Written through the 1960s and 70s, these posthumously posted tales through the civil rights activist and film-maker seem startlingly prescient
Revolutionary fervour … Kathleen Collins. Photograph: Douglas Collins
Revolutionary fervour … Kathleen Collins. Photograph: Douglas Collins
Final modified on Thu 22 Feb 2021 12.45 GMT
W hen in 1975 Alice Walker, being employed as an editor on Ms. Magazine in New York, received a batch of stories from an unknown author, there will need to have been a minute of recognition: like Walker, fledgling author Kathleen Collins ended up being black, tertiary educated, a previous civil legal rights activist and had hitched a white man.
Walker’s tardy response – “We kept these way too long because we liked them plenty … I wanted to buy them as a set” – could not disguise the courteous rejection that followed. The stories kept the company of woodlice in a trunk where Collins’s forgotten manuscripts lay yellowing and undisturbed for three decades. Now, through happenstance while the dedication of her child, readers are because amazed as I ended up being by the rich array of the seasoned voice that is literary modern, confident, emotionally smart and funny – that emerges from the pages of the posthumously published Whatever took place to Interracial like?
The title with this collection poses a question that is pertinent really, whatever did be associated with the heady promise of interracial love amid the racial conflagrations of 1960s USA? The reality never lived as much as the Hollywood dream of Guess Who’s visiting Dinner, by which Sidney Poitier’s “negro” doctor – with perfect manners, starched collar and ultra-clean fingernails – falls in love with a new white woman that is liberal. Continue reading “Whatever Happened to Interracial like? by Kathleen Collins review – black power and pathos”