Belton attended Philadelphia’s Penn Charter, a pri-
vate Quaker school, before attending and graduat-
ing from Vermont’s Bennington College and later
Virginia’s Hollins College. In his personal narra-
tives Belton speaks lovingly and proudly of his
grandparents and great-grandparents. For exam-
ple, in the introduction to Speak My Name (1995),
Belton speaks the name of his great-great-great-
grandfather, Albert Stone, a Virginia slave, mas-
ter hunter, and equestrian who taught dignity to
white men with his stellar character, will, and de-
termination as a member of a race that, although
it “had lost everything... still had the heroism to
re-create itself in a lost new world” (3). Born the
third son of a father whose name he fails to men-
tion at first—although it is later given as Charles,
Belton writes, “My father worked himself to death,
a man from whom I inherited a legacy of mascu-
line silence about one’s own pain going back seven
generations” (3). Before publishing his first novel,
Almost Midnight (1986), Belton worked as a re-
porter for Newsweek magazine and taught creative
writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Although Martha and Peanut are the central
characters of Almost Midnight, their narratives
center around the life and impact of their father,
Reverend Daddy Poole, a biracial former spiri-
tual leader, preacher, millionaire incestuous pimp,
numbers runner, and drug dealer, who, “as old as
Methuselah,” lies on his deathbed at the beginning
of the novel. Although Peanut hates Poole with a
vengeance and welcomes his death, Margaret, her
half sister, whom Poole raises after she was aban-
doned by her mother, Poole’s most prized prosti-
tute, believes he is invisible and, indeed, “that he is
God and won’t die” (37). Martha will not abandon
Poole or curse him, as Peanut does, on his death-
bed, despite the horrific stories of abuse, neglect,
incest, and exploitation that, she knows from per-
sonal experience, can be attributed to him. Peanut,
considering her father a soulless man, tells Martha,
“Your daddy got to pay for the shit he dealt women”
(28). Martha remains suspicious of Peanut’s mo-
tives, convinced that Peanut is interested purely in
developing further the lesbian relationship they, as
young women who were sexually abused by their
father, had explored together. Peanut refutes this:
“I don’t believe in living in the past. This ain’t even
about the past really. It’s about all the stories of the
women what lived it—and seen—coming together
into one story” (25).
During his young adulthood, Poole, the son
of a Louisiana prostitute and voodoo priestess,
Mozelle, who had given him up for adoption, finds
his mother, who by then had become well known
for giving “spells to people to perform good or
evil” (129). She takes him and at first trains him to
“identify those plants used for healing and divina-
tion and [tells] him of their different uses” (131).
Later, becoming the oracle of the snake, she per-
forms the proper rituals to empower him with her
magical gifts. In Newark, the Eden to which they
migrate with great expectation, Poole is loved and
feared by the members of his Metaphysical Church
of the Divine Investigation, his prostitutes, and his
children because of his knowledge of the occult,
specifically voodoo and other forms of African
traditional religious beliefs and practices, that
he inherited from his mother. “You could pay to
have private sessions with him, and there was a
time he sold cures and spells for everything from
TB to love trouble.... [H]e sold magic powders
and potions with names like Lucky Jazz, Get Away
and Easy Life” (47). In the end, however, neither
his knowledge nor his daughter can save him from
death, which comes at midnight.
Ultimately, Almost Midnight is about self-em-
powerment: “you must read the scripture of your
own heart.” This is particularly true of women,
who in the novel too often seem to be totally de-
pendent on men, who exploit and abuse them;
this gives the novel a feminist twist. It is also about
black migration from the South to the North and
the inevitable disappointment blacks encounter
when their naively imagined primordial space
turns out to be a nightmare. Ironically, before mi-
grating to Newark, Poole envisions it as a place
“where gas-powered automobiles were plentiful
and parks with lakes and fine trees lay in the thick
of granite and limestone” (135). A postmodern
world of alienation and destruction, Newark is a
place where deferred dreams were manifested in
“the conflagration of the 1967 riots” and attested
to with “burning streets and burned-out, gutted-42 Belton, Don