1959 by Thulani Davis

First published: 1992

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1959

Locale: Chesapeake Bay, Virginia

Principal Characters:

• Willie Tarrant, the narrator, a bright twelve-year-old girl
• Dixon Tarrant, Willie’s father, a man who has slipped into complacency after the death of his activist wife
• Ralph Johnson, Dixon’s former college classmate
• Mae Taliaferro, a teacher at Ida B. Wells Junior High
• Coleman Boteler, a tormented aspiring writer and teacher
• Maddie Alexander, a distant cousin of the Tarrants and mother of Willie’s best friend, Marian
• Herman Shaw, a white supremacist member of the school board

The Novel

On the surface, 1959 recounts the rite of passage of Katherine “Willie” Tarrant. Through the use of a first-person narrator, Davis presents an evocative portrait of a young African American teenager living during the 1950’s, an era beset by injustice and growing racial unrest.

The novel opens with the razing of Turner, Virginia. Above the sounds of bulldozers rumbling over what were once modest wooden bungalows, the adult Willie Tarrant muses over the history of the town. She imagines the arrival of an African woman three hundred years earlier. This woman, abandoned by a slaver because she is sick and therefore not a marketable commodity, has no name. Willie opts to call her “Gambia.” A woman of immense dignity and fortitude, Gambia does not die. By her very survival, she becomes the progenitor of Turner’s African American community. Subsequently, Willie regards Gambia as her spiritual kin. Although the town has been leveled and the mythical Gambia lives only in Willie’s imagination, Willie the adult has returned in triumph. What follows is her story 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 adolescents, one characterized by preoccupations with music, clothes, and the opposite sex. When her father, a college professor, tells her that twelve is the age of reason, Willie sees this as the opportunity to have her childish braids cut off in preparation for her 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,’ or ’I’m just here and I don’t understand but I know exactly what is going on.’”

The linguistic code of turn-of-the-century minstrel shows becomes the code of the town when the school integration issue is raised. Many parents, including Dixon Tarrant, are concerned with what might happen if selected students from Ida B. Wells Junior High were to be sent to the all-white Patrick Henry Junior High. Fearing for their children’s safety, the parents call a town meeting to discuss the issue. Eventually, they decide to send the top six students if the desegregation issue is forced. One of those students is Willie Tarrant.

Willie’s remarkable teacher, Mae Taliaferro, rigorously prepares her students for the possible move. She refuses to teach the erroneous and biased material covered in the out-of-date textbooks that the all-white board of education has provided for the Wells students. One of the board members, Herman Shaw, is outraged by what he, a white supremacist, views as Mae’s teaching of communist thought, and he calls for her dismissal. The African American community, however, stands behind Taliaferro, and Shaw’s edict is dismissed.

That winter, eight African American college students openly oppose segregation laws when they sit at the lunch counter of the local Woolworth’s. Jailed and beaten several times, the students do not give up and return daily to the counter. The African American community is galvanized by this event. Dixon Tarrant becomes the leading spokesperson for the desegregation movement. Other community members, heretofore apolitical and passive, engage in the fight. The changes affect all members of the community, particularly Willie. No longer is her world a pedestrian one. She has been exposed to the evils of racial injustice and becomes an activist. At the age of reason, Willie Tarrant becomes a tireless worker for civil rights, responding reasonably to an unreasonable system.

The Characters

The novel contains an interesting mixture of fictional and historical figures. Because it is Willie’s story on a primary level, the changes in other characters, as well as in Willie herself, are filtered through the point of view of an adolescent. Davis captures the concerns and values of a twelve-year-old by interweaving the social and political issues of the time with popular culture. The music motif permeates the novel, beginning with the reference to Billie Holiday and sustained by references to jazz, rhythm and blues, and Willie’s disdain for Pat Boone. The predominant music of the white culture seems empty to Willie, yet he songs of Billie Holiday are beyond her comprehension. The Willie Tarrant of the beginning of the novel does not have the life experience to appreciate the rich, painfully poignant music of Lady Day. The adult Willie Tarrant does. Willie’s fascination with such figures as Papa Doc Duvalier and Fidel Castro is augmented by youthful romanticism. For example, she compares Castro to Dwight D. Eisenhower, finding Eisenhower wanting and Castro a Cuban version of Marlon Brando.

Much of the Tarrants’ familial history is embellished by the creative Willie, especially the episodes dealing with Aunt Fannie and Gambia. Willie’s romanticizing of her ancestors is her way of creating the strong, positive female role models she believes that her life is lacking, initially not realizing that the authoritative Mrs. Taliaferro and her frivolous Aunt Maddie are women of powerful character.

The male characters in the book are originally limned as passive, self-centered, or bitter. At first, in Willie’s young eyes her father is old and staid, a reasonably accurate characterization for the first half of the novel. When he rises to the defense of the eight college students, Willie barely recognizes him. As the civil unrest begins to form and shape the lives of the adults, Willie is mystified by their behavior, not realizing that she is changing as well. When the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., comes to speak to the Turner community, Willie reaches an epiphany:

I felt as if I had never known who I was or where I was living. And I felt good. And I felt full of power. I closed my eyes and soaked in a feast of spirit. When he finished, the chapel exploded in joy, touchable joy.

Reverend King had made me angry and happy to be angry, really more happy than angry. He also made me feel that day that Negroes felt the same way about things, that the same kind of fire was in all of us.

The fire that lights Willie lights everyone. People who have led mundane, placid lives become activists. Ralph Johnson, the acerbic barber with an engineering degree, forsakes the solace his jazz records afford and becomes embroiled in the desegregation struggle. Coleman Boteler, a womanizing, self-indulgent writer and teacher, moves from his self-imposed periphery to the center of the movement. The lives of these people are thus irrevocably altered by the winds of change heralded by such leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Critical Context

Thulani Davis is a respected journalist, dramatist, and poet. Her articles have appeared in such highly respected publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, and American Film. Her libretto for the opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and her adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s 1948 The Caucasian Chalk Circle have earned her widespread critical acclaim in operatic and theatrical circles. Her first novel was 1959.

Overall, the novel has received positive reviews, being favorably compared with the works of James Baldwin and Carson McCullers. Critics have found correlations between Davis’s first novel and the works of a more established contemporary writer, Toni Morrison. Both Morrison and Davis have chosen to address social issues by filtering them through events centered in small African American communities. These communities ultimately become microscosmic studies of national and social concerns.

In addition, 1959 is often praised for its fusion of the historic and the fictional. The use of the juvenile narrative voice places the novel within the tradition of the female bildungsroman. Drawing upon her own experience as an African American who grew up in the era she is writing about, Davis has created a synthesis of autobiography, history, and fiction. As a work of fiction and as a social document, 1959 addresses a multitude of issues, including civil rights on a broad scale and the psychological implications inherent in the civil rights struggle on a more personal level. Davis has presented an affirming view of the African American experience. The story of Willie Tarrant and her community serves as a testament to the power of the community that bands together. The endurance and fortitude of the people of whom Davis writes had been tested and tempered.

Bibliography

Burn, Gordon. “Review of 1959.” The Times Literary Supplement, May 29, 1992, 21. Discusses the duality of the Willie Tarrant narrative and the broader implications of the civil rights experience, especially in the context of how the events set in motion transform the town.

Gates, David. “Review of 1959.” Newsweek 119 (March 9, 1992): 60. Sees the civil rights activities in the novel as a microhistory of the Civil Rights movement and as an emblematic prophesy of the African American experience. Analyzes Davis’ fictionalized account of how an African American community discovers its inherent power and the limits of that power from the standpoint of persuasive discourse.

Hull, Gloria T. “Review of 1959.” Women’s Review of Books (May, 1992): 6. Identifies the influences of Toni Morrison’s works on Davis’ novel. Views the novel as an affirmation of the spirit and dignity of people of the period described. Offers a brief analysis of Davis’ employment of characterization, asserting that the revelation of character through situation is poetic. Overall, Hull deems 1959 to be an excellent first novel, one that is lively in tone and subject matter and evinces the author’s talent.

Knight, Kimberly. “Thulani Davis: Writing the Untold Stories.” Essence 23 (May, 1992): 60. Discusses how Davis has drawn upon her own life and family experiences in her writing of 1959. Provides limited biographical information on Davis.

Levine, Beth. “Review of 1959.” The New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1992, 18. Examines how the novel presents a moving testament of communal power, a power that ignited the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s. Points out how Davis’ deft use of time and place, especially the function of the town’s history and Fannie Tarrant’s diary in the narrative, evokes that power.

Molesworth, Charles. “Culture, Power, and Society.” In Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Concisely deals with how contemporary American writers in general address and thereby illuminate the question of power. Considers the issue of social and political consciousness in the postwar era. Of particular interest is a discussion of the presence of adolescent sensibility in the contemporary novel, a device that allows postwar novelists to explore the notion of power versus powerlessness.