NONFICTION - May 17, 1992

THE HOTTEST WATER IN CHICAGO: On Family, Race, Time, and American Culture by Gayle Pemberton (Faber and Faber: $19.95; 276 pp.). One Sunday in the 1950s, when Gayle Pemberton was in elementary school in Dayton, Ohio, she took over the newspaper route for a boy who had gotten sick. As she lay the paper on one particular stoop, Pemberton writes, a man in his 60s appeared, aimed a shotgun at her, “and said if he ever saw my nigger ass on his porch again he’d blow my head off.” Pemberton, associate director of Afro-American studies at Princeton, doesn’t make anything of the incident. She hardly has to: It speaks for itself, saying volumes about the pervasiveness of racial prejudice in the U.S. “The Hottest Water in Chicago” could be described as a series of essays, but at bottom it is a thinking woman’s autobiography, deeply informed by W.E.B. Du Bois’ belief that blacks in this country suffer from a “double self”--the knowledge of being American and African simultaneously--and are thus denied “a true self-consciousness.” This book is clearly an attempt to discover (perhaps create?) an individual self-consciousness, one based on Pemberton’s family, friends, and life experience, yet somehow independent of the roles to which she was born or was required by society to adopt: daughter, woman, worker, member of a race. “The Hottest Water in Chicago”--the title refers to the peculiar boast made by a hotel that Pemberton’s father, as an executive with the Urban League, was invited to integrate in 1954--is an unusual and engaging work, and although Pemberton’s writing is occasionally formulaic, the book is consistently honest and constructive.