![]() ![]() ![]() Kelley makes his reader cobble the narrative together through myriad, rotating viewpoints-a white farmer, his son, porch talkers, and the members of the Willson family, the aristocratic descendants of Confederate General Dewey Willson, who make their living collecting rent. Structurally, too, A Different Drummer recalls Faulkner’s work. I am a Southerner, and my brain turned into a wrangled wriggling squiggle trying to visualize where “the State” must be, before giving in to the next few lines that declare that “the State’s” capital is Willson City (no such place of course), which is named after “Confederate General Dewey Willson…the chief architect of the two well-known victories at Bull’s Horn Creek and at Harmon’s Draw” (never happened).Īnd so well yeah Kelley has created his own Southern State, an amalgam of sin and poverty that sweats and skulks in the tradition of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. page 643 Īn East South Central state in the Deep South, it is bounded on the north by Tennessee east by Alabama south by the Gulf of Mexico west by Mississippi. The first, and shortest, “The State,” opens like this:ĪN EXCERPT from THE THUMB-NAIL ALMANAC. William Melvin Kelley’s 1962 debut novel A Different Drummer has eleven chapters. ![]()
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