The Book Reads You: William Melvin Kelley's Typographic Imagination

William Melvin Kelley's 1967 novel dεm begins with a dedica- tion to "The Black people in (not of) America" (5). As an opening gesture, it hardly prepares the reader for what follows: the story of Mitchell Pierce, a white Madison Avenue ad man whose midlife cri- sis takes increasingly bizarre turns. Things start to unravel when Mitchell visits a coworker at his suburban Westchester home. Wandering into a bedroom, he stumbles upon the bodies of the man's wife and two children. Far from being shocked by their murders, Mitchell finds the tableau appealing, his "curiosity" piqued (43). When he returns to the city, he takes steps to undo his own domestic ideal, making unfounded accusations against his black maid, eventually firing her, and then fantasizing a torrid love affair with a TV soap opera character. Mitchell gets a taste of his own medicine, however, when his wife Tam gives birth to twins, one white and one black. Horrified by this supposed proof of cross-racial cuckolding, he spends the rest of the novel chasing after the black man he believes has gotten the better of him. Psychopathy, paranoia, and white privilege: Mitchell, the mad Mad man, is the subject to whom Kelley dedicates his plot.

Yet for that very reason, the book's dedication makes sense. For to be in something but not of it suggests a critical orientation toward the context, "America," that would foster such neurotic entitlement. Kelley lends support to this reading in another paratext, appearing just before the narrative proper: "næt, lεmi tεljǝ hæt dεm foks lıv" (13). This mysterious remark serves as an omniscient invitation into the narrative. The voice issuing it disidentifies from "dεm," or white people like Mitchell Pierce, while directly addressing those who have come to hear the tale ("tεljǝ"). If you find yourself so addressed, then you know to approach what follows from the insider-outsider standpoint of being a black person in the US rather than Mitchell's perspective.

In order to get this meaning, however, you have to hear with your eyes. Kelley does not indulge the fantasy of orthographic transcription, which, by asking you to bridge the gap that opens up in the mind between sign and sound, risks inscribing racial stereotypes into what you think vernacular speech should look like. Instead, he uses the tools of phonetic transcription to compel you to hear exactly what he means. Drawing from the International Phonetic Alphabet, he presents visual data whose purpose is to actualize a black voice, not represent it. By sounding out the symbols on the page—that is, by pronouncing them correctly—you can hear vernacular speech in your mind's ear.

The typescript for dεm reveals that this expressive choice was no minor detail. On the title page, next to "dεm," Kelley noted "(phonetic symbols; no caps)," and Doubleday, his publisher, honored this directive (Fabre Archives, box 11, folder 14). When it brought out the first edition in hardcover, the title page, spine, and, most strikingly, dust jacket all displayed the version of "dεm" Kelley had included in the original (Figure 1).¹ The title and prefatory remark thus encoded Kelley's satirical intent. His wager seemed to be that, as long as you could hear (that is, see) the voice that whispers these paratexts, you would know that you are in Mitchell's world but not of it.

Kelley's satire of northern, bourgeois white life was one of several experimental novels by black writers that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From Charles Wright's The Wig: A Mirror Image (1966) and Hal Bennett's Lord of Dark Places (1970) to Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Fran Ross's Oreo (1974), a wave of postmodern novels sought to challenge essentialist prescriptions of what a "black" book ought to look and sound like. For these authors, the goal was not to write storylines that better reflected the black experience but to disrupt the identitarian assumptions by which readers apprehended race in...