MELISSA BLOCK, host:
A new collection of stories from Wanda Coleman takes us to the streets in Los Angeles. "Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales" will be out in bookstores next week. Here's our reviewer Alan Cheuse.
ALAN CHEUSE: The title spins out of a line from Billy Strayhorn's bittersweet love song, "Lush Life." Wanda Coleman is better known for her poetry and yet here, she presents bittersweet narrative portrait of lower, middle class black life, the portrait that evokes deep emotions about urban Southern California.
In "Backcity Transit by Day," for example, a sketch about a working woman crossing town by public transit, Coleman takes us on a seven-page tour of the neighborhoods, most of her characters and habit. It's a depressing spectacle of dilapidated pastel A-frames, she writes. Gritty-gray, mendable fences and dented primer-splatted jalopies blooming on the black top. These are neighborhoods I once knew and cannot forget.
Watching carefully, I can almost taste the mornings as they were then, the broad avenues dotted with meandering clumps of dark children, reluctantly headed schoolward. The solitary elderly churchwomen with their heavy-handled totes on their ways to tend the sick and soddens(ph) or the preschoolers of young working-class couples.
You can hear Coleman's gift, the way she sets down her scenes and stories in musical speech. And in these lines, her characters come alive, the down-and-outers, secretaries, musicians, folks in detox and therapy, taxi drivers and skimmers, all of them struggling for turf and peace. Now and then, when Coleman shifts the rhythms of her sentences, they shimmy and waver with the power of hallucination.
Here's a vision conjured up by a jazz drummer on a Sunday afternoon at a little bar on the Pacific Coast Highway. The only woman he's true to? She's as black as the Congo, as wide as the Atlantic, as glorious and as elusive as heaven promised here and now. She is as water rises to tongue the troubled shore with shimmers of foam. She's the desolation of being a gifted recalcitrant stranger in one's native land. Amen.
I'll say that again about "Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales. Amen.
BLOCK: And that's the title of the book, "Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales," new stories by Wanda Coleman. Our reviewer, Allan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
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