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In 1991, acclaimed poet Kenneth A. McClane published Walls: Essays, 1985-1990, a volume of essays dealing with life in Harlem, the death of his alcoholic brother, and the complexities of being black and middle-class in America. Now, in Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History, McClane contributes further to his self-described "autobiographical sojourn" with a second collection of interconnected essays. In McClane's words, "All concern race, although they, like the human spirit, wildly sweep and yaw."
A timely installment in our national narrative, Color is a chronicle of the black middle class, a group rarely written about with sensitivity and charity. In evocative, trenchant, and poetic prose, McClane employs the art of the memoirist to explore the political and the personal. He details the poignant narrative of racial progress as witnessed by his family during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. We learn of his parents' difficult upbringing in Boston, where they confronted much racism; of the struggles they and McClane encountered as they became the first blacks to enter previously all-white institutions, including the oldest independent school in the United States; and of the part his parents played in the civil rights movement, working with Dr. King and others. The book ends with a tender account of his parents in the throes of Alzheimer's disease, which claimed both their lives.
". . . 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. . . . [P]eople on both sides of the 'race question'—those who daily feel and see the effects of institutionalized racism and interpersonal prejudice as well as those who believe that we live in a post-racial America—will find ample food for thought in McClane's essays, which teach not through overt didacticism but through a carefully shaped and beautifully inflected meditation on self, other, and their intersection." —Callaloo
Kenneth A. McClane is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of seven poetry collections and a book of essays.