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A review by kevin_shepherd
Greyboy: Finding Blackness in a White World by Cole Brown
4.0
“Consider the fallen. Tamir was twelve. John Crawford was shopping. Tamir was twelve. Jordan Davis liked rap. Treyvon Martin was in a gated community. Renisha McBride needed help. Tamir was twelve. The sheer randomness of their unnatural ends seems a boast on the measure of death’s wingspan, that it can reach out and touch us at will. But somehow this relentless accumulation of tragedy diminishes our anger and fear instead of compounding it. Why?”
Greyboy is neither biography nor memoir. Author Cole Brown refers to it as his “scrapbook.” All the stories are true but not all of the stories happened to Brown. This is more dramatization than documentary, more reenactment than recollection. It has a prose that is awkward until you discover its cadence and then it flows almost effortlessly.
At first I couldn’t relate to Brown’s vignettes. Of course I couldn’t. He writes about what he calls “tokenism,” about being the only one of something. I was never a mixed race kid caught between two realities; a kid too black for whiteness and too white for blackness. I read this the only way I could, in third person. An outsider looking in.
But then came chapter seven, Parents Understand, where Brown writes about being raised at the business end of a belt. I could relate to that. And then in chapter ten, The Reveal, his response to Trump’s election in 2016 was my own. It was exactly as I would have written it if I could write this forcefully and powerfully.
Cole Brown writes about coming of age in troubled times. He writes about being different, about being judged, and about being unwelcome. The technique of his writing verges on poetry which works until it doesn’t, but when it does it is breathtaking.
Greyboy is neither biography nor memoir. Author Cole Brown refers to it as his “scrapbook.” All the stories are true but not all of the stories happened to Brown. This is more dramatization than documentary, more reenactment than recollection. It has a prose that is awkward until you discover its cadence and then it flows almost effortlessly.
At first I couldn’t relate to Brown’s vignettes. Of course I couldn’t. He writes about what he calls “tokenism,” about being the only one of something. I was never a mixed race kid caught between two realities; a kid too black for whiteness and too white for blackness. I read this the only way I could, in third person. An outsider looking in.
But then came chapter seven, Parents Understand, where Brown writes about being raised at the business end of a belt. I could relate to that. And then in chapter ten, The Reveal, his response to Trump’s election in 2016 was my own. It was exactly as I would have written it if I could write this forcefully and powerfully.
Cole Brown writes about coming of age in troubled times. He writes about being different, about being judged, and about being unwelcome. The technique of his writing verges on poetry which works until it doesn’t, but when it does it is breathtaking.