The Only Man on Liberty Street
African-American writer William Melvin Kelley on the plight of children
I’ve read William Melvin Kelley’s Dem (1967) and A Different Drummer (1962). After reading Eli Rosenblatt’s piece on Kelley back in May 2017 at Public Books, I decided to dig further into Kelley’s work, beginning with his short story collection Dancers on the Shore (1964). Immediately, two stories stuck out to me from the collection, “The Only Man on Liberty Street” and “The Servant Problem.” Over the next couple of posts, I want to explore each of these stories in a little more detail.
“The Only Man on Liberty Street” opens up the collection. Upon initially reading it, I could not help thinking about contemporaneous works from the period like Ernest Gaines Of Love and Dust (1967) and “Bloodline,” Frank Yerby’s Speak Now (1969), and Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) along with older texts such as Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons.”
Kelley’s story centers around a young girl named Jennie, the daughter of a mixed-race woman named Josie and a married Irish immigrant named Maynard Herder. Even though the story is told in third person, we get the narrative…
