BOOK REVIEW
Jewels: The Story of the Founding of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity By Darrius Jerome Gourdine
Brother F. Romall Smalls
The Artisan House, 2006 (193 pages) Reviewed by F. Romall Smalls
T
he historical novel is a unique literary tool. The genre was designed to be the antidote to those vexing questions that often surround some of history’s most intriguing personalities and events. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning work of art, Beloved, is one of the most powerful examples of the historical novel. In it, Morrison takes a tragic moment of a real life, runaway slave women in antebellum Ohio and crafts a 512-page tome that explores the supernatural heartache of slavery. I know it is unfair, almost cruel, to compare virtually any 21st century novelist’s work with the devastatingly rich prose of Toni Morrison, but she sets the standard of how a writer can take a segment of history and weave into it fictional dimensions of illumination that only the spring well of genius and imagination can unlock. Brother Darrius Jerome Gourdine’s first novel, Jewels: The Story of the Founding of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, takes place primarily in
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1905 and 1906 in Ithaca, New York. It unfortunately falls short of the tall order of bringing both the history and legend of the founding of Alpha Phi Alpha to life in a creative and compelling way. Jewels opens with a young Henry Arthur Callis, a graduating senior at an unknown high school in some unknown place, as he prepares to recite Booker T. Washington’s controversial “Atlanta Compromise” at a school assembly. “My papers are together, my notes are prepared and I have rehearsed the Atlanta Exposition Address a few times over. I’m prepared. I look across the students and see many colored faces, many white students too,” recounts Callis. One important bit of information that the reader is not given at this point is: just where in the U.S. is this fully integrated school located? Segregation was often the rule of the day at the turnof-the-century; and the few places where it was not the norm must have been interesting communities to say the least. Brother Gourdine
Spring • Summer 2007
reveals that Callis is from Binghampton, New York later on in the story but he never provides further informative detail about the communities where any of his characters come from or exist. The life stories of the men who created the nation’s oldest collegiate fraternity founded by African Americans are far removed from our present world and reality. By adding rich historical context to this work of fiction, Brother Gourdine could have crafted a clearer vision of the time and places these pioneering men existed. That would have made this historical novel and the era (preWorld War I) that it is suppose to capture come alive. Without such a detailed writing form, the window to the past on which the reader is perched remains shuttered. What was it really like in Ithaca, New York, or at Cornell University, over 100 years ago when electricity was still a new technological wonder and the car was yet to be? Brother Gourdine seems disinterested in such crafty nuances.
The Sphinx: www.APA1906.net
The time period in which Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity was founded abounds with interesting historical information. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, both giants in the “fight for freedom,” each called upstate New York, where Ithaca is located, home at one point. The Women’s Suffrage Movement also found this region to be fertile ground. Why was upstate New York such a hot bed for social change, including being the birthplace of Alpha Phi Alpha? Jewels greatest shortcoming is that such a query is never fully explored. The whole focus of the novel centers around the “Jewel” founders of Alpha Phi Alpha and how they endeavored to transform their literary society, which was spearheaded by an older African American graduate student, into a full-fledge “fraternity for Negroes”. The sometimes awkward writing makes it hard to follow just who is narrating the story at any given time. Brother Gourdine, however, does manage to capture the tension