South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature

NINE: Salting the Land but Not the Imagination: William Melvin Kelley’s: A Different Drummer

Nine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Salting the Land but Not the Imagination William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer A Various fictional works that depict parts of the American South depend for their landscape upon completely imagined territories that the authors have created out of whole cloth. Gloria Naylor has her Willow Springs, a mythical island off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia; Raymond Andrews completed three novels about Muskhogean County, Georgia, somewhere in the northeastern part of the state, near Athens; Randall Kenan has centered a novel and a collection of short stories upon Tims Creek, North Carolina; and of course William Faulkner has his Yoknapatawpha. One of the lesser known literary lights who has contributed to this southern imaginary space is William Melvin Kelley, who, in A Different Drummer, published in 1962, creates a mythical southern state to enact his narrative of black and white relationships. That unnamed state, with the capital site of Willson City named after the most prominent family in the region’s history, is uniquely situated. “An East South Central state in the Deep South, it is bounded on the north by Tennessee; east by Alabama; south by the Gulf of Mexico; west by Mississippi” (11). Its geographical location is matched by an equally noteworthy demographic fact: “In June 1957, for reasons yet to be determined, all the state’s Negro inhabitants departed. Today, it is unique in being the only state in the Union that cannot count even one member of the Negro race among its citizens” (12). 150 . . . Kelley’s A Different Drummer The novel anticipates Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence (1964), a play set in a southern town in which black people simply disappear for a day. During the course of that day, nothing goes right in the town. White women cannot cook or take care of their babies, no garbage gets picked up, no white businessmen can be chauffeured to their places of business, and there are no loiterers on the streets. The mayor makes a crying, begging plea for the blacks to return, and because of this plea or for other reasons, the next day things are back to normal. Or are they? While Ward focuses on absence and return and an implied permanent though subtle disruption of the status quo, Kelley spends his narrative exploring the process of disappearance and the one man who, inadvertently or deliberately, is responsible for that disappearance. The man who, in the Thoreauvian tradition, hears the different drummer is Tucker Caliban, a diminutive black man who is the fourth generational descendant of “the African,” a huge black man whom slave traders tried to enslave. What Tucker Caliban does and why ties the African, the Willsons, and the white “men on the porch” into a cycle of history and psychological and physical violence. A couple of months after Tucker convinces David Willson, the current patriarch of the Willson dynasty, to sell him seven acres of the original Willson plantation on which early descendants of the African had lived and worked, he severs the bonds of paternalism and history that have tied the two families together. The most dramatic part of his declaration of independence is what Tucker does to his land. He orders ten tons of salt and essentially plants it on the land. When his neighbors, both black and white, hear about this extraordinary deed, they come to watch Tucker carry out, patiently and methodically, what they judge to be a peculiar brand of insanity. One observer notes: Just like he’s planting seed. Just like it’s spring planting time and he started early and don’t have to worry none about missing the first good days. Just like all of us every spring, getting up early and eating and then going out into the field and tossing in seed. Only he ain’t planting nothing; he’s surely killing Kelley’s A Different Drummer . . . 151 the land and he don’t even look like he hates it. It ain’t at all like he got up one morning and said to hisself, “I ain’t busting my backbone another day. I’m getting that land before it gets me.” Not running out like a mad dog and putting down the salt like it was salt, but putting it down like it was cotton or corn, like come fall, it’d be a paying crop. He’s so tiny to be...