THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501240499
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BENJAMIN D. BERRY JR.
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE?
From the Projects to Prep School
CHARLISE LYLES
Faber and Faber. 228 pp. $21.95.
IN DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE?, Charlise Lyles presents her memoirs of life in the Kennedy-King Homes public housing project in Cleveland, the city in which she was born in 1959. Her family was among the first to move into that project, seemingly built in response to the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination; it opened in November 1969. Lyles recalls the joy with which her family, all except her father, moved into the project, and the pain as they watched it deteriorate.
The book spans those important years from 10 to 15 when Lyles moved from childhood to young womanhood and from ``the slow class'' - she was a dreamy child - to an elite preparatory school. Those years also marked the end of the nonviolent phase of the civil rights movement, the rise and fall of Black Power, the decline of Cleveland (the Cuyahoga River, which runs through the city, caught fire and burned on June 22, 1969), and the election of its first black mayor, Carl Stokes. These events and Lyles' own maturation are woven together in a very skillful and informative narrative.
We watch Lyles grow physically as childhood passes and a young woman emerges. We watch her grow culturally as she is introduced to her black culture, her black history and her black self by the Black Panthers. And most of all, we watch her grow intellectually, especially after spending most of one summer with ``Skeeter'' Lyles, her absent father. He introduces her to the world of books in ways that the schools had never contemplated, and frees her to question and to think.
She writes: ``. . . Charles Lyles made me understand that some universes needed to be disturbed: ones that required me to worship somebody else's idea of god; ones that wouldn't allow me to be my true self; and ones that seemed to insist that others were the cause of my troubles in the world.''
Once her mind was freed, Lyles was able to take advantage of the many programs born of ``white America's efforts to right racial wrongs [and] black America's determination to lead her own,'' and she escaped the projects, with their gantlet of boys who fondled her in urine-smelling halls. Identified as an exceptional student, Lyles received a scholarship through the A Better Chance program to the Hawken School outside Cleveland. She later graduated from Smith College. A former writer and public editor for The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Lyles is a graduate student at Old Dominion University.
If there is a fault with Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?, it is not with the writing, as Lyles is a superb writer. It is rather that there is too much here for one book. Some subjects that deserve fuller treatment, such as the impact of the Black Panthers on Cleveland, are dismissed fairly quickly.
Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? rightfully takes its place among a growing body of memoirs and biographies written by the new generation that is assuming African-American intellectual leadership. This generation is defining itself through its memories of those events that have shaped its growth. These memoirs articulate in a new and important way what it means to be black in the post-civil rights/Black Power era, when there is no Martin Luther King or Malcolm X to speak for or to African Americans.
- MEMO: Benjamin D. Berry Jr. is a professor of history and American studies at
Virginia Wesleyan College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
BOOK SIGNING
Charlise Lyles will read from her book and sign copies, today, 2
p.m., at Prince Books, 109 E. Main St., Norfolk, 622-9223. Look for
an excerpt in Commentary next Sunday.
by CNB