It sounds condescending, although it shouldn’t, to say that this novel would make a fine graduation present for any young man or woman on the way to college. For unlike most books about coming of age, this one shuns the superheated angst of the juvenile heart. This tale about the pleasures of growing up is meant for grown-ups, be they of legal drinking age or not.
In shimmering, loosey-goosey language that flirts with post-Faulknerian trance talk without ever succumbing (“the also and also and also of campus life”), Albert Murray evokes the Tuskegee Institute as it was 50 years ago, when he matriculated there. Again his fictional stand-in is Scooter, first met as a child in an earlier autobiographical novel, “Train Whistle Guitar.” Precocious and impressionable, Scooter maps the territory precisely and evocatively, as when he speaks of the “magnoliawhite eaves” of campus buildings.
The chinaberry tree that served as Scooter’s spyglass lookout in the earlier novel has been replaced here by an attic dorm room, “above but never apart” from campus life and the world beyond. Here James Joyce and Duke Ellington and Uncle Remus stand on an equal footing, as Scooter labors to match what he learns against what he knows and loves.
Against this bucolic recollection, Murray contrasts another, much darker story, in which Scooter finds himself caught up in a piece of racial ugliness that leaves a local man bloodied by a redneck store owner over a matter of “some pennies and nickels and dimes. " This incident, too, comprises part of Scooter’s education. It’s here he learns that a college diploma does not excuse him from donning any of the many masks that he, a black man in Alabama, must always wear, lest he ever do “anything that’s going to make somebody”-some white somebody-“realize how scared they are of you.”
One does not have to ignore the hard realities it sets forth to call this novel warm and joyful. The resourceful Scooter is the sort of son who never gave a mother cause to worry, but he never trades on his niceness. Deftly sidestepping the intellectual’s pedantry and the cynic’s alibis, he is, by the end of the story, well on his way to becoming the wise man who wrote this book.
