I first “met” James Alan McPherson in the College of the Holy Cross bookstore in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1969. I had come to find something to read beyond the nineteenth-century British novels of the course I was taking. Beyond Dickens. Beyond the Brontës. Beyond Thackeray. It was not that I had not been pleasantly, wonderfully nourished by such authors, but I had spent my teenage years in Washington, D.C., primarily devouring American writers, black and white. The literary world beyond America was still a generally new one to me, still a feast of rich, though unfamiliar food, as it were. And because Dinand Library at the Cross was still several months away from being a place that I, a black sophomore at a predominantly white school, could comfortably go and know that I could find something familiar, I went once more to the bookstore.

Familiar, then, was what I began to feel when I came upon the paperback Hue and Cry on the store’s shelf. Black cover, orange lettering. And on the back, a black-and-white stamp-size photograph of Jim, as I would come to know him, as a graduate student more than ten years later at the University of Virginia. Standing in the bookstore aisle, I had a growing feeling that I knew that man in the photograph in a way that I had not felt years earlier seeing pictures of James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison on the backs of their books. Perhaps it was because their photos were those of seasoned, established, older writers. Jim, obviously a long way from being even thirty years old, stood almost shyly in a peacoat, looking as if having his picture taken would never be one of the things he would get used to doing. I felt I knew this man because he looked like me. Read More

Not long ago I was asked point-blank if a short story I’d written, wherein the narrator gets high on crack cocaine, was based on firsthand knowledge. This was not the first time someone had inquired if I’d had similar experiences as my fictional characters: soldier at war, manager of a Walmart, cook in a restaurant, et cetera. It’s a slightly invasive line of questioning, to be sure, but mostly it’s flattering, because, after all, the question implies that I’ve managed to create a world so convincing that the reader has been forced to wonder whether what they’re reading has actually crossed the threshold into the realm of nonfiction. I will sometimes answer honestly—no, I was never a soldier; no, I was never a manager; yes, I was a cook—but often I’ll deflect, especially when it’s one of my creative writing students asking about my possible drug use in front of the entire class. All that matters, I will say didactically and evasively, is whether the story seems real.

Which is why I will sometimes give these same creative writing students, who are curious to know about me, an assignment to write a piece of fiction about themselves, in which they are the central character—but several decades older. What story can they create about who they might be in the future based upon the raw material of who they are now? This is, at least to my way of thinking, a quick and painless way for a beginning writer to launch into the world of fiction, by being obliged to build from facts close at hand. Some students, naturally, will ignore my guidelines and take the easy way out, recycling a short story they wrote for a previous fiction class, putting their first name on the middle-age character, who happens to have gray hair and shares no characteristics, as far I can tell, with the twenty-year-old author. Perhaps these students believe that when they are older they will be completely different from who they are at present—and how can I argue with that?

Read More