The Cotillion, or One Good Bull Is Half Of the Herd.

by John Oliver Killens Coffee House Press, April 2002 $14.95, ISBN 1-560-89119-1

My love, My Love, or the Peasant Girl by Rosa Guy Coffee House Press, September 2002 $11.95, ISBN 1-566-89131-0

John Oliver Killens and Rosa Guy were founding members of the Harlem Writers Guild in the early 1950s. The group's expressed mission was to create a place where black writers, particularly those imbued with a nationalistic outlook, could come together and critique each other's works.

One overarching concern of the group was to depose the social protest themes that had preoccupied the previous generation of writers, and both Killens and Guy adroitly sidestepped this issue in their books--The Cotillion and My Love, My Love--in different ways. Killens, who died in 1987, always posited race, class and color at the heart of his novels. Class and color are given caustic and humorous turns in The Cotillion, with characters often scarcely embodying certain class distinctions.

From the opening page, Killens' protagonist, Ben Ali Lumumba, assails the reader, announcing his pedigree, literary motivations and political perspective. "This book is kind of halfly autobiographical and halfly fiction" Lumumba writes in the foreword to the novel, "all based on facts as I have gathered them." But the story, he adds, "is not about me ... but about a fox named Yoruba."

Indeed, Yoruba's twisting between Lumumba's sometimes excessive nationalism and her mother's desire to keep her tied to her middle-class upbringing against the backdrop of the upcoming cotillion drives the narrative. Along the way to this hilarious destination, the reader encounters several unforgettable characters, again symbolic of some social standing. The way these differing outlooks rub against each other--the friction of Killens' fiction--provide a revealing look into the complexity of black society

It is not difficult to figure where the author's sympathies lie. However, it in no way hampers the author's incisive analysis of the "dicty," African-American bourgeois. The current crop of young readers will be amazed to discover Lumumba's rapping prowess that precedes hip-hop culture by some ten years. In this way, and in so many others, Killens forged an alternative style, a new way of distilling black culture, and making it resonate with flesh vigor and integrity.

Guy's tact may be more conventional but no less compelling. With a fairy tale motif, she tells the story of Desiree, or Ti Moune, a poor, lovely island girl who saves the life of an injured young man of considerable wealth. Because she believes the circumstances were wrought by the gods, Desiree is relentless in her pursuit to stay close to and care for him. "Daniel is my happiness" she declares to her guardian, "and I am his."

To be near him, Desiree must elude a rough gatekeeper to the family's estate. However, once inside, there are even more challenges, obstacles that overwhelm her impoverished background. Like Lumumba, Desiree is determined to leap the barriers of color and class, but the gap is wide and fraught with terrible consequences.

The author's lilting phrases and poetic grace evoke memorable scenes of a bucolic setting. "But then the peasants live in the valleys and mountain villages amid flamboy-ants, poinsettias, azaleas, ficus, eucalyptus and magnolias--their colors raging over the countryside and blending roads into hills, hills into forests." When Desiree loses her red comb, that precious amulet of good fortune, you know she's in for the worst.

Both Killens and Guy are brilliant when capturing the dilemma of class. "Lovejoy, who refused to be who she really was, possibly because she did not actually know who she really was. It could be a problem when you had pretended all these years," writes Killens of Yoruba's mother. And Guy's observation of Desiree's predicament: "The island's aristocracy, those to whom she might have spoken and whom she might have understood, drifted to one side of the room when Desiree stood at the other."

Although members of the same guild of writers, both Killens and Guy retained their individual perspectives. This singularity is further personified in Killens' classic, And Then We Heard the Thunder, and Guy's Bird at My Window. That The Cotillion and My Love, My Love are again available to another generation of readers is as much a testament to the vision of Coffee House Press as it is to the power of two writers with incomparable gifts of "telling it like it is and was."

--Herb Boyd is the national editor of The Black Worm Today an online publication. Race and Resistance-African Americans in the Twenty-first Century is his latest book.