Understanding Randall Kenan

James A. Crank

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781643361888, 9781611179583
• eBook ISBN: 9781611179590
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The first book-length study of the life and writings of the critically acclaimed Southern writer

Randall Kenan is an American author best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirit s and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and named a New York Time s Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Whiting Writers Award, Sherwood Anderson Award, John Dos Passos Award, Rome Prize, and North Carolina Award for Literature.

Understanding Randall Kenan is the first book-length critical study of Kenan, offering a brief biography and an exploration of his considerable oeuvre—memoir, short stories, novels, journalism, folklore, and essays. Kenan's writing can be complex and sometimes highly stylized while covering a broad range of topics, though he often explores African Americans' complicated relationships, specifically as they struggle to make connections along other axes of class, gender, and sexual identity. Crank explores these themes and how they influence Kenan's work through a personal interview with the author.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Randall Kenan

“I wanted to write before I knew I wanted to write, and write I did, talking back, writing back, on paper, to Beatrix Potter, to Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe and Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys.”

Randall Kenan, “An Ahistorical
Silliness” in The Fire This Time

Though Randall Garrett Kenan was born in the early spring of 1963 in Brooklyn, New York, he found himself very quickly the citizen of a state that would become not just his adopted homeland, but, indeed, the central focus of much of his intellectual and artistic exploration: North Carolina. Only six weeks old, the young Kenan was shuttled off from the big city of New York to the small, rural community of Duplin County, North Carolina, where he lived briefly with his grandfather and his seamstress grandmother in the thriving small town of Wallace. At first, his grandparents—who ran a dry-cleaning establishment—hired someone to take care of the boy while they worked, but his great-aunt, Mary Fleming, his grandfather’s sister, and his great-uncle Redden immediately “took a shine”¹ to the baby and would take him away for weekends to the family farm in Chinquapin, “about fifteen miles east of Wallace,” Kenan remembered; the farm and the country were very different from the town where Kenan’s grandparents lived. It was, as he recalled later, “deep, deep country, on the edge of the Angola swamp, it lay on a dirt road, surrounded by fields and woods. My first memories of the place are apple trees, grapevines, pine trees, and an oak tree so large it could blot out the sun, with limbs as thick as small automobiles, a trunk of truly elephantine proportions.”²

Mary quickly recognized that Kenan’s grandparents were too involved in running their business to take care of an infant. “One weekend she just didn’t bring me back,”³ he recalled with a laugh, and “Old Field Road became my home.”⁴ In a short amount of time, Kenan began to call Mary “Mama.” When Kenan was only three years old, Redden died unexpectedly. In his essay “Brother Rabbit versus Brother Fox,” Kenan muses that the man’s death is one of his earliest memories: “When I ask people about their earliest memory, it truly puzzles me when they say it’s from preschool, or kindergarten or first grade. Perhaps they are being cautious, but I remember images vividly from ages two and three and, I believe, from earlier. But I have no doubt about three, for that is how old I was when my great-uncle Redden died on my quilt.”⁵

The loss of Redden greatly affected Kenan’s family. In the wake of the man’s death, Kenan remembered his grandfather saying to his great-aunt, “You’re here by yourself, so why don’t you just keep the boy?” She did, and a young Randall Kenan remained with her for the rest of his childhood and adolescence.

Kenan’s biological parents were not married, and the young boy never knew much of his mother, who stayed behind in Brooklyn. However, his father moved back to Wallace not too long after Kenan was adopted. Still, Kenan’s intellectual, emotional, and familial mentor was Mary, who was adamant that the young boy learn the fundamentals of language from an early age; she taught him to read when he was only four years old. A kindergarten teacher by trade and used to working with children Kenan’s age, Mary Fleming could relate well to the child in her care. She bought him books: one of his first loves. Kenan remembered that the first book she got him was “Peter Cottontail, and on my fifth Christmas I got this adaptation of Moby Dick, which I still can’t find, because that book was kind of long gone, but I remember it vividly because it was one of those graphic adaptations for younger readers with big pictures and all that sort of thing.”⁶ The young Kenan found himself captivated by the world of words and images. “I was reading all the time,” he recalled. “I discovered comic books not long after that. The Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, all those books that none of my students read anymore.”

Kenan’s childhood, though impoverished and rural, was rich in support, education, and love. He found himself—especially later in life—looking back on his early experiences with a great deal of fondness and appreciation. The farm was his emotional center, but the nearby town “bustl[ed] like a little beehive, sprung up around a railroad depot, a warren of small tobacco warehouses and poultry plants, several stone’s throws from Wilmington.”⁷ And, of course, Kenan had the church: “Two churches in fact. First Baptist and St. Louis. Both Baptist … My mama was zealous about my going to church, and I remember too many sermons to be in my right mind, and the pastors Hestor, and Lassiter the younger, who succeeded Lassiter the senior. There were revivals in September and Vacation Bible School in June, when the blueberry season came, and Sunday school each and every Sunday…. Church remained an indelible mark on my growing up, and, no matter how far or how fast I run, the lessons of Baptist Protestantism and southern Calvinism will be etched on my brain—probably my soul—the way circuits are hardwired to a motherboard.”⁸

Kenan found a love for reading through the Bible, but he also discovered a passion for making up his own stories. His favorite subject in school was initially science, specifically physics. In high school, the young man had been in the Minority Introduction to Engineering program (MITE), which sought to introduce young, marginalized students to the concepts of engineering. Kenan recalled the program as part of a larger national ferment: “You know, in the late ’70s, early ’80s, they were much more aggressive and pronounced in outreach to young poor kids of color.”⁹ But even his interest in science was tinged with a connection to fiction and stories. “I think my initial fascination was with science fiction,” Kenan admitted. “I mean that led me into [writing], and I actually remember my high school physics teacher was extremely discouraging [about reading science fiction stories].”

Though he voraciously devoured science textbooks and memorized equations, Kenan also found himself interested in his own capacity for storytelling. During high school, he wrote what he later labeled “several bad novels in longhand” that were dark and macabre, more Edgar Allan Poe than William Faulkner. “I still have some of those stories,” he recalled. The stories would start out dark and mysterious and suddenly switch: “and then it would be Space Opera. You know, science fiction.” These stories he found himself writing were a way of dealing with a gap the young writer had found between the world he saw and the worlds he read about: “Writing is an extension of reading, and I guess that, in many ways, I wanted to write the stories that I wasn’t finding to read, that nobody was writing—that was a huge motivation, as well.”

Though he knew he would always love Chinquapin and the farm, Kenan never considered staying in his hometown; remaining there never felt like a viable option to him. “There’s nothing to do there,” he remarked about Wallace. “I don’t know what I would have done if I’d stayed. The only thing I could have done was teach school or become a farmer, and, you know, I wasn’t interested in either one of those [professions].” Kenan’s family also supported his decision to leave: “It was just assumed that you were going to go away, you know, when you grew up, that you would sort of go to college and then move on from there.” He had decided to pursue a degree in physics in college because a friend of his who had gone to Georgia Tech convinced him that getting a bachelor’s in physics before doing graduate work in engineering would work to his advantage in future employment. However, Kenan’s family and town weren’t so sure: “It was a very odd thing, especially in Dougal County, for a young black fella to actually want to do something like [go into the natural sciences], and people would look askance when I told them I’m going to go into physics,” he remembered. But he persevered and decided to “learn all my equations and algorithms at Chapel Hill and then go on.” Even despite his good planning, things didn’t work out quite the way Kenan envisioned.

In the fall of 1981, Randall Kenan began a difficult freshman year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He found himself confused about what direction to follow and not enjoying his science classes. After his first year, Kenan enrolled in a writing class with Max Steele, one of the preeminent professors of creative writing and an editor at The Paris Review. The young Kenan excitedly turned in his science fiction and mystery stories, but he was met with brutal rejection from his professor. “But I appreciated that sort of frankness,” Kenan remembered. “[Steele] recommended that I start looking at people like Ellison and Baldwin,” the latter of whom had been on Kenan’s radar early in his life. As an avid reader of magazines like JET and a consumer of popular culture in general, Randall Kenan already was aware of the larger-than-life presence of James Baldwin. But he admitted, “I knew about Baldwin. I had not really read him that much.” Really, the only memories Kenan had of Baldwin during his adolescence were of hearing his aunts talk about the writer’s books, especially “the gay stuff.” Kenan had a chance to meet Baldwin when the writer came to Chapel Hill during Kenan’s senior year. The University frequently drew big name writers to campus—Alex Haley, John Irving, Nikki Giovanni—but it was Baldwin and Haley who made an impact on Kenan.

Kenan remembered James Baldwin sitting in on Professor Lee Greene’s graduate seminar on African American literature; seeing the writer in person was almost too much for the precocious student to handle: “I was reading him, and I was reading interviews and stuff. I will never forget. I quoted something that he said on a Studs Terkel interview in like 1956 or something. He said, ‘That was like twenty years ago, how the hell would I remember everything I say?’” Similarly, the novelist Alex Haley influenced Kenan’s thoughts on writing as a profession and the difficulties involved in such a craft. “[Haley] was the first person who I remember talking about the idea of people who become writers have at some point spent a lot of their time alone which was … my childhood on a big farm out in the middle of a swamp, you know. And he talked about time on a ship, time in healing, and all that sort of thing. So, I’d been thinking about [writing during that time] increasingly.”

It was also during Kenan’s senior year at Chapel Hill that the young man began to work through a dramatic change in the style and subject of his writing. Part of the push to connect the pieces he’d been working on as an undergraduate was practical—Kenan was tasked with assembling a dossier of materials to graduate with honors. Ever precocious, the young writer graduated early and took courses with upperclassmen and honors students as a sophomore and a junior. His professors, from Louis D. Rubin to Doris Betts, encouraged his writing. At the time, Kenan found himself drawn particularly to fiction: “I was writing short stories, but I also started on a novel called Ashes Don’t Burn, and that actually became A Visitation of Spirits in a sort of inverted way, but some of the stories I wrote wound up in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, too.”

During his time in Chapel Hill, Kenan had begun to form a community of other men who shared a similar celebration of their sexual identity. While not an ideal place for a queer-identified young man in the 1980s, the University of North Carolina was accepting enough of gay students and faculty: “There was a Carolina Gay Association, and those meetings were held in the Student Union, and you had local members. We had some local members, the faculty, not a whole lot. Probably the most famous being Gary Utz in the Department of Education.” Though more “fringe” than mainstream, the small gay community of students in Chapel Hill found one another. Kenan remembered that finding his way into such a community was “very helpful”: “I had openly gay friends before my senior year, but my senior year, me and my close friend moved into this house on Friendly Lane. The house was called The Castle. I had just turned twenty, and it had been founded twenty years ago. And for twenty years, it had nothing but gay men living in there. Everybody called it The Castle, but it was just a white clapboard house. The house is still there. It’s fixed up much better than it was when we were there. It was kind of run down when we were there. They called it The Castle because queens lived there.”

By the time he was ready to graduate, Randall Kenan had a pretty firm grip on who he was, but he still was not sure of exactly what he wanted to do. He had gone back and forth between wanting to write and wanting to work in the publishing field. But mostly he felt stuck.

His senior thesis professor, Doris Betts, became Kenan’s friend and mentor. Unlike the somewhat pedantic Steele, Betts was appreciative of Kenan’s areas of interest. At the time, Kenan recalled, he was “already getting very frustrated with social realism, and [Professor Steele] didn’t seem to care. But Doris was very encouraging, and I think that was why I really started to write a lot like Latin American Boom writers who I was reading at the time.” Those writers—figures like Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes—were ones Max Steele didn’t know but Doris did. “She was very encouraging in anything—well, not any experiment—but she was cool with experimentation. She was so well read and so intellectual,” he recalled. Kenan decided to graduate a semester early; he had convinced himself that he belonged in the publishing world of New York City. At that time, he began to really “bug Doris to death [and she] wrote letters on my behalf to people she knew in New York. She wrote people at Harper & Row. That was the predecessor to HarperCollins. I went to a lot of places. I had a friend who lived in the Bronx, and I flew up there before I graduated and stayed with her and pounded the pavement for about two weeks.”

Nothing really materialized from Kenan’s hard work canvassing the publishing houses. He graduated from Chapel Hill in the fall of 1984 and promptly sank into a little bit of a depression. “After I graduated in December,” Kenan recalled, “that January, I stayed with my grandfather for about a month and my great Aunt Eerie. I went to see her, and she had like sixteen children. And she’s like, ‘Boy, what you want to do?’ and I said, ‘I want to go and live in New York, to work in publishing.’ And she said, ‘Well, what’s stopping you?’ ‘I don’t know where to go.’ Sort of sullen twenty-year-old, so she took down the phone, called one of her sons and said, ‘This boy wants to come to New York, can he stay with you?’” His cousin answered the call, and soon, Randall Kenan was living in Newark, New Jersey; he followed many of the leads that he had established through his and Betts’s letters. But his first potential job offer was an odd one—working for Jim Henson. “I was going to be a receptionist. It was back in the day when they still had receptionists,” Kenan recalled. “I was going to be a receptionist, and I was also going to be making puppets, so I guess that was fun.” But the young man worked for the Jim Henson Company for only one day before being offered a job at one of the most prestigious New York publishers, Random House.

Originally, Kenan got his job at Random House because the company had gotten into trouble with the Equal Opportunity Commission; the call had come down, Kenan remembered, “to increase their minority numbers, so what they said was, I’m hiring you as an office boy in waiting.” During that time, Kenan found himself tasked with odd jobs: “I was a floater for about six months, and it was actually a great way to get to know such a big company. I would work for the accounts department. I’d go work in Random House publicity. I’d be the receptionist at Pantheon, and this and that and the other. And then an opening came up for the receptionist at Alfred A. Knopf, and that’s how I wound up there … all because they had the band-aid to hire more black folk. So here I was a qualified black folk going to work for peanuts basically, and they made a position in-house temp until a full-time job came along. So, that’s basically how I got my foot in the door.”

By February 1985, Kenan had secured a job as a floater at Knopf; in that role, the young man found ample opportunities to read and study his craft. Most of the work he did involved waiting around to be called or answering phones for administrators. In between those calls, he would read and plan the structures for his fictional universes. He fancied himself not just a novelist or fiction writer but a man of letters, “like George Bernard Shaw; in fact, one of the people that Doris sent me to was Rocky Mussolini, who I got to know later, fairly well, and he had actually done that. He’d written a novel. He’d written a collection of short stories, but his reputation was based on play writing. And he said pick one, stick with it, and eventually if you want to do something else on the side, fine, but get over this silly idea you have that you’re going to do it all, because you’re not.”

Even though he was dissuaded from writing drama, the young Kenan went to the theater religiously. The off-Broadway scene in New York in the mid-1980s astonished him, and ticket prices were cheap enough to match his meager budget as a floater. “I got to see all of August Wilson’s twenty on Broadway, including Gem of the Ocean, Seven Guitars, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, that was playing when I first got to New York. And James Earl Jones in the first [production of] Fences.” Kenan was in New York City at the right time for the explosion of the Public Theater, too, “and that was much more affordable,” he remembered. “But also Papp did nontraditional casting. I saw Denzel Washington do Richard III.” While he was seeing plays in the evening, Kenan was reading and discovering up-and-coming writers, including a young Cormac McCarthy. He had the good fortune to learn from those in publishing, “people in the know” who had access to the best up-and-coming talent. Though McCarthy was not yet a best-selling writer, everyone Kenan knew was talking about him: “I mean Blood Meridian sold like eight hundred copies, but I was reading him on the PATH train, on the subways, back and forth from Newark.”

Only two months after securing a job as a receptionist, Kenan moved into a position as assistant to the executive vice president at Alfred A. Knopf, a move that, “for me felt like my graduate school,” he recalled. He stayed as assistant to the vice president for five years; in this capacity, he helped to edit dozens of books and honed his own craft in the process. More important, the job at Knopf gave Kenan a crucial window into the complicated process of publishing a novel. That world had opened to him in a way that it wouldn’t to other authors his age. Back in Manhattan in the late 1980s, Kenan was surrounded by writers who were trying to make a living doing what they loved. “There was this series of apartments on West End Avenue that all these Ivy Leaguers sort of held, and it was sort of like a revolving door,” Kenan recalled of that time. “You graduated from college and you moved in with one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Understanding Randall Kenan
• Chapter 2: A Community of Ghosts
• Chapter 3: Speaking for/Speaking to the Dead
• Chapter 4: Brother Baldwin and the Shadow of Tims Creek
• Appendix A: Writing B(l)ack: An Interview with Randall Kenan
• Appendix B: Tims Creek Genealogy
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index