Rails under my back : a novel / Jeffery Renard Allen.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Allen, Jeffery Renard, 1962-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• African Americans--Fiction.
• African Americans.

Genre:

• Fiction.

Physical Description:

563 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.

Summary:

• Rails Under My Back has at its center two young men at the heart of America, and at the heart of a mysteriously complex family. Hatch and Jesus are doubly cousins--in their parents' generation, two brothers, Lucifer and John Jones, married two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. This brilliantly colored, intensely musical novel follows these two young men as they face down danger and try to come to terms with their families' past.
• For Jesus and Hatch, as for all the Joneses and McShans, departure is a constant feature: someone is always leaving town, or the dinner table, or a job, or the family. Yet they somehow pick up and go on: nothing is more important than the family, even when (or especially when) it seems to be defined by abandonment.
• As Jeffery Renard Allen's extraordinary prose carries us into this multifaceted drama, we realize that the narrative is erasing the categories of past and present, that time has become a fluid, changing medium in which family events take on varying significance depending on how they are remembered, and that even the future is a condition in the "sea of time" surrounding Jesus and Hatch.
• Place is equally fluid in Rails Under My Back. Its "present" is set in the City (in many ways like both New York and Chicago), but the action ranges from locales in the South to New York City itself, and to many other places both "inner" and "outer." The multiple effects of the constant movement are devastating, but one image holding the family together is that of the railroad--the railroad that carries the Jones men off to war and back again, that carries their parents from the South to the North, from living quarters to workplace, from one form of bondage or freedom to another. This is the communal expression of the African American experience in the past half century, with its own imagery of exodus and exile, departure and destiny, being and becoming.
• Rails Under My Back has extraordinary literary, religious, and historical power, and the voice of Jeffery Allen is unforgettable.

Contents:

• Part 1 Seasonal Travel 1
• Part 2 Chosen 49
• Part 3 South 425
• Part 4 City Dream 483.

ISBN:

0374246262

OCLC:

42022221