Jedgement Day is exemplary among Pawley’s
one-act plays. Zeke Porter does not share the reli-
gious zeal of his wife, Minerva, who is concerned
about his salvation. Whereas Minerva attends
church every Sunday, Zeke goes solely on commu-
nion Sunday, when free wine is served. Moreover,
Zeke untiringly argues, the Bible sets aside Sun-
day as a day of rest. “An’ dat’s jus’ what I’m gonna
do!” In a dream, Zeke finds himself after death
standing before Gabriel and Mephistopheles on
Judgment Day. The two emissaries gamble for his
soul, but neither comes out a winner. They decide
to divide his body between them. Zeke awakens
as the devil’s agent comes after him with a knife.
Hearing the singing and worshipping across the
street from his home, Zeke decides he still has
time to be saved. However, he also decides he still
has time for a nap and goes back to sleep.
Jedgement Day is filled with humor. Pawley’s
use of black dialect is reminiscent of the folk char-
acters and culture in ZORA NEALE HURSTON’s short
stories, such as “Sweat.” In many ways, Pawley uses
his play as folklore to satirize the black church
and churchgoers, who may laugh upon seeing the
play but simultaneously recognize themselves in
Zeke’s behavior, Minerva’s commitment to Zeke,
and Preacher Brown’s fire and brimstone preach-
ing style. In the end, Jedgement Day represents
well black orality, which is central to the African-
American literary tradition.
Wilfred D. SamuelsPerry, Richard H. (1944– )
A New York native who was born in the Bronx and
raised in Monticello, Perry, a product of the local
school system, is a graduate of City College of New
York. He holds an M.F.A. degree from Columbia
University. For nearly 40 years, Perry has been on
the faculty of the department of English at Pratt
Institute in Brooklyn, where he is currently the
dean of liberal arts and sciences.
Perry has authored three novels: Changes
(1974), Montgomery’s Children (1984), and No
Other Tale to Tell (1994). Montgomery’s Children,
which was reissued in 1998, won the Quality Pa-
perback Books’ “New Voices” Award in 1985. Like
TONI MORRISON in her novels, particularly SULA,
Song of Solomon, and Paradise, Perry, in Mont-
gomery’s Children, is concerned with the transfor-
mation of an American small town, Montgomery,
New York, into an urban, crime-ridden space and
its impact on the lives of the affluent, committed
Christian black community of freedom seekers
who were isolated in the woodlands of central
New York before the metamorphosis.
Montgomery’s Children might be described as
an “ecological novel,” given Perry’s central theme
of deforestation. At the beginning of the novel the
narrator explains, “In 1948, people in Montgom-
ery, New York, did not understand that natural
resources are limited. So although the opposition
to the racetrack was vocal and well organized,
none of its energy was directed to the preserva-
tion of trees” (3). Soon a four-lane highway con-
nects the formerly undeveloped land between the
town and the track, accompanied with restau-
rants, gasoline stations, motels with waterbeds,
and X-rated movies. Even the dope dealer finds a
market in this American town to ply his trade. By
1980, when the novel ends, more than the town
has been transformed, for equally visibly defec-
tive are the now-polluted lives of Montgomery’s
residents, whose secret lives include murder, infi-
delity, infanticide, and corruption of every sort.
Like Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, who
wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, Perry,
writing at its end, reminds readers that provin-
cialism associated with small-town America
remains more fiction than fact. It is only an imag-
ined Garden of Eden.
The recipient of a National Endowment for the
Arts award, Perry is also a three-time winner of
the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award
for Fiction.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Perry, Richard. Montgomery’s Children: A Novel. 2d
ed. Columbus, Miss.: Genesis Press, 1998.Kaye Richards410 Perry, Richard H.