Category Archives: African-American history

The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film, by Bruce Chadwick****

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thereelcivilwarI found this gem at my favorite used bookstore in Seattle, Magus Books, which is just a block from the University of Washington. Its strength, as the title suggests, is in tracing the story of the American Civil War as told by the cinema. Those interested in the way in which movie impacts both culture and education in the USA would do well to find this book and read it.

Chadwick spends a considerable amount of time and space carefully documenting the myth produced by Gone with the Wind, a completely unrealistic, idealized portrait of the ruling planter class of the deep South. Many of us would, in years gone by, have been inclined to dismiss this concern by saying that after all, the book and movie were primarily intended as a love story, but Chadwick demonstrates that this is not so. He ferrets out actual interviews with Margaret Mitchell herself in which she insists that this is exactly the way it was. Her sources? Former plantation owners, of course.

To this day, if an avid reader goes to Goodreads.com and under the caption “explore”, goes to “listopia” and from there selects a list of readers’ favorite Civil War titles, GWTW will place within the top ten, and sometimes be the foremost title, selected over nonfiction as well as more accurate fiction. I find this horrifying.

The research regarding the Civil War itself is nothing I haven’t seen before, but Chadwick makes excellent use of strong secondary sources to document the fact that Black folks in the pre-war South were neither happy nor well treated. He takes apart the myth Mitchell constructed in a meticulous manner, one damn brick at a time. Hell yes. About ten percent of the way into the book, Chadwick’s removed, scholarly tone changes to one of articulate outrage, and I found this tremendously satisfying.

Chadwick follows Civil War films forward, after first also examining Birth of a Nation, a painfully racist film which was famous at the time because of its length; its original claim to fame was not content, but technology. For those that have not seen the film, this will be interesting reading also, and those that have seen it may pick up some new information as well.

A couple of generations later, the more realistic and highly acclaimed Roots television miniseries told the story of Black America in a way that hadn’t been represented on film before. Chadwick is again careful in his documentation and clear in his explanation.

The book’s final film treatment is of the most positive and accurate film depiction of African-Americans is the film Glory. This reviewer used this film in the classroom. It depicts the Black Massachusetts infantry that tried to take Fort Wagner and in doing so, inspired President Lincoln to order more Black troops to be armed and trained for combat in the American Civil War.

For those interested in the connection between film and American history, and of the American Civil War in particular, this book is recommended.

MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson, by Steve Knopper****

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MJthegeniusofmichaeljacksonJackson was a musical prodigy whose talent was almost limitless. His brilliant career was derailed by scandal, and his final 50 city tour was aborted by his death the night before it was to commence. Knopper does the best job of objectively recounting Jackson’s life and death that I have seen so far. His portrait is intimate without being prurient. Thanks go to Net Galley and Scribner for the DRC, which I received in exchange for this honest review.

Jackson was born in the 1950’s, a time when the race barrier kept Black performers from being seen by a general audience, with only the rarest exceptions. Black folks could play music for Black folks, and nobody else. The family was terribly poor, with eight or nine people crowded into a house better suited to three or four. They lived in Gary, a steel town in which Black poverty was more the rule than the exception. His father was a struggling musician until it became obvious that his sons had inherited his talent plus some. By the time Michael was five years old, he was the charismatic center of the Jackson Five, who soon were contracted to Motown, the center of African-American music in the USA.

Knopper explains how the family’s progression from a Motown act, where they were not allowed to actually play their own instruments on stage and could not use music they wrote themselves; to an independent family act, apart from one son who chose to remain with Motown; to the final day when Michael got himself an agent and a lawyer and set out on his own, divorcing his family so that he could have full control over a solo act. Until he was independent, iconic creations such as Thriller and Smooth Criminal would most likely never have been launched. And he recounts the family drama that ensued, with bodyguards pulling guns to discourage Michael’s angry brothers when they tried to force their way past the gates of his estate, shouting that he owed them money.

As a fan of excellent music and performance, I was sucked into the maelstrom produced by the press both during his life and afterward. It’s embarrassing to admit how completely I was played. For years I would not permit Jackson’s music to be played in my home because I thought he was a sick creep who used his fame to gain private, inappropriate contact with smooth-faced young boys. Somehow it escaped me that he had never been proved guilty in a court of law; on the one hand, it made sense to pay one family off in order to take the heat off his career, and Knopper documents the advice experienced, famous musicians gave Jackson to do whatever he had to do to shut that shit down so he could go back to focusing on music. But the press was merciless, and the payoff, which came too late to do damage control effectively, was portrayed as a tacit admission of guilt. And I bought it.

A few months after Jackson’s death, I was in a hotel room on vacation with my family, and my youngest son, who is Black, turned on the television, and there was the second round that Knopper documents, the round of memorial tributes that brought a lump to one’s throat as we saw Jackson’s miraculous career unspooled. He pioneered music videos in so many ways I had failed to appreciate, and he employed so many Black musicians that might never have had a steady job, while at the same time reaching out to Caucasian performers as well, creating a bridge between Black music and Caucasian sounds, transitioning from disco-like R and B to the “King of Pop”. I was horrified at the way I had misjudged him.

About a year ago, I read Michael Jackson’s memoir, Moonwalk, and while I took parts of it with a grain of salt, I also came to believe that the guy just didn’t know what was socially appropriate at times because he had never had a normal childhood. I was sold. Poor Michael.

Knopper has a more realistic take on all this. He certainly should; he used over 450 sources, and he wasn’t anybody’s mouthpiece. And so the truth turns out to be more complicated.

What left me somewhat stunned, in the end, was not the sex scandal, and it wasn’t the postmortem resurrection of Jackson as some sort of musical saint. Instead, I was absolutely floored at the number of people that worked for the guy, some of them for a lot of years, who he left without paychecks for weeks, then months on end. Jackson had a tremendous load of debt, was on the verge of bankruptcy and was saved only by his investment in song publishing, a piece of advice given him by friend Paul McCartney that he had followed through on. Yet he continued to buy one extreme luxury estate after another, holding residences he would likely never use again, shopping extravagantly (the example of taking a new friend shopping and telling him to do it “like this”, as he swept entire shelves of merchandise into his cart, astounded me) while leaving his employees, regular working folk with bills to pay for the most part, with no paychecks. There was money for shopping, but not for them, and some of them took him to court for it. It made me a bit sick. This man knew what it was like to be poor, and he knew what hunger was like, but as long as he didn’t have to see the people that he had betrayed, he could continue to play out the Peter Pan thread, irresponsibly trashing the lives of those he had told they could count on him, then leaving them with empty wallets and eviction notices.

Maybe you think I have over-shared. I have news; this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you have followed this review all the way to its conclusion, you will like this book. It is available for purchase October 20.

W.E.B. DuBois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, by WEB DuBois*****

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WEB DuBois SpeaksI read this book about 2 years ago, and then found I was intimidated by the 60 multicolored sticky notes that I had used to flag all the brilliant passages, and so I told myself I would review it…later. I didn’t have a DRC this time; I bought that book fair and square at full jacket price from Pathfinder Press many years ago, and then my life was too hectic for me to find time for it. And make no mistake, this is not a collection you want to take on while multitasking. This is deep, serious, articulate writing from one of the most brilliant civil rights leaders the world has yet known. And so although he has been dead for a long time, like Dr. Martin Luther King, his words have made him immortal. I recently read and reviewed another title about this luminary scholar and class fighter, and that reminded me that I had some unfinished reviewing to do for him…or maybe for me. Here we go.

It was DuBois that wrote The Souls of Black Folk, a wrenching reminder that even those Caucasian folks up north that think they have no racial biases, often have some issues they haven’t yet faced. It was true when he wrote it, and I’m sorry to say it is largely true today as well. In the letters and speeches, he takes the pain laid bare in that famous book and explains what the source of racism is, and what we can do about it.

Dr. King wrote the intro to this series of speeches and letters, and I actually liked that introduction better than I like the Dream speech. It has more substance. When you get this book, for heaven’s sake, don’t skip the introduction. In fact, the book is worth having just for the introduction.

Because it is a collection rather than a memoir, it isn’t linear. The opening text is a short overview of his own life, and so when we come to the second piece in the book, the reader steps backwards in time. Although it’s harsh and hard to read in some places because of the writer’s capacity to convey the pain that he and other Black folk have endured so that everyone can at least taste it for a moment, there is more to it than that. This volume is singularly useful, because in addition to laying America’s problem out bare and plain, DuBois has concrete recommendations for change. They are radical, but then we’ve seen what band-aid measures and the electoral process has done for Black folk, and anyone that regards the matter with any degree of seriousness has to recognize that what’s happened so far is a train wreck, primarily for African-Americans and other people of color, but also for all Americans, because those of us that have lived here for our entire lives have been denied the capacity to find out what it’s like to live without racism.

Is that asking too much?

DuBois became a deeply political individual, a Marxist that founded the NAACP, and eventually left that same organization because of political disagreement. He provides a thorough explanation of his experiences and reasoning. When he presents the problem as an economic one, it provides a path forward, and although he is gone now, it isn’t too late for the rest of us to climb on board, if we care deeply enough to do so.

DuBois’s speeches and letters reflect the progress of his thinking, and so some of what he says toward the end is very different from the ideas set forth earlier. It’s a good idea to read it in order, even though it’s a collection, because then the reader can see his personal and political evolution. I don’t think there has ever been anyone more articulate, more brilliant as a writer and speaker, than DuBois.

If you agree that the USA needs big change in order to end the institutions and practices that have created second-class citizenship for African-Americans, and if you want to see justice done for the families of all the men, women, and children that have lost their lives at the hands of racist cops and vigilantes even during the tenure of America’s first Black president, then you ought to get this book. It’s radical, but maybe it’s time to consider radical measures. Because the government and the elected officials that run it won’t correct this problem for us. We can’t leave it in the hands of others; we have to do this ourselves.

And DuBois explains it better than anyone else.

The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, by Aldon Morris*****

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thescholardeniedMorris considers DuBois the father of American sociology, and Morris is right. This is, of course, not the first time a Black man was robbed of credit for an accomplishment that was instead credited to a Caucasian American. It happens all the time. But until I ran across this scholarly study, I hadn’t thought about DuBois and sociology because I had never studied the latter. As an admirer of DuBois’ historical and political role, I was drawn to this book when I found it on Net Galley. Thank you to that excellent site as well as University of California Press for the DRC, which I was given in exchange for an honest review.
It is available for purchase now.

DuBois was a venerable intellectual, an academic light years ahead of most Americans of any racial or ethnic background. He was the first Black man to graduate from Harvard University, and in addition to his graduate work there, he also studied in Berlin under such luminaries as Max Weber and others. In Europe, he was treated as an equal by those he studied with, and I found myself wondering a trifle sadly—for him, not for us in the USA—why he chose to return here. And the answer is so poignant, so sweetly naïve, that I wanted to sit down and cry when I found it. Because once he had the empirical facts with which to debunk the whole US-Negro-inferiority mis-school of mis-thought, he genuinely believed he would be able to elevate African-Americans to a state of equality in the USA by laying out the facts. The racists that created Jim Crow laws in the south and an unofficial state of cold racism that let Black folk in the Northern states know where they were welcome and where they were not, would surely roll away, he thought, if he could reasonably haul out his charts, his graphs, his statistics, and demonstrate flawlessly, once and for all, that discrimination against Black people was based on incorrect information.

See what I mean? I could just cry for him.

So although DuBois was the first American to go to Europe, study sociology, and return with more and better credentials than any American academic, he could not persuade anyone with authority to bring about change, was not even allowed to present his findings to anybody except Black people in traditional Black colleges, because another school of sociologists, the Chicago school, were busy promoting armchair theories based on little data, or bogus data, all showing that Black people simply were not smart enough to become professionals or take on anything above and beyond manual labor, and of course, he was Black, so he must not be that smart, right?

Pause to allow your primal scream. It’s galling stuff.

Caucasian professors in Chicago had done a bit of reading, and with regard to Black people, decided that their craniums were too small to hold enough brain-iums. And just as there is one reactionary in every crowd that the newspapers will flock to in order to show that there is across-the-board agreement, so did Booker T Washington stand before any crowd that would listen to him (and the white academics just loved him), in order to say that it was the truth, that it was going to be a long time before the Negro was “ready” to do the difficult tasks involving critical thinking that had been so long denied him. Tiny steps; patience; tiny steps. Meanwhile, he extolled his fellow Black Americans to enroll their sons and daughters in programs teaching “industrial education”, so that they would be ready to do manual labor and put food on their families’ tables.

All of the studies that backed this line of thinking were deductive, starting with the answer (inferior beings, manual labor) and then finding the questions to fit that answer. DuBois had done inductive research because he was searching for information rather than looking for a rational-sounding way to keep a group of people entrenched in an economic underclass.

DuBois made the connection between the socialist theory he had studied and the material evidence before him: there were people getting rich off the backs of dark-skinned people, and they had a vested interest in maintaining Black folk as an underclass. Ultimately, he turned to political struggle, and that is how I knew about him, not as a sociologist, but as a Marxist. He also became the father of the interdisciplinary field of African-American studies. He helped found the NAACP.

This scholarly work, like just about anything produced by a university press, is not light reading. Rather, the author presents his thesis and synopsis, and then carefully, brick by brick, starts back at the beginning to build his case. His documentation is flawless, and his sources are diverse and strong. There is some repetition in the text, but that is appropriate in this type of writing. He is not there to entertain the reader, but to provide an authentic piece of research that will stand the test of time, so there is a little bit of a house-that-jack-built quality to the prose.

For serious admirers of DuBois’s work, this will be an excellent addition to your library. For those interested in sociology as a field, this is for you, too. And to those with a literacy level that permits you to access college-level material and who have a strong interest in African-American history and/or civil rights, this is a must-read.

For these readers, I recommend, in addition, The Souls of Black Folk, which I had not regarded as sociology-based material until now, though I have read it twice; and a collection of speeches by DuBois, which I have been intending to review for some time, and which will soon grace this page of my blog.

Morris has done outstanding work, and I like to think that if DuBois were here, he would be proud to see it.

Live From Death Row, by Mumia Abu-Jamal*****

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livefromdeathrowMumia is a former Black Panther. The facts support his having been framed in the murder of the cop, a crime for which he was nearly executed.

Live from Death Row, written before his sentence was commuted, is not, however, a vehicle he uses to advocate for himself or plead his own case to the public. He has written other books I haven’t read, and I don’t know if he did that there.

Instead, here he uses his own situation to discuss the racism inherent both in the U.S. court system; he also talks about racism on death row.

The mandatory fresh-air time, prized and treasured by men who rarely see the clear blue sky, is an Apartheid one, at least in Supermax, RHU,SMU, and SHU (ultimate maximum security prisons, which he says have swelled since jailhouse overcrowding has made prisons tenser places and more people are tossed into “the hole”). The vast majority of prisoners are Black, though they are a minority of the population at large, and in the Pennsylvania prison he describes, 80% of those maximum security cases, those who wear Black skin, are crowded into a courtyard. They can’t see green grass or the outdoors, only four brick walls and way up there, blue sky. Why? And where are the other prisoners going?

The other prisoners (who are also maximum security) who are not Black have a SEPARATE courtyard, which is surrounded by chain=link fencing with razor-wire, but has the view. The 20% have the perk of a much less crowded space and the capacity to see Mother Earth during their treasured time outside prison walls.

As to the racist system that places Blacks on death row at such a startlingly high rate, he offers the following statistics and footnotes all of them like the scholar he was before being incarcerated, and continues to be behind prison walls. He uses a Georgia case because it is one which caused the Supreme Court to recognize the following facts:

*defendants charged w killing Caucasian victims are 4.3 times as likely to be sent to death row as those charged w/killing Blacks;

*the race of the victim determines whether or not a death penalty is returned;

*nearly 6 of 11 defendants who received the death penalty for killing Caucasians would not have received the death penalty if their victims had been Black;

*20 of every 34 defendants sentenced to death would not have been given the death sentence if their victims had not been Caucasian.

He continues to pound one damning fact upon another, and cites court cases to back them up; those above come from McClesky vs. Kemp (1987). If the case sounds old, I would argue that precedents are set by very old cases indeed, and of course, this book was published early into the 2000 decade. I doubt a more recent gathering of data would return more favorable information; in the case of jail overcrowding, I suspect the recession has made it worse.

A person would have to be hiding under a rock or in a coma not to be aware of the level of violence visited upon African-Americans by cops and vigilantes within the past year.

I applaud Mumia for using his well-known case to set the facts before us, rather than trying to build momentum to save himself. There was a considerable amount of public pressure NOT to execute him, and I do think that had to do with his sentence being commuted; as it was, my kids’ urban U.S. high school was “barely holding together”, according to a counselor I knew there, the day that Mumia’s case was turned away by the U.S. Supreme Court.

If you are interested in reading about social justice issues, this relatively slender volume holds an astounding amount of really critical information. I appreciate Mumia’s relentless effort to make the public, both in the US and internationally, aware of the atrocities that continue to visit Black prisoners in the USA, and it’s more relevant now than ever!

God Help the Child, by Toni Morrison *****

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godhelpthechildI’d been looking forward to reading this book, and I’d been dreading it. The fact that Morrison is such an outstanding writer makes the pain in her prose more tangible than most. One doesn’t feel the pain of a character; one feels the pain of a friend. And so even though I have three of her books I haven’t read yet sitting on my to-read stack, challenging me as if to ask why I had skipped them so many times when it was their turn, I still asked for this hot-off-the-presses title for Mother’s Day. When I opened it, my son (the eldest, the one who worries about me now and then) said gently, “So Mom…you know…have you read Toni Morrison? Because…” And I told him I had, and I knew, and that I would also read something light or funny during the time I read this one, to break up the horror.

Going into it with that level of caution, not unlike going out to pick flowers when I was seven, wanting the heavenly fragrance of the posies that grew in our California yard but not wanting to encounter the rattlesnakes that sometimes lay coiled in their vines, I was actually pleasantly surprised. Because although there is certainly plenty of pain to go around, our protagonist advocates for herself; she takes charge. I came away feeling as if there was more that was good in the world, and in people, than bad.

And when we go to the contest for best first lines, hers should be a contender, particularly when one considers context: “It‘s not my fault.” Lula Ann’s mother was horrified at the very sight of her newborn: “Midnight black, Sudanese black.” She and her husband were both light-skinned people, “What we call high yellow”.

“You should have seen my grandmother; she passed for white and never said another word to any of her children.”

It’s all there on that first page: betrayal, betrayal, betrayal, and in the case of Lula Ann’s parentage, betrayal suspected (by her father) and denied (by her mother) and a marriage undone.

I think of my own family; when I was born, everyone in my family, and all of the photographs carefully lined up of those that had gone before, were of the super-pale variety found on the British Isles and in Northern Europe. Turn us loose in the sun for twenty minutes without sunscreen and we look like a family of lobsters.

And yet, over the generations, we have chosen to marry and procreate with people of color. Then, since there were already Black and Asian children in the family, the family members that could not have children adopted two children, the first one white, the second Black. At family parties, the Black relatives all congregate for part of the festivities, then move out to rejoin the rest of us.

And I know it’s not at all the same as for Morrison’s fictional family, because Lula Ann’s parents didn’t have the choice to be all white, or to bring people of color into the family. My generation and the Caucasian members of subsequent generations have had the power to choose who would be in their immediate family; of course, our Black and Asian relatives also had a choice of who to marry, but they also had less power socially and economically, so again: not the same thing. They have none of the history, none of the rage that is inherent of being a son or daughter of a grandson or granddaughter of slaves.

Lula Ann is instructed to call her mother “Sweetness”. There’s deniability there. Her mother doesn’t want people to think…to think something is wrong.

She grows up, ironically, to become a model who is prized for her dark skin. She turns it into a brand, with help from a friend, and wears only white, using the name “Bride”. White clothing day in, day out, to emphasize her darkness. She owns a cosmetic brand but wears no cosmetics. She needs to appear pure in order to carry it off.

She has a man, until he finds out the secret that is buried in her past. Actually, he doesn’t know the whole thing, and that’s where the trouble begins.

Literary fiction often carries power and authority that nonfiction can’t convey, and so it is with God Help the Child. I suspect professors that teach African-American Studies are putting it on their required reading list, and that’s a great thing, because there is so much to think about packed into this slender volume.

If you don’t have this book, get it and read it. If you don’t have the money, go to your local library and put yourself on the waiting list. And if it is assigned to you to read for a class, please, please, don’t buy a paper to get out of reading it (and don’t copy this blog post and turn it in as if it were your own). Don’t read the Cliff Notes. Read the book. It is both accessible and potent. It may be the most important book you read all year, and you won’t forget it.

The Fateful Lightning, by Jeff Shaara *****

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thefatefullightningThose that love strong Civil War fiction have to get this book. It comes out in June, but thanks to the wonderful people at Net Galley and Random House/Ballantine Publishers, I was able to sneak a peek ahead of time. Although it is the fourth in a series, it also works really well as a stand-alone novel if you know the basic facts regarding Sherman’s siege of Atlanta and its subsequent burning. As we join him and his hardened veterans fighting under Howard and Slocum, “the two fists that Sherman intended to drive through the heart of the deep South”, they prepare to march to the sea.

I have read every one of Shaara’s novels, those about the Civil War as well as the American Revolution and US war against Mexico. I am a fan. The last in the series, The Smoke at Dawn, left me hovering between a four and five star rating. It was a good read, yet I wasn’t sure I liked the way he voiced Sherman; I thought he made him sound a bit remote. But then it became evident that the controversy that sparked the indignation of other reviewers was his inclusion of one fictional character among the various perspectives presented (he flips back and forth, a format he uses regularly and that readers of his other work will recognize). The fictional character was invented to represent the too-often-voiceless rank and file, without whom the war would not have been fought or won. And I thought that this was actually a great idea, so I flipped from four to five stars in defense of his choice.

In this final installment, Sherman’s voice sounds much more real to me. I don’t know what happened, but it feels to me as if all the cylinders clicked into place. William T. Sherman is one of my heroes; I consider him America’s all time finest general, with Grant coming in second. He remains controversial to this day, mostly in the American South, so for those who wonder, the perspective definitely leans toward the Union, though both perspectives are given space. And it seems gobsmackingly obvious to me that in a war between feudalism and industrialization, between slavery and freedom, the latter should be the team to root for. But for those that feel differently, you’ve been warned.

Here we also meet a new fictional character named Franklin. Franklin is a slave until Sherman’s men come through. His father, an older man who was hobbled permanently by one of the master’s coon hounds when he attempted to flee, won’t leave the Plantation even after he hears that he is free. The master is gone, but it doesn’t matter. Walking is too hard, and frankly, he is also too afraid. And if someone were to sic a mean dog on me, I just might feel the same. But his son, Franklin, is grown, strong, and completely unafraid. He is allowed to join Sherman’s men as a laborer, and during a fight, he makes a heroic choice even though he has not been given a weapon or even permission to touch one. And the role that Black troops and spies also played is also included.

Throughout the narrative, Shaara’s voice feels authentic and honest to me. The reality of racist Caucasians within the Union’s forces is acknowledged, and the horrible crossing in which one of Sherman’s new, political generals causes the drowning of an unknown number of African-Americans trying to follow the army across a pontoon bridge that’s being withdrawn from enemy forces is not glossed over. More importantly, the slave breeding that brought international shame on the United States, a practice done exclusively here, in the “land of the free and home of the brave”, is presented; I can’t think of any other novelist I’ve read who includes this critical factor.

Fans of military history will appreciate Sherman’s approach to the war, that one cannot win by capturing the capitol of the rebellion, but rather, the Confederate forces must be defeated, and the people of the South that supported them had to know they were done. The desertions that marked the end days of the Confederate Army were the result of Sherman’s “juggernaut” through the South. Those that left home to fight to defend it, sometimes deserted for the very same reason. Home might not be safe; they might be needed back there. Shaara’s depiction of Sherman was consistent with Sherman’s memoir in this and every other regard.

In reading Shaara’s note to the reader, I felt a bit sorry for him, because it sounds as if every single Civil War buff has some treasured bit of arcane information or some hero in the family and they’re annoyed that Shaara has failed to include them. But this was one big war, and as the author notes, he can’t include everything. His publisher has set limits in terms of time and space. And Shaara has served them, and the memory of those who served the side of moral right, admirably.

The book will be sold in time for Father’s Day. But really, you should buy it for yourself. It’s worth every nickel.

Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones *****

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lostinthecityEdward P. Jones needs my review like Shakespeare needs my review. He is one of those literary luminaries whose work is timeless. Nobody can teach anyone to write like this. Either you have it, or you don’t. We are fortunate that he does.

This wasn’t a digital galley; it was a Christmas gift. That’s how much I like his writing. So I guess my purpose in reviewing someone this renowned is perhaps to draw attention to him for those that haven’t read his work yet.

I read this over the course of almost a month, short as it is, and I did it that way because it’s so painful. In this respect he is similar to Russell Banks: peerless, brilliant work that is also so sad that you just about have to sit down and cry when you finish. And because of this, I was glad to have a short story collection, because I could read a whole short story, put in the bookmark, then pick something else up for a little while to cheer myself up. Then when I was over it, I could pick it up and read another one a different day.

All the stories are set in Washington, DC, and all have to do with alienation and a sense of loss. I think the story I admire most is “His Mother’s House”, but all of them are strong.

The first book I read by this author was The Known World, which won the Pulitzer. Now I need to get a copy of All Aunt Hager’s Children.

The Personal History of Rachel Dupree, by Ann Weisberger *****

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thepersonalhistoryofracheldupreeRachel has married up. She used to be a hired girl working in the kitchen at Mrs. Dupree’s boarding house. Mrs. Dupree was forced into taking in boarders when  she was widowed, but she has done quite nicely for herself. She is among the cream of Chicago’s Negro community, and the women she entertains are light-skinned and at least four generations removed from slavery. Imagine her tremendous dismay when her only son, Isaac, comes home from fighting the Indian wars and announces that he is moving out to the Western territories to stake a claim and become a common farmer. “Rancher,” he reminds her. And if he marries a single woman who has also staked a claim, he will have twice as much land once they marry.

And so he stakes a claim on Rachel’s behalf, and she gets her heart’s desire: she gets to marry that handsome young officer. She becomes Rachel Dupree.

Roll the film forward about 14 years. Rachel is pregnant with her eighth child. The Badlands, “a country so backward and harsh that even Indians didn’t want it”, has had no rain for a long, long time. To get a little water, they have to tie one of their children to a plank and lower her on a rope to the bottom of the well. Liz doesn’t want to do it anymore. She has nightmares. There’s a snake down there, she says.

But their tongues are thick from lack of water. There is grit between their teeth. And they will lose the horses and their only milk cow if they don’t water them.

So at bedtime, Rachel tells her five surviving children to take just one sip of the water Liz brings up.

Are you spellbound, or are you horrified? I confess I was both. I live in the land of water. In Seattle there is moss growing on everyone’s front steps or porch, and if we aren’t careful, it will grow on our fences and our homes! Most of us don’t bother with umbrellas. We’re used to the fine mist that generally falls during the day. Most of the good hard rain falls at night, and it lulls us to sleep better than a lullaby. And yet, we send the kids to school carrying a water bottle anyway, because hydration is so important.

“Only a sip.”

I’m not the only one that doesn’t care for that. Rachel has about had enough of it, too. For one thing, there are no Negro families anywhere nearby. Isaac had told her that plenty of the men with whom he’d been enlisted had filed for homestead claims, but any that may have been nearby have gone on home. They can’t take it here. And actually? The white folk can’t stand it either. Every time someone goes home, Isaac buys their land. Every time there is a spare dollar, it does not go for a coat for the child who’s outgrowing hers; not even for fabric for Rachel to sew some new clothes. Rachel herself has a patched dress and a pair of work boots. What a contrast she makes from the finery she wore on her wedding day! And she is worried about their eldest daughter, Mary, who will be the right age to start dating soon.

The final straw is broken when Isaac buys out yet another departing neighbor–Rachel’s closest friend, too, as luck would have it–and there is no money at all. There is no money for winter provisions, even, and the kitchen garden died when the rain didn’t come. There is nothing, nothing, nothing. And his game plan is to work the gold mine in Lead, South Dakota, which is far enough away that he will be gone all winter, and she and the children will be left with a brand new baby and thousands of miles to ranch unassisted. And no food.

But hey, he believes in her. He’ll go hunting, maybe bag a bear together with his son, and between that and Rachel’s amazing know-how and steely determination, everything will turn out fine!

Not so much.

A strong subplot involves the local American Indian population. Homesteaders who are hungry, thirsty, and have almost nothing but the land on which they live and try to ranch are sometimes resentful of the “reservation Indians”, who have been stripped of their dignity and culture in exchange for free food, rent, and clothing (“free” being a relative term, of course). Isaac was one of the soldiers that subjugated those same Indians; when Rachel is alone on the ranch for days on end and Mrs. Fills the Pipe and her children pass by, Rachel craves company so desperately that she invites them to rest on her porch. She makes the very dead last of her chokeberry tea and serves it to Mrs. Fills the Pipe and her daughter.

“Our water?” said Liz. “You’re giving them our water?”

Liz had a point there; she was the one went down the well to get it. And yet, the good turn, though it upsets Isaac when he hears of it later, is not misplaced, and does not go unrewarded. And eventually Rachel thinks back to the things her hero, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, said in the Negro press (I use the term as the writer does, for historical purposes), she does not regret the gesture, except for the fact that she served them on the front porch when she should have invited them into her precious parlor.

I didn’t read this book as a galley, I got it at the local library. A galley led me to Weisberger, though. I read The Promise a year or two ago and decided that this writer was going on my to-read list. This makes two winners out of the two I have read. And on top of it all, Weisberger is a Caucasian writer (or appears to be; at any rate, she isn’t Black.) This is only the second writer I have encountered that could write a first-person fictional narrative in which she provides the voice of a Black woman, and does it creditably and with great dignity. I bow in awe.

And although I was already sold on the book and its author, the mention of Lead, South Dakota, nearly made me jump out of my skin. That is the tiny town where my late father was born, and its mine (gold but also iron ore) is where my late grandfather contracted the black lung disease that would eventually kill him. For those interested, it is pronounced “leed”. Maybe it’s too embarrassing to admit your home town is named after the mineral it produces, or maybe it’s a positive connotation, like leadership. My only visit there took place when I was a pre-schooler, and I have very few memories of it, all of them related to family rather than place.

Forgive the digression. All told, this is really strong historical fiction. If you want to read something a little different from most of the stuff that’s for sale; if you like stories of the homesteading movement; or if you want a story that features African-Americans in a positive light, this is your book. If you just want a great book to curl up with at night while the spring rains pass, this is your book too.

In short, highly recommended.