Darryl Pinckney

The experience of reading Sex and Race is one of embrace and recoil as Rogers indiscriminately loads us down with the provable and the forever dodgy, the serious and the frivolous. Sometimes his footnotes, not always adequate or acceptable, tell when he was at work on a given aspect of his subject, in the way that an itemized credit card bill is a diary, a record of movement. The references go in clusters: in the 1920s, he was reading about Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Persia; in the 1930s, he was reading the memoirs of English travelers in Africa. Sometimes, he clearly couldn’t go back to a particular library or text to check his facts again. And sometimes Sex and Race reads as though it had threatened to consume him, because the first-person voice breaks through in the book at times of what could be called narrative stress.

An unpublished manuscript is a like a message in a bottle, floating, floating, waiting to be found. A forgotten book is much the same, lost in the strong current. Vincent O. Carter is the author of both—the unpublished and the long out of print. Some thirty years ago, in 1970, the John Day Company of New York published The Bern Book: A Record of A Voyage of the Mind by Vincent O. Carter, a strange, disquieting, sometimes gorgeous account of what it was like for him to be the only black man living in Bern, Switzerland, between the years 1953 and 1957. Why Bern? Carter claims the Bernese themselves want to know, and this work is his attempt to answer them.

When Phillips published The European Tribe, Britain did not have a single black member of Parliament. He grew up hearing and not responding to jokes in Leeds about Pakis singing “We Shall Overcome.” It was the Britain of Enoch Powell. Yet it was also the time of Bob Marley and the Wailers and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Phillips describes his efforts to get in touch with that black Britain in the 1970s, how he left the “Nigger go home” scrawled next to his name on the notice board at his college, left the handful of blacks he could find university-wide, a Nigerian mathematics student here, a Rhodes scholar there, and took the train to London, where he would go from pub to pub in Brixton, trying to learn, to pick up something. Sometimes on these vague, sad trips to black London he would miss the last train back to Oxford and spend the night in a lounge at Heathrow. But he was always on time for his 9:30 A.M. class in lyric poetry.