Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

"'Remove the colon and semicolon keys from your typewriter,'" said Hemingway. 'Shun adverbs, strenuously.'" This advice is given to Daniel Quinn, a newspaperman looking for stories in Havana during the late '57. A lover of short, declarative sentences, Quinn strides up to the great writer in the Floradita and introduces himself. This will draw him into grand romantic adventure.

William Kennedy also seems to prescribe to Hemingway's advice, for Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, which unites Quinn's Cuban adventure with a day of racial violence in Albany New York in 1968, writes with precision and snap. The book is about the days when newspapers were king, and reporters were heroic. Quinn's grandfather covered the Civil War, originally rode with the Fenians as they invaded Canada, and then covered a revolution in Cuba. Quinn has gone to discover his grandfather's legacy, and ends up with an interview with Fidel Castro and a wife.

Kennedy has written a number of books about Albany, including Ironweed, which I count as one of the ten best books I've ever read. Chango isn't quite on that level--it at times is a little scattered in thought, as the two stories don't fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces--but it has much to admire. The first scene is a prologue when Quinn is a boy, and his father has a black jazz pianist over. Also visiting is Bing Crosby, and they sing the song "Shine," which is a standard but is also racist, a so-called "coon" song. Later, in the Albany section of the book, the son of that pianist hates the song, but his father continues to play it, though makes it his own.

The Albany section of the book takes place on the same day that Robert Kennedy is shot. Quinn's father, now suffering from dementia, has a grand adventure, as he wanders away from the Elks Club where Quinn has installed him and ends up at the center of a race riot. Quinn and a crusading liberal priest, Matt Daugherty, who is the kind of priest I wish there were more of, is a great character, as is Tremont, the son of a legendary black numbers runner and "coon song" singer, who is set up as a patsy in an assassination plot against the mayor. Quinn and Daugherty are all over town trying to put out fires, both literally and figuratively.

In Cuba, Quinn gets involved with a duel between Hemingway and a doltish salesman who Hemingway punches in the mouth. Quinn ends up as the referee in the duel, which Hemingway handles with elan. Quinn also meets Renata, who is a lover of one of the men who leads an assault against Batista that fails completely. Quinn is immediately in love with Renata, who follows the Santeria religion and wears the beads of Chango, a Santeria deity. These beads will later save her life.

This is a meaty, man's kind of book, with punchy quotes like, "The last time I refused a drink I didn't understand the question," and "Not since grammar school when I saw myself playing the banjo in heaven. When I got older I gave up on heaven, also the banjo. I don't trust religion anymore."

The book is also about memory. Wherever Quinn's father goes during his odyssey he remembers the Albany of old. A one-time waltz champion (Quinn tells Renata that they are destined to be together because his father and her mother were waltz champions), he takes to the dance floor and all the old moves come back to him. George is full of nuggets from the past: "'Fella named Zangara shot Mayor Cernak of Chicago,' George said. 'He was aiming at FDR but he missed. He was an Italian with stomach trouble and he lost two hundred at the dog races. They gave him eighty years but when Mayor Cermak died they sizzled him in Old Sparky.'"

The book ends poignantly, with George Quinn dancing with his daughter-in-law, Renata: "He was smiling, not at her but reveling in his own artistry as he moved her with astonishing control. He is dancing me back in time, she decided, he's dead to this day but alive in history: you are dancing with a ghost, Renata." Despite the use of the colon, I think Hemingway would have liked it.