A virtuosic epic applauded by Stanley Crouch as “an adventurous
masterwork that provides our literature with a signal moment,”
back in print in a definitive new edition “I have an awful memory
for faces, but an excellent one for voices,” muses Joubert Jones,
the aspiring playwright at the center of Divine Days. A
kaleidoscopic whorl of characters, language, music, and Black
experience, this saga follows Jones for one week in 1966 as he
pursues the lore and legends of fictional Forest County, a place
resembling Chicago’s South Side. Joubert is a veteran, recently
returned to the city, who works for his aunt Eloise’s newspaper
and pours drinks at her Night Light Lounge. He wants to write a
play about Sugar-Groove, a drifter, “eternal wunderkind,” and
local folk hero who seems to have passed away. Sugar-Groove’s
disappearance recalls the subject of one of Joubert’s earlier
writing attempts—W. A. D. Ford, a protean, diabolical preacher
who led a religious sect known as “Divine Days.” Joubert takes
notes as he learns about both tricksters, trying to understand
their significance. Divine Days introduces readers to a score of
indelible characters: Imani, Joubert’s girlfriend, an artist and
social worker searching for her lost siblings and struggling to
reconcile middle-class life with her values and Black identity;
Eloise, who raised Joubert and whose influence is at odds with his
writerly ambitions; (Oscar) Williemain, a local barber,
storyteller, and founder of the Royal Rites and Righteous Ramblings
Club; and the Night Light’s many patrons. With a structure
inspired by James Joyce and jazz, Leon Forrest folds references to
African American literature and cinema, Shakespeare, the Bible, and
classical mythology into a heady quest that embraces life in all
its tumult and adventure. This edition brings Forrest’s
masterpiece back into print, incorporating hundreds of editorial
changes that the author had requested (but were never made) when
the book was picked up by W. W. Norton after a disastrous warehouse
fire destroyed most of the inventory from the original printing of
the book by Another Chicago Press.
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