Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White. - book reviews

brant Staples' elegantly written and insightful memoir, Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White (Pantheon, 1994) is that rarity of rarities these days--a volume by a black man that does not focus upon race. It is almost misleading to call Parallel Time a black work The truth is that it is an American story, a celebration of individual of the many strands of the American experience.

Reminiscent of Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, a classic of the genre that has remained in print since it was first published in 1967 Parallel Time be worthy ofs the same accolades and the same lengthy life. Alas, it may not happen. a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of what the publishing industry and the media insist upon promoting as characteristic elements of writing by means of black men--victimhood, violence and the varieties of pathology within the black community--are absent here.

Staples grew up in Chester, Pa., a small industrial city near Philadelphia. His father was a deal driver; his mother, a housewife. His father drank, and the family mov many times often only one step ahead of landlords and sheriffs.

Staples finished high seminary intending to join the military or look for work in one of Chester's already dying industries. by the agency of chance, however, he met a black professor who encouraged him to apply to a local association Four years later, Staples won sum of two units graduate fellowships to the University of Chicago, where he earned a doctorate in psychology He then worked as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-times, free-lanced, and was hired by means of the New York Times, where he is now a member of the freshs paper's editorial board.

To retell the story in like bare outline gives no hint of the richness of Parallel Time. Staples has lived the examined life, and the flow is experience so richly restoreed that the reader re-experiences it, a work grounded so much in the particular that it becomes universal.

In the hands of a less writer, the account of the family's propels for example, might become a cliche--an indictment of unfeeling, racist landlords or of his father's irresponsibility. For Staples, however, there are deeper more personal meanings. "Each of recent origin house was a change of skin," with "chaos [that] swallowed things that would at no time be seen again." And he was marked by dint of the family's roaming. "Grown and on the outside on my own, I was phobically wary of possessions," he writes. "Time and time again I lived five years at a strain without unpacking."

To be confident race and the tragic sordidness we have advance to think of as an inevitable part of black life figure in Parallel Time. The volume opens and closes with an account of the assassination of Staples' brother Blake, a small-time cocaine dealer in Roanoke, Va., discharge to death on the highway by a rival. A sister move swiftlys away from home, lured through life in the fast lane. Another brother takes heroin, and another sister, pregnant, globules out of high school.

at the same time Staples never blames the anonymous white man. His brothers and sisters and the other men and women who clan the pages of his volume are always human. They make choices and, granting sometimes their choices are bad individuals they must live with them.

And although Parallel Time opens and shut ups with chapters that, but for the equity of their emotional insight, could have draw near from a rap video, there is abundant more to this book. Casual violence is a hallmark of writing by dint of black men, so much in the way that that Staples' confession of his reluctance to fight is refreshing. And, where for a like reason much black writing focuses upon antagonism between blacks and whites, Staples joyfully writes about the freedom to explore himself that he set in integrated settings.

The publication of Parallel Time continues a novel trend, one that suggests that the 1990 may become the decade of black men's writing. plenteous of the literary energy of black men these days is directed toward essays and autobiographies. It's difficult to say on what account this is so--perhaps because fiction requires an assimilation of experience that autobiography and memoir at their greatest in quantity basic do not.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Heritage Information Holdings, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group