Anna Holmes, the editorial director of “Topic”, a woman with one white parent and one black parent, asks, in her thoughtful article in the New York Times Sunday Review for February 11, 2018, if being born with one white parent, gave blacks an advantage in America’s racist society. She suggests that it does. William Melvin Kelley, who wrote “A Different Drummer” when he was 23 years old, seems to bear her out.
Kelley had a white grandparent who played a big role his upbringing. His family, middle class achievers, had escaped the ghetto, raised Kelley in an integrated community, enabled him to attend and graduate from a private white high school where his achievements led to his matriculation at Harvard in 1957. At Harvard, where his teachers included Archibald MacLeish and John Hawkes, Kelley began his writing career. His short story, “The Poker Game”, won the prize for the best work of fiction by an undergraduate.
“A Different Drummer” (1962), last in print in 1989 in an Anchor Books edition with an erudite forward by David Bradley, barely gets noticed these days. It has not shown the staying power of works by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison or Zora Neale Hurston among others, but, as Kathryn Schulz writes in her recent “New Yorker” appreciation (January 29, 2018), “it was that rare first novel that makes future ones seem both inevitable an exciting.”
What makes “Drummer” standout, Schulz points out, is that “the story is told exclusively through the eyes” of the white townspeople in the fictional southern town in which Kelley places his story. But that perspective may have been his undoing, she points out, “[t]hat perspective was smart and important . . . but it radically diminished Kelley’s audience. Many white readers didn’t want a black writer telling them what they thought, especially when so much of it was withering. . .”
Be that as it may, “Drummer” reads well today. The insights it provides on the black disadvantage in this country are at least as valid now as they were when Kelley wrote it in the early sixties. Indeed, it is the protagonist’s reaction to his underclass status that drives the book’s action and leaves the reader asking when will blacks ever be treated equally in their own country.
End note. For more on Kelley, read the New Yorker piece by Kathryn Schulz Jan,29, 2018, the forward by David Bradloey in the 1989 Anchor Books edition of “A Different Drummer” and Kelley’s obituary in the Feb. 8, 2017, issue of the New York Times .“
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