Abstract

Trudier Harris's essay raises many important questions about the past, present, and future of southern literary studies, chief among them the nagging questions of how and why particular texts and writers come to be both formative and neglected. My response to Harris begins by affirming that the novel she places under discussion, William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer, has been unduly overlooked by critics and teachers alike. Then I join with her in arguing that this deceptively Anglo-centered novel finds ways of making very telling points about African American identity in the South and, analogously, about African American literature as a driving force in southern U.S. literature. Kelley chooses to tell a story of black resistance by focusing much of his narrative on white resistance: how various white characters react to the complete, unanimous, and remarkably efficient black migration that happens before their eyes. Along with Harris, I address this paradox of a powerfully present African American absence; I also speak to other, related questions of personal, regional, racial, and cultural identity, such as the roles of problematic patriarchs and feminized male precursors in the novel. And I argue that the novel, finally and paradoxically, broadcasts the real live, invisible sounds of a different drummer, the words we never hear, the words African Americans use to make African American migration, resistance, and survival possible for themselves.

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