The characters in Kelley's novels and short stories suffer none of the violent terrors and persecutions that once seemed the inevitable heritage of the black protagonist. Despite their modest beginnings, they often manage to carve a reasonably secure niche for themselves within the American system; the trials to which they are submitted have as much to do with being human as they do, specifically, with being black, though it might be argued that Kelley's own sense of racial consciousness has become more troubled and more radicalized during the course of his career. Nonetheless, we can recognize in his writings the voice of a relatively comfortable, secure, well-educated black community which will no doubt make itself even more frequently heard in the decades to come. (p. 129)

Kelley's early, dramatic success clearly set him apart from former generations of black American writers, but it also played a role in establishing one of the central concerns of his fiction. The dilemma he frequently underscores is that the black's destiny is in many ways indistinguishable from the destiny of the entire post-modern American society, but that participation in such a destiny must not be allowed to submerge entirely the ethnic, cultural, and personal identity of the black. (p. 130)

Kelley's brief but significant career clearly establishes his credentials as a writer; his work reveals him not merely as an accomplished technician, but as a true pyro-technician. (p. 131)

In placing Tucker Caliban within the tradition of American individualism of grass-roots political activity, Kelley suggests one possible course for black liberation. In the person of a wealthy Northern reformer, a Negro preacher who comes to study Tucker's revolt, he depicts another—the uneducated, somewhat cynical liberal reformer. More importantly, in the reactions of the astonished whites who witness Tucker Caliban's rebellion, Kelley first begins to explore the subtle, complex, often painful symbiosis of black and white America. In its use of fantasy, the novel also points ahead to Kelley's further experiments in the fabulist tradition, represented by dem and Dunfords Travels Everywheres.

At first glance, A Drop of Patience seems more conventionally realistic than Kelley's other novels…. Any summary of the novel's action inevitably overstresses its realistic framework; in fact, the book is wonderfully innovative in technique. Ludlow Washington is Kelley's central consciousness, the sensitive register through which the author reflects on race relations, on the different life styles of the blacks, on North and South, on the perils of success and the meaning of art. But Washington is blind, and with immense technical virtuosity Kelley communicates his experiences through tactile and auditory sensations. Visual images rarely occur, and the reader is subtly drawn into the dark but delicately responsive world of the blind character. (pp. 131-32)

Kelley's third novel is prefaced by the phonetic transcription naev, lemi telje haev dem foks liv … ("Now lemme tellya how dem folks live …"). "dem folks" are, of course, the white folks, and they live with their feeble myths of white superiority, masculine prerogative, and soap-opera escapism…. Here, far more than in Kelley's earlier work, the common enemy is Whitey, Mister Charlie, the man, a theme stressed by the novel's dedication to "The Black people in (not of) America." The white world seems so empty, frivolous, and morally decayed that it can no longer offer a serious threat to black people, but in celebrating the continuing vitality of the black community, Kelley is also warning against the malaise that could come with the assumption of middle-class standards; hence, he adopts an Ashanti proverb to preface the novel: "The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people."

Dunfords Travels Everywhere is Kelley's most ambitious attempt to bridge the gap between academic and "populist" mores, between black and white cultures, between the burden of the past and the onslaught of a technological future. Chig Dunford, the product of private schools and the new black bourgeois propriety, finds himself the only black in a company of footloose expatriates who cluster together in a fictional European city. The group is catalyzed by private and public violence, and Dunford travels into himself to find there a bizarre reservoir of private language that evokes his Harlem antecedents. The linguistic explosion that follows is like a fusion of James Joyce and Dick Gregory…. Dunford then travels into the life of a Harlem dentist ("Hardlim denteeth") and from there, literally, everywhere, and always back to the same point, which Kelley calls the "Begending." Like Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the novel inscribes a circle, and just as Joyce's hero, H.C.E., metamorphoses into "Here comes Everybody," so Dunford is a kind of "everybody" traveling everywhere—Harlem spade, Ivy League Negro, crook and cowboy and lover and artist and pilgrim.

Measured against the novels, Kelley's short stories must inevitably seem rather conventional in technique, although they have a formal integrity the novels lack; indeed, the longer fiction occasionally seems selfconsciously contrived. There are, however, interesting narrative links between the novels and the short stories…. In dem the white protagonists' guide to the Nighttown of Harlem is none other than Carlyle Bedlow, who surfaces yet again in Dunfords Travels Everywheres as the wrecker of marriages and saver of souls employed by the Harlem dentist to provide grounds for his divorce…. [Many] of the stories in Dancers on the Shore share narrative links with each other, as well as having associations with the longer fiction. In addition, several of the most distilled and memorable of the stories collected in this volume are concerned with a young boy's initiation into the adult world. (pp. 132-34)

"The Poker Party" is the third story in Dancers on the Shore; like the two preceding ones—"The Only Man on Liberty Street" and "Enemy Territory"—it is concerned with a child's first awareness of the unexpected perils that lurk in the adult world. Indeed, internal evidence suggests that the small boy who must make his way through "Enemy Territory" on an adult errand is the same who witnesses the violence of "The Poker Party." The threats revealed to this young, nameless protagonist have none of the viciousness or the brutality of those which await Richard Wright's Black Boy, and they have nothing to do with the color of his skin. The child is black, but his encounter with a bruising reality is part of a rite of passage which recognizes no color bar. Indeed, it remains one of the most persistent themes in American literature, so deeply ingrained as to seem almost a cultural reflex…. It is hardly surprising that a young country should often be concerned with young heroes, or that a nation insecure in her identity should create so many heroes who are precisely searching for an identity, often literally or figuratively for a "father" to give them a sense of self. The relationship of fathers and sons takes on a yet more dramatic significance in black literature—partly because of the historical circumstances which often separated fathers from their families, partly because a white America often sought to rob the black male of his manhood, to reduce him to a harmless "boy."….

[While "The Poker Party"] contains none of the particular agony of the black search for identity, it clearly belongs within the broader tradition of initiation literature; it suggests, for instance, interesting parallels to Hemingway's celebrated short story, "Indian Camp." (p. 135)

As we soon realize, there is nothing extraordinary about the lives of Thomas Carey, his wife and son. The father has a job, there is an abundance of food on the table, the house in which they live is snug and comfortable, and no spectres of racial hatred loom in the shadows. What Kelley gives us here is the poetry of the commonplace, similar to the poetry John Updike often weaves in his short stories. The characters are ordinary, their experiences unexceptional, but the author forcefully denies that their emotional lives are therefore inconsequential, that there are no lessons to be learned here. Furthermore, into the idyllic landscape of the first section of the story, Kelley subtly intrudes images which anticipate the violence to come—the broken glass in a vacant lot, the sun setting behind the monuments in Woodlawn Cemetery, the war games the boy plays in his mind. (p. 136)

In marked contrast to the idyllic mood of the first section of the story, the second begins with images of threat. The darkness is no longer gentle: "I was afraid; each shape was a man in a long coat coming with a silver knife to slice my throat."… From this point, images of violence cease to be muted and fanciful, they become increasingly tangible and real. Similarly, the harmless games which dominate the first section give way to the accusations and frayed tempers of the adult "party."… Kelley's technical virtuosity is amply displayed in the minute but always perfectly focused details which create the mood of this night sequence. The kitchen smells not so much of food as of "something burning," the "musty and ancient odor of dust in a cellar."… As so often in this section, images will suggest confinement and constriction…. He instinctively knows that there is a significant difference between this game and the card games he has seen boys play in the schoolyard, and guesses that the poker chips are more valuable than money, without knowing they are associated with honor, pride, fair-play, propriety, cameraderie, and ultimately with his own identification with his father.

Kelley builds his effects meticulously. Constricted gestures like "hunched" and "clutching" give way to the more violent one: "My father clenched his fists."… The implied violence becomes manifest when Carey seems to suggest that Uncle Hernando has cheated, and the men begin to shout. Seeing their anger, the boy is reminded of "dogs fighting and snarling in the street" …—the same street where he had played harmless games earlier in the day. Even more traumatic for the boy than this display of vehemence is his sense that he himself has somehow committed an act of betrayal. He identifies so intensely with his father, respects so unquestioningly the "ritual of the game," the necessity of following the rules, that his brief comment on the card his father is dealt seems a horrible violation. "I knew then I had made a mistake," he says, "and that my father would lose. I wished I would never be able to talk again."… The reader sees and can properly evaluate Thomas Carey's unreasonableness, but the frightened child cannot. Identification with the father now takes on a new, fearsome dimension: "Everybody stopped and looked at my father, and it seemed they were looking at me too." (pp. 137-38)

What the reader witnesses is no agonizing trauma, despite the momentary terror it strikes in the boy's heart; but it suffices to erode the perfect faith, the intactness, of the charmed circle of childhood. Like such adolescent predecessors as Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield, the narrator has begun to see. His mother remarks, "'You've seen enough,'" and he thinks that while he had heard adults arguing, "I had never seen them argue …"…. The experience of "The Poker Party" thus involves the inevitable pain of growing up, of learning that the "games" adults play differ from those that children play; there are other rules, other stakes, other consequences. As a metaphor for adult communication and conflict, the socially ritualized poker game reveals the tenderness of the mother, the expansiveness of Mister Bixby and Uncle Hernando, the intransigence of the father. (p. 138)

Kelley never strains to achieve his effects. It is precisely because the tone of the story is so moderate, its themes sounded with such reserve, its commonplace setting evoked with such precise economy that the violence with which it climaxes seems so chilling. Indeed, we experience that moment as the boy experiences it, even though we may evaluate it differently. There is, throughout the story, that sense of craft to which Kelley dedicated himself at the beginning of his career…. [A sense of vocation] informs all of Kelley's writings, even the later works in which his treatment of the racial situation in the United States becomes more conflicted and unsettling. In its wonderful economies, its technical precision, "The Poker Party" can stand as fitting tribute to the writer's craft. It sounds no monumental themes and issues no shout of protest or reform, but it plays a sensitive, memorable variation on one of the most enduring motifs in literature—a child's bruising confrontation with the vagaries and aggressions of the adult world. (pp. 138-39)