMK: Oh yeah. Right.
AMD: There’s that compassion, and there’s that love.
WMK: Yeah, that’s right.
AMD: But it doesn’t bother you that it’s in dialect?
WMK: Who?
AMD: Twain.
WMK: It’s so well done.
AMD: Yeah, it doesn’t matter.
WMK: Yeah. I mean, he caught it. I’m sure if we went in there, all his be’s would be in the right places. Stuff like that most white people can’t hear. And the other one, of course, is Joel Chandler Harris.
AMD: Uncle Remus.
WMK: Yeah. I have a class that, sometimes, we read it out loud. Because some of the words, like fum, F-U-M, is from. But you can only get it if you read it out loud. It’s the same thing for Finnegan’s Wake: you’ve got to read it out loud. And once you do that, you’ll hear the Irish accent…So, yeah, so I got smart. I really learned how to read. I never really learned how to read before then. But I can read fast, or I can skim. And I got very sophisticated about the way books are actually constructed…So, yeah, then, of course, when you read Ulysses as a writer of fiction—do you write fiction?
AMD: I don’t, no.
WMK: That’s probably good. You know, either you got it or not…But what was I going to say? Oh yeah, it’s like a textbook. Ulysses is like a textbook for fiction. If you want to know how to write fiction, just read that book. He does everything you could possibly do. That’s why I liken him to Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is making it all up, too. He’s making up words, putting things together. I don’t know how many thousands of words that he made up. It’s a language, Shakespeare.
AMD: Is it true you make your writing students read Ulysses in a week?
WMK: I used to, in the first term, when I was teaching full-year courses. And now I figure I might drop dead in the middle of the term. So, I have them read one chapter. I have them read chapter four, which is the chapter that exposes you to Joyce’s narrative style, which is a combination of first person and third person. The concrete reality that he is describing is like Bloom—
AMD: Yeah, it’s Bloom walking around.
WMK: And then everything else is what Bloom is thinking.
AMD: Yeah, it’s crazy.
WMK: And so you combine those two, and you don’t have to do all the old-fashioned shit about, well, “He thought this or that.” Because, you know, Joyce takes you right into Bloom’s head. And in the new book there is a story that is about seventy or eighty pages—
AMD: How long is the new book?
WMK: It came out to be two hundred and fifty.
AMD: You write relatively slim volumes.
WMK: Yes, I get it from Hawkes.
AMD: That makes sense.
WMK: Hawkes would write two hundred superior, stunning pages, as opposed to…Well, Joyce used to say the novelist should not write about the extraordinary; that is the job of the journalist. And by that he’s saying—Well, that’s what he means with Bloom: write about an ordinary man. Show that he has all the emotions of a great hero. He’s brave sometimes, he’s fearful sometimes…
AMD: He’s nervous about his wife.
WMK: Yeah, you know. And, of course, their [Penelope and Odysseus’s] thing is totally reversed in Ulysses. I didn’t even really consciously realize that until last year. The thing about Ulysses is that every time you read it you learn a whole lot of stuff…But Penelope is totally loyal and totally chaste, and Odysseus is the one who is fucking everybody in the Mediterranean. But in Joyce’s world, Molly is promiscuous about once a year, and Odysseus isn’t promiscuous at all. He’s masturbating. I mean, not—
AMD: Bloom.
WMK: Yeah…But they love each other. That’s the essential thing. Like Penelope and Odysseus, they really only loved each other, because Odysseus has many opportunities to stay someplace. All these various women…And it was also a hidden thing because they [Molly and Leopold Bloom] are both Jews. But they’re un-Orthodox Jews. Molly’s mother is a Spanish Jew.
AMD: That’s right.
WMK: And her father is an Irish military guy. So, she could really be a Jew if she wanted to, because she’s a woman. Bloom, his mother is Catholic or Protestant or whatever and his father is a Jew. And even the Irishmen don’t think about him in the same way…The Irish guys see Bloom as a regular chap. And Bloom is not a Jew—you know, culturally, he’s not Jewish, but he has these memories of his father committing suicide. It basically comes down to cause and effect—that’s what he’s interested in. The causes and effects of things. Why we do this and this happens. Cause and effect. Yeah, I love my Joyce. I only read five books, really. I read the Little Red Book by Chairman Mao, which I used as a model to run a family. The Red Book says, “Cherish the people.” So, I took that to mean that your primary concern, as a parent, is to make sure that your kids are doing the right thing. Having the right thing. So, they’re the people. We’ve always had family meetings. And Jesi especially was very astute, and Cira, my second daughter, she also became very astute, and so we could really rely on them to tell us stuff about the world that would influence our decisions, because being old-fashioned, we didn’t know the latest news. We didn’t know the latest dance. We didn’t know the latest records…So, where are we now?
AMD: The other books that you read?
WMK: So, Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. Thoreau, Walden. Mark Twain, Huck Finn. Ulysses. And, finally, the work of Jiddu Krishnamurti…One morning when we were in Jamaica in the country, I was walking to town—
AMD: What’s the town?
WMK: Nine Mile, Bull Bay—and I found a knapsack sitting on the side of the road. I don’t know if it looked as if it had been stolen or something. It was more like someone put it down and forgot to pick it up. So, every time I passed it, I noticed it was more and more in disarray, that it was open, and people had taken things out of it. And so, one day, I said, my turn. Found a winter coat, perfectly fit, down, really good. And, ironically, I was expelled from Jamaica about two months later, so suddenly I got to America and had a winter coat, a good one. And a few books: the Culpeper book, which is about all the herbs, what’s good for this, and golden seal, and all that; it’s all in there. Another book by a man named Sri Chinmoy, who was around in New York for a while, teaching—Buddhism? Yeah, must have been Buddhism, in America. And finally, a book by Krishnamurti, who, I found out, actually, at the end of his life visited—Ojai? I think it was Ojai, California. And he had such spiritual power that a bunch of people decided to support his ass and let him just talk to people.
AMD: See, that’s what we got to get into!
WMK: Well, maybe we will! They would copy down what he said and make books out of it, and so here was what was called The Life That We Lead, by Krishnamurti. Well, Krishnamurti’s story was great. There used to be this society in America, started by a woman called Annie Besant, and it was called the Theosophical Society. I guess it was kind of an attempt to link Buddhism up to Christianity. Especially Jesus. Because I know for myself, I think Jesus actually did spend time in India, and that’s how he came up with basic passive resistance, civil disobedience. Thoreau had read Indian philosophy. And then King got that from Gandhi down the line. Anyway, there was a compound in India, Madras, and Krishnamurti’s father was the gardener, and one day there’s this woman, Annie Besant, walking in the garden and she sees the gardener’s son, Jiddu, and she feels the Jesus spirit, the God spirit, is coming out of him. So, she adopts him and gives him the best possible education that he can get, and when he’s grown, in his early twenties, she gives him this movement that she’s started. They have, like, at least one hundred thousand worldwide followers and everything like that. And they all basically worship this kid. And then I think when he’s about twenty-eight years old, his beloved brother dies, and it totally disillusions him. He says, basically, I can’t even keep my brother alive, so all this deification that these people have done of me is total bullshit. So, he actually disbanded the whole group—that’s why you don’t know anything about them now, except they have a Theosophical bookstore—and decided that he was going to search for reality. And he comes to the conclusion that the only real thing is you and me sitting here now, and when you’re gone, it won’t be real anymore—it’ll be a memory—and before I came, before you came, you didn’t know what it was going to be, and I didn’t know what it was going to be. I probably thought you’d be more sandy-headed because you’re an Irishman, but besides that, I had no idea what you were going to be…And then our problem is, as human beings, that our minds—like he says, the mind itself is fear. Our mind is always dragging itself, our memories are always dragging themselves, into our presents. So, half the time we’re not even reacting to what’s present; we’re reacting to what is from the past. You know, the simplest read is that if you were betrayed by a red-headed man in the past, you wouldn’t be trusting of red-headed people after that.
AMD: Even if it’s not the man.
WMK: Yeah, it’s not even the actual man. It’s the way our mind puts together things. And, basically, you should try to live your life not making those connections at all. What goes through your mind should be what is happening in front of you, so you really see what’s there…And he pointed out things like if you’re really in an emergency situation, you don’t even think about it.
AMD: No.
WMK: You don’t. It’s later. When I was a kid, ten years old, I saved a woman from drowning, and I thought about it often because…I wasn’t thinking. If I had been thinking, I don’t know what would have happened. But I had the presence of mind. I’d been in the Red Cross program, and I had the presence of mind to remember the adage: “Reach, Throw, Row, Go.” There are various stages for approaching a person who’s drowning. First thing you do is, if they’re close enough, reach for them with your hand or something that they can hang onto, and you can pull them in. And then the next stage is to throw something to them. And if you can’t throw anything, you can row something out to them. You know, you row out to them, and get them in the boat. You throw first, and then you have to get closer to them, because people who are drowning are very dangerous. They grab you around and they can take you right to the bottom. So, the third one was row, to tow, some kind of float device out to them, let them hang onto it. But only at the end is go—only if you’ve been properly trained, which primarily you had to know how to break holds, just like a wrestler. You got to put your head around and you have to know how to sink down, turn them around. So, I was only ten, and this woman was a grown woman, in her twenties, and later on we found out that she got beyond where she should’ve gone. So, when I saw her struggle—we’d been trained to see when people were in trouble—I never thought about it. There were some kids playing on the shore with an innertube, and I jumped off the raft—I was in a raft, out deep—swam into the shore. I grabbed their innertube, and I swam it out to the woman, and she grabbed it, and I pulled her into shore. And I sat down next to my mother, and I began to tremble.
AMD: After, yeah.
WMK: Once I realized what I’d done…And that was a good indication of, you know, you don’t really think—of how you know you don’t. Because I’m not always that brave…I remember one time I saw, from a distance—though I couldn’t be able to cross to get there in time—a kid’s shoelaces getting caught in the escalator at the Port Authority. And I was frozen. Because I knew I would never get there in time. I think I shouted something at somebody close to him—I think the shoe came off. The escalator swallowed the whole shoe!
AMD: The whole foot could come off in that case.
WMK: No, the guy saved the kid’s foot.
AMD: But I mean that could have happened.
WMK: Yeah, and I was aware of the fact that I was so far away from it that it was not going to do any good to run over to him. By the time that I got there, the kid’s foot was going to be in the escalator, you know?
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: And I was horrified. But luckily there was somebody close, too, but sometimes you’re the only person to notice things. Somebody else noticed it, quickly pulled the kid’s shoe, sort of pushed right out of the shoe. So, I’m not quite sure how brave I am. Everybody was saying that I was brave. I don’t think I would jump down into the subway to help somebody up out of the train, you know? I always hear about that, somebody that jumped down and the train’s coming, jumped down and helped some pregnant lady up, saved them both. It’s amazing, actually.
AMD: Duke, do you ever doubt yourself as an artist?
WMK: Oh, no. I know I am a great artist. It’s just whether or not I’m going to be rewarded in my lifetime. I’m pretty sure that in fifty years I’ll be a revered American writer. It might even start in my lifetime. I notice things are bubbling up. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that “there are no second acts in American lives.” But I’ve outlived everybody. I’ve outlived Ellison and Langston Hughes and Baraka, and everybody—Clarence Cooper, Jr. You know, all kinds of writers. I’m the only male left. So, I have a feeling—I see it beginning to develop—that maybe I’ll get a payoff.
AMD: What would you rank as your best work?
WMK: Oh, Dunfords. Dunfords is perfect in terms of every word of it I have approved, and I wouldn’t take any basic interference from the editor I had. She would obviously try to give me some suggestions, but I was sure. I mean, I was sure of every punctuation. I was sure of everything. And it was much more sophisticated than she could handle. Because I was thinking of Finnegans Wake, and I was writing it in a circle. And then I began to write it so that there really was no beginning and no ending, that you could jump into it anywhere and be able to go all the way around to the back and get it just as well as what was nominally chapter one. But I always say to people, if they’re reading it, that chapter one for me is really chapter thirty-one. So, if you started at chapter thirty, in a way you can understand…Well, in chapter thirty you can understand the whole language experiment that I’m doing. But if you start, if it goes around to chapter one, the five words are an equation of what happened to us in America, which is: “MAN! BE! GOLD! BE! BOY!” So, we were taken from men, and then we were turned into gold, and then we were turned into boys. Because we have to really come to grips with that. You know, slavery wasn’t just—the Americans want to think of it as psychological and everything like that, but we were profoundly cheated economically by slavery. We weren’t allowed to pass anything on. Everybody in the world is passing on whatever they can pass on to their children, but we were absolutely forbidden from doing that.
AMD: The only thing we could pass on was slavery.
WMK: Yeah. We couldn’t even pass on our tools. Frederick Douglass was an expert carpenter, but if he hadn’t gotten away, if instead he had died a slave—his master, his owner, owned his tools. They weren’t Frederick Douglass’s tools to pass on to his son. So, they cheated us out of a generational accumulation of wealth. Put us behind everybody, basically. My plan is—I think I told you this—if you can prove that you had an ancestor, an African American, in the 1900 census, you should get a million dollars apiece. And that’s fair, because Jamaicans don’t need it. They weren’t slaves in this country. It’s a different kind of slavery. Very brutal, but in a way American slavery was more pernicious, because they were really into buying and selling our children and breeding us.
AMD: Breeding, yeah, absolutely.
WMK: Breeding and all that kind of shit, you know? So, they really did reduce us from the—My daughter wrote something about this recently. She explained in her blog why her experiences were so different. And, in so many words, she was saying, “I know what it is to be a human being and to be equal to every human being in the world. And so, I have no idea that American racism, and the hierarchy that was formed by it, really has anything to do with me. Because I totally see through it. You know, I’m human.” For me it was a profound moment…I was riding the bus out into the country, from Kingston, and I’m sitting on the bus with the people with the goats and the chickens and everything like that. I’m wearing Jamaican clothes. My American clothes had worn out by that time, so I’m totally dressed in Jamaican clothes. I’d learned the language. Somebody speaks to me, and I speak back to them in Jamaican. And the most that anybody could say—Jamaicans are basically very perceptive—is that he seems to have a little bit of an American accent. A twang. [Jamaican voice]: “You have a twang, mon.” That’s what they said to me. They said, [Jamaican voice]: “American, not the twang, mon! Speak Jamaican!” And I began to speak Jamaican, you know, began that little…got the edge, that Jamaican edge. And by the time I learned enough about them—Well, you know, in Jamaica, you say exactly what you want. Because they’re really free. Not like us…
WMK (cont.): You ever see the beginning of The Harder They Come?
AMD: I have, yeah.
WMK: When they beat the guy over a barrel? That shit’s real! And they may have it still to this day. But the guy’s got a choice: spend five years in jail, or you’re going to let us beat you on the ass ten times—and run up to you and beat you! And it’s going to hurt, but you won’t have to spend five years in jail. But if you steal something, they don’t give you any break. Every so often, somebody will sneak into some old woman’s house and try to rob them. Woman will rise up out of the bed with a machete—chop, chop! Guy would be running out with wounds all in his shit. Somebody said:
[Jamaican villager #1 voice]: “What ‘im do?”
[Jamaican villager #2 voice]: “Oh, ‘im tried to rob Ms. Millie!”
[Jamaican villager #1 voice]: “Then go get them! Cut this man!”
WMK (cont.): And it’s up to the police to rescue the guy before the villagers kill him. Really! So, then everything turns around, you know?
[Jamaican police voice]: “No, no, leave the man alone. No, no, no, mon. Drop the cards, mon. We’ll carry the cards.”
[Jamaican villager voice]: “This rassclot tried to rob Ms. Millie!”
WMK (cont.): And everybody—a whole crowd—is there…Because that’s the way they handle things. But I loved it, because I didn’t have to—you know, when you’re a black man in America, if you don’t try to be nice and polite, some cop is going to shoot you. You know what I mean? You really can’t speak your mind.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: You can’t say, “What the fuck are you stoppin’ me for, man? I’m not doin’ anything! Man, get away from me…Yeah, all right, I didn’t put the signal on. Give me a ticket, let me get out of here.” You can’t talk like that to a cop in America. Well, in Jamaica, you might be able to talk like that. Jamaicans be hesitating to shoot people. But if you’re really a bad boy, like a rapist, a bank robber, or shit like that—you know, real bad—they’re going to get you…But I loved it. There just wasn’t all this foolishness about race, and following me around the store, and all of this bullshit. You know? “He’s got good hair,” or “He doesn’t have good hair.” That was one of the things that turned me against it. Because Jesi had good hair. It was like mine. Straighter in the back than in the front. She had the same kind of hair. And a really good friend of my wife’s came in and said, “Oh, she’s got such pretty hair…” Like, I’m going to have to go through the whole good-hair, bad-hair thing again? Because that was the first thing of Malcolm’s that ever got to me: “Why are you wearing stocking caps? And why do you think your nose is ugly? And why do you think your lips are ugly? And why do you think your beautiful skin is ugly? And why do you think your hair is ugly that you want to put a stocking cap on and flatten it?” That was the thing about the Nation of Islam. They all had nice African American hair. Treat it with respect. Didn’t have any kind of outlandish things. One of the first sad things I saw when I came back was that everybody was back to straightening their hair. You know, that little, brief period where suddenly the women were loving their hair, and doing all kinds of natural things with it, learning stuff from Africa. To a certain extent it became a style—we had nothing but African hair-braiding places in Harlem. But it didn’t have the meaning that it had. When the Rastas wear the dreadlocks, it meant something. It was the hairdo of the Ethiopian army that defeated Mussolini. Everybody knew they were some bad asses. Beat them twice! Twice turned them away. Turned them away in 1896, and then when Mussolini tried to hook up with Hitler and get into colonialism. When they invaded—I guess it was in ‘32 or ’33?—they turned them away again!…And it was around that time that that guy…he was a poet…that brother—I’m not sure. But he was the one who had that Rastafarian insight, that the way the Catholics had Rome to look to, and that was the beginning of our religion, the Ethiopians had the Bible to look to, too…I guess it’s St. Stephen. Might’ve been St. Stephen…
AMD: He’s Ethiopian?
WMK: Yeah. They write about him in the Acts of the Apostles. He comes looking for Jesus, and Jesus is dead by that time. But I think—it might be Stephen, but it might also be St. Paul, who teaches them the new religion, and is last seen going back to Ethiopia to rejoin. You know, there are a lot of people, me pretty much included—at least fifty-one percent—who believe that they’re supposed to have the Ark of the Covenant, in some church that they built way deep down into solid rock—they’re supposed to have the Ark of the Covenant, the original thing. So, the Rastafarians saw all that and said, “Oh, that’s the beginning of our spirituality.” Except that they substitute Selassie for Jesus…And they say, just like the Pope, he is the representative of Jesus in modern times. So, Selassie—the Ethiopian monarchy—represents for us, the Bible. But everything else is Old Testament. They hardly ever talk about Jesus. But they follow the food laws to an extreme. Because somewhere in there they read that salt is bad for them to eat, so they don’t eat salt, which is what I call food—salt is food. But the Bible—the Torah—says a little bit of salt makes it taste good. But their belief was strong. They say, “Jah Rastafari!” Around the circle with the chalice, it gets to be like a Southern church meeting. “Jah Rastafari!” You know, the belief that He’s going to save us. He’s going to come through for the people. And that was what inspired Bob Marley. They were all Rastafarians. When I got to Jamaica, he was just beginning, and they were very good. The Wailers were. They did a lot with a few things…
AMD: Were you teaching the whole time that you were in Jamaica?
WMK: No.
AMD: Yeah?
WMK: One day I just couldn’t take it anymore, because Jamaicans…Whatever the English writers had, they lost that shit after Shaw. And their thing was that the women were always better writers than the men. I mean, you can name five really great women writers—English writers—but after two men writers, you’re fucked up. You can’t find any more. You got Dickens and Thackeray, and Hardy. You ever read The Return of the Native? Tess of the d’Urbervilles and that shit? I mean, that’s it. And then, of course, it really bugs them that the best writer in the English language is James Joyce—the only Catholic. Because they try to make Oscar Wilde great. And Sean O’Casey, he’s pretty great, for a Protestant writer. They even try to include Swift, you know, all of them. They try to say, okay, these are Irish writers, but they’re all of English descent.
AMD: Right, yes.
WMK: It’s only Joyce and Swift who came from Ireland—all the others were Protestant…And what’s the guy’s name?…Yeats.
AMD: Yeats, yeah.
WMK: They’re the best, really, when you get down to it…Dylan Thomas is good.
AMD: Does not publishing anything in forty-five years bug you?
WMK: Well, you know, my religion teaches me to always look for the—it’s either blessings or lessons. Most of the time, it’s a lesson. So, I had, really, a good ten years. And then I made some choices that might not have been too wise. At Harvard they taught me that you have to be the best that you could be, and I was being the best that I could be. And, especially with Dunfords, I was really going against a lot of conventional wisdom. And that editor was calculating not to make it better but to make it sell. Or even in A Different Drummer: I wrote in all these different voices, and the first editor that they gave me at Doubleday—and I only signed at Doubleday because there was a guy who taught at Fieldston who was an editor at Doubleday, and I figured at least I’d have somebody who might understand my craziness, you know? But then he quit to write his own novels, and I was given the editor I was given, and he wanted me to change it all back into third person. I said, “You don’t understand the way I wrote the voices of all the characters. I’m not going to change it to third person.” So, I went to my agent, and I said, “I don’t like this guy. Give me someone else.” And they got me a really great editor. And, like you, she had no interest in writing her own novels. She really wanted to make other people’s novels really good, and she immediately perceived that I was not an ordinary Negro. She was dealing with a Harvard guy. She was dealing with a guy, you know, who—
AMD: She was dealing with Frank Sinatra!
WMK: Yeah! She was. Right. That’s right! And nobody could calculate. I don’t think anybody can do that. That was always my hidden thing. They always thought of me as Harvard and WASP-oriented, and stuff like that, but I was already a stealth writer in that I was more influenced by an Italian writer, and Hawkes, and had other ways of dealing with things, you know?…And Italian culture, too. Because Joe—he was my godfather. I called him Godfather from time to time, and I met him the same way that it was in The Godfather. He did shit for the good. He got me apartments. He got me jobs. He really did stuff for me. Whatever little influence he had, he used it to help me. I was always tremendously grateful to him. And then he introduced me to Italian wines and Italian dishes, and—
AMD: Italian women?
WMK: I liked Italian women, but I was married by that time. And I wasn’t mature enough to have an affair. I had a time where I didn’t know that I was good looking. Or that I was an attractive guy. I didn’t know.
AMD: You’re a family man.
WMK: Well, that is very true. The day that I really decided that I had to leave Paris was I was at a party, and I was smoking a lot of hashish and drinking wine, and it was starting to bubble up, to get really out there. And I had to make a piss. I went and knocked on the door of the bathroom and somebody said, “Come in!” And I opened the door and there was a woman in the bathtub. The woman hosting the party. So, I said, “I got to make a piss.” And she said, “Come in.” And I made a piss and then I sat on the edge of the tub, checking her out. She’s talking amiably, and I’m talking amiably. And I thought, if I take off my clothes and get into this tub, I’m going to fuck this woman right here. And I didn’t. I didn’t. And I think probably the only thing I was thinking about was my kids. And I was thinking about my wife. I’d have to put my clothes on again and go home…I had a conversation with the woman, and after a while, I said, “I have to go home.” I thought about that shit all the way home, walking around the Paris streets, you know? “I could’ve fucked that woman.” And she was looking pretty good. She was older, so she was ripe. I was thirty. Maybe she was late thirties, early forties. Ripe. And I just said this is crazy. I got to get out of here. If I don’t get out of here, I’m going to lose everything. Ruin my life. Everything’s being offered to me now. And what’s funny is, the next year, when they had the big strike and they brought down de Gaulle and everything like that, after that, in ‘68, somewhere in there, the French were going to give me a professorship at a place that was, like, a second-rate Sorbonne, that was very good, on its way to being great. They wanted me to teach American literature out there. And I thought about that shit. My kid turning into a French person. And I thought about Richard Wright’s kids. And I said, fuck, we got to get out of here. I’m not going to trade American racism for French racism. Even though it feels great to be in the middle, I want to be done with it forever. And so, I said, Jamaica—let’s go there. The kids are already going to have to learn Spanish—because we thought of Puerto Rico, too, but I had no contacts there, but, shit, my grandfather was from there. I never considered Brazil, but that would’ve been a good choice. But I didn’t want to have to learn another language, because that’s a weird feeling—to be in a country and not know the language…So, we went to Jamaica, and I started to work…But this is a little circle too: what I found out was that the truth that I would’ve said about Jamaica—because I was not going to say bad things about Jamaica. I was loving it. So, I said, fuck it, I’m not going to be the one to say bad things about Jamaica. I love the place. And I know it’s fucked up and you got all these things. But, you know, for instance, I’m not going to tell the editor of Playboy that they were all Communist when, if you know anything about Jamaica, it’s [Jamaican voice]: “Every spoil is a style, mon!” You’re not going to get a thousand Jamaicans into the same shirt and the same bandana on their heads. It’s not going to happen. The woman’s going to want to put it on her arm. And the guy wants to cut off the legs of the shit. They had some soldiers there, the Jamaican Defense Force. They were real military guys, and they’re in uniforms. But most Jamaicans are not going to do that shit. So, I say that—You don’t have to worry, America. Jamaica is not going to become Communist. Because, actually, Jamaicans didn’t like Cubans, because the Cubans would say, “We’re going to build you a school,” and then they would send everybody over there, and they would build a school, and then they would leave. And they would never teach any Jamaicans how to do anything. Never taught them in any schools. Never put them to work. And the Jamaicans would say, “What the fuck was that?” I understand the Chinese are the same way. They don’t really teach people how to do things. They just come and want to show off. Manley was a Democratic Socialist, and he was willing to—he liked the fact that if he stood up and badmouthed the Americans, Fidel would be there to cheer him on. And he was more independent-minded. But he tripped up. He saw politics as just a gesture. He passed a law in his parliament that you didn’t have to wear a shirt and a tie and a coat anymore. You could wear a guayabera. And the American State Department checked that out and said, “Oh, trouble!” And the next thing you know everything went up. Taxes went up, and wheat went up. And Pillsbury—flour went up. Because in Jamaica, what they really have is a two-party system. Much better than ours in terms of two parties. The one side, the Democratic Socialists would do everything as Harold Wilson would do, or whoever was the head of the Democratic Socialist Party in England. Nationalize a whole lot of shit. And the other side, the Jamaican Labour Party, which, ironically, had grown out of the labor unions—they were staunchly capitalist. So, Jamaicans had a choice. They’d stage an election. Usually, it went every eight years. So, say, in eight years, the first eight years, the Labour Party got in. They would make money. And then the people would begin to say, well, everybody’s getting richer, but we’re not getting richer. And then they’d vote the Democratic Socialist Party in. And it would be like—I don’t know how many people that they would have in parliament, but say they had twenty people. In one election it would be eighteen and two. And then it’d go to the other side, and it’d be eighteen and two the other way. And you’d see the opposition sitting there with two guys and all the other eighteen guys would be Democratic Socialists, and then you’d see the two guys be Socialists and the others would be capitalist. Every eight years.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: And we could use that. If we had a Bernie Sanders, who’d come in and nationalize everything—good schools, good roads, and everything like that, and impoverish the government. And then the capitalists could come in and make a whole lot of deals and make money and everything like that, and then when it got up high enough—boom—then the people would put him out and put the other guys in. They’ll go with the swing vote. Forty percent of Jamaicans were always Jamaican Labour, and forty percent were always Democratic Socialist, and every eight years twenty percent would swing back and forth and change the whole thing…And we could use that same thing. Because our thing’s right down the middle. The capitalists aren’t really capitalists. If I was a Republican, I would concentrate on small business. You know, we’re going to give you money enough to start a business in your neighborhood. Because we didn’t have any businesses in our neighborhood. Mom-and-Pop stores went to the Yemenites, and the fish and vegetable stores went to the Italians and the Koreans. And we have all kinds of different African restaurants. But we can’t get into it. They redline us. The banks redline us. They won’t give us the loans to start anything. Meanwhile, the Jamaicans and the—especially—Trinidadians and Koreans, they have these economic clubs. Every month, everybody in the club puts in a hundred bucks, and I might take as much as eight hundred dollars if there were eight people. It could be two thousand dollars. And once a month, one guy gets it all. And so, then, of course, the next month someone else gets it. But our lack of trust in each other is so great that if somebody would start a scheme like that, and they get the first thousand dollars, or the first two thousand dollars, then everybody breaks out into all kinds of acrimony and shit, and everybody feels cheated. They’ve given up their hundred to one guy, and the whole thing turns out to be a nonsense scheme. Something hangs the Trinidadians together, or the Koreans together, and they keep it going for years. And you know if you’re in there long enough, you’re going to get that payoff, and then you’ll be able to start your business. And then what happens is your business gets really good, and then you can move to a better location, so you don’t have to be in Harlem anymore. And now you can go do it at 96th Street, and have a vegetable store, of course, with your white clientele. And your cousin comes in and takes care of the store in Harlem—or your best friend, or your brother, or whatever. Because we have seen Yemenite guys that we knew, who were running the mom-and-pop store downstairs from us, actually, on 125th Street, and we have seen them now in other parts of the city, where they’re running bigger and better stores. Because they just worked their way up. But it’s like slavery, you know? They did not want us to be entrepreneurial. They didn’t want us to be capitalistic. And anybody else can come in and be a capitalist in our neighborhood, but we can’t get to be capitalists in our neighborhood. And now all the people that would’ve been capitalists have moved out. They don’t want to live with poor people anymore. And because they left—this is what was bad and good about segregation: when we were all segregated together, and had to live, rich and poor alike, we had a whole base of leadership, like, say, a Martin, an Adam Clayton Powell, you know, people who were good with money, and people who were good with politics. Because I watched the way they basically killed Harlem. When I first got here in ‘77, they were beginning to close the hospitals. If you couldn’t afford it, you could go to Harlem Hospital…Then when there’s no more hospitals, people get sick, they have no place to go, they say, oh shit, I better go to Queens. They have five hospitals out there. And so, they begin to move out, the old people. And then when the old people move out, oh, well, we don’t have enough kids for three schools; we only need two. And then we only need one. And by that time, the place is emptied out. There’s nobody there to fight the fight. I talk about that in my video. There’s nobody there to fight the fight.
AMD: The Beauty that I Saw?
WMK: Yeah.
AMD: And so, we don’t know when it’s coming out yet?
WMK: No. We’re looking into everything that we know. There is going to be, like, a festival… When you got to leave from here?
AMD: Within twenty minutes.
WMK: Oh, really?…What didn’t we cover?
AMD: So, the last thing I have on my list is actually the film. I wanted to talk about Harlem. We did that. We talked about your teachers. We talked about your new novel. We talked about who you read and reread. I want to ask you who you correspond with.
WMK: Nobody.
AMD: Yeah.
WMK: Every so often somebody shows up. Some guy in Texas, I think, named Cole, L. William Cole or William L. Cole. He wrote me and came up actually and I gave him the same amount of time, and he asked me all kinds of questions, and—
AMD: Did that appear anywhere?
WMK: Not yet. And I understand that he was going to collect all my essays, but I don’t know what he’s actually done…
WMK (cont.): But I never got into—after I left here, I was basically isolated. When I got to Jamaica and saw how much I loved it, I wasn’t thinking I was going to come back. But we became so impoverished by that time, that either one of two things happened: either my mother-in-law, who always hated me and who hated the idea of me taking her daughter to Jamaica to live among Jamaicans, she might have squealed on us to Jamaican immigration; and/or possibly the last landlord or two that we had that we ended up owing money to. So, either one of those—one or the other of those—was going to squeal on us. And one day we were in our house, I think getting over dengue fever, and here come Immigration! [Jamaican bureaucrat voice]: “You must leave, mon! Get yourselves together. You’re leaving!” And they took me to the bank, where I had just received a check for two thousand dollars. That would have kind of set us up a little bit, but it was taken. And so, they drove us to the bank, and I had to buy a ticket, and then they gave us two weeks to get packed up and said that they were going to come back for us. And we had to leave.
AMD: Back to the States.
WMK: Back to the plantation. And I broke it down to my kids the same way. I said, “We got to go back to the plantation.” And we all cried. As I said, one of the reasons why I began to write in phonetics is because I didn’t want to just lose everything. I wanted to have that little bit of distance from English. But it was good. You know, God is always good.
Notes
- Kathryn Schulz, “The Lost Giant of American Literature,” The New Yorker, January 28, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/the-lost-giant-of-american-literature. ↑
- Schulz, “The Lost Giant.” ↑
- Schulz, “The Lost Giant.” ↑
- Andrew M. Davenport to William Melvin Kelley, email, July 21, 2015. ↑
- William Melvin Kelley to Andrew M. Davenport, email, July 25, 2015. ↑
- Author’s notes. ↑
- Author’s notes. ↑
- Yannic Blec, “Story of a Life: A Conversation with William Melvin Kelley,” GRAAT Online, August 2019, 21. http://www.graat.fr/kelley.pdf. ↑
- Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Kelley cited in this introduction originate from the interview that follows. ↑
- The phrase is from Henry David Thoreau, who was one of Kelley’s favorite writers. See Schulz, “The Lost Giant.” ↑
- Kinohi Nishikawa, “The Book Reads You: William Melvin Kelley’s Typographic Imagination,” American Literary History 30, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 730-55. ↑
- Nishikawa, 732. ↑
- Nishikawa, 750. ↑
- Author’s transcription of an audio recording of Kelley and Benjamin Oren Abrams’ public conversation at the Harlem International Film Festival, September 2015, author’s collection. See also note 15. ↑
- Karen Aiki Kelley, Summary of The Beauty That I Saw, IMDB, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4123840/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl. ↑
- The goal of the editing process was to transcribe and present as much of the original audio recording as possible. To enhance the overall clarity of the language, minor corrections have been silently made throughout, and interruptions and/or portions deemed especially extraneous have been silently omitted. ↑
- Kelley, “William Melvin Kelley,” interview by Roy Newquist, in Conversations, ed. Roy Newquist (Rand McNally & Company, 1967), 208. ↑