Dancing with Strangers: A Memoir

Watkins, a former editor at the New York Times Book Review and author of The Real Side, a capacious history of African-American humor, confines himself here to his childhood and youth. Unfortunately, his story lacks sufficient drama or style to achieve full momentum. Watkins grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, the child of black Southerners who landed up north in Youngstown, Ohio, with a promise of ""opportunity."" Though his parents brawled and his brother went to prison, young Mel was mentored by his fierce and proud father and embraced playing basketball and baseball and reading. Amid overly dense detail, his memoir retains a consistently interesting thread concerning race. Raised unencumbered by ""rigid social conventions,"" Watkins eventually encountered white racism, but his experience in an integrated high school was mostly positive. A scholarship student at Colgate in upstate New York in the early 1960s, he had to adapt to an overwhelmingly white world but found solace in reading Sartre and James Baldwin, and discovered he had no trouble dating both black and white women. Before he graduated, a summer living in Harlem while working as a newspaper copyboy furthered his embrace of black culture, the product, Watkins concluded, not of ""primal racial identity... but the externally imposed experience of repression."" Further fueled by classroom disparagement of black culture when he returned to Colgate, Watkins resolved to celebrate that culture in his future life. The story leaves the reader wanting to learn more about Watkins's quest, but the book ends a few pages later. (Feb.)