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Let’s give a warm welcome to Randy Luce, who has a book to tell us about.
Hello. My name is Randall (Randy) Luce. I’m a long-time lurker. I recently had a novel published, named Black and Tan Fantasy (after the Duke Ellington/Bubber Miley composition) that I highly recommend for your reading pleasure. Most of the action takes place in the Mississippi Delta during the early days of the Freedom Movement, and follows, in alternating narrative lines, two protagonists, Harry Wilbourne and Aleck Sharpe.
From a BookLife (Publisher’s Weekly) review:
In the 1920s, Harry Wilbourne—a white man who rescues a Black woman, Geneva, and her children from a fire—does more than commit a heroic act. As Luce demonstrates, with pained clarity, Harry steps out of whiteness itself, launching himself into a racialized exile. In Chattanooga, among the very people he tried to save, Harry becomes a stranger—never quite accepted, never fully at home, his journey exposing the cost of crossing lines in an era when the rules of identity are rigid and unforgiving. From that wrenching setup, Luce fast-forwards to the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement, as a young Black activist named Aleck Sharpe, raised in the shadows of racial violence, joins the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—but bristles at the doctrine of nonviolence, with Mississippi’s white supremacy chafing against everything he’s seen and felt.
Luce traverses the haunted terrain of the segregated American South with historical precision, interrogating the complex construction of racial identity and the binary ways—violence and nonviolence—people are driven to pursue justice.
BookLife gave the novel its Editor’s Pick designation, reserved for books of “outstanding quality.”
📚
This novel is one aspect of my life-long attempt to understand this country I was born and raised in. I grew up in Southern California, in a state (California) and among towns and cities (Los Angeles, La Habra, Pico Rivera) that have Mexican origins and Spanish names, during an era of hyper-segregation. So, I grew up surrounded by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (just like me), with nary a person of color around. I never had occasion to consider how odd that was. I liked music, and the music I grew up listening to—rock and roll—I had no idea just how all mixed up it all was—Black, white, Hispanic. Nobody told me. Long story short, to me my childhood life, culturally and socially, was pleasantly bland.
So, how do I get off writing a novel that features Black characters?
In my late teens, two things happened. I heard John Coltrane on the radio, and Louis Armstrong died. John Coltrane’s music blew me away. I’d never heard anything so exciting. I had no idea who he was or where he came from. And I wanted to hear more. When I got a record player as a going-to-college present, one of the first albums I bought was The Best of Coltrane, on Impulse Records.
As for Armstrong, when he died I was surprised to read in the newspapers that this genial entertainer, who I’d seen many times on TV, was a musical genius and one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century. I wondered why I hadn’t known that before.
When he appeared on television, why hadn’t he been introduced as the genius he was? Why hadn’t he been allowed to demonstrate the full extent of his musical talents? I decided I had to hear the music that marked him as a genius. When I got a recording of his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, his music sounded just as timeless as Bach’s and Beethoven’s. I’d known that there was this genre of music called jazz—you know, like Dixieland—since I’d been a child, but I’d had no idea that jazz was about geniuses like Armstrong and Coltrane, so I started to learn all I could about this music and the musicians who played it.
That led me to discover other aspects of Black culture, and how it lives in the very center of the American experience. We all know the quintessential American story, the type where, say, Abraham Lincoln is born in a log cabin and becomes president. But Frederick Douglass’ journey of self-creation was no less remarkable and no less American.
Long story short: I learned you can’t know America without knowing about all its people, and so much of that information is hard to find, and is doled out only occasionally and in very small doses. I came to feel that I’d been cheated out of something that was my, and everybody’s, due—a full knowledge of my country’s cultures and history and people. I went on to do graduate research in the Mississippi Delta on local Black and white political activity, particularly how local criteria of authority among Blacks and whites affected, and was affected by, the Civil Rights Movement. Black and Tan Fantasy came out of that research, and years of reading and thought.
So, the way I look at it is, if I was going to write a story that takes place in America, how could I not include Black characters?
Here’s a .pdf file of the first chapter, if you’d like to read it. BLACK AND TAN FANTASY First Chapter
You should be able to order the book at your local bookstore. It’s also available at Amazon and at the publisher’s (GladEye Press) website.
I’d be more than willing to answer questions from any and all Jackals that might find this interesting.
Authors In Our Midst – Randall Luce – The Cost of ‘Good Trouble’!Post + Comments (56)
