The Chaneysville Incident

By David Bradley

Book Overview

"The
Chaneysville Incident rivals Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon as
the best novel about the black experience in America since Ellison's Invisible
Man." -- Christian Science
Monitor

Updated with a new foreword by the author in celebration of its fortieth anniversary, the classic PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel about a man's obsessive quest to uncover the circumstances of his father's death and his town's murky history.
Legend has it something happened in Chaneysville . . .
John Washington is coming home to Chaneysville. Old Jack Crawley, his father's closest friend and John's guardian, is dying, and the young man will care for him in his final days.
For the brilliant and embittered black historian, it is a return that will plunge him deep into the past, into the dark secrets of this town and the buried evil of his heritage. Investigating the death of his father, Moses, a moonshiner with a difficult past, John must come to terms with his family's proud and tragic history and the terrible truth of this white rural town close to the Mason Dixon line-- a waystation for slaves traveling along the Underground Railroad--that he once called home.
The Chaneysville Incident is the story of John's relationship with his family, his hometown, and the woman he loves--and the indelible bonds between past and present, oppression and bondage, history and myth, faith and guilt, love and acceptance.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0063135620
• ISBN13: 9780063135628
• Release Date: November 2021
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

One of the great American novels

This is one of the best books I have ever read. It is deeply steeped in both history and a profound sense of the limits of history. I think it has a justifiable claim to standing among the great American novels. It is well researched, and the product of a keen, nuanced, discriminating intellect that, one can tell, does not suffer fools gladly. It deals with our central American wounds, those of race and privilege. It does all of that good stuff that English teachers and critics love to rattle on about. It's just dang DEFENSIBLE on all levels as a piece of work. That being said, it would be easy to lose track of how good a novel it is. The characters are believable to me, the storytelling and the storytelling-within-the-storytelling is so rich, so deep and true, that it ends up being a good, resonant read. It satisfies the intellect, it satisfies the heart, and it keeps one reading. I often think of this novel among the company of other novels, such as perhaps Huckleberry Finn or Moby Dick, that are slighted in their own time, their own first publication, only to have later generations say, "How did they not get it about this one?...How did they not realize what they had here?..." As with the above mentioned works, there are probably moments reading it when it feels like "work", that it feels like it's "not an easy book", but then you break through again to understanding and realize how glad you are that the author did not condescend to "easify". I have given away many copies of this. It amazes me that it is ever out of print or hard to get hold of. It's truly one of the great stories, one of the great novels. Buy it and read it and love it.

Makes a lasting imression

This book has stayed with me for many years. I was moved to tears reading it, which is an unusual reaction for me. While at first I found the book moving slowly and, yes, on the angry side, as I got further into it I was drawn into its tragedy. I recently read Ecenbarger's new book "Walkin the Line" (about the Mason-Dixon Line)who claims the "mystery" of Chanesyville is a true story/local legend and has a photo of the gravesite of the slaves who died at the end. I really praise Bradley's book as a powerful, graphic narrative of hate and tragedy.

Weaver: mastery story-teller: fine tapestry

You know that you're reading a great story when you don't want the story to end. The Chaneysville Incident is a great story. David Bradley is a master story-teller. He juggles the threads of America's history of slavery, with all its ripples and undercurrents that yet rock our national boat, the psyche of today's educated black man, and complex family relationships with brilliant dexterity on his loom. If a more sophisticated understanding of American culture is what's desired, then, The Chaneysville Incident, as a tapestry, is a necessary addition to anyone's intellectual decor.

A Haunting Book

I first picked up this book in the mid '80s because it was written by a contemporary at the University of Pennsylvania. Little did I know; this is a brilliant work which deserves much more attention than it has gotten. On one level it is about a man's acceptance of the world(s) he came from and the world(s) he lives in; on another level it is about his understanding that his pre-conceived notions about those worlds are not universally valid. And, it is not without humor - read the descriptions of the sanitation facilities on various sorts of transportation at the beginning! This book is gripping, eye-opening, and emotionally spending. But well worth it.

Rediscovering a lost treasure of Black literature

History, anyone's history, does not live apart from us; it surrounds us, leads us, condemns us and rescues us. David Bradley's "The Chaneysville Incident" draws us through the reluctant passage of one black man who has completely been assimilated except for to inescapable conditions: he has black skin, and he has a black heritage. Uncle Jack's approaching death has forced a reluctant John, a professor of "white" history at the University of Pennsyulvania, to hasten home. Jack's the last remaining member among the black men who raised him up and set him on his path. Because of Jack's disappointment in John, and because of Jack's attachment to the passed elders, the professor discovers how unconditionally the feet that carry him are "black feet". Long a historian with no interest in his own history, John sinks into a morass of personal historical events: The suicide of his father, a forgotten tragedy of escaped slaves, a mysterious bequethal left in the hands of his hometown's most powerful white man. Using his tools, he slowly pieces the ruins of his own heritage to discover a world and a history as exciting, and as damning, as any history he'd ever studied before. This is not a black man's book; I, a white man, consider Bradley's achievement as a service, as an invaluable insight into a human psyche unlike my own. Carved in gorgeous and accurate prose, paced like a mystery with none of that genre's weaknesses, Chaneysville grips to the last word. I ask nothing more from great literature than these two things.