Rails Under My Back: A Novel

by Jeffery Renard Allen

“Will put Allen in the company of writers such as James Joyce, August Wilson, and Ralph Ellison.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer

When it was first published fifteen years ago, Jeffery Renard Allen’s debut novel, Rails Under My Back, earned its author comparisons to some of the giants of twentieth-century modernism. The publication of Allen’s equally ambitious second novel, Song of the Shank, cemented those lofty claims. Now, the book that established his reputation is being restored to print in its first Graywolf Press edition. Together, the two novels stand as significant achievements of twenty-first-century literature.
     Rails Under My Back is an epic that tracks the interwoven lives of two brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is always full of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving the remaining family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic consequences. The multiple effects of the comings and goings are devastating: These are the almost mythic expression of the African American experience in the half century that followed the Second World War.
     The story ranges, as the characters do, from the city, which is somewhat like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many “inner” and “outer” locales. Rails Under My Back is a multifaceted, brilliantly colored, intensely musical novel that pulses with urgency and originality.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, African American, American

576 pages, Paperback

First published January 10, 1999

About the author

Jeffery Renard Allen is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999), and of the widely celebrated and influential novel, Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), which won The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His other awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, The Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-first Century Award, a Recognition for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from the African American Literature and Culture Association, a support grant from Creative Capital, and the 2003 Charles Angoff Award for Fiction from The Literary Review. He has been a fellow at The Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, a John Farrar Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a Walter E. Dakins Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Bomb, Hambone, The Antioch Review, StoryQuarterly, African Voices, African American Review, Callaloo, Arkansas Review, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, Notre Dame Review, The Literary Review, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11, Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, and Homeground: Language for an American Landscape.

Born in Chicago, Renard Allen holds a PhD in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Besides teaching at Queens College (including, as of fall 2007, in the college’s new MFA program in creative writing), Allen is also an instructor in the graduate writing program at New School University. He has also taught for Cave Canem, the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nairobi, Kenya, and in the writing program at Columbia University. In addition, he is the director of the Pan African Literary Forum, a writers’ conference in Accra, Ghana, to be held in the summer of 2008. A resident of Far Rockaway, Queens, Allen is presently at work on the novel Song of the Shank, based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century African American piano virtuoso and composer who performed under the stage name Blind Tom.

Reviews

[G · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book does amazing things with language. I can see why there aren't a lot of reviews for it, it's certainly not a fast or easy read. There are no quotation marks and sentences blur together, thoughts of one character becoming memories of another. But turn to any page and learn ways to twist, stack, break open words. A master class on the act of writing even beyond the plot (which is a free-roaming look at one Black family's life and times in this weird jumble we call America). With characters named Lucifer and Jesus (Lucifer's embittered nephew) the symbolism is bound to be seven layers deep below the page.

The vernacular takes some getting used to and you very well might go through all 563 pages without being 100 percent sure of what's going on (thank God for those family trees), but there's wonder starting from the opening lines and carrying all the way through:

"Long before Jesus entered the world, blades of southern grass sliced up the slides of his grandmother's feet. Her blood leapt from the danger, drew back into the farthest reaches of her heart, and the roots of her soul pulled away from the sharp earth which had nurtured her. But nothing escapes the laws of gravity. We martyr to motion."

"Lucifer renamed New York the City of Trains. All rails glowed with the memory of those speeding colorful objects his eyes had witnessed years before. A babel of color inside and out. Scrawled tongues twisting into a mute vision of motion and voice. So his nostalgia had formed."

"Records are black seeds which begin to sprout musical trees. You hack through foliage. Perched birds sing on six twanging limbs."

"Even the sky was dirty here, canvas-colored, a rough sun pasted to it. Used papers fluttered about, giant moths. The morning full of sirens, moving in waves, crashing and rising again. Stonewall and Red Hook ran the distance of the horizon. Gateways in his eyes."

"You sleep good at night? Lucifer said.
I sleep like a baby, John said. That's how you win."


That's how you do it.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opening this book was like getting thrown into a culture and world I had no knowledge of except for media stereotypes which are hard to accept. But I was drawn to it by the music of the words, the very poetry of images: "The earth cooled. A heat hushed night, The heavens low-hanging. Moonlight soft-showered the window. You rested under the white bedspread translucent from use, safe now..."
Descriptions so wonderfully strange: referring to T-Bone, "Held his barking bull dog taytoos in check with the leashes of his shirtsleeves." or, of Porcha driving in the rain " Her wipers quit. The windhield cried with blind rain."
The song of this mult-generational family pulls you along all their moves and resettling, their hanging on to one another from childhood to death is so beautifully crafted that you are swallowed up in the story.

[David Zhang · Rating 1 out of 5]

"To be clear, the racism in this novel is not a subtle undertone; it is explicit, pervasive, and central to the narrative. The author confronts the reader with a constant barrage of racial slurs and acts of racial violence. For me, this relentless and overt depiction, while likely intended to be a raw reflection of reality, ultimately became a barrier. It was so overwhelming that it diminished the emotional and thematic resonance the story was aiming for."
"One of my primary struggles with Rails Under My Back was its handling of racism. Rather than exploring prejudice through subtext, Jeffery Allen opts for a brutally explicit approach. The narrative is saturated with overt racism, from its language to its plot. While this is a bold stylistic choice, I found it had a numbing effect, and the sheer volume of it made it difficult for me to connect with the characters' deeper struggles beyond their trauma."
"I found the book's explicit racism incredibly difficult to read. The author does not shy away from the ugliest aspects of American life, and the language is filled with overt prejudice. While I understand the intent may be to shock the reader into understanding the characters' reality, for me, it felt gratuitous at times and overshadowed the more nuanced explorations of identity, family, and sexuality that were also present in the novel."

[Carina · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried, so hard, to get into this book but I just couldn't. The sentences felt jarring in thier shortness, and the lack of punctuation when characters were speaking left me confused.

The story seems to jump back and forth between various characters and eras, but the lack of indication as to whose point of view the reader was reading, or the time, just threw me out of the narrative every time. It actually gave me a headache trying to work out what the hell was going on and how it relates back to the characters.

This book clearly isn't for me, but I can see how fans of the English language and the use of language in literature would enjoy it.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 but I rounded up because of the amazing writing. The landscape descriptions, particularly some of the descriptions of the trains, are wonderful. I also loved the use of different language to represent the diverse generations portrayed in the book. It is a long book but did not feel nearly as long because of how good Allen is at taking you into the world of each character