Author: By Amy Alexander

Date: SUNDAY, February 14, 1999

Page: E1

Section: Books

In these times, anyone attempting to define what it means to be black in America is asking for trouble. A prime example is the recent flap in Washington, D.C., over a white mayoral aide's use of the word ``niggardly'' (which means miserly and has nothing to do with the similar-sounding ethnic slur). The incident threatened to undermine Anthony Williams, the newly-elected mayor whom black activists had previously accused of not being ``black enough.''

In today's sensitive atmosphere, the arrival of a serious nonfiction book that tries to answer the question of what it means to be black at the dawn of the new millennium would seem fortuitous. Indeed, with sublime timing, Randall Kenan's book, ``Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the 21st Century,'' seeks to be that ambitious undertaking. Presented as a sweeping exploration of racial identity, ``Walking on Water'' tries to bring a dose of realism and historic context to a discussion that is frustratingly tricky.

To pose such a question might be a no-win proposition: Since there are more than 30 million black Americans, holding various and sometimes contradictory definitions of blackness, it would be easy to dismiss the premise as flawed. Moreover, wouldn't an attempt to define blackness require a correlating attempt to define what it means to be white in America?

Notwithstanding these difficulties, Kenan, a fiction writer in his first significant attempt at nonfiction, makes an effort that is noble in its sincerity and impressive in its geographic scope. In a remarkable display of stamina, he spent more than seven years crisscrossing the country interviewing hundreds of black Americans. Unfortunately, his clumsy reporting, narrow emphasis on older, middle-class subjects, and an over-reliance on questionable literary motifs leave us with an unsatisfying answer to an admittedly difficult question.

In fairness to Kenan, it is unlikely that any writer could have successfully portrayed, in all its complex shadings, the breadth, depth, and totality of black American opinion regarding the amorphous question of what it means to be black. To his credit, Kenan acknowledges that his mission is quixotic: ``To accurately accomplish what I had originally set out to do would have made it necessary to go and talk to thirty-six million people -- but the truth is, even if that feat were humanly possible, the end result would be the same: inconclusive.''

Even veteran journalist David K. Shipler last year, in his book on black-white relations in America, ``A Nation of Strangers,'' fell prey to the size of his task and failed to keep his own biases from cluttering the text. Kenan clearly lacks the resourceful sensibility, the intrepid nature, and the reporterly skill needed to deliver a broad sampling of individuals who can represent the many ways black Americans see themselves.

What he gives us instead is a perplexing combination of disparate elements: personal musings that fail to move the narrative smoothly along; long quotes from famous writers including I. F. Stone, Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas Wolfe, Arnold Rampersad, and Friedrich Nietzsche; scores of interviews with just-plain-folks who are allowed to discourse at great length -- sometimes for seven or eight pages -- without imparting much that might help elucidate what it means to be black in America. There are also several curious side trips into popular culture, including a dissection of the ``Star Trek'' phenomenon as it relates to Kenan's wish for a world in which color and class take a back seat to integrity and moral wholesomeness.

Kenan's sampling lacks diversity. The majority of his subjects are middle- or upper-middle-class Americans in their 40s to 60s -- judges, retired sheriff's deputies, school administrators, or politicians -- individuals whose age and economic status lend a stultifying sameness to their perspectives. When he is confronted with a black American outside middle-class boundaries -- for example, a talkative prostitute he happens upon in Salt Lake City -- Kenan is timid. ``I knew straightaway that I should ask for an interview, but I hesitated,'' he writes of his chance encounter in Mormon country. After he gathers the courage to ask the woman if she would be interviewed, he sabotages his chances by adding, ``I'll pay for your time, if that's a problem.'' Ultimately, he does not interview her.

Kenan's inability to surmount obstacles that wouldn't stop a second-year newspaper reporter is troubling. In Chicago, for example, he is put in a bad mood because the barber shop he visits has a woman hairstylist who summarily routs a panhandler who wanders in. ``City of the big shoulders, indeed,'' Kenan sniffs. Amazingly, he all but skips over the city, recusing himself because the Windy City has ``a rich past so vast and deep that I felt crushed by it.''

He offers a cursory look at Chicago's significant place in 20th-century black history (he mentions poet Gwendolyn Brooks and beauty products entrepreneur John H. Johnson), and he manages to sit down with poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti. As for Oprah Winfrey, Kenan doesn't even bother to try for a meeting with the talk-show host-turned New Age guru and media mogul, waving her off as ``a true postmodern force, but she's much too tricky to assess, too much of a moving target to pin down.''

Had Kenan interviewed people like the prostitute or the homeless panhandler, and set their observations beside those of middle-class regular folks and poobahs like Winfrey, ``Walking on Water'' might have lived up to its billing. Even with the people he does interview, in many cases he fails to provide basic information -- their ages, even the dates on which he spoke to them.

Kenan also short-changes blacks in two other large regions where they have played a uniquely important role -- New York and the San Francisco Bay area. Citing exhaustion, he blows by San Francisco, where the World War II industrial boom led thousands of Midwestern and Southern-born blacks (including Maya Angelou's family) to seek prosperity. And when contemplating New York, Kenan writes: ``If Chicago defeated me and California consumed me . . . New York would surely kill me,'' and resorts to an annoyingly shallow discussion of Harlem's mythical standing as a black mecca.

Where historical touches appear, they are moving and vivid: Several interview subjects describe their parents' and grandparents' struggles to build productive lives in in the era before the civil rights movement. Kenan also visited local libraries from Boston to Las Vegas, and unearthed a multitude of historical nuggets detailing blacks' progress in places as disparate as Martha's Vineyard; Bangor, Maine; Seattle; and Anchorage. (He seems more comfortable with descriptions of the black experience culled from libraries than from living, breathing subjects.)

In the end, we are served some beautiful writing about America's stunningly diverse topography -- particularly in passages about the Pacific Northwest and the Great Plains -- and many vignettes detailing the mundane experiences of black Americans in the 1990s.

Not that Kenan's interviews are worthless: Some of his subjects offer trenchant observations about everything from the current state of race relations, to welfare reform, to the self-esteem of teenagers, to love, responsibility, and the joys of creative accomplishment. But because he did not edit his subjects (and because his editors apparently did not edit him), we are left with an overlong, muddled search for answers to a question that is all but unanswerable.