Walking on Water

Alan Wolfe

What makes his book so unusual is his willingness to look beyond the usual places...In talking to individuals seemingly so unrepresentative of the group he wants to understand, Kenan violates every rule of the sociologist. And that may just be the reason his book succeeds so well as a work of insight and compassion.
— New York Times Book Review

Gene Seymour

What does it mean to be black? It is to the task of answering this question that Randall Kenan purposefully applied himself by wandering all over the North American continent, collecting voices as if they were bright, intricately patterned swatches to be sewn into a quilt...The resulting book is almost unique in its attempt to swallow America whole... It is this cacophony of urgent, sometimes dissonant voices that makes Walking on Water feel like a living thing you want to keep close to you, especially if you're black.
— Newsday

Salim Muwakkil

A masterwork...a panoramic document of African-American life at the end of the 20th century...It is also a labor of love and a majestic offering to the future...One of the book's many pleasures is its texture. In one chapter we meet the black owner of a convenience store in Ilewild, Mich. and, in another, Kenan introduces us to a black filmmaker, winner of a MacArthur genius grant.
— Chicago Tribune

Publishers Weekly

Kenan styles himself as the heir of W.E.B. Du Bois and Gunnar Myrdal, but this massive collection of 200 interviews is ultimately not as enlightening as either The Souls of Black Folk or An American Dilemma. In his preface, Kenan (The Visitation of Spirits, a novel) puts his finger on the problem when he admits that the book is more of an attempt to answer questions about his own blackness than to figure out what it means to be black in the U.S. But his efforts on this score suffer from an apparent self-absorption born of his fear that he is "not black enough, inauthentic" — a fear that could conceivably anchor a short memoir but not a tome of this size. Kenan spoke with the young and the old, the middle and the working class (though rarely with professionals). Strong points include informative local histories (a passage about the Black American West Museum in Denver, which has archives on black cowboys, is particularly good). The book's fundamental flaw is that Kenan is determined to think about black culture as monolithic, but the form of the book itself, with its interviews of people from diverse places and backgrounds, shows readers that black American life is multifaceted, shaped as much by class and region as by race. Indeed, Kenan's own childhood in rural North Carolina speaks as much to rural Southern culture as to black culture. In the end, Kenan, faced with the diversity of black lives, finds very little of substance to say about black identity: "being black is a desire toward some spiritual connection with some larger whole, an existential construct: Who am I? Where do I belong?" How this differs from "being" anything else, Kenan doesn't say.

KLIATT

Randall Kenan, a gifted young African American writer, is on a journey. At first the reader believes with Kenan that it is a journey of universal discovery, a journey to discover what it means to be black, especially black in America at the end of the 20th century. Starting in the early Œ90s on what he planned as a two-year project, Kenan spends most of the decade crisscrossing the country talking to blacks, young and old, who might give him insight into his sought-for definition. Like a neo-Studs Terkel, he drives, interviews, questions others, and then questions himself. Primarily, he questions himself. Kenan does his reader the wonderful service of introducing black Americans who live in Anchorage and Salt Lake City, in Oakland and Bangor, in Seattle and St. Paul. While in many cases he dwells on black life in the '90s, often he reconstructs the historical accounts of black migration to a spot where we do not think of many blacks living: Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; Cheyenne, Wyoming. Some of his interviews, fashioned as much by his own passion as by the story of the individual or locale, are tightly written and deeply absorbing. Thus the Martha's Vineyard matron, the "Iron Ladies" of Idlewild, Michigan, and the vibrant minister in Burlington, Vermont. The pace of the work is as uneven as the choice of individuals he interviews, however, and there are times when the reader would just love to tell Kenan to get back in his car and drive on. There are several themes in Walking on Water that will intrigue the student of history or sociology. Kenan returns repeatedly to the role of the black church in maintaining and promoting the life of the black community, especially the community as he, achild of rural North Carolina, experienced it. Then there is the question of whether a black community can be maintained at all when, once segregation and covenants are no longer operant, the geography of the black community dissolves. Finally, when Kenan asks yet again what it means to be black, an informant replies, "I don't believe there is such a thing. You can't define what is being black, because everybody is different." Kenan terms his book a failure because he is, in the end, unable to answer his own central question. The work is not a failure. Soul searching, however, especially when it is someone else's, does require patience on the part of the reader, all the more because this is a work that does not lend itself to a "chapter here-chapter there" approach. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 1999, Random House, Vintage, 670p, 21cm, $16.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Patricia A. Moore; Academic Resource Ctr., Emmanuel College, Boston, MA, July 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 4)

Library Journal

Chronicling a journey to self-identity, North Carolina-born writer Kenan — author of the novel A Visitation of Spirits (Grove, 1989) and the story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead — reports on four years of travel through North America to discern what it means to be black here and now. Testing stereotypical attitudes, Kenan explores perceptions of race, region, and more. His ostensible travelog inquires into his self and into the heart of the places and persons of his sojourn. He offers fertile commentary on contemporary America, ripe not simply with questions of what it means to be black but of what it means to be American and to be human. Recommended for collections on the contemporary United States and on black America.
— Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
— Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, MD
— Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, MD
— Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, MD

Booknews

Randall spent six years travelling through the US collecting the thoughts, feelings, and lives of African Americans during the post- Civil Rights era of the 1990s. Quoting extensively, he quilts them into a portrait of a people shaped like his journey from New England to Alaska, down the west coast, back through the south to Georgia, then to New York City. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Kirkus Reviews

A personal meditation in the guise of a search for the essential nature of the black community in America. Kenan, an award-winning writer (and author of the novel A Visitation of Spirits, 1992, etc.) travels across the country looking for what it means to be black. He interviews an eclectic assortment of people, interspersing the conversations with his own reflections, with discussions of relevant writings drawn primarily from the black intelligentsia, local history, and stream-of-consciousness observations about everything he confronts along the way. In the unlikely surroundings of Vermont and Maine, Kenan's assumptions about black identity are challenged by Jack, an obviously white man who has grown up in and continues to live as a part of black culture. California would seem to be a more likely place to find the heart of the black community, and there, not surprisingly, Kenan confronts the movie industry. While his own reflections focus on the distortion of black reality represented on the screen, his conversation with Charles Burnett suggests more that distortion is a Hollywood reality across the board. This is a long book, and there are scores of such encounters with very interesting people. In the end, however, the interviews are sidebars; the presentation is first-person throughout, and as Kenan ultimately notes, what he presents is not a compilation of the thoughts of others, but rather "my personal history of the last five years."

What saves the volume from pretentiousness is that for the most part his personal musings merit reading and reflection. While his conclusion is predictable, it is also profound: there is no one element that defines the black Americansoul. Taking a close and serious look at black Americans unveil their essential individuality, Kenan ends up appreciating the diversity of black America rather than celebrating distinguishing characteristics.

Definitely worth reading, even though it's not always clear whether this is powerful introspection or self-indulgence.