Such Sweet Thunder

A Novel

Foreword by Jesse McCarthy
“Astonishing … an uncommonly rich picture of Black American family life in early 20th century Jim Crow America.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This “vibrant portrait of African American life” in Jazz Age Kansas City captures the magic of childhood and parental love through the eyes of a remarkable boy (New York Times)



This must-read rediscovery, published in an elegant and unabridged paperback edition with a new foreword, is a literary masterpiece poised to take its rightful place in the American literary canon.

Such Sweet Thunder immerses readers in the life of a precocious infant, Amerigo Jones, and then tells the story of his first 18 years as he becomes aware of the adult world, from racism and crime to falling in love. All the while, in one of the most moving homages to parents ever to appear in literature, Amerigo is protected by Viola and Rutherford, who are loving and, mostly, even-tempered, but also desperately young — teenagers themselves when Amerigo is born — and poor.

When it was finally published in 2003, 40 years after Carter completed it and 20 years after he died, Critics hailed the novel’s “unflinching condemnation of a society that rejects bright, eager Black children” (The Cleveland Plain Dealer).

This “colossal work of fiction” (The Kansas City Star) and “vibrant portrait of African-American life” (New York Times) is set in an era marred by racial segregation and relentless, daily injustices and yet renders with deep appreciation and artistry a time and place enriched by a widely influential African American culture and a fierce feeling for family and community.
Foreword
 
Great novels are not always recognized in their own time; often they lie waiting, as if in ambush, for the future to catch up to their achievements. In the case of Such Sweet Thunder, the miracle of its arrival at all inevitably continues to color its critical appreciation. We know something about the unusual circumstances that led Vincent O. Carter to effectively exile himself from his native Kansas City and take up residence in Bern, Switzerland, (where he wrote the novel over the course of several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s), because of the only book that Carter would see published in his lifetime: The Bern Book.
This deeply ironic, essayistic blend of memoir, travelogue, and poetic meditation was successfully published in the United States in 1973 but, despite some favorable reviews, it was quickly filed-away and forgotten. Appearing at a time when black militancy and popular discourses about race were just reaching a fever pitch of declamatory and affirmative style, Carter’s arcane, cosmopolitan, and inwardly focused ruminations—qualities that would have made The Bern Book legible to what I have elsewhere called the “Blue Period” of black writing that lasted between 1945 and 1965—were, alas, a terrible fit for the reading public’s sense of what black writing should be the mid-1970s.
The difficulties that this first book encountered had implications for the viability of the second. Despite the efforts of Herbert Lottman, who acted as Carter’s literary intercessor, and of Ellen Wright, the widow of Richard Wright, who read portions of the manuscript (at the time still bearing the working title The Primary Colors), no publisher would take it up and Carter eventually despaired of seeing it through to publication. He retreated from his attempts at writing and devoted himself increasingly to spiritual practice and to his shared life with his partner Liselotte Haas. He died in Bern in 1983.
The manuscript of Carter’s only novel, long believed to have been lost or destroyed, was thankfully preserved by the care of Liselotte Haas and retrieved for publication through the heroic efforts of Chip Fleischer, who recognized the importance of the manuscript and first published it under the magnificently braided Shakespearean and Ellingtonian title Such Sweet Thunder at his own Steerforth Press in 2003.
Despite its evidently eccentric stylistic flourishes and a somewhat contrived overture, Such Sweet Thunder is in many ways a fairly conventional Bildungsroman, or even more accurately a Künstlerroman that narrates the dawning of creative consciousness and of a sentimental sensibility in the boyhood and teenage years of Amerigo Jones, a character whose roving mind and synesthetic perceptions are clearly a stand-in for Carter’s vision of his own years growing up in the black working class neighborhoods of Kansas City. These were the interwar years of the Depression, but also of the Negro League’s Kansas City Monarchs and their star pitcher Satchel Paige; the cradle of Kansas City jazz and its musical luminaries like Count Basie, Bennie Moten, and Charlie Parker; a time when black Kansas City was, tragically in retrospect, at a social and cultural zenith.
Such Sweet Thunder is centered in the mercurial consciousness of young Amerigo, yet his parents, Viola and Rutherford Jones are every bit as much the protagonists—the beating heart of this novel—as he is. Based on Carter’s own mother and father, they are teenage parents and working poor: Viola works in a laundry and also as a maid (Carter’s mother Eola likely worked both of those jobs) and Rutherford (like Carter’s father Joe) works as a porter at a hotel. As with many of the details in the novel, the brick-and-mortar realism of the spatial and material cityscape is emphatically accurate, even as it chooses at times to withhold key details. The imposing Muehlebach Hotel is rendered with fidelity; but the humbler hotel where Rutherford works is never named, for instance. Yet because Amerigo places it at Ninth Street and Locust Avenue, we know that it must be the Densmore Hotel which indeed operated from that location from 1909 until it was demolished in the late 1990s. This feeling for the city is that of the exile, familiar to us from James Joyce whose obsessive reconstruction of Dublin in Ulysses is clearly one of the models for Carter’s depiction of Kansas City. Indeed, Such Sweet Thunder is inspired by Joyce not only in this sense, but perhaps even more so with its plentiful stream of consciousness riffs and colorful uses of onomatopoetic language that echo Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, with, in Carter’s case, the addition of a magnificent ear for the cadence of small talk among black folks.
During one of his only return visits to the United States, Carter saw for himself the staggering devastation of what had once been a world of throbbing multicultural and interethnic vitality, rife with racial tension and violence to be sure (an aspect Carter vividly captures in all its quotidian banality), but nonetheless, a community brimming with what Carter conceived of as a web of aesthetic relations: between jazz on the radio and the gestures of aunties cracking wise, the vocal timbre of men hailing each other in the street and the rumble of streetcars at Eighteenth and Vine, between the poolhall slouch and the preacher’s lean in the pulpit, the dense matrix of communal black life in an urban setting marked by the dominant presence of poor, working people with immense belief in their own talents and abilities and ever scornful of the racist forces regularly lashing out at them and reminding them of their place. In a letter to Lottman from 1973, Carter lamented this lost world that, paradoxically, flourished under segregation:
 
It had all changed, Herb, it was all different now; the people were gone and the houses were gone; in their place was a super highway. Only the light was the same: sunlight at seven in the morning, at noon, at five o’clock in the evening when dad used to come home from his hotel. Perhaps it was when I boarded the plane for New York that I realized that nothing has been lost. I had written it all down—that fabulous world of childhood, the world of mom and dad young, laughing and in tears. It was all in The Primary Colors, my way, and what I couldn’t say because one can never say it all, is written in my heart.
 
But Carter’s vision cannot be reduced to the idiosyncratic story of one young man’s personal emancipation against a screen of nostalgic reminiscence. The work of ideological mythmaking has ensured that what happened to downtown Kansas City remains in large part a mystery to most Americans (including black Americans), who cannot seem to imagine that it was ever anything other than the cross-roads of highways, banks, convention centers, and empty lots that now defines it as predictably as virtually any other important urban center in the country. What Carter wants us to see—to make us feel grievously as an immediate loss—is a tragedy that holds a much broader allegorical force within the national narrative of the United States, and with particularly fierce poignancy in the historical memory of African Americans. It stands for the unpardonable ruination of the first black working class, the massive squandering of the heroic efforts undertaken by the first generation of black freedmen and women, the formerly enslaved and the sons and daughters of the formerly enslaved who took off their shackles only to get to work building up the first free black neighborhoods across America’s cities, everywhere under duress and festering resentment, and often under the hooded overwatch of the Klan’s terrorism and the de jure apartheid of Jim Crow.  
One can think of other classics of African American literature that know these people and tell aspects of their story: William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge; Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying; Margaret Walker’s Jubilee; Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, to name a few. Yet, none arguably captures quite so aptly the note of gallant hopefulness, the tender vivacity, the sarcasm and cunning that generation seems to have possessed in such abundance as the novel you hold in your hands.
Anyone who ever knew black folk of that era, knows something of the distinctive grain of the voice that they brought into the world. Everywhere the grain of that black voice was allowed to show up it changed the world; in popular music, in sports, in the arts, in politics, in fashion, in everyday speech, and yes, in literature.
In her striking work of literary criticism Liberating Voices, Gayl Jones makes the argument that the African American novel emerged out of the struggle of black writers to incorporate their own “distinctive aural and oral forms” into the representational conventions established by the European realist novel. The opening pages of Such Sweet Thunder do seem to groan as Carter struggles to stage Amerigo’s encounter with the Proustian madeleine that will open the floodgates of memory to his lost Kansas City. It’s no coincidence that the vehicle he lands upon, however, is a copy of a newspaper called The Voice, an obvious allusion to the legendary Kansas City Call (still extant), one of the oldest and longest-running black newspapers in the United States. The black press and its once improbable reach and influence are now something of a spectral myth, acquiring that vaguely legendary sepia tint that also attaches to the Negro Leagues and other bygone relics of an era that our popular culture has seemingly no capacity or desire to meaningfully remember. Yet the idea to use the black newspaper both allegorically as a symbol of a historic community, and formally as a choric voice, is perhaps the masterstroke of genius in Carter’s novel. Without the opening vignettes, we would lose sight of this deliberate construction.
As a scholar I can appreciate Such Sweet Thunder as a miraculous recovery and a remarkable example of what was possible in black postwar fiction. But as a novelist, I appreciate even more how it does things in prose with such a wondrously open sense of freedom. It is unsparing when necessary, yet humming with grace and good humor. It is also a social novel, passionately carrying us through living rooms and street corners and social dances in virtuosic passages that linger long after we have left them. It remembers for us a world that deserved its own bard and, recognized or not, has always had one.
The novel’s gift to us is ultimately the achievement of this tremendous sense of voice, or rather the orchestration of its collective voices, newspaper-like you might say, but swinging like a jazz ensemble. This is a book I have wanted to read late into the night. It stays with me in those quiet hours, even after I put it down, its rolling thunder unfurling just above my head.
 
 
Jesse McCarthy
Rome, June 2024
"Carter had finished Such Sweet Thunder in 1963, but by 1970 he had given up trying to find a publisher for it. Most unpublished manuscripts stay that way for a reason; Such Sweet Thunder is an exception. The novel . . . is a dense and vibrant portrait of African-American life at the nation's crossroads. Carter's choice of period is felicitous. The Kansas City that he describes is in its bustling, bloody heyday, a town where gangsters are gunned down in the streets, Joe Turner plays on the radio, and children wander home past overrun soup kitchens, clanging streetcars and nightclubs with names like Dante's Inferno. With his fastidious attention to urban detail . . . Carter even resembles another, more famous expatriate, James Joyce. But the novel's real achievement is in its evocation of Amerigo Jones's childhood and his interaction with his parents, Rutherford and Viola, themselves only teenagers when their son's life begins. . . . Carter is in essence a celebratory writer, not a voice of protest, and the thunder that sounds in his novel is meant to evoke the storm of sensation that illuminates American life. . . . Such Sweet Thunder belongs with other enduring documentaries of the dispossessed, like Cormac McCarthy's Suttree or Langston Hughes's novel Not Without Laughter." New York Times Book Review

"The book takes us into its arms and transports us back in time to a racially segregated Kansas City in the late 1920s. . . . Seamlessly, gently, Such Sweet Thunder carries Amerigo and us through adolescence, first love and the edge of world war and its sad demands on the safe, secure world Amerigo had come to love. . . . Carter connects all of our childhoods to Amerigo's, while making us feel intensely what made his childhood - Carter's childhood, presumably - as special as it was. The book does his memory proud. And gives our present time a priceless heirloom. The novel arrives late. But it lives." —     Newsday

"The story behind Such Sweet Thunder is almost as captivating as the extraordinary tale told within its pages . . . A rousing, inspired work, keenly observed and soulful . . . The novel sparkles with life, soaring with the loose flow of a jazzy improvisation. More akin in style to Charles Dickens than Richard Wright or James Baldwin, Carter writes prose that tingles with detail . . . Racism certainly stings Amerigo's life, as he finds his opportunities limited by prejudice. But Carter's characters are not, to borrow a famous phrase from Zora Neale Hurston, ‘tragically colored,’ and this frees Amerigo's story from getting mired in a woe-is-me pity party. . . Ambitious and resonant, Such Sweet Thunder often achieves brilliance; at its best, it has the kinetic energy of an August Wilson play. . . . This is a rich addition to our literary understanding of the 20th-century African-American experience." Boston Globe

"Originally written in 1963 and shelved, this hefty, astonishing novel by a black American expatriate who died in 1983 tells — in electric modernist vernacular prose — the story of a black child's life in Jim Crow America. . . . Through a steady accumulation of detail, sustained lyricism, flights of fancy and, especially, reams of swinging dialogue, Carter paints an uncommonly rich picture of black American family life in the early 20th century. Like the composition it is named for, a Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn tribute to Shakespeare, it is a marvelous blend of jazz rhythms and high literary tradition. — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This diamond in the rough is an extraordinarily honest and compassionate child’s-eye view of a world too seldom seen in American fiction." Kirkus Reviews
 
"Readers will appreciate Such Sweet Thunder’s dreamy, nostalgic quality and lyrical writing, which evokes urban life before the war and offers a stirring portrait of a young boy growing up." Booklist (starred review)

"Infused with the sounds and spirit of Kansas City jazz, the author’s gritty style was ahead of its time." —  Library Journal
 
"A colossal work of fiction . . . Sprawling and searching, it is Dickensian or even Joycean in scope. Carter's rendering of Amerigo's journey to adulthood is masterful. . . . Carter's greatest triumph is his dreamlike depiction of Amerigo's childhood mind and soul. Few writers have captured that strange, off-kilter, almost mystical feeling of what it is like to exist on this planet as a preadolescent. . . Carter gets it right because he laces the waters of innocence with bracing shots of guilt, confusion and pain. His Amerigo roams downtown Kansas City, finding adventure, yes, but also the misadventure of falling in with a bad crowd of kids, and, worse yet, the discovery of violence within himself: The passage in which the boy unleashes his cruelties upon a kitten is hard to read, indeed -- but also rings terribly true. Of all the novels about boyhood I've encountered, I can think of only one that achieves Carter's level of fearless mimesis: Roddy Doyle's tender-brutal Paddy Clarke Ha-Ha-Ha. Another extraordinary aspect of this book is its refusal to pin all its hero's troubles on racism. . . . Amerigo's reactions to his world constitute a deeply moving experience for the reader. Obviously, there is anger here -- but also tremendous love in the familial passages. And Amerigo's longing, his quest for an existence more meaningful than the one his world begrudges him, is both beautiful and wrenching. Such Sweet Thunder is a soulful, haunting book. . . . Readers seeking a comparative way into this novel might think of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man or Langston Hughes' Not Without Laughter. Such likenesses are valid thematically but not stylistically; both Hughes and Ellison were more direct. Such Sweet Thunder, following Amerigo about in his wanderings, seems closer to James Joyce's Ulysses, and also displays a kinship to Charles Dickens at his most expansive. . . . This novel is not only a Bildungsroman but also a road map -- an atlas that points the way to both the heartland and the human heart." —  Kansas City Star

"An unapologetically literary effort with echoes of Faulkner, Twain and Joyce. . . . For its lyrical rendering of a time and place long vanished, this is a book to savor, slowly." Entertainment Weekly

Fans of Toni Morrison or William Kennedy will appreciate Carter’s style, and history buffs will be fascinated by a Kansas City that may have otherwise gone unsung. —     Midwest Living Magazine
 
"A spiraling and powerful account of African American life in Kansas City during the 1920s and 1930s. Carter paints a rich, jazz-like portrait of pre-World War II life in Black America. . . . By fusing the best European modernist literary traditions with African American ones, Carter weaves a colorful, distinctive tapestry of a seminal period in African American history." —  Seattle Skanner

"Such Sweet Thunder is Carter’s Portrait of the Artist. . . . Amerigo Jones — the name itself speaks of discovery and bold hope — is Carter’s stand-in in the novel . . . Dedicated to musical giant Duke Ellington, the book is a jazz mix of sounds and sensations – the phonograph in the living room, the slamming of screen doors up and down his alley, trams clacking down the boulevard, the rhythms and rhymes of his young parents’ enthusiastic speech (“I was standin’ pat in ma gray bo-back, Jack!”). Amerigo as a child and young man is thirsty for the world, and we drink it all in with him. . . . A certain diamond-in-the-rough feeling only adds to the joy of discovering a book that spent far too long on a shelf in Switzerland.” —  Rain Taxi
 
"Carter bridges Zora Neale Hurston's folkloric narratives and Toni Morrison's communal spirituals. In reading Carter's intermittently brilliant narrative of black boyhood and adolescence in the Jazz Age and on through the Depression and Second World War, one is not treated to a dysfunctional "ghetto," nor a liberal oasis of zebra-colored neighbors, friends and family. Instead, Carter depicts, painstakingly, a mainly black, urban community that is close-knit, organic and striving for uplift. In his Kansas City, MO., setting, black life ain't easy, but it has its passions, satisfactions and inspirations. . . .
 
"Few works of legitimate fiction are so insistently frank about a boy's proto-sexual, innocent but instinctive yearnings. Fundamentally Romantic, even wholesomely naive, this Bildungsroman idealizes male desire to the point that when, as a young man, Amerigo fails to win his ferociously chaperoned brown bourgeois sweetheart, Cosima, he prefers celibacy to the available charms of her obtainable rival. . . .
 
"Carter Musters profound empathy and warmth for all his characters, especially Amerigo's parents, Rutherford and Viola, who are self-sacrificing, loyal, contradictory, loving, bawdy and philosophical. Carter's creations evade stereotype because they seem modeled on people he knew in true-grit Missouri and whom he recollected later in Swiss tranquility. . . .
 
"Carter's novel continues to make noise - and subtly subversive music. Its survival, after so much neglect, is its triumph.” National Post (Canada)

“Some critics have speculated that publishers rejected this book because its gentle coming-of-age tale, partially based on Carter's own life, was at odds with the fiery black-power rhetoric of the '60s. If that's true, publishers missed this book's quiet but unflinching condemnation of a society that rejects bright, eager black children.” —  Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Carter’s work was simply ahead of its time. . . . the book is becoming a major literary milestone, and deservedly so. What if the manuscript, and Amerigo Jones with it, had disappeared without a trace? Try to imagine the American literary landscape without Scout Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird. Or picture the jazz scene if Charlie Parker fell at age 24 instead of 34.” Jazz Ambassador Magazine


“It is seldom that one comes across a book that dazzles and surprises, a book that will surely withstand the test of time. Such Sweet Thunder is such a book. . . . Not since reading Henry Roth's rediscovered masterpiece, Call it Sleep, has this writer encountered a book which so viscerally conveys the sensibility and environment of a young protagonist rooted in
family while at the same time opening to the grand and thrilling world around him. . . . A dreamer and a stargazer, Amerigo Jones is a character and an eye-on-the-world to stand beside the more angry and alienated protagonists of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Carter's contemporaries and fellow expatriates. Perhaps Carter's onomatopoeic use of language and punctuation, his deep immersion in the sensuousness of life, his skilled use of dialect to reflect on class in society, his unexpected changes of scene, inserting stunning set pieces into the text, like gems, or contemporary song lyrics, like flashes of insight, and maybe even the sheer volume of his prose put off editors forty years ago. Perhaps it was racism that stood in his way, but racism is not Carter's subject here. Rather, it is the glories of his race that he celebrates” Santa Fe New Mexican

Missouri spawned Huck Finn . . . and now it will have Amerigo Jones too. Speakeasy
 

 
Vincent O. Carter was born in Kansas City in 1924. At seventeen he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He landed on a Normandy beachhead and took part in the drive toward Paris. Back in the United States, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill, earning a college degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and spending a graduate year at Wayne State in Detroit. Eventually he returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam before settling in Bern, where he spent the rest of his life in a sort of self-imposed exile. He died there in 1983. View titles by Vincent O. Carter

About

“Astonishing … an uncommonly rich picture of Black American family life in early 20th century Jim Crow America.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This “vibrant portrait of African American life” in Jazz Age Kansas City captures the magic of childhood and parental love through the eyes of a remarkable boy (New York Times)



This must-read rediscovery, published in an elegant and unabridged paperback edition with a new foreword, is a literary masterpiece poised to take its rightful place in the American literary canon.

Such Sweet Thunder immerses readers in the life of a precocious infant, Amerigo Jones, and then tells the story of his first 18 years as he becomes aware of the adult world, from racism and crime to falling in love. All the while, in one of the most moving homages to parents ever to appear in literature, Amerigo is protected by Viola and Rutherford, who are loving and, mostly, even-tempered, but also desperately young — teenagers themselves when Amerigo is born — and poor.

When it was finally published in 2003, 40 years after Carter completed it and 20 years after he died, Critics hailed the novel’s “unflinching condemnation of a society that rejects bright, eager Black children” (The Cleveland Plain Dealer).

This “colossal work of fiction” (The Kansas City Star) and “vibrant portrait of African-American life” (New York Times) is set in an era marred by racial segregation and relentless, daily injustices and yet renders with deep appreciation and artistry a time and place enriched by a widely influential African American culture and a fierce feeling for family and community.

Excerpt

Foreword
 
Great novels are not always recognized in their own time; often they lie waiting, as if in ambush, for the future to catch up to their achievements. In the case of Such Sweet Thunder, the miracle of its arrival at all inevitably continues to color its critical appreciation. We know something about the unusual circumstances that led Vincent O. Carter to effectively exile himself from his native Kansas City and take up residence in Bern, Switzerland, (where he wrote the novel over the course of several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s), because of the only book that Carter would see published in his lifetime: The Bern Book.
This deeply ironic, essayistic blend of memoir, travelogue, and poetic meditation was successfully published in the United States in 1973 but, despite some favorable reviews, it was quickly filed-away and forgotten. Appearing at a time when black militancy and popular discourses about race were just reaching a fever pitch of declamatory and affirmative style, Carter’s arcane, cosmopolitan, and inwardly focused ruminations—qualities that would have made The Bern Book legible to what I have elsewhere called the “Blue Period” of black writing that lasted between 1945 and 1965—were, alas, a terrible fit for the reading public’s sense of what black writing should be the mid-1970s.
The difficulties that this first book encountered had implications for the viability of the second. Despite the efforts of Herbert Lottman, who acted as Carter’s literary intercessor, and of Ellen Wright, the widow of Richard Wright, who read portions of the manuscript (at the time still bearing the working title The Primary Colors), no publisher would take it up and Carter eventually despaired of seeing it through to publication. He retreated from his attempts at writing and devoted himself increasingly to spiritual practice and to his shared life with his partner Liselotte Haas. He died in Bern in 1983.
The manuscript of Carter’s only novel, long believed to have been lost or destroyed, was thankfully preserved by the care of Liselotte Haas and retrieved for publication through the heroic efforts of Chip Fleischer, who recognized the importance of the manuscript and first published it under the magnificently braided Shakespearean and Ellingtonian title Such Sweet Thunder at his own Steerforth Press in 2003.
Despite its evidently eccentric stylistic flourishes and a somewhat contrived overture, Such Sweet Thunder is in many ways a fairly conventional Bildungsroman, or even more accurately a Künstlerroman that narrates the dawning of creative consciousness and of a sentimental sensibility in the boyhood and teenage years of Amerigo Jones, a character whose roving mind and synesthetic perceptions are clearly a stand-in for Carter’s vision of his own years growing up in the black working class neighborhoods of Kansas City. These were the interwar years of the Depression, but also of the Negro League’s Kansas City Monarchs and their star pitcher Satchel Paige; the cradle of Kansas City jazz and its musical luminaries like Count Basie, Bennie Moten, and Charlie Parker; a time when black Kansas City was, tragically in retrospect, at a social and cultural zenith.
Such Sweet Thunder is centered in the mercurial consciousness of young Amerigo, yet his parents, Viola and Rutherford Jones are every bit as much the protagonists—the beating heart of this novel—as he is. Based on Carter’s own mother and father, they are teenage parents and working poor: Viola works in a laundry and also as a maid (Carter’s mother Eola likely worked both of those jobs) and Rutherford (like Carter’s father Joe) works as a porter at a hotel. As with many of the details in the novel, the brick-and-mortar realism of the spatial and material cityscape is emphatically accurate, even as it chooses at times to withhold key details. The imposing Muehlebach Hotel is rendered with fidelity; but the humbler hotel where Rutherford works is never named, for instance. Yet because Amerigo places it at Ninth Street and Locust Avenue, we know that it must be the Densmore Hotel which indeed operated from that location from 1909 until it was demolished in the late 1990s. This feeling for the city is that of the exile, familiar to us from James Joyce whose obsessive reconstruction of Dublin in Ulysses is clearly one of the models for Carter’s depiction of Kansas City. Indeed, Such Sweet Thunder is inspired by Joyce not only in this sense, but perhaps even more so with its plentiful stream of consciousness riffs and colorful uses of onomatopoetic language that echo Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, with, in Carter’s case, the addition of a magnificent ear for the cadence of small talk among black folks.
During one of his only return visits to the United States, Carter saw for himself the staggering devastation of what had once been a world of throbbing multicultural and interethnic vitality, rife with racial tension and violence to be sure (an aspect Carter vividly captures in all its quotidian banality), but nonetheless, a community brimming with what Carter conceived of as a web of aesthetic relations: between jazz on the radio and the gestures of aunties cracking wise, the vocal timbre of men hailing each other in the street and the rumble of streetcars at Eighteenth and Vine, between the poolhall slouch and the preacher’s lean in the pulpit, the dense matrix of communal black life in an urban setting marked by the dominant presence of poor, working people with immense belief in their own talents and abilities and ever scornful of the racist forces regularly lashing out at them and reminding them of their place. In a letter to Lottman from 1973, Carter lamented this lost world that, paradoxically, flourished under segregation:
 
It had all changed, Herb, it was all different now; the people were gone and the houses were gone; in their place was a super highway. Only the light was the same: sunlight at seven in the morning, at noon, at five o’clock in the evening when dad used to come home from his hotel. Perhaps it was when I boarded the plane for New York that I realized that nothing has been lost. I had written it all down—that fabulous world of childhood, the world of mom and dad young, laughing and in tears. It was all in The Primary Colors, my way, and what I couldn’t say because one can never say it all, is written in my heart.
 
But Carter’s vision cannot be reduced to the idiosyncratic story of one young man’s personal emancipation against a screen of nostalgic reminiscence. The work of ideological mythmaking has ensured that what happened to downtown Kansas City remains in large part a mystery to most Americans (including black Americans), who cannot seem to imagine that it was ever anything other than the cross-roads of highways, banks, convention centers, and empty lots that now defines it as predictably as virtually any other important urban center in the country. What Carter wants us to see—to make us feel grievously as an immediate loss—is a tragedy that holds a much broader allegorical force within the national narrative of the United States, and with particularly fierce poignancy in the historical memory of African Americans. It stands for the unpardonable ruination of the first black working class, the massive squandering of the heroic efforts undertaken by the first generation of black freedmen and women, the formerly enslaved and the sons and daughters of the formerly enslaved who took off their shackles only to get to work building up the first free black neighborhoods across America’s cities, everywhere under duress and festering resentment, and often under the hooded overwatch of the Klan’s terrorism and the de jure apartheid of Jim Crow.  
One can think of other classics of African American literature that know these people and tell aspects of their story: William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge; Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying; Margaret Walker’s Jubilee; Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, to name a few. Yet, none arguably captures quite so aptly the note of gallant hopefulness, the tender vivacity, the sarcasm and cunning that generation seems to have possessed in such abundance as the novel you hold in your hands.
Anyone who ever knew black folk of that era, knows something of the distinctive grain of the voice that they brought into the world. Everywhere the grain of that black voice was allowed to show up it changed the world; in popular music, in sports, in the arts, in politics, in fashion, in everyday speech, and yes, in literature.
In her striking work of literary criticism Liberating Voices, Gayl Jones makes the argument that the African American novel emerged out of the struggle of black writers to incorporate their own “distinctive aural and oral forms” into the representational conventions established by the European realist novel. The opening pages of Such Sweet Thunder do seem to groan as Carter struggles to stage Amerigo’s encounter with the Proustian madeleine that will open the floodgates of memory to his lost Kansas City. It’s no coincidence that the vehicle he lands upon, however, is a copy of a newspaper called The Voice, an obvious allusion to the legendary Kansas City Call (still extant), one of the oldest and longest-running black newspapers in the United States. The black press and its once improbable reach and influence are now something of a spectral myth, acquiring that vaguely legendary sepia tint that also attaches to the Negro Leagues and other bygone relics of an era that our popular culture has seemingly no capacity or desire to meaningfully remember. Yet the idea to use the black newspaper both allegorically as a symbol of a historic community, and formally as a choric voice, is perhaps the masterstroke of genius in Carter’s novel. Without the opening vignettes, we would lose sight of this deliberate construction.
As a scholar I can appreciate Such Sweet Thunder as a miraculous recovery and a remarkable example of what was possible in black postwar fiction. But as a novelist, I appreciate even more how it does things in prose with such a wondrously open sense of freedom. It is unsparing when necessary, yet humming with grace and good humor. It is also a social novel, passionately carrying us through living rooms and street corners and social dances in virtuosic passages that linger long after we have left them. It remembers for us a world that deserved its own bard and, recognized or not, has always had one.
The novel’s gift to us is ultimately the achievement of this tremendous sense of voice, or rather the orchestration of its collective voices, newspaper-like you might say, but swinging like a jazz ensemble. This is a book I have wanted to read late into the night. It stays with me in those quiet hours, even after I put it down, its rolling thunder unfurling just above my head.
 
 
Jesse McCarthy
Rome, June 2024

Reviews

"Carter had finished Such Sweet Thunder in 1963, but by 1970 he had given up trying to find a publisher for it. Most unpublished manuscripts stay that way for a reason; Such Sweet Thunder is an exception. The novel . . . is a dense and vibrant portrait of African-American life at the nation's crossroads. Carter's choice of period is felicitous. The Kansas City that he describes is in its bustling, bloody heyday, a town where gangsters are gunned down in the streets, Joe Turner plays on the radio, and children wander home past overrun soup kitchens, clanging streetcars and nightclubs with names like Dante's Inferno. With his fastidious attention to urban detail . . . Carter even resembles another, more famous expatriate, James Joyce. But the novel's real achievement is in its evocation of Amerigo Jones's childhood and his interaction with his parents, Rutherford and Viola, themselves only teenagers when their son's life begins. . . . Carter is in essence a celebratory writer, not a voice of protest, and the thunder that sounds in his novel is meant to evoke the storm of sensation that illuminates American life. . . . Such Sweet Thunder belongs with other enduring documentaries of the dispossessed, like Cormac McCarthy's Suttree or Langston Hughes's novel Not Without Laughter." New York Times Book Review

"The book takes us into its arms and transports us back in time to a racially segregated Kansas City in the late 1920s. . . . Seamlessly, gently, Such Sweet Thunder carries Amerigo and us through adolescence, first love and the edge of world war and its sad demands on the safe, secure world Amerigo had come to love. . . . Carter connects all of our childhoods to Amerigo's, while making us feel intensely what made his childhood - Carter's childhood, presumably - as special as it was. The book does his memory proud. And gives our present time a priceless heirloom. The novel arrives late. But it lives." —     Newsday

"The story behind Such Sweet Thunder is almost as captivating as the extraordinary tale told within its pages . . . A rousing, inspired work, keenly observed and soulful . . . The novel sparkles with life, soaring with the loose flow of a jazzy improvisation. More akin in style to Charles Dickens than Richard Wright or James Baldwin, Carter writes prose that tingles with detail . . . Racism certainly stings Amerigo's life, as he finds his opportunities limited by prejudice. But Carter's characters are not, to borrow a famous phrase from Zora Neale Hurston, ‘tragically colored,’ and this frees Amerigo's story from getting mired in a woe-is-me pity party. . . Ambitious and resonant, Such Sweet Thunder often achieves brilliance; at its best, it has the kinetic energy of an August Wilson play. . . . This is a rich addition to our literary understanding of the 20th-century African-American experience." Boston Globe

"Originally written in 1963 and shelved, this hefty, astonishing novel by a black American expatriate who died in 1983 tells — in electric modernist vernacular prose — the story of a black child's life in Jim Crow America. . . . Through a steady accumulation of detail, sustained lyricism, flights of fancy and, especially, reams of swinging dialogue, Carter paints an uncommonly rich picture of black American family life in the early 20th century. Like the composition it is named for, a Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn tribute to Shakespeare, it is a marvelous blend of jazz rhythms and high literary tradition. — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This diamond in the rough is an extraordinarily honest and compassionate child’s-eye view of a world too seldom seen in American fiction." Kirkus Reviews
 
"Readers will appreciate Such Sweet Thunder’s dreamy, nostalgic quality and lyrical writing, which evokes urban life before the war and offers a stirring portrait of a young boy growing up." Booklist (starred review)

"Infused with the sounds and spirit of Kansas City jazz, the author’s gritty style was ahead of its time." —  Library Journal
 
"A colossal work of fiction . . . Sprawling and searching, it is Dickensian or even Joycean in scope. Carter's rendering of Amerigo's journey to adulthood is masterful. . . . Carter's greatest triumph is his dreamlike depiction of Amerigo's childhood mind and soul. Few writers have captured that strange, off-kilter, almost mystical feeling of what it is like to exist on this planet as a preadolescent. . . Carter gets it right because he laces the waters of innocence with bracing shots of guilt, confusion and pain. His Amerigo roams downtown Kansas City, finding adventure, yes, but also the misadventure of falling in with a bad crowd of kids, and, worse yet, the discovery of violence within himself: The passage in which the boy unleashes his cruelties upon a kitten is hard to read, indeed -- but also rings terribly true. Of all the novels about boyhood I've encountered, I can think of only one that achieves Carter's level of fearless mimesis: Roddy Doyle's tender-brutal Paddy Clarke Ha-Ha-Ha. Another extraordinary aspect of this book is its refusal to pin all its hero's troubles on racism. . . . Amerigo's reactions to his world constitute a deeply moving experience for the reader. Obviously, there is anger here -- but also tremendous love in the familial passages. And Amerigo's longing, his quest for an existence more meaningful than the one his world begrudges him, is both beautiful and wrenching. Such Sweet Thunder is a soulful, haunting book. . . . Readers seeking a comparative way into this novel might think of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man or Langston Hughes' Not Without Laughter. Such likenesses are valid thematically but not stylistically; both Hughes and Ellison were more direct. Such Sweet Thunder, following Amerigo about in his wanderings, seems closer to James Joyce's Ulysses, and also displays a kinship to Charles Dickens at his most expansive. . . . This novel is not only a Bildungsroman but also a road map -- an atlas that points the way to both the heartland and the human heart." —  Kansas City Star

"An unapologetically literary effort with echoes of Faulkner, Twain and Joyce. . . . For its lyrical rendering of a time and place long vanished, this is a book to savor, slowly." Entertainment Weekly

Fans of Toni Morrison or William Kennedy will appreciate Carter’s style, and history buffs will be fascinated by a Kansas City that may have otherwise gone unsung. —     Midwest Living Magazine
 
"A spiraling and powerful account of African American life in Kansas City during the 1920s and 1930s. Carter paints a rich, jazz-like portrait of pre-World War II life in Black America. . . . By fusing the best European modernist literary traditions with African American ones, Carter weaves a colorful, distinctive tapestry of a seminal period in African American history." —  Seattle Skanner

"Such Sweet Thunder is Carter’s Portrait of the Artist. . . . Amerigo Jones — the name itself speaks of discovery and bold hope — is Carter’s stand-in in the novel . . . Dedicated to musical giant Duke Ellington, the book is a jazz mix of sounds and sensations – the phonograph in the living room, the slamming of screen doors up and down his alley, trams clacking down the boulevard, the rhythms and rhymes of his young parents’ enthusiastic speech (“I was standin’ pat in ma gray bo-back, Jack!”). Amerigo as a child and young man is thirsty for the world, and we drink it all in with him. . . . A certain diamond-in-the-rough feeling only adds to the joy of discovering a book that spent far too long on a shelf in Switzerland.” —  Rain Taxi
 
"Carter bridges Zora Neale Hurston's folkloric narratives and Toni Morrison's communal spirituals. In reading Carter's intermittently brilliant narrative of black boyhood and adolescence in the Jazz Age and on through the Depression and Second World War, one is not treated to a dysfunctional "ghetto," nor a liberal oasis of zebra-colored neighbors, friends and family. Instead, Carter depicts, painstakingly, a mainly black, urban community that is close-knit, organic and striving for uplift. In his Kansas City, MO., setting, black life ain't easy, but it has its passions, satisfactions and inspirations. . . .
 
"Few works of legitimate fiction are so insistently frank about a boy's proto-sexual, innocent but instinctive yearnings. Fundamentally Romantic, even wholesomely naive, this Bildungsroman idealizes male desire to the point that when, as a young man, Amerigo fails to win his ferociously chaperoned brown bourgeois sweetheart, Cosima, he prefers celibacy to the available charms of her obtainable rival. . . .
 
"Carter Musters profound empathy and warmth for all his characters, especially Amerigo's parents, Rutherford and Viola, who are self-sacrificing, loyal, contradictory, loving, bawdy and philosophical. Carter's creations evade stereotype because they seem modeled on people he knew in true-grit Missouri and whom he recollected later in Swiss tranquility. . . .
 
"Carter's novel continues to make noise - and subtly subversive music. Its survival, after so much neglect, is its triumph.” National Post (Canada)

“Some critics have speculated that publishers rejected this book because its gentle coming-of-age tale, partially based on Carter's own life, was at odds with the fiery black-power rhetoric of the '60s. If that's true, publishers missed this book's quiet but unflinching condemnation of a society that rejects bright, eager black children.” —  Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Carter’s work was simply ahead of its time. . . . the book is becoming a major literary milestone, and deservedly so. What if the manuscript, and Amerigo Jones with it, had disappeared without a trace? Try to imagine the American literary landscape without Scout Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird. Or picture the jazz scene if Charlie Parker fell at age 24 instead of 34.” Jazz Ambassador Magazine


“It is seldom that one comes across a book that dazzles and surprises, a book that will surely withstand the test of time. Such Sweet Thunder is such a book. . . . Not since reading Henry Roth's rediscovered masterpiece, Call it Sleep, has this writer encountered a book which so viscerally conveys the sensibility and environment of a young protagonist rooted in
family while at the same time opening to the grand and thrilling world around him. . . . A dreamer and a stargazer, Amerigo Jones is a character and an eye-on-the-world to stand beside the more angry and alienated protagonists of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Carter's contemporaries and fellow expatriates. Perhaps Carter's onomatopoeic use of language and punctuation, his deep immersion in the sensuousness of life, his skilled use of dialect to reflect on class in society, his unexpected changes of scene, inserting stunning set pieces into the text, like gems, or contemporary song lyrics, like flashes of insight, and maybe even the sheer volume of his prose put off editors forty years ago. Perhaps it was racism that stood in his way, but racism is not Carter's subject here. Rather, it is the glories of his race that he celebrates” Santa Fe New Mexican

Missouri spawned Huck Finn . . . and now it will have Amerigo Jones too. Speakeasy
 

 

Author

Vincent O. Carter was born in Kansas City in 1924. At seventeen he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He landed on a Normandy beachhead and took part in the drive toward Paris. Back in the United States, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill, earning a college degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and spending a graduate year at Wayne State in Detroit. Eventually he returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam before settling in Bern, where he spent the rest of his life in a sort of self-imposed exile. He died there in 1983. View titles by Vincent O. Carter