GLR November-December 2022

I NAN ESSAY centering on legendary photographer Gordon Parks titled “There’s a Hellhound on Your Trail,” the late Randall Kenan suggests: “The scary truth about fiction and nonfiction is that when it comes to writing, to captur ing—the difference is that there is no dif ference.” This assertion is often felicitously borne out by this posthumous collection of 21 of Kenan’s prose pieces written during his relatively short lifespan. As Tayari Jones explains in her appreciative introduction, the title of the collection derives from the African-American folktale depicting Africans who flew back to Africa after the slave ships arrived in the U.S. Jones rightly points to the ending of the book’s first selection, “AChange is Gonna Come,” where Kenan explicitly evokes the myth and metaphor as he urges his godson to “Remember that [story] when you think you are stuck in the mud.” Fans of Kenan’s fiction may well recall the title of his last story collection, If I Had Two Wings , or his dazzling debut novel, A Visitation of Spirits , to recognize the writer’s ongoing preoccupation with folkloric supernaturalism and the other worldly. In fact, “Ghost Dog or How I Wrote My First Novel,” one of the most appealing pieces in Black Folk Could Fly, traces the tales he heard in childhood of an apparitional white canine who performed various benevolent acts and then disappeared. Enter Dani, a photographer who’s as tall as Grayhall, and as forthright. They meet at a Gay Women Professionals gathering in Boston and become ardent lovers. In spring 1979 the author gives Dani a ring, and the pair travel to Isla Mujeres (“Women Island”) in the Caribbean. The lovestruck M.D. has come full circle and wants an exclusive relationship, but Dani views monogamy as confining, and balks. Eventually a shattered Grayhall calls it quits and leaves for the OSHA job. Anne Charles lives in Montpelier, VT. With her partner and a friend, she co-hosts the cable-access show All Things LGBTQ . 36 for Dee, head of a hospital pulmonary therapy department. Short, self-confident, and “sharply dressed,” Dee garners ap proval from Grayhall’s mother at medical school graduation in 1975, but her relationship with the writer founders. When Grayhall returns to Boston as an M.D. for her medical residency and then a fellowship, things get complicated. Cass is sometimes back in the picture and the writer is also sleeping with English teacher Maryann, who has accepted her invitation to move in with her and David. Yet when the striking, Oxford trained biologist Gillian shows up in epidemiology class, Gray hall begins to ignore Maryann. Writer and biologist co-teach a Harvard course on “Women and Cancer,” but they are only oc casional lovers and break up when Gillian’s ambivalence about being in any intimate relationship, much less a lesbian one, be comes clear.

If her romantic quest has come up empty, it has still deliv ered powerful insights. For one, Grayhall has come to under stand how feminism falls short of helping lesbian couples. “My exposure to the women’s movement ... had taught me female eroticism was cause for celebration, but it provided few models of sustaining relationship beyond desire. I didn’t even know where to begin,” she says. “In Boston in the seventies, while the free-wheeling sexual revolution was conducive to having affairs, it wasn’t conducive to monogamous couplings among lesbians, except for a lucky few.” A second insight is Grayhall’s acknowledgment that her own dating behavior had hurt people, and the awareness is sobering. The epilogue reveals that within a year the writer would meet someone on a business trip to London, and their relationship would last. She and her (now) wife live on an island off the northwest coast of Canada, in a “tight community” of mostly straight friends, with opportunities to visit lesbian pals from Grayhall’s medical career in Seattle—a foot in both countries, as it were. Making the Rounds is alive with passion and tumult, a dis covery narrative in which the writer comes to recognize herself as capable of love. More reflection on the transformation might have been nice. But then again, the journey was hectic!

From Chinquapin to NYC and Back

After multiple engaging detours covering Kenan’s intellectual awakening, including his discovery of such influential figures as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston, the writer circles back to the image of the “ghost dog,” which seems to symbolize his own literary project— which, alas, he did not get to complete due to his premature death at age 57.

A NNE C HARLES

BLACK FOLK COULD FLY Selected Writings by Randall Kenan W.W. Norton. 268 pages, $27.95

Kenan’s childhood in North Carolina is the focus of the first part of the collection, titled “Comfort Me.” Here he reminisces about members of his father’s family who raised him after his birth in Brooklyn as “a love child.” He introduces readers to the great aunt who began taking care of him when he was three and whom he called mother. Friends and neighbors appear as well, inhabitants of the rural village of Chinquapin where “Commu nity was an experienced thing, not simply an idea.” In this sec tion, he recalls chasing a rooster and awakening a rattlesnake, being struck by lightning, discovering sex by seeing two hogs mating, and catching his first glimpse of homosexuality in the 1976 Max Beer film Ode to Billie Joe. These accounts are often rendered in Kenan’s lyrical prose incorporating Whitmanesque list-making that accelerates the narrative and fosters a poetic sense of place. The impact of the writer’s early years is echoed throughout the last two parts of Black Folk Could Fly. The lens is broadened to include perspectives from the writer’s stint working in a pub lishing firm in New York and his travels around the U.S. in search of what it means to be Black. Biographical information appears, including an account of a prison visit to his biological

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