Volume 42, Number 6 · April 6, 1995
Promissory Notes
By Darryl Pinckney
Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White
by Brent Staples
Avon, 274 pp., $11.00 (paper)
Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America
by Nathan McCall
Vintage, 404 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Ever since the publication in London in 1789 of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, a saga of his kidnapping, various sea voyages, servitude in the West Indies, and subsequent career as a missionary, the expectation of autobiographies written by blacks is that they will tell of the journey from Can't to Can. That slave narratives existed at all implied a satisfactory conclusion to the journey—the attainment of literacy, the escape to the place where one could reflect on the experience of bondage and the flight to freedom, and, in the early days of the slave trade, the conversion to Christianity.
Review, 7737 words
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