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Book Reviewed by:In this impressive debut Marcus J. Guillory brilliantly weaves together the many obstacles of a young man growing into adulthood, the realities of urban life, the history of Louisiana Creole culture, the glory of the black cowboy, and the role of religion in shaping lives.
South Park, Houston, Texas, 1977, is where we first meet Ti' John, a young boy under the care of his larger-than-life father - a working-class rodeo star and a practitioner of vodou - and his mother - a good Catholic and cautious disciplinarian - who forbids him to play with the neighborhood "hoodlums." Ti' John, throughout the era of Reaganomics and the dawn of hip-hop and cassette tapes, must negotiate the world around him and a peculiar gift he's inherited from his father and Jules Saint-Pierre "Nonc" Sonnier, a deceased ancestor who visits the boy, announcing himself with the smell of smoke on a regular basis.
In many ways, Ti' John is an ordinary kid who loses his innocence as he witnesses violence and death, as he gets his heart broken by girls and his own embittered father, as he struggles to live up to his mother's middle-class aspirations and his father's notion of what it is to be a man. In other ways, he is different - from his childhood buddies and from the father who is his hero.
The question throughout this layered and complex coming-of-age story is will Ti' John survive the bad side of life - and his upbringing - and learn how to recognize and keep what is good.
With a luscious Louisiana Creole always percolating below the Southern-spiked black urban dialect, the language is as rich and textured as the landscape Guillory evokes, reminding one of Faulkner's famous line: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The whole novel, in fact, can be read as an exploration of Faulkner's contention. Ti'John must learn to incorporate the past into his life, or else be haunted by it, in his case quite literally. Much as he might wish to turn a blind eye to the dark, violent, contentious history of his people and concentrate on running the block and "getting booty," Ti'John realizes early on that he must honor his heritage before he can make his own future...continued
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(Reviewed by Morgan Macgregor).
In Red Now and Laters, there are several references to zydeco, a type of music descended from Louisiana Creoles.
The commonly accepted explanation for the word "zydeco" is that it comes from the old Creole adage, "Les haricots ne sont pas sales," meaning literally "the beans aren't salty," a lamentation that times are hard when you can't even have salt for your beans. The saying can be found in many Creole songs, and when pronounced in Louisiana Creole sounds like,"leh-zy-deco nuh sonh par salay" It officially began to be called zydeco when Creole musician Clifton Chenier defined his own music as such.
Chenier (pronounced shen-eer to rhyme with veneer) identified with the blues over traditional French music, adopting the keyboard...
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A truly unforgettable world of spirits and magical men. Guillory's community is like the richest of cultural maps, peopled by some of the most memorable characters I have ever encountered.
