Killing a Mockingbird?

As an active book blogger and huge fan of To Kill A Mockingbird (public library), I feel compelled to write my review of Go Set A Watchman (public library) as soon as I've finished it. My friend Evelyn and I were first in line at our local independent bookseller earlier this week here in Houston when the book was released on Tuesday, July 14.

Actually we were the only ones in line. And no one else showed up the whole time we were there. Both booklovers from Mississippi, Evelyn and I thought for sure, in such a big city, we wouldn’t be alone. But we were the only geeks who got up early on a Tuesday to get the first copies of the controversial, long awaited second novel from the reclusive 89-year-old Harper Lee.

I started reading the book that very evening, and was drawn into the story of a grown up Scout coming home from New York City to Maycomb, Alabama at age 26. Even though I'd read the reviews and was prepared, I had the same reaction as Scout on page 103, now called by her given, Jean Louise, when she said,

"Citizens' council? In Maycomb?" Jean Louise heard herself repeating fatuously.  "Atticus?"

Atticus? I was in as much shock as Jean Louise. But as the story continued, I felt very comfortable with the situation. It felt so much more real to my experience of the South. I was born in 1959, so I’m much younger than Harper Lee and her fictional Jean Louise. But the men of Meridian, Mississippi were much more like the Atticus Finch of Go Set A Watchman than the Atticus of To Kill a Mockingbird. My father included. There was an Attticus in our town, but he was pragmatic, I’m sure, just like this new version of Atticus.

The book is about Jean Louise Finch coming home and seeing the South and her revered father, Attitus, in a new light. Jean Louise worshipped her father, who taught her to be color-blind and treat every human equally. She is literally sick to her stomach when she discovers her father at a Citizens Council meeting during her visit home. Harper Lee does a beautiful job of showing all the nuances of the situation in the South in the mid-1950s. The content is important for us all to read today in light of the racism that seems worse in some ways now in this country.

Readers will have the same repugnant reaction as Jean Louise, but you mustn’t let it stop you from picking up this very enjoyable book. Harper Lee weaves a great story with flashbacks and engaging dialogue and small town humor.  I cried and cried at the end. I guess daddy issues are something most of us can relate to. Jean Louise’s emotions touched something deep in me. I remember that feeling of disgust toward my South (and also my father at times) when I was in my 20s and my reluctance to stay in the South to fight to make things better.

Another reason I really enjoyed reading Watchman is that I kept thinking about how it was a first draft. This was the manuscript that young Harper Lee took to her editor originally. The editor asked her to ditch that narrative and write a new novel about a younger Jean Louise (Scout) and the trial of the wrongly accused black man that was mentioned in Watchman.  The original manuscript was probably too controversial in the early 1960s. So the whole time I was reading the book, as a writer, I was very interested in how Lee took the thread of the young Scout shown in this book and turned it into To Kill a Mockingbird. This increased my appreciation of Harper Lee as a truly great writer.I'm proud to add this first edition on my bookshelf, next to my signed first edition of Mockingbird.

So read your copy (I know you pre-ordered one) and enjoy the story and re-visiting old friends - Scout, Atticus and Maycomb – and remember it's just fiction. Forget the controversy and enjoy the book. Go Set a Watchman doesn't Kill the original Mockingbird, it just adds to the story we all love.

Race in America(nah)

I’ve been a busy bee reading this summer on all my travels to this date. But probably the best book I’ve read so far is Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I had just heard of Adichie a few days before when my daughter bought a book of her popular Ted talk called “We Should All be Feminists.”  I watched her talk and was intrigued by this outspoken young woman. Then a favorite young adult friend posted an Instagram photo of the book Americanah and said how much she liked it. I happened to be staying above a bookstore at Rosemary Beach and promptly went downstairs the next morning and bought the book and took it to the beach with me.  Not exactly beach reading, but the book became waterlogged and salty during the next two days on the sand. I couldn’t stop reading. The novel weaves both an epic love story of two young Nigerians and insightful social commentary on being black in America.

I was transported far from the beaches of South Walton to Lagos and Princeton – the two worlds of Ifemelu, the young woman who becomes a well-regarded blogger on race in America only to realize the limitations of her American freedom.  The life of an undocumented alien in London contrasted with that of a wealthy successful Nigerian man encompasses the story of her lover Obinze. Their paths come together in middle school in Lagos and later depart and converge as the story unfolds.  Ifemelu’s commentary on race through her blog is interspersed with the very gripping story of the two young lovers.  In this novel, Adichie holds nothing back in her thoughts on race and class and immigration through the fictional Ifemelu’s blog posts. Here’s an example:

As I have said before, I read novels because they help shine a light on a way of life that I could never understand unless I have experienced it. I want to understand the world and get insight into other people’s reality. This is a love story, which has a universal appeal and helps me to see what it’s like to be a non-American black and an immigrant. Adichie is an important writer who needs to be read and heard.

In the novel, a character says, “You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them…have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race…”

I think Adichie makes it clear that this novel is about race. In the fictional blog, the character Ifemelu says, “In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here’s the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven’t lynched somebody then you can’t be called a racist. If you’re not a bloodsucking monster, then you can’t be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters.”

After last week’s hideous shooting in Charleston, conservatives first labeled the shootings as anti-Christian, serial killings, everything but what they were. Until finally the racial motivations for Dylann Roof entering Emanuel AME church and killing nine black people after watching them in a Bible study were clear: He is racist and hoped to start a racial war. Now everyone wants to take down the Confederate flags. That definitely needs to happen, but don’t we need to go many steps further? We need to sit down with our black brothers and sisters and understand the realities of what they face. Black mothers fearing their sons will be unjustly accused of crimes. Young black men are being shot and innocent young black women are being thrown to the ground at a pool party.  Are you watching all this?  We are racist in these big ways and also in more subtle ways. This madness must stop,  but things will only change if we can name the evil lurking in our society.  Adichie helps do this in her brilliant book.  I hope she will keep speaking the truth in the darkness.

Graphic Magical Realism in the Piney Woods

Ruby by Cynthia Bond drew me in with its strong portrayal of a forty-year-old black man who was finally deciding to break free from the family ties that had held him back his whole life. At first, I was charmed by the funny and tender portrait of Ephram Jennings and the characters in his tiny all-black East Texas town.  I was also mesmerized by the picture Bond painted of the woman Ephram loved his entire life - Ruby Bell.  We first see her as the crazy woman wandering the streets of their town, Liberty.  As we get to know both main characters - Ephram and Ruby - better, we began to see the horrors they have lived through.  The cruel abuse Ruby has experienced her whole life is overwhelming to see on the page. The book becomes very difficult to read as the descriptions become more graphic and the reader goes deeper into a world of darkness and evil in the piney woods of Texas.  But as a reader, I could not put down the book because Bond's prose was so strong, poetic really, drawing me in with forceful description and lyrical magic and symbols of both evil and hope. Ruby is a tough read in many ways, but essentially a great book.  Reading this book requires something from the reader, but the best stories always do.  I felt involved in the lives of Ephram and Ruby and couldn't stop reading until the end.

It's hard to believe that this is Cynthia Bond's first book, but she certainly deserves all the accolade she has received. Recently chosen for Ophrah Winfrey's book club, the book is brutally honest about racism and hatred in the South. One character says, "Hell, ain't nothing strange when Colored go crazy. Strange is when we don't."  This book is about survival and grace is totally worth the pain it takes to read the hard truths about sexual violence and evil. Redemption is possible.  Published by Random House in 2014, the book only had a smallish run of 15,000 but Oprah's endorsement helped build the buzz and the next printing this year was 250,000. The book is harrowing, but as Oprah said, "If she can write it, we can read it." The book speaks for many, many young girls who are being abused even now. Reality can be tough to swallow, but Bond's book makes us all better for experiencing the truth.  I am grateful to Blogging for Books for sharing this book with me. It should be noted that I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.