William Melvin Kelley's Real Live, Invisible South

Like many African American writers born and bred outside the southern United States, William Melvin Kelley is attracted to the South, its people, its soil, and its history. In A Different Drummer(1962), Kelley creates an invisible southern state (located between Mississippi and Alabama and south of Tennessee) in which he can work through a range of complex attitudes toward the South and the people who reside in that territory. By creating a novel about African Americans in which the narrators of the tale are all white, Kelley is able to explore race relations that originated during slavery and that still have consequences in 1957. Tucker Caliban, the diminutive chauffeur who is a descendant of "the African," a gigantic black man enslaved by Tucker's employer's great grandfather, must sever the bonds between his family and the Willsons, in whose family several generations of his ancestors have been employed following their enslavement to the Willsons. The primary narrator, Mister Harper, speculates that the blood of the African, dead since early in the nineteenth century, nonetheless courses through Tucker's veins; it eventually awakens Caliban to reclaim his family and his history. Through narration and character, Kelley creates a unique lens through which to view black heroism, white male cowardice, white female sexuality, black activism, the possibility of friendship across racial lines, the failure of that potential for friendship, and the consequences of misdirected violence. In a narrative unusual in its formation as a text composed by an African American, A Different Drummeris an inviting site on which to explore mythmaking, the meanings of southernness to African Americans and specifically to African American writers, and the impossibility of any African American writer, no matter his or her state or city of origin, to escape imaginative immersion in the South.