New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. SIGNED first edition - A non-fiction book by this award-winning author which grew out of his travels across the United States over six years, during which he "talked to nearly two hundred African Americans, starting from he long-standing black resort community on Martha's Vineyard, up through New England, and heads west, visiting Chicago, Minneapolis (home of the singer Prince and of the Pilgrim Baptist Church, with its seven choirs and vast outreach), Coeur d'Alene (skinhead capital of the world), Seattle, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. He moves on to the South, to Louisiana and St. Simons Island, where so many slave ships landed, and ends up at home in North Carolina, telling his own family's story. He talks to a wide variety of people: the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West; the Republican congressman from Alaska, Walter Furnace; to a rising young air force major whose father was lynched in Alabama when the major was a child; a vocal welfare mom, a retired railroad conductor, Atlanta's new Panther-style militants, a bisexual AIDS activist, and many, many more." Among Kenan's awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the North Carolina Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. SIGNED on the title page. An uncommon advance copy of this significant book, scarce signed. Selected bibliography. 658 pp.