Kenan troubles the South by unsettling blackness and rustic life in equal measures. In “The Acts of Velmajean Swearington Hoyt,” maybe the best story in the book, the title character discovers she can perform miracles just like Jesus and, similarly, it causes her no end of trouble. In “Now Why Come That Is?,” the only story featuring a white protagonist, Percy Terrell gets haunted by a hog who symbolizes the man’s multitude of sins - racism and avarice being the key ones. Of course, it’s not any easier for those who never left it. They’re uneasy whenever they visit or linger, unsure if Tims Creek can or even wants to welcome them on their own terms. In one story, a man asks his new lover, also a man, “Do you miss North Carolina?” The response is, “Only when I’m there.” The coastal Black South still doesn’t quite feel like home to the queer men and women who left it, who populate Kenan’s oeuvre. It’s not accidental that almost all of the stories feature titles drawn from either the Bible or gospel music.īut coming home is hard for some, and “If I Had Two Wings” understands precisely and complexly why some folks had to leave in the first place. Thematically, there’s also a coming home to, and reconciling with, a sense of faith. “If I Had Two Wings,” Kenan’s new collection of short stories, feel like a series of letters from an old friend who still lives there, letting us in on what’s new, who’s died, who’s shacking up with whom, and who renovated their old house in the tackiest manner possible. Over three decades, he’s built up the history and culture of Tims Creek, North Carolina, a coastal enclave of African Americans whose lives seem to seep from regularity to surrealism without even a wink to the reader.īut it’s been a while since we’ve heard from his town’s inhabitants. But, if urban spaces provide safe haven for weirdness, it’s tiny, isolated communities that breed it.Īrtists as varied as William Faulkner, Gilbert Hernandez and David Lynch have always known this their fictional rural spaces bloom and fester with dreamscapes, night visions and ghosts. Cities may put up with more oddity, and indeed freaks from rural towns often escape to big cities precisely because their weirdness is more tolerated there.
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