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Hoffman 140 Little wonder that Murray writes his works longhand, then dictates them to a computer operator, carefully tuning the sounds of his prose as he goes. In the apartment filled with books by world authors, photographs of two of Murray’s heroes, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, look sweetly on. “Albert Murray is the greatest living Alabama writer,” contends Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Howell Raines, a fellow Alabamian who puts Murray ’s accomplishments ahead of even Harper Lee’s. From his office as editor of the NewYorkTimes editorial page, Raines speaks with delight of Murray’s South to aVery Old Place, recalling “its jazz inflections, the riffs on language, the invocation of the smell of fish frying in his boyhood home near Mobile. It’s like you could play it on a trumpet.” “It’s interesting, but not surprising,” Raines adds, “that he writes about Gasoline Point, Alabama, from Harlem because a lot of southerners, particularly a lot of Alabamians, find they’re closest to home, in a literary sense, when they’re away.” The official name of that place (which is perhaps even more of a location in time than an intersection on a map) was Gasoline Point, Alabama , because that was what your post office address was, and it was also the name on the L&N timetable and the road map. But once upon a time it was also the briarpatch, which is why my nickname was then Scooter, and is also why the chinaberry tree (that was ever as tall as any fairy tale beanstalk) was, among other things, my spyglass tree. Albert Murray, ȅ TrainWhistle Guitar, 1974 On Albert Murray’s writing desk are his “reference books”: mythology by Joseph Campbell; novels by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Thomas Mann; world histories. Among the “references” are Mother Goose, “Uncle­ Remus,” and a collection of fairy tales. Odd choices for sacred texts? “If you can’t write a fairy tale,” he says with mild annoyance—a recurrent mood—“you can’t write a novel. If it’s got five hundred pages you’re trying to make it something as meaningful to a sophisticated reader as a fairy tale. A fairy tale you never outgrow. Journalists’ minds are so screwed up with soci- Murray’s House of Blues 141 ology and economics that they don’t see you’re talking about fairy tales.They spread confusion.” Murray intends to make his literature accessible, and clear. In doing so he returns, time and again, to the geography of his youth, and to heroic characters like Dr. Benjamin Baker, his beloved teacher and principal at Mobile CountyTraining School. The neighborly street corners of his youth have long been bulldozed over to make way for paper mills. The Magazine Point he knew endures in his imagination. The voice of Scooter, the fictional narrator of his novels, keeps the place alive for others. “When you deal with your consciousness it’s got to have a real base, a point of departure. The meanings begin there. This is where literature turns into romance.The facts are nothing unless they become legend.” Does Murray feel any connection to another black southern writer of his generation, Richard Wright, author of Black Boy and Native Son? “I don’t think a novelist should be telling the reader how to vote,” he complains. “It feels better to me to be going somewhere with Hemingway than going somewhere with any number of other writers. Certainly going somewhere with Richard Wright, who’s depressing to me. With Hemingway I would see the landscape; I would see the streams; I would see the sun; I would see the people; I would hear the language. That’s what being alive means to me. That’s the earth. You’ve got to go through race if the guy’s talking about a bottle of wine?” In fact, Murray bridles at being called “black,” preferring the term “colored.” In America, he argues, black and white are no longer accurate, nor are they valid as distinctions. He explored the nuances of race and identity in his first book, The Omni-Americans. “We don’t know who’s Negro and who’s white,” he says. “You don’t know who’s passing, and nobody cares. People no longer care if a guy’s a black second baseman.They care if he’s a good second baseman.” Twenty-five years after publication of The Omni-Americans, Newsweek is on the newsstands with an article titled “In Living...

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