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"I Contain Multitudes": Randall Kenan's Walking on Water as Collective Autobiography

"I Contain Multitudes": Randall Kenan's Walking on Water as Collective Autobiography “I Contain Multitudes”: Randall Kenan’s Walking on Water as Collective Autobiography by George Hovis After winning widespread acclaim for a novel, A Visitation of Spirits (1989), and a story collection, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), Randall Kenan undertook a very different sort of project, a book that would blend the genres of travelogue, biography, oral history, and spiritual autobiography. Whereas his fi ction is almost exclusively set in the postage stamp of soil around his rural hometown of Chinquapin, North Carolina, in his next major work, Walking on Water: Black Ameri- can Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (1999), Kenan turns his gaze outward to take in an entire continent. Walking on Water chroni- cles six years of intermittent travel, between 1991 and 1997. Kenan be- gins by heading northeast as far as Maine, then travels westward across the country via the Rust Belt and the upper Midwest all the way to western Canada and Alaska. Afterward he records his experiences along the west coast and the western “promised lands” of Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Finally, he makes an abbrevi- ated tour of the South, stopping in Louisiana, Georgia, and http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Southern Literary Journal University of North Carolina Press

"I Contain Multitudes": Randall Kenan's Walking on Water as Collective Autobiography

Hovis, George.
The Southern Literary Journal , Volume 36 (2) – May 19, 2004
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 the Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English.
ISSN
1534-1461

Abstract

“I Contain Multitudes”: Randall Kenan’s Walking on Water as Collective Autobiography by George Hovis After winning widespread acclaim for a novel, A Visitation of Spirits (1989), and a story collection, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), Randall Kenan undertook a very different sort of project, a book that would blend the genres of travelogue, biography, oral history, and spiritual autobiography. Whereas his fi ction is almost exclusively set in the postage stamp of soil around his rural hometown of Chinquapin, North Carolina, in his next major work, Walking on Water: Black Ameri- can Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (1999), Kenan turns his gaze outward to take in an entire continent. Walking on Water chroni- cles six years of intermittent travel, between 1991 and 1997. Kenan be- gins by heading northeast as far as Maine, then travels westward across the country via the Rust Belt and the upper Midwest all the way to western Canada and Alaska. Afterward he records his experiences along the west coast and the western “promised lands” of Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Finally, he makes an abbrevi- ated tour of the South, stopping in Louisiana, Georgia, and

Journal

The Southern Literary Journal – University of North Carolina Press

Published: May 19, 2004

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