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How do the people in our lives and beds really see us? Arnold Giovanni, a white professor at a black college in a small Southern town, has developed an obsessive fascination for black culture and ... black women. Through The Chinaberry Tree, the local bar, he has been able to befriend several patrons and to eavesdrop on others. Like a sly, modern-day Chaucer, he has retrieved revealing stories of their journey through the American experience, while expertly being "in" the [black] world but not necessarily "of" that world.
On Judgment Day, however, a heated conversation ensues at The Chinaberry Tree, and Arnold freely chirps in as one of the guys. This time, Bo Willie, the bar's co-owner and a Vietnam vet often plagued by flashbacks, stops him in his tracks with a simple question.
Those few words launch the stream of consciousness tirade going on inside Arnold's brains when the novel opens, spinning him across time dimensions. It's Prufrock on steroids! The "tales" that follow replay the intricacies of the several lives colonized by Arnold on his personal quest to delve into an authentic black experience.
While he may have secured some points toward becoming a sanctioned part of the "we," the day of reckoning has come, and Arnold is thoroughly initiated, and the Universe has spoken: The real will always be out of reach of the fake. Can he bounce back? Should he even try? It's all an invaluable lesson in the human experience. Oh, what a world, what a world.
