Beetlecreek, p.1
Beetlecreek, page 1
William Demby
Beetlecreek
William Demby was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 25, 1922, and attended college in Clarksburg, West Virginia, before enlisting in World War II and serving in Italy. He graduated from Fisk University in 1947, then moved abroad to Rome, where he spent the next two decades working as a novelist, journalist, and script translator and screenwriter for the Italian cinema. In the late 1960s, Demby joined the faculty at the College of Staten Island, dividing his time between the United States and Italy. His works include Beetlecreek, The Catacombs, Love Story Black, and King Comus. In 2006, he was the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died in Sag Harbor, New York, in 2013.
Books by William Demby
Beetlecreek
The Catacombs
Love Story Black
King Comus
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION 2026
Copyright © 1950, renewed 1977 by William Demby
Introduction copyright © 2026 by S. A. Cosby
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Published by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019. Originally published in hardcover by Rinehart and Co., New York, in 1950.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Demby, William, author
Title: Beetlecreek / William Demby.
Description: First Vintage Books edition. | New York : Vintage Books, 2025.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025012897 (print) | LCCN 2025012898 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: African American teenage boys—Fiction. | City and town life—Fiction. | Male friendship—Fiction. | Race relations—Fiction. | Men, White—Fiction. | West Virginia—Fiction. LCGFT: Psychological fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3507.E5346 B44 2025 (print) | LCC PS3507.E5346 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025012897
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025012898
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9798217007318
Ebook ISBN 9798217007325
Book design by Steve Walker, adapted for ebook
Cover design by Mark Abrams
Cover painting: Blue Madonna (detail), 1961, by Bob Thompson. Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI. Gift of Edward Levine in memory of Bob Thompson (F1983.57); © Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY/Bridgeman Images
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Contents
Introduction to the Vintage Books Edition (2026)
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Four
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
_154715802_
Introduction to the Vintage Books Edition (2026)
William Demby: A Voice Out of the Darkness
When I was first trying to get my work published, more than one potential publisher would reject it with what I like to call “the three-quarters rejection.” They would praise the dialogue, the characters, the plots, but then would end their missive with the clichéd:
“We don’t know how to sell this.”
A part of their reticence was anchored by the idea that no one was interested in stories set in Virginia about poor Black characters that didn’t fit the preapproved narrative I like to call “poverty porn.” Stories that espouse a tortured, painful existence bereft of love or joy or hope. To be honest, that sort of reductive thinking puzzled me. I would think to myself, “Have they never read William Demby?”
* * *
—
William Demby was born on Christmas Day 1922, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A fitting beginning for a man whose talent and verve was, and continues to be, a gift to the world of letters. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to Clarksburg, West Virginia. Demby’s childhood there, while in many ways prosaic, was also shaped by the omnipresent racism and class struggles that permeated most of the country at that time and still affects so many parts of our world today.
Bright and inquisitive, Demby would enroll at West Virginia State University, but his time at WVSU was cut short by the battle trumpets of World War II, which saw him deployed to the Italian front. Demby was not to be dissuaded from his writing practice, however: even on these far-flung shores, he found opportunities for publication in the U.S. Army publication Stars and Stripes.
The love of words, of language, would guide him to Fisk University after the war. There, he would meet the poet Robert Hayden, who mentored Demby and encouraged him to pursue his art.
But it was after graduating from Fisk when Demby’s life truly became the stuff of legend.
In 1947, he moved to Rome, the Eternal City.
For a Black man in the 1940s, escaping the virulent hypocrisy that faced a WWII veteran who had risked his life fighting for freedom abroad just to be denied that same freedom at home must have felt like Dante emerging from the frigid lake of ice in the ninth circle of Hell.
In Rome, Demby found love and joy in a world that so often sought to deny both to people of color. He made a career out of writing, translating screenplays into English for Italian directors, including the iconoclastic Federico Fellini. He worked as the assistant director of dialogue on the film Europe ’51, acted in the film Anna’s Sin, and continued to write for English-language magazines. And alongside the writer Lucia Drudi, whom he married in 1953, he started a family, welcoming his son, James, in 1955.
For all of his incredible creative endeavors, it was his novels that would cement William Demby’s reputation as one of the most important African American writers of the twentieth century. It was during his time in Italy that he completed the first of four novels, Beetlecreek.
Set in a small town in West Virginia, Beetlecreek is a remarkably frank and clear-eyed, for its time, examination of race and passion and prejudice in America. Mainly constructed around the friendship between a kindhearted—if somewhat naïve—elderly white man, a troubled young Black teenager, and his dispirited uncle, a frustrated artist nearly at the end of his rope, Beetlecreek has a lyrical dreamlike quality that invokes the work of Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre but with the added gravitas of a rhythmic existential longing, like a novel-length blues song in a minor key.
Love, laughter, pain, persecution, and perseverance are all on display and rendered with a deft touch by a writer who has tapped into the eternal muse in a way very few ever do. Demby makes Beetlecreek a real place with history and secrets and weight and heft in the same way William Faulkner made Yoknapatawpha County a place so vibrant one thinks they could visit it. Beetlecreek is simultaneously a classic narrative and an experimental exploration of what a novel is and what it can do.
It’s at times tender and beautiful, and at other times it shines a light on the ugliness that can pour forth from our friends and neighbors with the force of a geyser.
But Demby wasn’t done pushing literary boundaries.
In 1965, he published The Catacombs.
Reminiscent of the work of the Beat writers, specifically William S. Burroughs, The Catacombs further stretches and pushes the limits of metafiction and the traditional structure of a novel. It tells the story of Bill Demby, a fictional stand-in for the author, as he attempts to complete a novel about his friend Doris, who is living the proverbial high life as an assistant to a famous actress while romancing an Italian count. Interspersed with newspaper headlines and other media, The Catacombs moves from a Holly Golightly narrative to an angst-filled search for definable truth and the meaning of our journey through this chaotic world. Beatific, powerful, and moving, The Catacombs stands as a testament to the deep and abiding artistic imagination that would make Demby stand out from his contemporaries in a way that can t be overstated.
Love Story Black, his third novel, finds an author at his most surreal and satirical. The story of a professor trying to interview a former African American chanteuse who was once the toast of Europe, Love Story Black takes us on a whimsical, erotic, and at times hilarious sojourn into the literary bourgeoise. Guided by Demby’s razor-sharp wit and poetic prose, Love Story Black crackles with gorgeous dialogue even as the story careens along an unbeaten path. Reading this novel is like riding on a roller coaster while sipping mimosas as the world shifts and changes like a kaleidoscope. And Demby’s posthumous, genre-defying King Comus cements his place in the literacy pantheon.
But it was Beetlecreek that started it all. That first opened the doors that Demby would ultimately knock down for all time.
Reading William Demby is akin to listening to Thelonious Monk play for Billie Holiday as she sings “Strange Fruit,” then shifts into “God Bless the Child.” Demby’s work is fluid, fierce, and fabulous. He defies categorization, refuses to submit to the prevailing genre limitations, and continues to push us as readers and human beings to seek the truth of love, of life, and ultimately of our existence on this floating rock that orbits a giant ball of fire in the outer dark.
S. A. Cosby
July 2025
S. A. Cosby is a New York Times bestselling writer from southeastern Virginia. He is the author of All the Sinners Bleed, which was on more than forty best-of-the-year lists, including Barack Obama’s; Edgar Award finalist Razorblade Tears; and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Blacktop Wasteland. He has also won the Anthony Award, ITW Thriller Award, Barry Award, Macavity Award, Black Caucus American Library Association Award, and Audie Award and has been longlisted for the American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.
Part One
Chapter One
Always when he looked in the mirror his eyes were different. Sometimes they peered from out of the broken glass asking an unanswerable question, sometimes they were angry and damning, sometimes they were sullen and brooding—too often they were the eyes of a dead man, jellied and blank. This ritual of looking at himself went on every day as soon as he got out of bed. His thick, blunt fingers would clutch at each other, moving back and forth slowly like the antennae of insects. His long, fleshy nose with its countless red pinpricks would expand and contract in time to his breathing and the gray-striped lips that refused to open over the severe outward slant of the front teeth would strain themselves into the subtlest kind of smile. There were deep vertical wrinkles along his cheek and at the corners of his eyes which gave an impression of kindliness. These wrinkles moved up and down, restlessly recording the changing climates of his emotions. Thus he would stand, sometimes for over an hour, a silent ugly man who could no longer tell whether he was inside the mirror or inside himself.
Bill Trapp had not long been at the mirror that afternoon when he heard a rustling in the bushes near the stonewall. Quickly he ran his hand through his matted hair and put on a huge felt hat. He walked very slowly, half on tiptoes, until he arrived at a bush. There, he kneeled down on the cold mud and parted the branches. He waited until he heard the rustling again and then rose high enough to see the intruders. His heart beat fast as it always did. Always when they came he would look into their faces. He would be filled with uncontrollable excitement knowing that he was seeing them while they couldn’t see him. Faster and faster his heart would beat until, filled with shame and rage, he would rush out at them waving his arms wildly, shouting, almost screaming long after they had disappeared down the road.
In fifteen years he had had only one visitor, a tramp who came to his door to beg because he was too proud to beg from the Negroes down by the bridge. He gave coffee and sandwiches to this tramp, who, as soon as he had finished eating, went away. Once, some colored ladies started to come into the yard and he chased them away with his shotgun. Sometimes, out of a furious impulse to break the clammy silence, he would begin singing songs he had heard in the towns along the river. Once a week, when he went to town to fetch the provisions he needed to live on or to sell the fruits and vegetables he grew, he found himself still talking in whispers, and people who spoke with him then would whisper too.
This time there were four boy Negroes under the tree. Three of them, wild-eyed and grinning, were signaling frantically to the boy in the tree to hurry and throw down to them some of the waxy, red apples.
The face of the boy in the tree held Bill Trapp’s attention. He had never seen this boy before although the faces of the others were all familiar. All the boys were between the ages of thirteen and fifteen but the face of this boy seemed at once younger and older. It was a gentle, pear-shaped face; the eyes were clever and slanted and there was a serious monkey expression on it as the boy tried to concentrate on reaching for the apples.
For almost ten minutes the white man watched. Soon he felt the familiar itchy nervousness coming. But instead of rage this time, he was filled with curiosity. Very careful not to rustle the leaves, he rose to his feet; then, slowly and silently, he walked toward where the boys were crouching.
As soon as they saw him, the boys on the ground fled shrieking, but he paid no attention to them. His eyes were on the boy in the tree and toward him he walked. Even as he came nearer and nearer the tree and saw that the boy made no move to escape, he felt that it was he himself who should be fleeing. Closer and closer he came to the tree and slower and slower became his footsteps. Then, as he realized there was no backing away, that he would have to speak to the boy, he was filled with complete panic. His sweaty fingers deep through the holes in his pocket pulled at the long hairs of his thigh.
The boy’s eyes swept back and forth like the eyes of a movable valentine. His pouting lips were parted and he breathed with difficulty.
“Come down,” Bill Trapp said, and while the words were still forming on his lips, he realized that by an act of his own will he was ending his fifteen years of silence and solitude.
He bade the boy Negro sit down on the porch while he went into the shack, mumbling incoherently that he had something to do. The moment he was inside, he peeped out the window and was surprised that the boy seemed not to be frightened but was relaxed against the two-by-four support of the roof. Realizing that the boy was not going to run away as he had at first hoped and feared, he experienced a strange feeling—a feeling of tenderness toward the boy and indeed, to all people. With no more preparation than that—in one instant—the fifteen-year-old desire to be alone was wiped away.
He ran to the mirror and looked at himself. He tried to smile. For years and years he hadn’t washed his teeth. He found a broken piece of comb and tried to do something with his hair. He found two cracked cups and filled them with cider he had bought recently from the A&P. These he carried out to the boy on the porch who turned with wide-eyed surprise to face him. Still trembling, he offered one of the cups to the boy. They drank nervously and silently. Neither would look at the other.
“I didn’ mean nothing by it,” the boy said finally, holding the empty cup close to his ear as if he were listening to a seashell.
The sound of the boy’s voice came as a shock to him, came as a clap of thunder, and he didn’t know what he should say.
“You kids should ask for the fruit…all you had to do was ask and you coulda had all you wanted.”
The cider was all gone—they each had had three cups—and there was no longer any excuse for the boy to stay. Once, the boy turned toward him and looked straight into his eyes. Bill Trapp blushed and tried desperately to pry his mouth open in some kind of smile. He felt dizzy, tingling all over with thoughts that appeared and disappeared in his consciousness like so many fireflies. He kept saying to himself: Chase the kid away, give him a bawling out and chase him away. Instead, he asked the boy his name. And then asked him where he lived, realizing after a few moments that he was having a conversation with him. The boy’s name was Johnny Johnson. He was from Pittsburgh and had come to stay with his aunt and uncle while his mother was in the hospital. He wanted to look at the boy’s face again to see if he was scared. He found himself rooting in his nostril, wiping his thick finger on his pants. But the boy didn’t see this and he was relieved. He coughed and began to fidget.
