Volume 39, Number 6 · March 26, 1992
Easy Living
By Michael Wood
High Cotton
by Darryl Pinckney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 309 pp., $21.00
Summertime, the song says, is when the living is easy. Fish are jumping, and the cotton is high. Ease is a relative notion, of course, and in the world of Porgy and Bess it means only a modest letup in a very hard life. Similarly the high cotton of Darryl Pinckney's title signals a realm of relative comfort and privilege which is nevertheless haunted by a sense of barriers and denials and difficulties, and is only (at the most) four generations away from slavery.
Review, 2332 words
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