Love Story Black: A Novel - Softcover

Demby, William

 
9798217007356: Love Story Black: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 13: 9798217007356
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

This "thoroughly engaging" third novel by the author of Beetlecreek ("[a] quiet masterpiece" —Kirkus Reviews) follows a Black journalist in the 1970s whose bourgeois life is turned upside down by the subject of his writing assignment.

In the midst of the tumultuous 1970s, Edwards, a freelance writer and Black Studies professor at a small college in New York City, is assigned a story for New Black Woman magazine: a profile of Mona Pariss, an aging former singer whose popularity once rivaled Josephine Baker’s. With his creditors at the door, Professor Edwards beats a path to the crumbling Harlem apartment house where Mona Pariss, once the toast of Europe for her singing, now lives in squalid obscurity. As his interviews progress, Edwards is gradually drawn into Mona’s strange world. At the same time, he finds himself entering into an affair with Hortense, a beautiful young assistant at New Black Woman. From revolutionary downtown poetry readings to a hospital bed on the Continent and back, becoming entangled in the lives of both women might turn Edwards’s bourgeois life upside down for good.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Demby was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 25, 1922, and attended college in Clarksburg, West Virginia, before enlisting in World War II and serving in Italy. He graduated from Fisk University in 1947 then moved abroad to Rome, where he spent the next two decades working as a novelist, journalist, and script translator and screenwriter for the Italian cinema. In the late 1960s, Demby joined the faculty at The College of Staten Island, dividing his time between the United States and Italy. His works include Beetlecreek, The Catacombs, Love Story Black, and King Comus. In 2006, he was the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died in Sag Harbor, New York, in 2013.

Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books and plays, including Mumbo Jumbo and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism. He has received the MacArthur Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award. Reed has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and is the only person to be nominated for the National Book Award in two categories in the same year.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1
“Miss Pariss? Miss Mona Pariss?”

“Who are you? You my new welfare worker?”

“No, mam—I’m—well, I’m a writer . . .”

Hastily I backed away from the triple-chained crack in the door through which her darting suspicious eyes were studying me, and I assumed the smiling expression of a kindly undertaker to convince her, and myself as well, that I was neither a criminal nor a policeman—though my nose was vibrating convulsively from the exotic stench of collard greens, pork fat cooking, and powerful incense leaking out onto the darkly sinister landing of the fourth floor walk-up apartment where the great lady lived.

“How come those people down at welfare always changing my worker?” she whined, she too shuffling back cautiously from her side of the door, so that I caught a fluttering glimpse of what
looked like a tattered oriental robe of embroidered dragons and poisonous flowers draped over a slender body like an over-sized flag around a corpse.

“I’m not a welfare worker, Miss Pariss,” I repeated loudly, thinking perhaps she was deaf. “I’m a writer—”

“Oh, you one of them welfare auditors. Well, I ain’t got nothing to hide from the government. But where’s my Miss Hollygreen—that nice red-headed white girl got me my telephone put in. I ain’t seen hide nor hair of her since way before Christmas, and my arthritis been accumulating something terrible . . .”

“Miss Pariss,” I said wearily, “I’ve been sent by New Black Woman Magazine to interview you, or at least seek your permission for such an interview—”

Nervously I fumbled in my jacket pocket for the letter Gracie had had her secretary prepare for me, neatly typed and very officious looking on heavy bond paper, and bearing the self-consciously elegant New Black Woman letterhead. I pushed the crisp letter through the crack of the door but Miss Pariss only took another step backward.

“I already been interviewed by the welfare people,” she said, sidestepping the letter, “three times—twice at the Center, and they didn’t even pay my busfare, and once by some pimplyassed dude who came snooping around the apartment looking for rats and cockroaches pretending he was an exterminator, when I could tell right away he was an inspector from the Department of Social Services by that skinny black tie he was wearing and those cheap two-toned Thom McCann shoes, and he had on one of those skinny-brimmed Jewish black hats—”

“Please, Miss Pariss—!”

“Now come to think of it—how come you know my real name before I was married? How come you know my stage name? You a detective from the Bureau of Investigation? If you are, I don’t know nothing about the nigger they found cut up into stewing beef in the apartment across the hall. My motto is ‘See no evil, hear no evil, and talk no evil . . .’ I’m a religious woman, and I stay out of trouble like trouble stinks and trouble stays away from me like I stink—if you’ll pardon the metaphor, that’s show business talk you know—”

“If you’ll just read this letter, Miss Pariss, it will explain everything . . .”

Bony fingers heavily burdened with many gaudy rings and with long purple-painted nails snatched the letter from my hand.

“I got to get my reading glasses,” she said, “so you stand right there and cool your heels while I go and verify your credentials . . .”

Abruptly and definitively the door slammed shut, and there was the grating sound of locks being turned, and I was left standing there on the dark landing, feeling humiliated and impotent, my initial elation over the assignment having abandoned me already, as though the stench of collard greens, pork fat and incense had the effect on my already shaken psyche of a depressant gas.

I lit a cigarette and glanced at my watch, thinking that if I could get this over within half an hour or so I would still be in time for my first class of the Fall semester. But when almost fifteen minutes passed and there was still no sound from within Miss Pariss’ apartment, I knocked urgently on the door—the way detectives knock on doors in the movies.

Still no sound from within. But now in the abrupt silence I heard faltering footsteps climbing the creaky wooden steps that had evidently replaced the concrete steps long since disintegrated;
for Miss Pariss lived in an ancient town house that had undergone countless transformations in its century-old existence.

In a few minutes, a light-skinned Black man with the puffy jowls and slow shuffling one-sided walk of a waiter still carrying an invisible tray appeared on the landing. He was wearing a jaunty red, black and green wool ski cap and a frayed black minister’s coat which was several sizes too small for his flabby cucumber-shaped frame. Under his arm he carried a hand-carved cane with a crudely wrought Coptic cross on the head, and with his free hand he was hugging a gallon jug of red Gallo wine which he delicately placed on the sagging floor in front of the apartment adjoining Miss Pariss’ and began to fumble clumsily in his bulging coat pocket for his keys. Apparently he was in a drunken stupor but after several unsuccessful attempts at fitting the key
into the lock his eyes narrowly focused on me and he turned, his blood-streaked eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“You the new welfare worker?” he asked in a squeaky belligerent tone of voice.

“No, I’m not—I’m waiting for Miss Pariss . . .”

“Miss Pariss? Maybe you mean Madam Sheba Smith—anyway she ain’t home. She gone for the week. Her sister down home in Cedric, North Carolina died—besides she already been inspected
by the exterminator—”

“But I just spoke with her—I’m waiting for her to open the door—”

“You must a been speaking to a ghost then, cause she ain’t back from the funeral. I thought you was the new welfare worker, cause that hinckety white girl ain’t been back since the week before Christmas and she promised me an emergency clothing allowance on account of the fire last Thanksgiving when they turned off my electricity and I had to use candles . . .”

Wheezing as though he had a console of tiny whistles imbedded in his chest, he promptly forgot me and, having finally found his keys, he began unlocking each of three locks with the solemn concentration and dignity of the night watchman of a bank.

When the door closed behind him, I lit another cigarette, and resolved that if Miss Pariss didn’t open the door within a few minutes I was going to leave and renounce the whole project of interviewing her, no matter what Gracie would say about novelists lacking “journalistic initiative,” the exact phrase she had used when I first approached her about doing a “literary” piece for her
new magazine.

“We’re not printing any of that washed out white literary chi-chi bullshit,” was her scathing retort. “We’re trying to get to the nitty-gritty shit about the black experience!”

Gracie didn’t like my novels and said I’d lived in Europe too long.

“You’ve got to take that brain of yours out of that white plastic bag!” she said.

And maybe she was right. At any rate, here I was standing like a fool in a toxic cloud of collard greens, cooking fat and incense waiting for Miss Pariss to open the door. And just as I was about to knock one last time, the...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217007356
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
193
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