Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White. - book reviews

American Visions, April-May, 1994 by David Nicholson

Brent Staples' elegantly written and insightful memoir, Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White (Pantheon, 1994), is that rarity of rarities these days--a book by a black man that does not focus on race. It is almost misleading to call Parallel Time a black book. The truth is that it is an American story, a celebration of one of the many strands of the American experience.

Reminiscent of Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, a classic of the genre that has remained in print since it was first published in 1967, Parallel Time deserves the same accolades and the same long life. Alas, it may not happen. Much of what the publishing industry and the media insist on promoting as characteristic elements of writing by black men--victimhood, violence and the varieties of pathology within the black community--are absent here.

Staples grew up in Chester, Pa., a small industrial city near Philadelphia. His father was a truck driver; his mother, a housewife. His father drank, and the family moved frequently, often only one step ahead of landlords and sheriffs.

Staples finished high school intending to join the military or seek work in one of Chester's already dying industries. By chance, however, he met a black professor who encouraged him to apply to a local college. Four years later, Staples won two graduate fellowships to the University of Chicago, where he earned a doctorate in psychology. He then worked as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-times, free-lanced, and was hired by the New York Times, where he is now a member of the news paper's editorial board.

To retell the story in such bare outline gives no hint of the richness of Parallel Time. Staples has lived the examined life, and the result is experience so richly rendered that the reader re-experiences it, a book grounded so much in the particular that it becomes universal.

In the hands of a lesser writer, the account of the family's moves, for example, might become a cliche--an indictment of unfeeling, racist landlords or of his father's irresponsibility. For Staples, however, there are deeper, more personal meanings. "Each new house was a change of skin," with "chaos [that] swallowed things that would never be seen again." And he was marked by the family's roaming. "Grown and out on my own, I was phobically wary of possessions," he writes. "Time and time again I lived five years at a stretch without unpacking."

To be sure, race and the tragic sordidness we have come to think of as an inevitable part of black life figure in Parallel Time. The book opens and closes with an account of the murder of Staples' brother Blake, a small-time cocaine dealer in Roanoke, Va., shot to death on the street by a rival. A sister runs away from home, lured by life in the fast lane. Another brother takes heroin, and another sister, pregnant, drops out of high school.

Yet Staples never blames the anonymous white man. His brothers and sisters and the other men and women who people the pages of his book are always human. They make choices and, though sometimes their choices are bad ones, they must live with them.

And though Parallel Time opens and closes with chapters that, but for the honesty of their emotional insight, could have come from a rap video, there is much more to this book. Casual violence is a hallmark of writing by black men, so much so that Staples' confession of his reluctance to fight is refreshing. And, where so much black writing focuses on antagonism between blacks and whites, Staples joyfully writes about the freedom to explore himself that he found in integrated settings.

The publication of Parallel Time continues a recent trend, one that suggests that the 1990s may become the decade of black men's writing. Much of the literary energy of black men these days is directed toward essays and autobiographies. It's difficult to say why this is so--perhaps because fiction requires an assimilation of experience that autobiography and memoir at their most basic do not.