Different Souls, Different Smithies
KAMINE, MARK
Different Souls, Different Smithies Crossover By Dennis A. Williams Summit. 315 pp. $20.00. The Run of the Country By Shane Connaughton St. Martin's. 247 pp. $17.95. Reviewed by Mark...
...Shit, man, you think the police care about you and me...
...For Williams has built a complex character in Ike, one that I think will open the eyes of many white readers...
...Ike leaves college unpersuaded by his extremist colleagues...
...You had to eat and drink the other person to survive...
...Williams tracks his protagonist's development in clear, largely unadorned prose, occasionally punctuated by more highly charged language to convey urgency...
...Won't forget what you've done for me,'" Prunty tells him, aware of the effort he has made...
...In a priceless scene the boy, taken by surprise while dressed in a priest's vestment, improvises a mock prayer to bless the pig of a superstitious farmer...
...Begod you couldn't say the same to Annagh Lee,'" is Prunty's rejoinder...
...Thrown out of Prunty's house by relatives eager to sell it, the boy goes home, reconciles with his father, and later sets out again on his own...
...To impart a sense of the tensions of Ike's childhood, the author echoes Gertrude Stein: "She opened the door and stood there while Daddy said hello and asked could he come in and was he there and he wanted to move so Daddy could see him but he was scared...
...His friend responds, "'The British...
...Shane Con-naughton opens with a mystery that is properly unraveled very late...
...He writes of a "round of testimony about run-ins with cops and dogs and tear gas in pursuit of justice or good times or both," and of "rum-punched white tourists...
...Lycidas and Julius Caesar, amen.'" Even the darkest moments are leavened with humor...
...The passage deftly joins Ike's political opposition to violence with his social awareness in turning down the joint, while making plain his appealing individuality...
...Reviewed by Mark Kamine Short story writer...
...His diction is anchored around the hard, clipped sounds of verbs with Old English and Germanic roots...
...Although these first novels give us bookish boys initially encountering love and resistance, the heroes have more set against them than the usual temptations of commerce and complacency...
...Annagh, the boy's beloved, greets him with a reference to his wild reputation: "'Sure I know...
...Enough of Ike's past is limned to give his struggle to stay removed from campus activism resonance...
...In the end, they generally emerge scarred but with a mission, the most famous example being James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen Dedalus finally vows "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race...
...But they'll never lose,'" Prunty says, adding that neither will the Protestants ultimately prevail...
...If the drama falls off a bit at the end of Ike's tumultuous freshman year, about two-thirds through Crossover, interest in the hero never fades...
...When intensity is warranted Connaughton is capable of Lawrentian heights...
...You're as good as aconcert.'" His father sums up the death of a drunk who had dozed off on the railroad tracks: '"The eight o'clock train got him...
...They'll always be the best-dressed mourners at the funeral.'" Throughout The Run of the Country, palpable tragedy is redeemed by know-ingness and wit...
...She was a river of life beneath him, his body and soul flowing in...
...Cause we in college or somethin...
...He moves on to lifein Washington, D.C., and then New York City, committed to reform but not to revolution...
...These are remarkable qualities in a first novel...
...Since the story is set in Ireland, politics and religion are necessarily mixed into everything: Whether to listen to Radio Eirann or the BBC is a significant dilemma...
...Veins "rippled...
...Yet what engages in this novel set on the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland are isolated incidents both comic and dramatic, adept characterizations and, above all, glorious writing pitched perfectly to the story's emotion-laden events...
...Know all about you...
...Amid his turmoil over Armagh's pregnancy, the boy helps dig a grave for Prunty's mother...
...Yeah, Ike answered, butwhere's the payback if you're dead or exiled in Cuba someplace...
...I've done nothing,'" the boy says...
...Well, y' all done killed the wine, so what do you say...
...Connaughton, co-author of the screenplay for My Left Foot, has an uncanny ability to turn simple speech into poetry...
...But the wine helped him challenge the wisdom of armed confrontation and risk Zulu's scorn...
...Still, his brushes with physical conflict frighten him more than they exhilarate him...
...Just some more nigger heads to crack open, and I for one ain't turnin no cheek, dig...
...We get in a position to run these cities, get control of the political machinery, the police will be working for us...
...The book begins with the unnamed protagonist hiding naked in a shed...
...It seemed a canned spiel, primarily for Ike's benefit, since everyone else had no doubt heard it to death...
...Ike is out of sync with the times: More concerned about studying than protesting, he does his best to avoid two intertwined organizations, the Black Liberation Front and the Black Studies program, both based at Uhuru House, the campus nexus of radical activity...
...Most of what follows actually takes place in the months preceding his arrest, a period jammed with calamities...
...crazy over old Motown hits...
...And like Lawrence, he occasionally loses his way up there: "Love was a torturing mixture of physical hunger and mental thirst...
...Neat as a bacon slicer.'" For all the tragedy, the novel contains much humor and at times is boisterously funny...
...Eventually, though, the pressures of the era prove too much...
...Everyone does...
...Never...
...What about the British?' " the boy asks...
...To Williams' credit, Crossover never less than engrossing...
...Zulu scoffed, and asked Freddie how he'd like them ribs at the barbecue...
...I didn't think there were any black people living there.'" He works hard, eats alone and visits with his hometown sweetheart whenever possible...
...Whole sentences seem to pound out the roughness of the rural locale: "His laugh, starting in a private chuckle, rasped up into a hard public bark...
...Dennis A. Williams and Shane Connaughton's contributions to the genre are to some degree exceptions...
...Lovers were cannibals...
...The expectations of a strong mother, the void left by his absent father, the continuing affair with a white high-school classmate—all have a bearing on Ike's stance...
...He is dragged into the fray when Uhuru House is firebombed and the Black Liberation Front takes over the college library, Ike in tow...
...At the sound of an explosion Prunty guesses the Customs Post has been hit, and the boy wonders if the IRA can ever win...
...In the exchanges between characters the region's turns of phrase are faithfully reproduced...
...In addition, the IRA is a stubborn presence: A local member stands alone at attention when the national anthem plays after a movie...
...At least they ain't no revolutionary rapists like your boy Beaver Cleaver, and I'm tellin you, that dope's killin us, man...
...Along the way Williams manages to poke gentle fun at the spirit of the '60s and at white soul...
...battling for Irish independence is the highlight of the father's life...
...Race complicates the maturing of Williams' Richard "Ike" Isaac, an African-American who goes off to college in 1969, one of the most militant years of student activism...
...He concludes with the benediction, "'Knio, knio...
...Upon the death of his mother he leaves home to live with a friend, a local character named Prunty who divides his time between running a farm and smuggling goods across the border...
...After Ike tells a fellow black student which dorm he lives in, she replies tauntingly, "'Yeah, that sounds right...
...Then Prunty's mother dies...
...Itis further testimony to the author's narrative skill that in the same paragraph he effortlessly traces talk ranging from professional football to the black power landscape to a popular pastime at college parties: "They assessed O. J.'s pro prospects —Carl, from Buffalo, was missing the last exhibition game by being there— and Zulu held forth on the Panthers...
...It's just not practical...
...a girl wears jeans "stuck into brown boots...
...As he spoke, a reefer floated by and Ike waved it off expecting a reaction but Freddie, stillsipping, denounced drugs in the name of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad...
...Annagh becomes pregnant and has a miscarriage...
...We learn why the boy was forced into hiding and imprisoned...
...The drama in The Run of the Country is not wholly sustained either...
...The boy falls in love with a girl named Armagh Lee...
...asked Carl, splashing Brut at the dresser...
...All the memories he ever had were washed away...
...For a while he succeeds...
...Not as fast as the honkies, said Zulu...
...His father, a police sergeant on the northernmost section of the Irish border, hunts the teenage boy down and brings him to jail...
...He is released and takes up again with his friend, who dies shortly afterward...
...At this point, the author returns to the present...
...contributor, "The Quarterly," "Massachusetts Review," "Newsday" Coming-of-age novels typically feature introspective budding artists who are forced to confront the cruel world...
...Lad, lad, I won't forget this...
...Talkin bout payback...
...Catholic boys fight Protestant boys...
...I will be surprised to see a better one published this year...
...the Irish are poor, the wealthy English are decadent and eccentric...
...I ain't no Muslim, he replied, but that don't mean they ain't right about some things...
...an elderly couple "swept" round the floor...
...Prunty gets him involved in the illicit trade...
...The word had become flesh...
Vol. 75 • March 1992 • No. 4
