The Homecoming of a Black Preppie : TROUBLE THE WATER <i> by Melvin Dixon (University of Colorado Press: $18.95; 194 pp.) </i>

African-American literature, particularly at the fiction level, has been enjoying a healthy renaissance during the last decade. To the names of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison must now be added that of Melvin Dixon. In this, his first novel, he reveals a sensitivity and conviction that are riveting in their realism.

The setting is a hamlet in North Carolina named for the Pee Dee River. In the early chapters the principal protagonist, Jordan Henry, is a young boy living with Mother Harriet, actually his grandmother; his mother, Chloe, is dead, and the father, a hard-drinking wanderer named Jake Williams, who impregnated Chloe when she was 16, then walked away from her just before the birth, is only vaguely aware of the son’s existence and is repelled by Mother Harriet when he attempts to see the youth. Dixon sets the Southern locale with evocative imagery: “Drunk with thaw from the Carr Mountains, the Pee Dee River raised its muddy arms and hugged the shore. Drunk with spring the river was still drinking. Ripples on its surface arched into blue-black lips that puckered and belched with every swallow. As the river swelled, hilltops along the Blue Ridge Mountains seemed to shrink. A low, thick fog inching out of the North Carolina morning hung a veil of heat over all and narrowed the horizon. Under a silver-green sky the water glistened like a bolt of wrinkled satin. But when it rose, the river became as sloppy and inebriated as molasses.”

Jordan soon escapes from the South, makes his way to Philadelphia and, through a scholarship, enters Groton, where he was expected “to bring honors to the fledgling basketball team or at least be musical or entertaining in the class play.” But spurred on by greater ambitions, he goes to Harvard, where he meets the struggling poet who becomes his wife.

The world of Phyllis Whitehead, Jordan’s bride, differs vastly from his own background; her father, the most prominent black lawyer in Boston, wanted her to join the family’s legal practice, but she pursues her literary objectives.

Jordan, who has studied the colonial past of New England and is now a rising young professor, seems to have achieved success, but his life and values are shaken, first by a cross-burning on the green of his campus, then by the news that his grandmother has died back home.

Jordan’s Northern experiences symbolize the subtle humiliations endured by blacks in white American society. Courses in literature and history rarely mention the contribution of blacks; black theater majors are not offered major parts in campus productions.

Jordan recalls vividly his days at Groton when the film club showed “Birth of a Nation” and “how he cringed in his seat, trying to hide. And how he laughed himself silly along with whites as they viewed ‘Song of the South’ and afterwards imitated big-lipped Uncle Remus. And he recalled the dumb wonder of his roommates when he applied Vaseline to his scalp and brushed his short hair to a crisp shine.”

Dixon’s story gathers in intensity as Jordan and his wife head to Pee Dee to claim the legacy of the grandmother’s farmland. Interwoven with his hegira is that of Jake Williams, who has been living in New Orleans with Mam’Zilie, the gold-toothed, spell-casting, Creole-French-speaking conjure woman. Jake is determined to make his way back to Pee Dee along with Mam’Zilie, whom the spirits have told that she and Jake can claim the land.

The contrasts between the black experience in New England, New Orleans and the South are brought to a head as Jordan begins to sense that he may have been living a lie. He is back home now: “He studied the presence of the wind and the road. Was it telling him to leave now just as he arrived? Or telling him to stay just long enough to feel the redness of the earth again, the redness of his own brown skin? Something out of the ground was speaking to him, Jordan was checking it out, holding.”

Just as Jordan finds himself inexorably drawn to the sights and sounds, the smells and memories of his Southern childhood, the initial awkwardness between Phyllis and the strangers she meets down South is soon resolved.

Though Dixon’s narrative is liberally interlarded with flashbacks and reverie-like interludes, the continuity never suffers. Jordan, his cousins and Jake and Mam’Zilie are brought into ever sharper focus as the story reaches its less than completely predictable climax.

The dualities and contradictions inherent in African-American life, in its folkloric background and its contrasting cosmopolitan sophistication, are superbly captured in a tale that has already won kudos for Dixon, who is currently a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a professor at City University of New York and Queens College. “Trouble the Water,” which has already won the first Excellence in Minority Fiction award from the University of Colorado, is bound to set its author (already established through numerous short stories and poems) more firmly on the way to an illustrious career as a novelist.