Church Bell Blues: Autobiography of a Colored ExAmerican (The Prophetic Disposition)

In the form of a slave narrative rendered as an extended prose poem, this memoir posits an historical explanation for past and present expatriations of Americans of African descent. The historical memoir conveys the underlying message that African Americans, including the author, have expatriated in postbellum times for the same reason plantation slaves ran away in antebellum times. The slave-narrativizing of this true life-story “of a Colored ExAmerican” necessarily caricatures its characters but in a way in which a more realistic picture emerges of what it is like to feel oneself an exile in one’s own homeland, to feel the compulsion to run away and expatriate and, moreover, to realize that the antagonists closest at hand are your own black people. Understandable, then, is that fugitives have always left in their wake some kind and degree of critical commentary on the oppressive systems, peoples, and individuals that forced them into exilic flight. Understandable too is why this memoir’s idiomatic language and poetic-prose form, along with its painted illustrations at the hand of the author’s young son, suggest that fugitive flight, when intensely survivalistic and salvific, can lead to deep forms of mystical experience, reflection, contemplation, creative expression and, consequently, such relocation as now characterizes the author’s life far from the land of his birth.