Randall Kenan: Walking on Water

1963-2020

“I must say, before I even begin, that this work—in the end—is a failure.”

That sentence was the fearless way Randall Kenan began his book Walking on Water. Kenan, the decorated and adored writer and UNC professor who died last week at 57, was best known for his fiction that explored being Black and gay in the American South. But that fearless first sentence was how Kenan started the preface for his nonfiction opus Walking on Water. It was the welcome mat he laid out for a 639-page book he hoped you’d enter. A book he spent seven years reporting and writing as he traveled the nation. I didn’t know Randall Kenan, but to me that sentence embodies bravery on many levels, including the conversations he must’ve had with himself before writing — then deciding to share — it.

To be clear, the book isn’t a failure. It was nominated for the Southern Book Award, and in a 2017 conversation with John Grisham and Jill McCorkle, Kenan said that Walking on Water (1999) was his favorite of his books. (Sadly, in the same conversation Kenan and Grisham mourned mutual writer friends they’d lost too soon.)

Beyond the fearless first sentence, the very idea of Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century required bravery. It was inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’ seminal book The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois wrote Souls at the turn of the 20th century, and it is an extraordinary and groundbreaking examination of the condition of Black people at that time, how that condition came to be, and the centrality their struggle would take in the coming century.

A hundred years later, Kenan boldly set out to travel the country (with a stop in Canada) in search of an answer to a related question: What did it mean to be Black as the next century arrived? To have set out on that mission, with that lodestar, was brave as well. In his second sentence, Kenan called it an “arrogant proposal” from its start, but I’d surmise that the quest of anyone who’d write that first sentence was guided more by courage and hope than by arrogance. His confession that the end result was a “failure” was born of a realization well into his journey that the question he’d set out to answer was unanswerable, and his final destination would necessarily differ from where he’d thought he was headed. Humility and course correction require bravery too.

What Kenan ultimately provided was a chronicle of his travels with a view not from a car window but from intimate rooms of meaningful dialogue with strangers, rooms where he brought you along to shake hands and hear their lives. It is a panoramic snapshot of Black people across America at the changing of millennia. His interviews and researched regional biographies reveal how being Black varied and overlapped.

The places he visited were:

Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts; Burlington, Vermont; Bangor, Maine; Buffalo, New York; Idlewild, Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; Chicago, Illinois; St. Paul/Minneapolis, Minnesota; Grand Forks, North Dakota; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Maidstone and North Battleford, Saskatchewan; Anchorage, Alaska; Seattle, Washington; San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and Allensworth, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; Salt Lake City, Utah; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Denver, Colorado; Lafayette, Louisiana; Atlanta and St. Simons Island, Georgia; North Carolina; and New York City.

An observation from Kenan’s travels that stuck with me was that some Black people who lived in places where few other Black people did described encountering less overt racism there. Their small numbers meant they were not perceived a threat. Racism and white supremacy was about power. And fear of its loss.

As if following in the footsteps of W. E. B. Du Bois wasn’t enough, Kenan took on his hero, James Baldwin, as well. He wrote a young-adult biography of Baldwin (Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians: James Baldwin) before later writing an homage to Baldwin’s iconic The Fire Next Time he titled The Fire This Time. Baldwin’s estate then asked Kenan to be the editor of a collection of Baldwin’s work, The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin.

To carry those torches demonstrated not only courage, but also ambition, curiosity, and a hunger to live a future that could learn from its past. To hand the lens through which he viewed his country and communities over to readers was a blessing.

W.E.B. Du Bois, Randall Kenan, James Baldwin, Randall Kenan

Toward the end of Walking on Water, Kenan ruminated on Chapel Hill. He’d returned a decade after graduating from UNC.

“After polyglot and polycolored Brooklyn and Queens and Manhattan, it struck me how homogeneous and largely white Chapel Hill was in 1994, and how much more it had to have been in 1984. All those Scots, Irish, English and German faces, blond, brunette and red hair all seemed to weigh on me more, and I wondered then how I had coped with that sea. I remembered how often I joined groups of black folk out of the sheer need to see black folk; how I volunteered at soup kitchens and tutored black kids, perhaps more out of a personal need than out of a desire to help.

“I remembered incidents of being singled out as a Negro, like the time I was almost ejected from a frat party, being the only black person there; or the time the police stopped me while I was running down Rosemary Street near a number of sorority houses, because I ‘fit the description’ of someone who had mugged a woman the day before. I remembered trying to express my outrage to my white housemates at the time, and their baffled inability to say anything at all, which made all of us feel inexpressibly worse and alienated from one another.”

Kenan grew up in the small community of Chinquapin in eastern North Carolina, and the local school had integrated when he was a first grader. When he came to UNC as an undergrad, he chose to live in Grimes dorm because it was a short walk to classes, not realizing the choice was out of the ordinary.

“The first black student was admitted to Chapel Hill in 1951 to the medical school … though [UNC] did not gracefully tear down the barricade for most black folk for decades. In 1981, most of the 800 or so black students (out of 20,000) lived in what was known as South Campus, at the southernmost eve of the school, where four of the newest, high-rise dorms had been erected. It was understood that South Campus was where the black folk were largely housed, and those who chose to live elsewhere were considered somehow different.”

In that 2017 book talk with John Grisham, Grisham asked Kenan if he was kin to the Kenan family whose wealth had landed its name on buildings around UNC’s campus. It went unstated, but the white Kenans had been significant enslavers in Randall Kenan’s home county, Duplin, and Kenan Stadium’s longtime namesake was at the center of the Wilmington Massacre. With a knowing chuckle, Randall Kenan simply said, “I could claim ’em.”

We were fortunate that Randall Kenan let us claim him in some way. May we be capable of his fearless self-examination. And the successes failure can seed.

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The Chapel Hill Public Library has a list of recommended readings by Randall Kenan. Walking on Water is available here and here.

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SOURCES & CREDITS:

“NC writer Randall Kenan, a voice of Southern literature, dies at 57”: Herald-Sun

“Randall Kenan kept writer James Baldwin’s fire burning”: News & Observer

“Randall Kenan dies: Author depicted Black, gay life in prose”: Associated Press

Randall Garrett Kenan: UNC-Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature

“Book Tour with John Grisham, Sixth Stop: Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC with Jill McCorkle and Randall Kenan”: Apple podcasts

Walking On Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century by Randall Kenan

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

The Fire This Time by Randall Kenan

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

“UNC’s  Football Stadium: Memorial to the Leader of a White Supremacist Massacre”: Craig Calcaterra

Souls of Black Folk photo: The Kinsey African American Art & History Collection

Walking On Water and The Fire This Time books photo: Mike Ogle

W. E. B. Du Bois photo: New Georgia Encyclopedia

James Baldwin photo: WUKY (AP)

Randall Kenan photos: UNC, Nasher Museum, and UNC-TV “NC Bookwatch” screenshot