"Another Drummer"
By William Kelly
Translated by Tan Yiqi
Published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
On a hot afternoon in June 1957, in a state in the South, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban sprinkled salt in his fields, shot his horses, and burned down his house... Kelly takes a different approach to telling the story through the eyes of the white residents who remain, and its irony and unique perspective give the book unparalleled significance.
"The Lost Giant of American Literature"
Catherine Schultz
Three weeks after the New York Times opinion piece was published, Kelly's novel "Another Drummer" was published. Kelly was 24 years old at the time, and this debut immediately put him on par with literary giants such as William Faulkner, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and James Baldwin. It also made him one of the most popular African-American artists of his generation, along with the likes of Alvin Avery and James Earl Jones.
When I read "The Other Drummer", I immediately understood why. Geographically, the novel is set in a small town called Sutton just outside the city of New Marseille, an imaginary southern state between Mississippi and Alabama. It was set in June 1957, when a young African-American farmer named Tucker Caliban sprinkled salt on his fields, slaughtered horses and cattle, burned his house, and left the state. Immediately after, all the African Americans in the state left.
It's an excellent setting. Our culture has had countless fantasies about what would have happened when the Civil War ended differently. Mainly, what would happen if the Confederacy won and slavery continued. But what if we lack the art of imagining the different outcomes of the civil rights movement, or a parallel universe in which the power held by African Americans in any one era continues undiminished but increases?
Appropriately, the sudden refusal of African Americans to continue living under subordination was an act of power that unnerved the white citizens of Sutton. The story of The Other Drummer begins with a character telling a harrowing story in order to make sense of what has recently happened in the town. Half slave story, half weirdness, the protagonist is a huge man who is simply called "African". One day, with a baby boy in his arms, he followed the slave ship to Sutton. This "African" was chained, at least 20 people led by chains, he was taken to the city and sold. Then he whipped with chains, knocked on his captives, and beheaded the auctioneer: "Some cursed - the head in the derby hat flew a quarter of a mile through the air like a cannonball, then bounced a quarter mile on the ground, and finally smashed into a horse of the new horse racing from someone in the crowd." He "grabbed the hem of her skirt like a woman getting into the car" and "tightened the chains," and then the "Africans" fled to a nearby swamp and began a raid to free the other slaves. Eventually, a traitor led the titular owner of the "Africans" to his hideout. The owner killed the "African" and claimed that the child, the great-grandfather of Tucker Caliban, belonged to himself.
The storyteller insists that Caliban did it because "the 'African' bloodline" was revived in him. Not all listeners agreed, but they struggled to provide a better explanation for the recent exodus of blacks, or to imagine its possible consequences. One wonders whether a third of the population will get higher or lower wages when they disappear. Others did not care at all about Caliban and his followers, echoing the governor's statement: "We never needed or wanted them, and we would live happily without them." "There are also people who feel betrayed, but they have no way to express it because they have never seriously studied this violated social contract before."
Although The Other Drummer's plot is based on African-American autonomous actions, the story is told entirely through the eyes of these white citizens. It's also a clever idea, and it also confirms the words of the historian Leon Bennett in a novel way: "There is no black problem in America." America's racial problem is a white problem." Also, the story is very well told. The 24-year-old Kelly is already a very confident writer, and his sense of humor is reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's Revelation: ironic, novel, and spiritual. He is also a keen observer, and while his stories have mythical emotional proportions, his sentences do feel like real life. Tucker Caliban cows are "as colored as freshly cut wood"; For the men watching from the outside, the fire lit by Caliban first appeared in the white curtains in the middle of the house, and then "slowly moved to the other windows like a man who wants to buy the house and examine it carefully".
"The Other Drummer" ended in tragedy, not so much a pessimism about the fate of blacks as a pessimism about the moral potential of white people. However, thanks to this, Kelly's career began with great optimism. His book rarely makes the future seem both inevitable and exciting. In fact, he published four more books over the next decade. But I'm not the only one who isn't familiar with these works. Because after the great popularity of the early years, Kelly basically faded out of people's eyes during the heyday of his personal creation, and also faded out of the eyes of people of our time. Of course, obscurity is a universal fate for writers. But strangely, very few people read Kelly's books today, given the weaknesses of the people shown in his books, as well as their unique, disturbing strengths.
(This article is excerpted from the preface to The Other Drummer)
By Catherine Schultz
Editor: Zhou Yiqian