I am a country boy.  I grew up in Louisiana, in a little town; Opelousas.  I grew up “in town” but “in town” was still “the country.”  Friends of the family and our relatives lived on farms with chickens, cows, pigs, horses and all that.  Still, even in town, next door to our house, our neighbor Mr. Reuben had pigs and chickens.  Like I said, I am a country boy.

That’s why it frustrates me that so much of currently published “African American literature” is about urban city life.  As a reader of books, I am frustrated by that fact of African American literature not because we blacks do not live in cities but because we blacks also live (and always have lived) in the country.

Are there no black writers who know and write about rural experiences?  Well I know the answer to that question is, yes.  Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins, The Great, David Bradley’s The Chaneyville Incident, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, and Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying are books that give us a glimpse of rural, African American life.  So it is not that there are no black writers who focus on the rural African American experience.  For me the problem is that there are too few, and certainly too few that gain a large readership.

I guess that is why when, last May, I discovered David Anthony Durham’s novel Gabriel’s Story, I couldn’t resist buying it to read and to review for the Nubian Message this Fall.  Here was a book that told a rural story about the life of an African American male set in the American West of the 1870’s.

Gabriel’s story is a novel of a prodigal son.  In frustration Gabriel runs away from the family’s new home, a sod-house, in rural Kansas.  You see, Gabriel had spent the early years of his life in urban, genteel, Baltimore, one of two sons of an African American undertaker and his wife Eliza.  He was not satisfied with his new, rural, hard, farm-life in Kansas.

“They soon engaged in a meandering conversation that tended toward light banter.  They talked of people they all knew back East, about food items and comforts yet to be seen on the plains.  The men told of some of the trials of this land, but did so with the humor of distance.  They made the chill of winter into a joke, coyotes into playful creatures, and the labors of the land into things not to be feared but to be proud of.  Gabriel sat beside his brother but seemed to find entertainment only in the dark corners of the room.  Each change in the conversation seemed to annoy him, although he spoke no protest.” (p. 21)

So after a time, with his friend James, Gabriel runs away from farm life.  Like all prodigal sons, he thinks he is running to a new freedom.  Soon he discovers he has run into the company of men for whom freedom means random violence. Marshall, a white American cowboy, efficient and effective, a natural, ruthless leader, and a killer; Dunlop an Irish cowboy with a spirit so gentle that horses and cattle seem to obey his very whispers; and Caleb who was a black man like none Gabriel had ever known or thought could exist.

“But the man who caused Gabriel the greatest concern was the one he saw the least of, the black man, Caleb.  He led the way, darker and more silent than ever, on a large painted stallion that had some wildness in it still.  It seemed he preferred his own company to that of any other and tolerated the rest only from the solitude of the lead position.  Watching him on his horse, Gabriel thought him some dark figure of the apocalypse.  It was unclear which of those demons he might incarnate, but when he glanced back at the caravan, Gabriel saw in his gloomy countenance an utter and indescribable loathing for the world and all its creatures.  Gabriel had never seen such a face before, black or white, and he couldn’t help but hope that his perceptions were wrong.  He knew instinctively that no man should be so twisted, and he knew further that no man could remain so for long without enacting some drama upon the world.” (pp, 79-80)

Like that portrait of Caleb, all of the characters are well drawn out.  It does not matter how long they are with the story.  Character portraits are strong whether it is a long time like for Caleb, Gabriel, James, Marshall or Dunlop. The portrait is strong, coming like a sudden storm, even if the character is with the story briefly, like Diego Maria Fuentes, the Mexican who is living an idyllic life of hard work on the plains with his wife and two beautiful daughters.  Diego Maria Fuentes and his family you love immediately and so you are crushed when the violence that Gabriel now travels with comes to visit them.

“Whether Dallas would have understood [Diego’s] words was doubtful, but Marshall seemed to grasp them clearly enough.  He swung on [Diego], drew his pistol, and stopped him with the butt of it.  The impact across his mouth knocked out four of [Diego’s] front teeth.  He stumbled backward and fell flat on his back.  He struggled to his feet, but Marshall hit him again with the pistol, across the forehead this time.  As the man stood, dazed, Marshall swung the full force of his kick to the man’s groin.  He went down.”

Repeated with some frequency in Gabriel’s Story, that kind of action will make some say that this is a very male novel.  Yet if it is a male novel, it is not because of the violence and hardships described and survived by Gabriel.  If it is a male story it is because of the inner struggle that his running has caused Gabriel to face.  A struggle between a boy’s ideas about what it means to be a man and that boy seeing the reality of how some males live their adult lives; without scruples, without dignity, without purpose.

All of this is in a story that is well told down to the authentic, American western, accented dialogue.  Aside from the power of the story there is a language that is elegant in its poetic touch.  Where another writer might say “It was raining,” the author of Gabriel’s Story writes:

“But sleep had been blown away by the wind.  Both boys lay with ears alert.  The storm soon became a living thing running across the prairie.  Far off they heard the pounding of footsteps, a steady bass over which the wind played.  It grew louder, like a stampede of cattle, coming hard and furious.  It hit the house with a force that seemed to rock it.  The window shook in its pane and the door bucked against its hinges.  But the pounding was no herd of maddened beasts, no creatures of the apocalypse.  It was rain.”

A gripping story, beautifully told, recommended, yet I must warn you.  Gabriel’s Story is not a pretty story.  There is much violence here.  And the descriptions can be graphic and the idea that men could live like this, disturbing.  So why do I recommend it at all, and so highly?

We all know that the burden of leadership is to lead.  This is the special burden of intellectual leadership because “thinking leadership” will always take us into the unknown where our fears reside.  Intellectual leadership, which is the only legitimate leadership at a university, must lead the young and fearful into the unknown many have been taught to fear.  In the formal classroom or in the big classroom of the campus, this is so.

There are many reasons I believe you should read Gabriel’s Story; the rural, American West setting of the action, the writing.  More than any of that, I believe you should read this novel because of the intellectual challenge it offers by reminding us that as a group that is fewer in number than other groups in America, African Americans have always had to learn to manage diversity to survive and thrive.  It reminds us too that whether we have liked the idea of having to deal with diversity, we have also had to teach other groups how to do so.  That is part of the legacy and responsibility of smaller numbers. And we see that through the writing of an African American, a brown-skin, who clearly has a deep love for many things; love for writing, the American West, Ireland and Irish, and African Americans.

Gabriel’s Story is painful in spots, grotesque in spots.  But it is real; it is poetic; it is true.  Peopled by individuals of different races and nationalities, working for and against each other, this novel reminds us that it has always been the case that the lives of African American people have been connected to the human mosaic of struggle and diversity.