Nigger S Heaven

Few contemporary writers share the remarkable talent of Terence E.Jackson. - A talent for telling a story with brightly -lit realism, for depicting characters with extraordinary sharpness and insight, and for inciting his readers to agree or disagree with his viewpoint. Mr. Jackson has indeed done what many of his peers have failed to do. That is restore the African-American novel to it's rightful place. Like a bullet being fired from a gun, Nigger's Heaven grabs hold from the first page and never lets go. Nigger's Heaven is a story all readers will want to know and that none will ever forget.

It's June 1947 in Riverton, Alabama. Ten-year-old Graham and his pals, Blake and Todd, are fresh out of school for the summer and don't have a care in the world. Or do they? The annual slingshot battle, using chinaberries as ammo, is only a few weeks away and they need a plan. Last year their tree house was demolished by the mock orange cannon of the Ramar Renegades. Following her sister's death in February, Ruth St. John has been alone in her ante-bellum house. With Rachael gone, the old woman develops an interest in the outside world, especially the "roughnecks" she sees through her window. Gayle Freemont, a young black professor at the Negro college, wants to have a wife and children but is reluctant to get trapped in the South where he is just another "boy." The childless wife of a prominent architect, Jane Forrester is entering menopause and fears that life is passing her by. She resents her husband's selfish and domineering behavior and longs to find happiness before it's too late. Graham's father Pete is the county school superintendent. He considers himself quite progressive with respect to race relations--until the day he has to put his progressive ideas to the test. Priscilla Andrews teaches at the elementary school. Her acne-scarred face has caused some of the boys to call her Worm Face behind her back. But she maintains her professional bearing and decides that she and black people share a "skin problem." Crayton Turner pedals his Popsicle cart as fast as he can, trying to reach the construction site before the workers leave which proves to be a fateful decision.

This book evaluates Carl Van Vechten's contribution to the Harlem Renaissance by presenting hitherto unexamined documentary evidence. The author draws on correspondence, manuscripts, personal memorabilia, and published materials to examine the origins and development of the period in the 1920s which was termed the New Negro Renaissance. In the later years of the 1920s, as a result of the success of his novel, Nigger Heaven, Carl Van Vechten received extensive publicity associating him with Harlem and with the Harlem Renaissance. The vehement controversy which the book aroused among African American critics and the black press, who attacked it, and the African American authors and friends of Van Vechten who defended it, obscured the true extent of Van Vechten's role in the Harlem Renaissance. This study sheds light on the Van Vechten controversy which has continued to the present day. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1969; revised with new preface)

Argues that the various aspects of the "counterculture" of the 1960s had a significant impact on American religious institutions.

By the time of his death in 1964, Carl Van Vechten had been a far-sighted journalist, a best-selling novelist, a consummate host, an exhaustive archivist, a prescient photographer, and a Negrophile bar non. A white man with an abiding passion for blackness.