He set his first novel, A Different Drummer (which appeared less than a month after his New York Times article) in the recent past, having had the idea for it in high school. Kelley sounded Bronx rather than black, and impersonated Frank Sinatra for the local kids. Jazz was analogous to black writing, played first in all-black dancehalls and moving out to the white mainstream, finally reaching a point where La La Land could let Ryan Gosling explain a black artform to us. Black slang, awkwardly placed in white mouths, sounds, he said, like white audiences clapping on the wrong jazz beat, first and third instead of two and four. He was interested in idiomatic language, and said his grandmother had told him that ‘ofay’, meaning a white man, was pig Latin for ‘foe’, so black idiomatic language was primarily used for secrecy, exclusion and protection.
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