'When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." -- First Corinthians: 13:1.
The trouble with Charlisle Lyles is that she speaks as a child when her book pleads for the voice of an adult. Her portrayal of four pivotal years in her young life during the turbulent period following the slaying of Martin Luther King Jr. is often charming.
But the memoir lacks Ms. Lyles' perspective as an adult, which appears only infrequently.
Ms. Lyles might have benefitted from the techniques used in " Freedom's Children," by Ellen Levine, the recollections of adults who as children played roles in the civil rights movement.
Because she didn't, what might have been an important examination of life among African-American government housing project residents after the riots of the late '60s falls short because Ms. Lyles insisted on limiting her observations to those of a 14-year-old.
There could have been more. Note her observation: " In the King-Kennedy Homes, Black Power and pride disappeared in the retreating steps of the militant marchers. We were left with an angry sense of us and them-ness, our collective poverty overwhelming, our immobility staggering. Compressed into six city blocks where no whites were to be found, we had no target and no outlet for fighting the oppression the Panthers had urged us to fight. We turned on ourselves. It happened fast, like insects sealed in an air-tight jar: frantic buzzing, frantic flight, colliding and dying."
The metamorphosis didn't happen that fast. People did not over-night go from being proud of living in one of Cleveland's newest housing projects to being so damn tired of the place they casually urinated in its halls.
Ms. Lyles' superficial treatment of the events that made " Black Power and pride" disappear is insufficient. As an adult -- a newspaper reporter at that -- surely she could have done the research to place her personal story more thoroughly in the context of the history.
Ms. Lyles hedges on important but possibly embarrassing details in discussing her brother being sent to a juvenile detention center for two years for stealing " cigarettes and a jar of pigs' feet." The sentence seems particularly harsh. Ms. Lyles provides no explanation.
She romanticizes her father -- a shiftless, alcoholic wife beater and family deserter -- arguing too simply that his plight was all due to a mysterious, unexplained letter.
This is not a bad book. But as someone who also personally witnessed a debilitating change in how housing project residents lived after King died, I was distressed that the book fell short. It could have been so much more.
Harold Jackson, a City Hall reporter for The Sun, lived in a housing project in Birmingham, Ala., during the same period Charlisle Lyles writes about. A reporter and editor for 20 years, in 1991 he won the Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing.
"Do I Dare Disturb the Universe: From the Projects to Prep School," by Charlisle Lyles. 228 pages. Winchester, Mass: Faber and Faber Inc. $21.95