| Contents |
Come out the wilderness -- 1: In Thoreau's backyard -- Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts: once upon an Eden -- Burlington, Vermont: where two or three are gathered in my name -- Bangor, Maine: many hundred gone -- 2: The great big middle -- Buffalo, New York: lake effect -- Idlewild, Michigan: the snowbirds -- Madison, Wisconsin: something like the future -- Chicago, Illinois: my own private Chicago -- St. Paul/Minneapolis, Minnesota: what is the question? -- Grand Forks, North Dakota: "how old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?" -- Coeur d'Alene, Idaho: fight no more forever -- 3: The ice mystique -- Maidstone and North Battleford, Saskatchewan: by the big gulley -- Anchorage, Alaska: cold hands and fiery hearts -- 4: Our still-frontier -- Seattle, Washington: city on the edge of forever -- San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and Allensworth, California: the there there -- 5: Promised lands -- Las Vegas, Nevada, the American city -- Salt Lake City, Utah: upon this desert -- Cheyenne, Wyoming: and still I rise -- Denver, Colorado: destiny made manifest -- 6: Night song after death -- Lafayette, Louisiana: Zydeco who? -- Atlanta and St. Simons Island, Georgia: walking on water -- 7: Home to a very strange place -- Cyberspace, North Carolina: where am I black? -- New York, New York: blackness on my mind. |
| Abstract |
From the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Let the Dead Bury Their Dead comes a group portrait of African Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century. In a blend of oral history and travel writing, Randall Kenan sets out to answer a question that has long fascinated him: What does it mean to be black in America today? To find the answers, Kenan traveled America--from Alaska to Louisiana, from Maine to Las Vegas--over the course of six years, interviewing nearly two hundred African Americans from every conceivable walk of life. We meet a Republican congressman and an AIDS activist; a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah and an ambitious public-relations major in North Dakota; militant activists in Atlanta and movie folks in Los Angeles. The result is a sharp, full picture of contemporary African American lives and experiences. |
