
DATE: Wednesday, September 24, 1997         TAG: 9709240043

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E7   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JOHN-HENRY DOUCETTE, CORRESPONDENT 

                                            LENGTH:   97 lines

AUTHOR TRACES AFRICAN-AMERICAN QUEST

IT WAS almost 1990.

George Davis, author of the Vietnam War novel ``Coming Home,'' attended a well-catered party at a huge house to do research on another book about holding on to identity in America.

The party celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Howard University class of 1965. There were successful black people there, people with Rolls-Royces and tennis courts in their back yards, yet they seemed to have something missing. They blamed it on discrimination.

To Davis, there seemed to be a deeper discontentment. Somehow these successful people had lost the American dream.

Davis, who will speak at 11 a.m. Thursday at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, considers himself a griot, an African tribal history teller, though his subjects are strikingly American.

In his latest work, ``Branches: The African-American Spirit in Search of the American Dream,'' he follows eight of those classmates on their search.

The work is part journalism, history and storytelling, as the reality of these characters' lives is melded together with spiritual themes.

The 1,148-page manuscript will not be released until next year, and it will probably be edited down by at least half. Thursday, Davis will speak on all of it. As it stands now, ``Branches'' is broken into testaments, and Davis said the work shows common themes in all American lives, not just African-American lives.

``There are a lot of strains in culture that want to embrace Africa in ways that I don't,'' Davis said. ``I think my American heritage is crucial to how I see the world.''

What he sees seems to be pretty simple:

``We're one.''

Davis should have been a preacher. His father was a preacher. So were his grandfather and great-grandfather. And so on.

The 57-year-old writer has faith. He has a God, though not necessarily one from any particular church.

He believes he has tapped into something spiritual on his path to becoming a griot.

Through the many stops in his life, his childhood in Virginia and Maryland, college at Colgate, navigating an aircraft on 47 missions over North Vietnam, seeing his first novel turned into a surface-flicking Jane Fonda vehicle, stints in the newspaper business and writing and educating, fatherhood and being a husband, Davis has been working toward something in his own life that he believes shows itself in ``Branches.''

He hadn't quite figured it out until he had woven the stories of eight men and women into nearly 1,200 pages of social history.

We're all confined if our heads play the dime philosopher's game. But Davis has seen even the oppressed find energy in life through human history, and even the enslaved can be bound together by peace, love, joy. By exaltation of the human spirit.

Something - and Davis speaks of it almost scientifically, as though he can almost quantify it - in humanity can rise above.

``American transcendental tradition,'' Davis said, ``is not best expressed by Emerson and Thoreau but by slavery.''

One of the problems with ``Branches,'' its author says, is that it does not lead to easy answers by throwing its hands over its head and supplicating at the altar of victim consciousness.

Although Harpo, the company owned by Oprah Winfrey, is scheduled to develop the story into a television project, it may not end up on Oprah's book club when his publisher releases it next year.

``The normal line is that bad things happen to people and then some brave souls will triumph and that's Western literature,'' Davis said. ``But there's another way of seeing and being in the world that says bad things happen but the human experience is a glorious and triumphant experience.

``I don't know,'' he continued, ``that all the people involved commercially are on line with that.''

Davis feels the book is at the proper length to fairly represent the people who trusted him with their stories. He wants to be faithful.

Whatever the length, the book, which follows eight folks doing a bit better than the average Joe, may not strike home authoritatively with the poor and lower middle-class folks who are among the angriest of Americans.

Davis teaches at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. It's a tough campus.

``Students at Rutgers are very angry when they come to class,'' Davis said. ``Most are very angry about some things that happened in the past in the community. That anger makes a lot of sense, but what we're able to do is show, no matter what their circumstance now, it is not as bad as people in slavery.

``If they can rise above it,'' Davis said, ``and eventually liberate themselves, maybe we can.''

In part, Davis is teaching redemption, the name of the last testament in the griot's forthcoming work. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

COURTESY OF GEORGE DAVIS

George Davis will talk about his unfinished book, ``Branches.''

Graphic

WANT TO GO?

What: Free lecture by George Davis about his new manuscript

When: 11 a.m. Thursday

Where: Village II Commons of Virginia Wesleyan College