Dr. King's Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories

Black Issues Book Review, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Tanu T. Henry

Dr. King's Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories by Charles Johnson Scribner, February 2005 $20, ISBN 0-743-26453-3

A submerged brilliance dwells in all the novellas that make up Johnson's Dr. King's Refrigerator. Even though the author refrains from interrupting the even flow of his storytelling with loudening moments of intrigue, his intimate grasp of life, and the subtleties of the human experience make this book a deeply satisfying reading adventure.

Johnson, a professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, invents his science, contemporary and historical fiction with insight and precision, speaking to the depth of the author's intellect. Even when he teases his readers to uneventful or abrupt endings, or when he stretches his premises to the height of imagination, they remain bolted to a concrete floor of realism that lend them originality, believability and enjoyment. He's able to pull this off with consistence--whether he's carefully reconstructing a scene in the Alabama kitchen of Martin Luther King Jr. during his graduate-school years, conjuring the details of a fictional central African empire or turning presidents' sons into toads.

Like the rest of the stories here, "Dr. King's Refrigerator" is intelligent. "Sweet Dreams" the most entertaining, takes a futuristic thrust, putting forth an entertaining vision of what it would be like in the near future when the government starts to tax people's dreams.

Besides its undergirding genius, the second strength of the book is its accessibility. Anybody, or any age group of readers, should be able to enjoy these decompressed, clever and highly personalized stories. In their remarkable simplicity, they reach into the academic strongholds of philosophy and history, politics and the African American experience with surprising freshness and the fluency of years of gathered wisdom.

Tanu T. Henry Tanu T. Henry, a former staff writer at Africana.com and the Oakland Press, is a programming manager at AOL Black Voices. He is a graduate of Wilberforce University and Harvard Divinity School.