A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley

First published: 1962

Type of plot: Impressionistic realism

Time of work: 1931-1961

Locale: A fictitious East South Central State in the Deep South

Principal Characters:

• Tucker Caliban, the novel’s protagonist, the “different drummer”
• Bethra, his wife
• Mister Harper, the town philosopher who tells the story of “the African,” Tucker Caliban’s black ancestor
• Harry Leland, a poor white who is sympathetic to Tucker Caliban
• Mister Leland, Harry’s son, who befriends Tucker Caliban
• David Willson, a liberal descendant of Dewey Willson, who was a Confederate general and the state’s governor in 1870
• Camille Willson, David’s wife
• Dewey Willson III, David’s son
• Dymphna Willson, David’s daughter
• Bennett T. Bradshaw, David’s black college roommate who is active in the civil rights movement

The Novel

A Different Drummer begins with “an excerpt from THE THUMBNAIL ALMANAC, 1961 . . . page 643” describing a fictitious Southern state, admitted to the Union in 1818, the home of Confederate General Dewey Willson, who was born in Sutton, a small town twenty-seven miles north of the Gulfport city of New Marsails. Willson was a brilliant military commander and the dominant figure in state politics after the war, and his descendants have controlled the government and the economy for generations. Yet a brief notation in the Almanac under the heading “Recent History” refers to the mysterious departure in June, 1957, of “all the state’s Negro inhabitants.” This dramatic juxtaposition of whites and blacks, of the governors and the subjects of society, provides the central focus for A Different Drummer. Somehow a whole people has heeded Henry David Thoreau’s powerful words of dissent which serve as an epigraph to the novel. Blacks have left the state hearing a “different drummer” and stepping to the “music” created by Tucker Caliban’s destruction of his farm and abandonment of the state.

In the first chapter, “The African,” men gather on the porch of Thomason’s Grocery Company to hear Mister Harper tell the story of Tucker Caliban’s ancestor, the giant African chief brought in a slave ship to New Marsails, where he was bought by the general’s father, Dewitt Willson. Only Mister Harper understands that his tall tale will help explain the reasons for the black exodus from the state. Because Harper exaggerates the African’s strength and the inability of the whites to control him, the men on the porch, especially Bobby-Joe McCollum, question the relevance of this tall tale to the present.

Mister Harper, however, does not claim to be wholly accurate; indeed, he suggests the story’s explanatory power depends on its exaggeration, as if that is the only way people will remember the truth. In effect, he is invoking the power of all myths that have less to do with literal facts than with the reality of people’s feelings. In this case, Mister Harper (although he does not put it this way) is describing the myth of black resistance to white subjugation. “The African” may not have been so superhumanly powerful, but he is an example of the independence exemplified in Tucker Caliban’s decision to own and then dispossess himself of the land that whites have created for him and his family. Thus the story of the African serves two functions: It is a parable that explains how a people have been made slaves against their will, and it is a prelude to the final act of violence committed against Bennett T. Bradshaw by Bobby-Joe McCollum and the other whites on the porch during Mister Harper’s absence.

The Characters

Each chapter of A Different Drummer concentrates on a unique point of view, so that the history of the state, of the Willsons, and of the Calibans is intricately pieced together by seeing how individuals have discovered and dealt with the relationships between blacks and whites. Tucker Caliban, for example, is approached obliquely— first through the story of his African ancestor, and then through the Lelands, father and son, who give a sympathetic but somewhat removed view of Caliban, a view that is available to the community but which it does not share because intimacy between the races is discouraged.

David Willson, the great-grandson of the general, gradually becomes the novel’s chief interpreter of Tucker Caliban’s actions. He has grown up with Tucker, seen an uncomplaining Tucker take a beating because he stayed out too late helping David learn how to ride a bike. Willson’s diary, covering the years from 1931 to 1957, reveals how he has tried to surmount the limitations of his Southern background. At college, he has befriended the radical Bennett T. Bradshaw, espoused Socialist causes, equal rights for blacks, and then come home to compromise his ideals when it becomes clear that he will not be able to support his family otherwise.

In many ways, Willson reflects his family’s ambivalent history. In “The African,” Dewitt Willson seeks to own the defiant black, but the master also admires the slave’s independence. Similarly, David is alternately respectful and condescending with Tucker; he is caught up in the complex of conflicting emotions which his family and his people have never been able to resolve.

David’s wife, Camille, is hurt by his inability to accept the full faith that she has in him, and their marriage is nearly ruined by the attenuation of his convictions. His son, Dewey, does not realize how his father has relinquished his youthful ideals and sees only a lack of generosity and an unwillingness to communicate. David’s daughter, Dymphna, provides interesting insights into the marriage between Bethra and Tucker and thereby unwittingly reveals the sources of trouble in her parents’ marriage. Tucker and Bethra have worked out their differences in temperament and background, and it is their marriage and their decision to leave the state together that makes possible the redemption of David and Camille’s marriage.

Tucker Caliban leaves the state because it is the only way that he can free himself. By David Willson’s own account, the efforts of Southern liberals have failed, and only Caliban’s “primitive act” of salting his fields and burning his farmhouse has freed both himself and the Willsons. Caliban, like the African, has not depended on any organization, white or black, to assert his rights as a human being. Indeed, he has rejected his educated wife’s faith in civil rights organizations, for he has concluded, in David’s words, that he must act “individually.”

Critical Context

As many readers have noticed, William Melvin Kelley’s first novel suggests a black writer’s mature response to the work of the South’s greatest novelist, William Faulkner (1897-1962). Like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Kelley’s fictional Southern state with its history of interrelated black and white families provides him with a way of crystallizing the meaning of Southern history. General Dewey Willson’s historic example is like that of Colonel John Sartoris in Faulkner’s novel Sartoris (1929; revised as Flags in the Dust, 1929). Both writers share, moreover, a basic concern with the theme of freedom and with the way slavery has demeaned both blacks and whites.

Kelley has been influenced by Faulkner not only in terms of themes and characters but also in the way that he handles point of view and chronology. Like Faulkner in Go Down, Moses (1942), Kelley begins in the present and moves rapidly into the past. Separate chapters of A Different Drummer reflect different periods of time and points of view, as is true in much of Faulkner’s fiction. Both writers withhold crucial information and force readers to assemble history in the fragments of evidence offered in widely separated chapters. In this way, not only is considerable suspense and mystery generated but also readers are forced to take individual responsibility for making the narratives of the novel cohere.

A comparison between these two writers should not obscure, however, Kelley’s originality. It would be more proper to say that he takes on the methods of one of America’s greatest writers to embody an original vision. For example, Tucker Caliban’s act of renunciation in A Different Drummer has a far more powerful impact on society than the white Ike McCaslin’s relinquishment of his inheritance in Go Down, Moses, where he is relegated to the status of ineffectual idealist. Unlike Lucas Beauchamp, the head of the black branch of the McCaslins, who decides to stay on the land his white ancestors first farmed, Tucker acknowledges his bond with the Willsons, but he can no longer let them set precedents for his own actions.

The twenty years that separate A Different Drummer from Go Down, Moses reflect changes in Southern society and in political thinking that Faulkner’s conservatism did not anticipate. As a contemporary black writer, Kelley places great emphasis on Caliban’s carrying on the tradition of the African, although Kelley’s white predecessor also used parables to show the resistance of blacks to white superiority. The difference between them is perhaps most clear in Kelley’s sense of the future, for he concludes A Different Drummer with Mister Leland imagining Tucker Caliban’s return. The white child would ask the black man why he returned, and “Tucker would say he had found what he had lost” thus clearing up the boy’s confusion about something Tucker told him before he left. The two would be together laughing and eating food Tucker had brought home. Tucker’s act of renunciation, the novel implies, has left a gap in Southern identity, a gap even the white bigots in the novel uneasily sense, and it will only be when Tucker returns, with his own identity intact, that the South will be made whole.

Bibliography

Faulkner, Howard. “The Uses of Tradition: William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer.” Modern Fiction Studies 21, no. 4 (Winter, 1975-1976): 535-542. Affirms that Kelley incorporates many of the traditions of European American literature, often ironically, including the tall tale (the African), the Transcendental notion of self-reliance (Tucker), and biblical symbolism. Also examines the influence on Kelley of southern novelist William Faulkner, as evidenced by the use of child narrators and multiple points of view and by stylistic parallels in sentence structure and the use of italics.

Harris-Lopez, Trudier. “Salting the Land but Not the Imagination: William Melvin Kelley’s A Dfferent Drummer.” In South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Extended analysis of Tucker and his relationship to Kelley’s fictional landscape.

Klotman, Phyllis Rauch. Another Man Gone: The Black Runner in Contemporary Afro-American Literature. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977. Examines the figure of the black runner within the larger framework of the “Running Man”—one who ultimately rejects the values of his culture or society by leaving it—in Western literature. Tucker, like his rebel ancestor the African, is able to act and has the courage to do so by breaking the pattern of the past and rejecting all tangible symbols of black servitude. Running for both of these characters is seen as a positive act.

Newquist, Roy. Conversations. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967. Contains an interview with Kelley, who discusses his “belief that the novel should educate men’s hearts” and argues that the racial struggle should not cause art to be used as propaganda. “It seems to me that the writer’s job is to raise questions and to criticize in a constructive way,” Kelley says, adding, “Without this freedom one cannot be a writer, much less a person.”

Wardi, Anissa J. “William Melvin Kelley.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Includes biography of Kelley, critical overview of his works, and bibliography of those works and of secondary sources.

Weyant, Jill. “The Kelley Saga: Violence in America.” CLA Journal 19, no. 2 (December, 1975): 210-220. Discusses how Kelley challenges racial stereotypes, depicting white characters as incomplete, having lost the ability to feel and express emotion; in his fiction, these repressed emotions erupt in violence and aggression. Kelley’s white characters, Weyant argues, are more cerebral; his black characters, in touch with emotion, are more vital. Notes Kelley’s reshaping of William Shakespeare’s rude character Caliban into a hero.

Weyl, Donald M. “The Vision of Man in the Novels of William Melvin Kelley.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 15, no. 3 (1974): 15-33. Discussion of Kelley’s first novel in the context of his next three books. Notes a shift away from the focus on individual struggles in A Different Drummer to an emphasis on ideas, as in his third novel, dem (1964); Weyl detects a corresponding decline in quality.

Williams, Gladys M. “Technique as Evaluation of Subject in A Different Drummer.” CLA Journal 19, no. 2 (December, 1975): 221-237. Analyzes Kelley’s integration of the contrasting elements of romance, myth, allegory, realism, and naturalism in the novel. Also explores the contrasts between characters and symbols, noting that the novel achieves a balance and unity through opposition.