Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Writers and editor discuss their book Red, White, Black & Blue
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William "Bill" Drennen Jr. and Kojo (William T.) Jones Jr. and editor Dolores Johnson will lecture about their book Red, White, Black & Blue, a collaborative memoir about growing up through the trauma of desegregation at 2 p.m. on Friday, April 22 in Kleymeyer Hall in the Liberal Arts Center at USI. It is open to faculty, staff, and students. The lecture is free and the public is welcome. These Appalachian men grew up in the South Hills section of Charleston, West Virginia. As boys they played on the same Little League baseball team and experienced one year together as schoolmates after the all-white Thomas Jefferson Junior High School was desegregated in 1955. After that, class, race, and choice separated their life experiences for 45 years. Drennen is a European American and Jones is an African American. The book’s purpose is to foster understanding between their distinct cultures for themselves and for their own and future generations. Dolores Johnson, in editing the two texts, observed two very different modes of expression: Drennen’s narrative is threaded with references that connote wealth, status, and personal privilege; Jones’s memoir is interwoven with African American signification, protest, and moral outrage. The stories of their Appalachian upbringing in homes less than a mile apart are anecdotal in nature, but their diverse uses of the English language as they endeavor to communicate shared memories and common meanings reveal significant cultural connotations that transform standard American English into two different languages, rendering interracial communication problematic. The book offers an approach to studying not only cultural linguistics but also the cultural heritage of a historic time and place in America. It gives witness to the issues of race and class inherent in the way we write, speak, and think. Delores Johnson, a professor of English at Marshall University, is an author and writer whose articles cover teaching strategies for the multicultural classroom. This presentation is sponsored by the Community of Scholars in the School of Liberal Arts. A reception will follow the lecture. |
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