The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Rails under My Back by Jeffery Renard Allen
Christopher C. De Santis

Jeffery Renard Allen. Rails under My Back. Harcourt, 2000. 563 pp. Paper: $14.00.

Poet and short-story writer Jeffery Renard Allen’s first novel stitches together the complex stories and genealogies of two African American families from the South and the residual effects of early-twentieth-century northern migration on the families’ modern generations. Allen contributes a unique and enduring voice to a long and distinguished tradition of black migration novels. Building on such works as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s naturalist The Sport of the Gods, Ralph Ellison’s modernist masterpiece Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s recent Jazz, among many others, Allen explores themes of family, identity, and the struggle against alienation as individuals with agrarian roots attempt to come to terms with an ever-changing modern world that threatens the ties of kinship. Framing Allen’s novel are the stories of two cousins, Hatch and Jesus Jones, close since birth but drifting apart in their teenage years as each attempts to make his way in the world under various pressures from family and friends. Hatch—sensitive, articulate, and artistic—is largely successful in resisting the negative influences of city life, focusing his energies on music and piecing together his family’s history. Jesus, by contrast, seethes with a hate whose roots stretch deep into the family’s past, when his grandmother made the decision to “cut the final strings of attachment, her children,” and leave the South bound for New Mexico. Jesus’s very existence is motivated by this sense that he was dealt a bad hand from birth, and the violence, drugs, and gang activities of the inner city prove irresistible to him in his quest for an identity outside the family bonds that seem, at times, like a prison. Rails under My Back is a difficult novel, its author not always weaving the many characters’ lives together through shifting time and geography in a seamless fashion. It is, nevertheless, a beautiful and powerful novel, and will surely emerge among the more important works of fiction in the African American literary tradition. [Christopher C. De Santis]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Rails under My Back by Jeffery Renard Allen Christopher C. De Santis Jeffery Renard Allen. Rails under My Back. Harcourt, 2000. 563 pp. Paper: $14.00. Poet and short-story writer Jeffery Renard Allen’s first novel stitches together the complex stories and genealogies of two African American families from the South and the residual effects of early-twentieth-century northern migration on the families’ modern generations. Allen contributes a unique and enduring voice to a long and distinguished tradition of black migration novels. Building on such works as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s naturalist The Sport of the Gods, Ralph Ellison’s modernist masterpiece Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s recent Jazz, among many others, Allen explores themes of family, identity, and the struggle against alienation as individuals with agrarian roots attempt to come to terms with an ever-changing modern world that threatens the ties of kinship. Framing Allen’s novel are the stories of two cousins, Hatch and Jesus Jones, close since birth but drifting apart in their teenage years as each attempts to make his way in the world under various pressures from family and friends. Hatch—sensitive, articulate, and artistic—is largely successful in resisting the negative influences of city life, focusing his energies on music and piecing together his family’s history. Jesus, by contrast, seethes with a hate whose roots stretch deep into the family’s past, when his grandmother made the decision to “cut the final strings of attachment, her children,” and leave the South bound for New Mexico. Jesus’s very existence is motivated by this sense that he was dealt a bad hand from birth, and the violence, drugs, and gang activities of the inner city prove irresistible to him in his quest for an identity outside the family bonds that seem, at times, like a prison. Rails under My Back is a difficult novel, its author not always weaving the many characters’ lives together through shifting time and geography in a seamless fashion. It is, nevertheless, a beautiful and powerful novel, and will surely emerge among the more important works of fiction in the African American literary tradition. [Christopher C. De Santis]

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