Driving the King (20 page)

I
am thankful for the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hemingway Foundation, PEN New England, Ucross Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Baton Rouge Area Foundation for funding and residencies that helped me to complete this novel.

Thank you to the staff of the Rosa Parks Museum and the Davis Theatre for the Performing Arts for tours and notes on Montgomery history. Both facilities are entities of Troy University Montgomery, an important center of downtown preservation.

I also appreciate the efforts of Alabama State University and those involved in the salvage and restoration of Nat King Cole's childhood home. I am likewise grateful for the work of Mr. Edward Davis, owner of the Ben Moore Hotel, who granted me access to the facility and answered questions about Centennial Hill and Montgomery in the 1950s.

I appreciate the work of the Paley Center for the Media, locations in New York and Los Angeles, where hours of Nat King Cole footage are available for public view and research.

Thank you to the staff of the Emory University Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. The collected papers of Almena Lomax provided deeply engaging insight into her work chronicling the civil rights movement.

I have shared this work with my fellow
Callaloo
Creative Writing Workshop faculty, Maaza Mengiste, Gregory Pardlo, and Vievee Francis. Thanks to them and to
Callaloo
editor Dr. Charles Rowell for generous feedback, support, and encouragement.

I am indebted to Sanderia Smith and Nelly Rosario for their generous notes on the novel. I also appreciate the good counsel of Dr. Kern Jackson and our conversations on Albert Murray and the Alabama blues aesthetic.

I am likewise grateful for the support of Marita Golden and the Hurston/Wright workshops for helping me to shape my voice. I continue to cherish the instruction I received at Howard University and the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Virginia.

As always, I thank my wife, Laura, and our boys, Ellis and Cole, for their love, support, and patience. Thanks to my mother, Caroline Yelding; my father, Leon Howard;
my sister, R. Jai Gillum; and my brother-in-law, Andrew Gillum.

I am, as always, thankful for the support and good counsel of my editor, Claire Wachtel, and my agent, Dorian Karchmar, whose advocacy and feedback have supported and enhanced my journey through publishing.

I am thankful to so many in my hometown, Montgomery, Alabama. Most of those who made the bus boycott successful did not become famous, but they shared their stories with younger generations. As a youngster I met some of the activists, and I surely crossed paths with the anonymous many.

We can never know or call every name, but we can show them the work made possible by their efforts, sacrifices, and triumphs.

RAVI HOWARD
won the 2008 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for his novel
Like Trees, Walking
. He was also a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Howard has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts. Howard's work has appeared in
Callaloo
, the
Massachusetts Review
, the
New York Times
, and on NPR's
All Things Considered
. As a sports producer with NFL Films, he won an Emmy in 2005 for his work on
Inside the NFL
. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Cover design by Jarrod Taylor

Cover photograph: © The Granger Collection, NYC (front)

Like Trees, Walking

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

DRIVING THE KING.
Copyright © 2015 by Ravi Howard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-052961-1

EPub Edition January 2015 ISBN 9780062199157

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