Minnette Coleman

Minnette Coleman is an author, actress and singer born in Atlanta, Georgia. She has lived in New York City for almost 25 years. Having performed off-off Broadway she has toured her one woman show on the civil rights movement in the south, been a teacher actress for The Creative Arts Team at New York University and is a member of the esteemed Harlem Writer’s Guild, one of the oldest literary organizations in the country.

Minnette's first novel - 'The Blacksmith's Daughter' - has just been published, and her second novel - 'No Death By Unknown Hands' - will be published in June 2010.

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'The Blacksmith's Daughter'

Before reading ‘The Blacksmith’s Daughter’, I was already a big fan of Minnette Coleman’s writing. Beneath an eloquent surface rippling lies a keen habit of observation which manifests as both a warmly empathetic understanding of humanity and a careful detailing of its struggles, foibles and follies.

And it was not far into this epic tale that I realised that this was Minnette at her very best.

A black blacksmith from Alabama decides to make a name for himself through hard work, thrift and the relentless acquisition of land in Atlanta, Georgia. He has a loving and mutually supportive relationship with his wife Bira, five beautiful daughters and one son who is handicapped. The household is run according to a strict discipline and timetable, everyone to her or his task. As the daughters grow up, the blacksmith is most particular as to who they consort with and in which order they will eventually marry. Suitors must be educated and on their way to acquiring wealth in order to assure the blacksmith that his daughters will be appropriately provided for in the future.

Then along comes the Piano Man who has been brought up principally in the North and in Europe, who is circumspect and sophisticated, and who is dazzling at the piano and in appearance. Furthermore, he is about to become a professor of music at the local university. This man is a catch worthy of one of the blacksmith’s daughters – of Minnelsa, the eldest - or so the blacksmith decides.

June, the rebellious youngest daughter has already determined otherwise. She has seen the Piano Man playing in the dive in the forest and this man is for her. To clinch the deal, the blacksmith tells the Piano Man that if he marries Minnelsa, he will be given a house and 50 acres of land as a dowry. For the previously itinerant Piano Man, this represents a grand settling down indeed. However, the strikingly attractive and musical June has other ideas.

The story is a classic. It could almost be Jane Austin in its precise dissection of the mores of a society, in this case of the emerging black middle classes in the Deep South. At other moments it is closer to Dickens in his more sentimental ‘Little Nell’ moments. Anybody who can describe someone dying as saying “the lights are fading, I cannot see”, or words to that effect, and get away with it, truly has you hooked. And yet, at others, it could be Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milk Wood’ as the city breathes to the lyrically distinctive beat of the blacksmith’s hammer.

The really masterly aspect of this book, beyond its authentic voice, its entirely credible characters and its compelling situations delivered in hypnotically cadenced prose, is the way it twists and turns you as to how you react to the behaviour and values of the blacksmith himself. In one section he is the proud astute businessman, in another he is the authoritative but loving father, in another he is the paterfamilias safeguarding the future welfare of his daughters, in another he is domineering and capricious, and in the last he is the master puppeteer several of whose strings have snapped mid-show leaving his marionettes dangling off-balance and helpless.

It is a long book but I found myself gliding through it, captured by the storyline, the characters and the prose. In a way it is a quiet nineteenth century classic describing 1920s Georgia. That must make it prescient as well, and so it seems. It should be leather-bound with greenish-gold edging. It should be cherished and placed on the bookshelf carefully once finished to await the next lucky reader.

Minnette Coleman - No Death By Unknown Hands

To be released July 2010

'No Death By Unknown Hands'

To be released by Night Publishing in July 2010.

‘No Death By Unknown Hands’ is the simple, basically true story, told in all the complexity that is its due, of how a brave, gentle, concerned and God-fearing man who ministered to the coloured community of Atlanta in the 1950s was accused of the rape of a white woman that never actually took place.

The complexity is in the response of the coloured community to this injustice.

And it is the story of a young girl growing up watching in great confusion the way the elders in her community wrestled with the political issues of truth and justice, those elders including her father who was the editor of The Atlanta Star newspaper at the time.

Minnette Coleman is a very subtle writer indeed, both in her prose style and in the depth of her observation. Her recently released first novel, ‘The Blacksmith’s Daughter’, is an obvious tour de force. ‘No Death By Unknown Hands’ is a much more subdued, sadder affair, a tale told by a quiet recorder of the facts of a world gradually improving in small ambivalent steps.

Its style is to lull you into an appreciation of the slow rhythm of the domestic details of a black middle class household, then to poke you back towards the essentials of the plot with a sharp stick. In moments it is frightening. In others it is confusing to reflect the confusion of the narrator. In yet others it is angering. Above all it tells a greater truth, that the law is often about something other than justice.

Do not expect fireworks. There is nothing to celebrate in this tragic tale of too-recent history. Expect insight. Expect humanity. Expect a cruelly-wrought hope. You will find them.