So here again, it’s the metaphor that generates either the bliss or the banality! Thus one person’s restriction may be another person’s incentive! What one person may perceive as the outer limits of all that really matters (as the Chinese once dismissed whatever was beyond the Great Wall), another group of people may regard as the come-hither region of ever more promising horizons of aspiration.
In all events, that certainly strikes me as the snapshot of a fairy-tale princess you sent along with your update, my all too obviously lucky old cut buddy. So cross your fingers and touch your talisman and polish your wiles to their highest sheen. Who ever said that romance was not a game of chance?
Nor should you ever be unmindful of any of those slapdash— slapstick, nay, downright farcical escapades and labyrinthine misadventures old ever so jam-riff-clever Odysseus himself had to maneuver his way out of and back on course to and through the gateway to the remembered hometown boy blue bliss with the one for whom he had forsaken all others not only in Ithaca but everywhere else.
Albert Murray
THE MAGIC KEYS
Albert Murray is the author of The Omni-Americans, Stomping the Blues, The Hero and the Blues, South to a Very Old Place , Conjugations and Reiterations, and From the Briarpatch File. He is the coauthor of Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie and the coeditor of Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. He lives in New York City.
ALSO BY ALBERT MURRAY
The Omni-Americans
South to a Very Old Place
The Hero and the Blues
Train Whistle Guitar
Stomping the Blues
Good Morning Blues:
The Autobiography of Count Basie (as told to Albert Murray)
The Spyglass Tree
The Seven League Boots
The Blue Devils of Nada
Trading Twelves:
The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
(edited by Albert Murray and John F. Callahan)
From the Briarpatch File
Conjugations and Reiterations
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2006
Copyright © 2005 by Albert L. Murray
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and
colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition
as follows:
Murray, Albert.
The magic keys / Albert Murray.
p. cm.
1. African American men—Fiction. 2. Graduate students—Fiction.
3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Married people—Fiction.
5. Young men—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.U764M34 2005
813’.54—dc22
2004060128
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42895-0
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