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Albert Murray is eighty-nine years old. THE MAGIC KEYS (Pantheon, $24) is the fourth volume in his "Scooter" series of autobiographical novels. But the hero is still in his twenties and we haven't yet reached World War II. Murray clearly isn't interested in the anguished trajectories of traditional fiction, the shameful secrets of confessional memoir, the vehement dithyrambs of the pamphleteer, nor in settling scores or finding God. In its lyrical passage from down-borne Alabama to the great cities and the Mother Goose realm of "Philamayork," The Marc Keys, like Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, and The Seven League Boots, is less kiss-kiss bang-bang ("the all-American pursuit of the all-American melodramatic climax") than elegy, reverie, memory book, and musical score, as well as a thank-you note to the entire sustaining community of black America.

Scooter wasn't set down on this earth or these pages to suffer so that white people get a clue on how to behave. ("Mockingbirds," I call such cultural productions, after Harper Lee's novel, and many movies from apartheid-era South Africa also mar tyred blacks to help white journalists and lawyers discover scruple.) Scooter was chosen. He was chosen outside Mobile, Alabama, before he entered the third grade; a teacher, Lexine Metcalf, identified him as one of the Talented Tenth, the precious few who must make up for a silent many: "Who if not you, my splendid young man?" Being chosen...

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