86
PARTISAN REVIEW
In my essay collection,
Always
ill
Pursuit,
I had written about Albert
Murray at far greater length, and with more thorough specific literary
analysis than anyone else of whom I am aware. ror this occasion, I will
say that the freshness of Albert Murray's vision has been best served by
his nonfiction but his overall output since he began publishing books in
[970
has been quite impressive. None of his books is more impressive
than
South to a Very Old Place,
which was the first book entirely writ–
ten in the second person and so high-handedly uses memories sparked
by visits to familiar places in the South that Murray considers the book
a novel. Whatever its category and however narcissistic, it is a very
important work, one that offers a perspective resulting from his own
life, which included growing up in Mobile, Alabama, going to Tuskegee
University, and developing himself as an aspirant intellectual and writer
within the context of that Southern Negro College.
What Murray was after was a complete rejection of the Richard
Wright picture of Afro-American life in the South. What he wanted to
say was this: yes, there was segregation, yes, there were rednecks, yes,
the South was not the fairest place on planet Earth, but there were also
football games, beautiful girls, family dinners, clothing stores that the
college boys shop in so as to get themselves dapper, there were also mag–
nificent dances at which the great genius Louis Armstrong played, lead–
ing Murray to ask, who even in Tolstoy had a musician as great to
perform at those Russian balls as we who heard the young Armstrong
filling the night with those golden notes? Murray was not saying, by any
means, that everything was okay. What he was saying was something
we always discover, which is that if people are given a certain amount
of latitude, they create the same thing that they would have a little bit
more of if they weren't held back somewhat. And so what Murray's
great contribution has been, is that he makes us see this thing in people
that refuses to be destroyed, that refuses to buy a very narrow or even
hollow version of itself, no matter how much the people outside of the
group tend to think about it. That's the substance of
South to a Very
Old Place.
That's what Albert Murray is after. And he does it in many
different ways. In
South to a Very Old Place
we get this shockingly orig–
inal take on the way things were, because we have not been told to
expect these sorts of things from people of his background.
Here is a passage from
South to a Very Old Place.
It
is a perfect
example of Murray's rhythms and of how these guys at Tuskegee were.
We get something here that is totally different from anything written
about Negro American life at that time. In the following passage he is
talking about how these guys are getting ready
to
deal with this very
