"Black and Tan Fantasy" is the title of a song written by Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley in 1927. The racial discord through the early 20th Century came to a head by the 1960s. Much like the song, the story alternates between two men-one White, one Black-as they journey through one of the most fraught and disturbing periods of US history, one that remains largely unresolved even sixty years later.
The "drowned man" a White man stripped of his place in the strictly segregated society struggles to navigate the surging currents and find a place for himself and his complicated family. The "wounded man" works to bring the power of the vote to the oppressed rural Black population in the Mississippi Delta while struggling to maintain his own dignity and a pledge of nonviolence in the face of atrocities. Truer than many accounts, as only great fiction can be, Black & Tan Fantasy is a tale that strikes a chord that still reverberates today.
