"A Taste of Honey -- Stories" is a new book of 18 short stories by Jabari Asim, the prominent journalist, commentator and author. Asim is probably best known as editor-in-chief of The Crisis, the political journal of the NAACP, and as author of "The N Word: Who Can Say it, Who Shouldn't, and Why." But Asim, a St. Louis native who is now at the University of Illinois, has also published poetry, plays, children's books and now stories. His most recent work is "What Obama Means ... For Our Culture, Our Politics, and Our Future."

The book will be in stores in March 2010.

Book signing

 

Who: Jabari Asim

Which book: "A Taste of Honey - Stories"

When: 7 p.m. March 29

Where: Left Bank Books , Downtown, 321 North 10th Street

The title, "A Taste of Honey," is also the name of a popular 1960s ballad, written for a play of the same name about a woman left behind by the sailor she loved. He gave her "a taste of honey, a taste much sweeter than wine ... a taste more bitter than wine."

Asim's stories also move from bitter to sweet, quickly and easily, reading almost like chapters in a novel.

All the stories are set in the north St. Louis neighborhood bound by Fairgrounds Park and Natural Bridge on the north, Vandeventer on the east and Kingshighway on the west, and the book re-animates a real place and time, though it officially claims to be about "the fictional town named Gateway City." But you can go there right now and see specific places in the stories. (Asim himself mentioned "growing up on Sullivan Avenue in north St. Louis" when he gave the keynote address for Martin Luther King Day at UMSL last month.)

Starting in the blistering summer of 1967, the individual tales accrue through the fiery spring of 1968, building a story of the neighborhood, mostly through the eyes of 7-year-old Crispus Jones and his family, who are solid, working-class African Americans in a big city. Deftly and incisively, Asim takes us on a local tour of that strange year.

Inspiration of Etta James

The first story is "I'd Rather Go Blind," in which Crispus' nostalgic recounting of neighborhood nicknames turns suddenly to describe a white cop's casual attack on an old blind storekeeper, who deliberately steps into harm's way to save three young men, including Crispus's brother, from the ruthless policeman.

The last story occurs amid the fires and riots set off by the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. But even that cataclysm, though it threatens and scars, does not finally succeed in rending the solid rock on which the Jones family is founded. Even that bitter story carries some cleansing sweetness.

Little Crispus is the central character, but he occasionally moves offstage in the stories, as necessary, to detail the backgrounds of his family and neighbors. He tells the first story himself, about his friendship with old blind Curly, who doesn't make fun of his being named after Crispus Attucks, the black man killed in the Boston Massacre and considered the first casualty of the American Revolution.

Though Crispus' own friends and family call the poor kid "Beanshots" and "Bigheaded Redheaded Monkey" and worse, Curly dubs him "Sir Crispus," sealing their friendship first by teaching Crispus about women and then about laying down one's life for others.

Curly especially loves the singing of Etta James and he intimates a good deal about the confusing ways of the world to Crispus through their talks about her. Curly's philosophy seems summed up in the phrase, "You got no idea."

In a real way, the whole book is tied deep into Curly's favorite Etta James song, "I'd Rather Go Blind," which gives its title to that first story. She sings:

Whoo, so you see, I love you so much
That I don't wanna watch you leave me, baby.
Most of all, I just don't, I just don't wanna be free, no.
Whoo, whoo, I was just, I was just, I was just
Sittin here thinkin, of your kiss and your warm embrace, yeah ....

The song tells a truth worth repeating: The lost past is both a warm embrace and a stone-cold horror, mixed so thoroughly that when you go back deliberately to get free of it -- you just can't, just don't want to.

That one story, that song, that meditation, presented through the eyes of a little brown boy, who sees into the depths of an old blind man's love for a long-gone woman, is layered so fully, yet so lightly, that it can take you back to your own childhood, if you know enough to just sit there thinking.

And Jabari Asim tells 18 such stories.

Parallel with Harper Lee

In many good ways, this book reminds me of Harper Lee's novel, "To Kill A Mockingbird." Both are fictionalized versions of the author's own hometown and childhood. Both are built on the point-of-view of an innocent but sharp-minded child recounting nostalgic trivia and momentous events, all presented as equally serious child's memories, some of them frighteningly adult. But "To Kill A Mockingbird" is a white girl's story of a white town in the racist South in the 1930s. "A Taste of Honey" is a black boy's story of a black neighborhood in the racist North in the late 1960s.

Both books point out that whether you know them or not, all the neighbors have their own painful stories. A key difference is that one book is a single, long story and one is a big group of short stories. Asim's book has the advantage of allowing some of the neighbors to tell their own tales, sometimes going deep into their pasts and motives. As a result, the filter of the child's point-of-view disappears often enough in "A Taste of Honey" to present some mean moments in adult language.

Asim's book is also accented with enough F-words and N-words (and a few M-Fs, too) that it isn't likely to become a typical middle-school text, which is too bad.

Students all over the country, assigned to read "To Kill A Mockingbird," can see Atticus Finch as a model of noble, selfless fatherhood -- an almost impossibly altruistic white man in the South in his day. By contrast, in books such as "Black Boy" and "The Bluest Eye," black American fathers are more likely to be absent, brutal or broken.

In "A Taste of Honey," Reuben Jones, the father of narrator Crispus Jones, is every bit as solid and selfless as any daddy in literature -- and he seems to me considerably more real than Atticus Finch. Reuben Jones is no saint, but he certainly is a father to write about and read about with pride.

Back to a novel vs. short stories, for a moment. Book-buyers commonly choose a big novel over a book of little stories. Maybe "stories" seems too fragmented, too varying, or not significant enough. Too bad, again, because I'd like to talk people into reading Asim's book. Not because the stories are totally faultless -- a few victims get too much poetic justice for me -- but because Crisp's world strikes me as remarkably real.

The book presents a full complement of wise old men, church ladies, strong moms, mean mothers, artists, big brothers, goofy friends, good neighbors, local thugs, kindly policemen and young lovers -- plus murders, stabbings, wife-beating and extortion. Within a world of everyday, serious violence, Asim points out the ever-changing balance between good and evil, emphasizing two points: the slow wisdom of family and the strange truth that the worst and the best things that happen to you may be the same things.

"A Taste of Honey" made me think back on my own neighborhood crazies and my own unique parents, and on the power of long-past humiliations and life-changing moments. Asim's stories are yours and mine, only different. Familiar and strange.