A Different Drummer

Like Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, Kelley's novel (his debut, published in 1962 when he was 24) straps itself into the straitjacket of American racial history but leaves just enough room to wriggle out and imagine something else. Set in an unnamed southern state wedged somehow between Alabama and Mississippi, A Different Drummer has the Great Migration taking place in single month, emptying the state of every one of its black residents. And perhaps most challengingly to the traditions of African American (and American) fiction, Kelley presents it entirely from the perspective from the state's white residents, giving readers a puzzle he declines to solve for them.