A Place Without Twilight

Book excerpt: In the New Orleans of the ‘30s and ‘40s, things—and people—are supposed to be black and white. Cille and her light-skinned brothers are neither. They are “the color that looks not-quite white next to a white man, and not-quite colored next to a colored man. It was a non-color in a place where you had to be something.” The daughter of a dreamy alcoholic father who introduces Cille to “Mr. Keats and Mr. Shelley” but who exits her life too soon, and a mother who teaches her children not the love of God but the fear of him, young Cille struggles for balance and identity in a world where race and class define people for life, and where her brothers destroy themselves beating against the bars of the cage of a divided culture. “A Place Without Twilight is the best novel of 1958, and Peter Feibleman the most exciting discovery.”—NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE “An artistic achievement....An ardent new talent telling in fine, sensuous prose the story of an inbetween Alice in a wonderland of blacks and whites.”—NEW YORK TIMES “Engrossing, brilliant, moving.... A full-fledged, first rate achievement.”—CHICAGO TRIBUNE