Blues Dancing
by Diane McKinney-Whetstone
List Price: $24.00
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0688149952
Publisher: HarperCollins
For the last twenty years, slim, dazzling beautiful Verdi Mae has composed a
quiet life for herself with her former professor, Rowe. He makes her feel so
good, even as stifles her with his care--until, walking home from her cousin
Kitt's, Verdi smells butter in the foggy evening air. It is the fragrance of the
future beckoning. It is the scent of falling in love. It is also the harbinger of
change. Verdi's first love has returned to town: Johnson, the boy from the
back streets of Philadelphia who captured Verdi's heart when the two of
them were in college. Their relationship was unalloyed sweetness until
Johnson taught Verdi to love heroin.
With Johnson's reappearance, questions about the choices Verdi has
made and the person she's become rise inexorably to the surface. As the
ground beneath her shifts, Verdi must discover the one person who can
save her--herself. In vivid, incandescent prose, Diane McKinney-Whetstone
offers an unforgettable tour de force about love, betrayal, and faith.
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1. Johnson and Verdi "watched their blues dancing like they wished that they could." Why do you think McKinney-Whetstone chose this as a title for her book
2. "Even though Rowe fell in love with the restored version of her, he'd never really let go of the impending-doom anxiety that Verdi might leave him" (p. 13). Although Rowe is purportedly the protector, he lives in constant fear. What is he afraid of losing? Why does he feel such animosity toward Kitt?
3. Posie apologies to Johnson for overburdening him with expectation. To what extent is her expectation tied to race and class?
4. Throughout her life, Verdi seeks a balance between security and freedom. How do Rowe, Johnson, Kitt, Posie, Hortense, Leroy, and Sage navigate between these two extremes? To whom do they look for guidance? What are obstacles in their paths?
5. Kitt lives in doubt of Leroy's love for her mother. Posie never suspects that her niece is a junkie. It takes Verdi over twenty years to suspect that Johnson told Rowe where to find Verdi the night Johnson left. What is it that keeps them from seeing the truth?
6. Blues Dancing is alive with scent, sound, sight, taste, touch--each of the senses abound in Diane McKinney-Whetstone's prose. Choose an example you find particularly evocative and discuss why.
7. How do you think Verdi, Rowe, and Johnson changed over twenty years? How do you imagine each of them will continue to change?
8. Leroy tells Verdi of two roads, "a slick superhighway, sure to get the man to his destination with unparalleled swiftness" and a road on which "the destination is not assuredbut what a journey" (p. 290). For Leroy, where was this destination? For Verdi? Do you agree with Verdi that sometimes the "highway" is the better path?
9. Posie plunges into romance after romance, but her daughter is more careful, more restrained. What is it that finally liberates Kitt, enabling her to take a risk, to open herself to loving Bruce, and to see what happens? What was she waiting for?
10. Because Sage cannot speak, she experiences the world in colors. How do these colors infuse the prose? How does Sage's silence function in the novel? What is holding her back? What are the other incarnations of voicelessness in this story?
11. Discuss McKinney-Whetstone's use of food and eating throughout the novel.
12. Near the end of the novel, Verdi tells Johnson, "'No more giving up power that's not even mine to give up, nor yours to take,'" (p. 306). Whose power is it? What is the nature of that power? How do you think Verdi has come to this realization?
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