the 1959

RUNNING HEAD : THE 1959 ' BY THULANI DAVIS

The 1959 ' By Thulani Davis

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The 1959 ' By Thulani Davis

Summary

On the surface , the novel 1959 ' by Thulani Davis narrates the custom of passage of Katherine Willie ' Tarrant . By using a first-person narrator , Thulani Davis presents a suggestive of a young African American teenager living in the 1950 's , which was a period weighed down by injustice and increasing ethnic conflict . The novel starts with the destruction of

Turner , Virginia . Over the noises of bulldozers echoing over what were once reticent wooden bungalows , the adult Willie Tarrant ponders over the history of the town . She visualizes the coming of an African woman three hundred years before This woman , deserted by a slaver because she is sick and thus not a profitable commodity , has no value . Willie chose to call her Gambia A woman of extreme self-esteem and courage , Gambia does not die (Davis 1993 ) By her very endurance , she becomes the progenitor of Turner 's African American community . Afterwards , Willie considers Gambia as her divine family . Even though the town has been leveled and the imaginary Gambia lives only in Willie 's thoughts , Willie the adult has come back in victory . What follows is her narrative told in retrospect . On the same day in July , 1959 , Willie Tarrant turned twelve and Billie Holiday died . Willie 's world is the world of most teenagers , one differentiated by obsession with music , clothes , and the opposite sex . When her father a college lecturer , informs her that twelve is the age of reason , Willie perceives this as the chance to have her juvenile braids cut off in preparation for her very first date

Willie reveals that her interests transcend the teenage world of boys clothes , and music . She is mesmerized by the exploits of prominent dictators in the news , among them Fulgencio Batista , Papa Doc Duvalier and Fidel Castro . Willie 's fascination with dictators and guerrillas stems from the white community 's concern over Cuban affairs , which she equates with the furor over the civil rights struggle in Little Rock Arkansas . Interspersed within Willie 's narrative is the story of Willie 's dead Aunt Fannie . What Willie cannot glean from her father 's family stories about Fannie , she imagines . Thus Fannie becomes a mythic figure within the novel . Fannie , Willie has learned , often sneaked out of the house to see minstrel shows , in defiance of her parents ' wishes Her niece shares her fascination with the Tambo /Mr . Interlocutor routines . Willie often begs her father to recount what his older sister had told him . Dixon is wary about re-creating the old routines for his precocious daughter . He does , however , tell her that the minstrel shows were in a different language . It was a hungry language and all the words were a complicated code that grew more and more intricate . And all the words said , `I 'm a fool , but I 'm not a fool...