What struck me, as I again read Hue and Cry, for perhaps the third or fourth time in 2018, is how powerful and strangely frightening at times the first five stories of the book are with their men and the often crushing burden of their work. Young Thomas Brown of “A Matter of Vocabulary” bagging potatoes in a supermarket. The waiters and sleeping-car porters slaving away on trains in “On Trains” and “A Solo Song: For Doc.” Robert the janitor forever lugging his “three overflowing cans of garbage” in “Gold Coast.”

The last time I saw Jim, it was winter in Iowa City, nearly fifty years after that sophomore fall of discovering Hue and Cry. The world and life had done many good and bad things to both of us. He was coming to see me read at the University of Iowa. He could barely walk because of illness, but he still had the look of a wise man with secrets he was more than willing to share. I don’t think he knew what part he had played in my getting to that moment in my life.

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UPON READING THE FIRST STORIES in Hue and Cry in 2018, I was struck, again, at how work can become such a yoke for a black man. Jim has this incredible ability to show how much a black man’s work—tied so much to his being—could ultimately contribute to his undoing, no matter how well the job is done. “A Solo Song: For Doc” is a splendid example, well worth, as the worn phrase goes, the price of admission. I always get a feeling of grand relief when I get to the end of “Gold Coast” with Robert’s liberation from his garbage cans, with his realization that his world can be a bigger place than a building of sad and failed people. There is a reason why John Updike chose that story as one of the best of the twentieth century.

The first time I met James Alan McPherson in person, it was 1978 in Washington, D.C. He was alone in a corner of someone’s home, a few hours before his reading at the Library of Congress. He held a glass of white wine in a living room with ten or so people waiting to go to the reading and he indicated to me with a nod that I should come over, something I would never have done on my own. He had already won praise and prizes for Elbow Room, his second book. We talked for some ten or fifteen minutes. He was humble and funny and shy, and it was somehow quietly evident that he knew a lot of things, which was the major reason why I would go to the University of Virginia, where he was then teaching.