Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History (review)

One of my favorite courses to teach is a class on American autobiography, in which we read memoirs and autobiographies, primarily those written by members of historically marginalized groups, and a variety of critical scholarship on the topic of life writing. Unlike most of the literature courses I teach, this class contains a creative component. In addition to writing a research paper, students must write a 3-5-page personal narrative that incorporates some of the tropes or techniques used by authors we have encountered. Students often express more anxiety about this assignment than the twenty-page research paper, yet the day when students share their memoirs in class is always a highlight of the semester. While nobody can sum up his or her life in a few short pages, these narratives provide snapshots of how they see themselves and how they relate to language, and the results are poignant. Similarly poignant, and further distinguished by a prolific and award-winning poet's attention to language and form, is Kenneth McClane's slim volume entitled Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History. These eleven anecdotal essays provide glimpses into McClane's personal development through their poetic precision and their ability to speak to each other. While the topics that McClane addresses, including the challenges of caring for ailing parents, racial oppression that stymies educational and professional growth, colorism, and art's role in strengthening the human spirit, have been treated by many Black writers past and present, he provides a fresh lens through which we can view the continuing relevance of these issues.

One of the most striking characteristics of these essays is their intertextuality. McClane, a poet who is currently W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of Literature at Cornell University, cites the words of everyone from James Agee and George Orwell to Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. While such rampant allusion in a piece of writing might appear to be a gratuitous display of the writer's erudition, it is clear that these references are never superfluous gestures. In fact, McClane attends to the words of the great writers of the twentieth century as carefully as he listens to the masses. For instance, the two epigraphs to his essay "Hungers: Reflections on Affirmative Action" come from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem and a "conversation overheard on a New York City bus" (60). His inclusion of multiple sources stems from an understanding of his role in a supportive community that reminds him of his origins and his obligations. As McClane writes in an essay in which he reflects on an encounter at the age of eight at his parents' house in Martha's Vineyard in 1959 with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., both preachers and musicians in Black culture "sample" from their peers. Yet "the preacher, like the jazz musician, is not stealing: he is celebrating, extending, and reinterpreting. Fundamentally, his enterprise is not an act of theft but of communion. It reminds us that a good tree springs from well-tended soil" (32). Indeed, McClane's own writing is marked by the signifyin(g) tradition that is central to African American cultural expression.

McClane's family also figures prominently in many of the essays, and the formal family portrait of him as a baby with his parents, brother, and sister before the Acknowledgements sets the stage for the text. The portrait and their clothing mark them as upper-middle class, and one cannot help but read their varied expressions as windows into their individual and collective traumas and triumphs. McClane writes briefly of his older sister Adrienne, who suffered brain damage right after birth, and says a bit more about his older brother Paul, who died young of alcoholism, but it is his late parents, both of whom suffered from Alzheimer's disease, whom we get to know most intimately. While McClane states that he does not want his "experience to be seen as representative of how Alzheimer's patients handle the disease or how families...