NONFICTION - Aug. 23, 1992

FACES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL: The Permanence of Racism by Derrick Bell (Basic: $20; 222 pp.). The first book by African-American law professor Derrick Bell, “And We Are Not Saved” (1987) was as melancholy as the Biblical passage from which it took its name. “The harvest is past,” lamented Jeremiah, “the Summer is ended, and we are not saved.” “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” in contrast, is as angry as the L.A. riots it follows. If Bell was turning his anger inward in the 1987 book--encouraging African-Americans, some critics said, to sink into a depression that fosters dependency--here, he directs his anger outward with a vengeance. Quoting Paulo Freire’s slogan, “Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift,” “Faces” is virtually a declaration of war. Declaring that “black people will never gain full equality in this county,” it is also a manifesto of secession.

Bell is too angry to preach to the unconverted by documenting the perseverence of racism. But even the unconverted will have to admit that the fictional parables that function as his sermons are powerful in their eloquence. “The Afrolantica Awakening,” for instance, chronicles the journey of several hundred thousand African-Americans to a land mass that arises suddenly in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Just as the travelers believe they may have found their homeland in this new Atlantis, the continent disappears in a fog and sinks back into the sea.

Now that Martin Luther King’s birthday is on American calendars and “whites only” signs are off diner doors, it may be difficult for whites to understand why the hopes of many African-Americans have sunk like Bell’s Atlantis. But as one of Bell’s characters, a limo driver, makes clear, the root of the problem lies in racial memory: “A holiday for Dr. King is just another instance--like integration--that black folks work for and white folks grant when they realize--long before we do--that it is mostly a symbol that won’t cost them much and will keep us blacks pacified. It’s an updated version of the glass trinkets and combs they used in Africa a few centuries ago to trick some tribes into selling off their brothers and sisters captured from neighboring tribes.” BOOK MARK. For an excerpt from “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” see the Opinion section, Page 3.