A drop of patience

At the age of five, a blind African-American boy is handed over to a brutal state home. Here Ludlow Washington will suffer for eleven years, until his prodigious musical talent provides him an unlikely ticket back into the world.  The property of a band, playing for down-and-outs in a southern dive, Ludlow’s pioneering flair will take him to New York and the very top of the jazz scene – where his personal demons will threaten to drag him back down to the bottom.  A Drop of Patience is the story of a gifted and damaged man entirely set apart – by blindness, by race, by talent – who must wrestle with adversity and ambition to generate the acceptance and self-worth that have always eluded him. 
Translated (to French) by Éric Moreau

William Melvin Kelley (1937–2017) was an American writer, regarded as an overlooked forerunner of the Black Arts Movement. Born in New York, he gained attention with his debut novel A Different Drummer (1962), a visionary work that explored racial themes through experimental prose. Although his work was largely forgotten for some time, it has recently been rediscovered for its avant-garde approach to the African American experience.