After Hours: A Collection of Erotic Writing by Black Men.

edited by Robert Fleming Plume, August 2002 $14.00, ISBN 0-452-28332-9

Author and editor Robert Fleming scores big with his new book of erotic short stories by "gentle" men of color. After Hours opens with foreplay in the form of a charming sexual allegory, "Cultural Relativity;' from National Book Award winner Charles Johnson. A post-coital triste moment is bittersweet in the final story, "Revolution," Colin Channer's romantic depiction of the turning of the wheel of fate through endings and beginnings, for individuals and for empires. Fleming is one editor who knows when to lift his pencil: he has arrayed these stories like a well-orchestrated seduction.

The actors in After Hours' stories are imaginative, sensitive, conflicted, yearning. In other words, these are people, not pornographic archetypes. Indeed, the closest we get to a dominatrix--the staple pornography role for black women--is an experienced, successful entertainment agent in "Up" by Kenji Jasper. For once, "erotica" isn't being misused to tart up raw pornography. When Arthur Flowers' conjure man walks out of a sort of Rastifarian woodland to ask a married woman to let him court her, the blend of modern images and language achieves the sense of life's ineffable wonder that recalls Jean Toomer's Cane.

After Hours doesn't take itself all that seriously, though. The boys have some fun. Tracy Grant parodies the dilemma of the preacher called to minister unto his flock, or at least certain members thereof, in ways his wife would consider extracurricular, while still being true to the Word. The resulting story, "The Apostle Charles," is a hoot--juicy, wry and wise.

This collection adds up to a distinctive work of American literature that should be recognized and marketed as such. John A. Williams, Clarence Major and Colin Channer, for example, can hang out with D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Laurence Durrell.

--J.D. Simmons is a writer living in Alabama.