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.

Southern Gothic

Under Magnolia, A Southern Memoir, was a great surprise. I wasn't sure if I'd enjoy reading yet another novel about growing up in the South. But Frances Mayes (known for her Tuscany books) used poetic images and elegant prose to describe growing up in Georgia in the fifties. Passages like this one "…Listening to women - playing bridge, shelling peas, visiting the dressmaker - those who were dead seemed present…" - evoked the women of my own childhood in Mississippi in the sixties. But like all Southern families I know, this  story was not without its damaged characters and twists in the plot line.   Her parents, unhappy with each other and small town life, drank and fought in the background and sometimes foreground of her childhood.  Her father died while she was in high school and her feelings about him were even more complicated after his passing.  His death left her alone in the house with her mother throughout her difficult teen years and their relationship was fraught with emotion. But her tribute to her mother later in the book is one of the most beautiful I've ever read.

Mayes' mother, Frankye 

"She will never lean toward the light, moisten the thread between her lips, and thread the needle. She'll never throw one sheet on the floor and pile on the dirty laundry. Brush her hair a hundred strokes….no more - placing blue hydrangeas in a glass bowl, scraping her rings on the inside of the black mailbox, boiling jars for peach pickles, dabbing a bath powder puff under her arms, refusing catfish because they're bottom feeders, bidding grand slams, pulling meat off the bone for chicken divan, hand washing a peach silk slip, surrounding the birthday cake with pink camellias…" This describes my mother and probably some of your mothers as well, if you grew up in the South. 

Mayes never directly says why she has never written about her family of origin and her place of origin. Her beloved Tuscan books certainly evoke a strong sense of place and identification of the culture of that place. Yet, I, for one never knew about her Southern upbringing.  Once Mayes moved to California with her first husband in her early twenties, she never looked back on her past.  California is a place of re-invention and Mayes did just that.  She says, "When I left the South at age twenty-two, the force that pushed me west was a powerful as the magnet that held me."  She went on to later buy the home in Tuscany and began to write her many books about Tuscany. Her genre is memoir and essay, so this book at age 75 is a long-awaited remembrance for her fans.  She did write a novel, set in Georgia, called Swan, published in 2002, but I think this memoir is Mayes at her finest with strong imagery and boldly accurate descriptions of small town Southern life.

In the preface, Mayes shares what made her decide to write a book about her childhood. She was in Oxford, Mississippi, one of my favorite places, for a reading at Square Books, one of my favorite bookstores, and the feeling of being in a small town in the South brought back memories she had avoided for years. In fact, she said, "For years when I went back home to visit, I broke out in hives." As she wanders through Oxford and even visits Faulkner's house, the smells and sounds of the South that she had ignoring for years drew Mayes back in. She had long known the resemblances of Tuscany and the South - "the complex interconnections of family and friends, the real caring for one another, the incessant talk, emphasis on ancestors, the raucous humor, the appreciation of the bizarre, the storytelling, the fatalism, the visiting, the grand occasions…"  Now she realized that she wanted to go back to the South, to re-look at her past and to even live in the South. At the end of that visit to Oxford, Mayes called her husband and told him, "I want to move back South."  They did indeed move to rural North Carolina and Mayes wrote this lovely memoir about the South. Thank you Oxford and Square Books!  I was pleased to receive this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

The Past Binds to the Present

The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter is a haunting book about memory and uncovering the past.  I feel it was a literary fiction “sleeper” because I had not heard of it through any of my usual book sources. I selected it through my affiliation with Blogging for Books. I was entranced by this novel and read the last three-quarters this past rainy Saturday afternoon. This book combined a historical mystery with a modern tragedy. The plot felt a bit thin at times, but it propelled me along enough to stay interested. 

An archivist in a small London museum, Jane Standen, becomes interested in a Victorian asylum and an old estate separated by woods she had wandered in as a teenager.  For the second half of the book, she is re-visiting this spot outside of London as her past and her present come together. The Victorian era mystery is linked to the modern tragedy through a chorus of ghost like creatures that lurk alongside Jane throughout the novel.  These spirits from the past floating in Jane’s life fascinated me and helped hold together the story. Aislinn Hunter has published stories, poetry and a novel previously in the UK, but this is her first U.S. publication. I look forward to seeing more from her. I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

More Books Fed to Me as A Child

As a child, manners were important in my home.  My mother tried, as best she could, to teach us how to act in the different situations we would face in life. Two of the children’s books that best prepared me for life were SesyleJoslin’s two classics – What Do You Do, Dear? (Subtitled: Proper Conduct for All Occasions) and What Do You Say, Dear? (A Book of Manners for All Occasions).  What Do You Say Dear was a Caldecott Medal Honor book in 1959, the year I was born. What Do You Do gives such wonderful advice as the following:

You are in the library reading a book when suddenly you are lassoed by Bad-Nose Bill. “I’ve got you,” he says, “and I’m taking you to my ranch, pronto. Now get moving.” What do you do, dear?

Walk through the library quietly.

Each situation is wildly improbable but the reader is given practical advice like “wash you hands before you eat” or “cover your mouth when you cough.”  I can still remember as a child the awe I felt at the crazy situations described with such handy solutions. Both books are called “A Handbook of Etiquette for Young Ladies and Gentlemen to be Used as a Guide for Everyday Social Behavior.” With illustrations by Maurice Sendak, the books are delightful and very useful for teaching manners and how to act in different situations, even the Princess’ ball or London to see the Queen. I used the Queen scenario with my children so much that they believed that they were actually going to London to see Queen Elizabeth. Sadly, we never have met the Queen.

Another book that really stands out from my childhood is Big Susan by the wonderful children’s book author, Elizabeth Orton Jones (Prayer for A Child and Twig). Even after I became a teenager, I would re-read the book every Christmas Eve. First published in 1947, Big Susan was out of print for many years and I had to really search to find a copy for my own children when they were small. I think it frightened by girls with the thought that their dolls came alive every Christmas Eve, but it always enchanted me. The book Big Susan made me believe that miracles can happen anytime if only we believe.

Lastly, I cannot pay tribute to my favorite children’s books without recognizing Charlotte Zolotow. I have already written about her on this blog when she died in late 2013 at age 98. But two of my childhood favorites (still on my shelves along with all the others mentioned here) are The Sky Was Blue (out of print) and Over and Over. I received them in 1963 and 1962 respectively. My mother read to these books to me over and over. I still hear her voice when I re-read them and see the timeless illustrations by Garth Williams.  Both books give reassuring stories of how life goes on and the same values remain through the seasons of the year and through the generations.

Zolotow herself said, “All of my books are based on an adult emotion that connects with a similar emotion that I had as a child. I like each of my books for a different reason, because each comes out of a different emotion. If a book succeeds in bringing an emotion into focus, then I like that book very much. “  I think that is why Zolotow’s books, as well as my other beloved books, are so special to me as an adult. These books helped me understand emotions.

Books Fed to Me as a Child

“Stories are the natural soul-food of children.”- G. Stanley Hall

My mother reading to my older
 brother and sister.

My love of books definitely came from many hours spent leaning on my mother’s shoulder while she read to me from the time I was a very small child. In fact, Emilie Buchwald said, "Children are made readers on the laps of their parents."  I also know much of my understanding about the world came from those pages. Recently I read an article on Marie Popova’s wonderful Brain Pickings about picture books that celebrate the lives of great creators. And I started thinking about children’s books in general and how what we read as small children helps form our personalities and values. Much research has been done on fiction in the development of personality.  So I began to do my own exploring on the earliest books I was given.

All I had to do was go upstairs to my own children’s book nook and see what stories I was fed as a child.  You see I adore children’s books. My mother read to me and my older brother and sister on a daily basis and I still have most of those books. I also have all the books I read to my own daughters as well as more recent purchases. So I walked upstairs to see what books stand out the most in my memories…

One the earliest books my mother read to me was The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper. Ours was a Silver Anniversary Edition and was given to my older sister in 1955 on her second birthday.   First published in 1930, the story was about being positive and working hard. I was raised to remember the words of the little engine who made it over the mountain by just saying, “I think I can-I think I can-I think I can-I think I can” over and over.   The theme that a good attitude can get you over the toughest obstacles was definitely taught to me at my mother’s knee.

Another beloved book from my childhood was Edith &Mr. Bear, A Lonely Doll Story by Dare Wright. First published in 1957, photographer and author Dare Wright went on to publish at least eight more in the series. I still have The Lonely Doll and A Gift from the Lonely Doll and The Lonely Doll Learns a Lesson. I read those books over and over. The main thing I remember is the scene where Mr. Bear spanks Edith for misbehaving. The books slightly creep me out now and my daughters never loved them like I did. I think the photo of Wright on the book jackets were what attracted me to the books. I was more influenced by the author than the main character, Edith. I imagined being a photographer and writer in New York City like Dare Wright. I recently read a biography The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: Dare Wright by Jean Nathan.  Her bizarre life was definitely not what I imagined when I read her books as a child. 

One book character that definitely influenced me was Pippi Longstocking. The wonderful books by Astrid Lindren filled me with joy. My copy of the first book, Pippi Longstocking, is dated on my birthday in 1967. So I must have been eight years old when I discovered this carefree tomboy. Pippi has no grown ups in her life and her funny adventures and creative spirit inspired me and children everywhere. I once read that she was the Junie B. Jones of her day. Her refreshing disrespect of adults and willingness to break the rules created my own distrust of authority figures. Pippi has always been a role model with her great physical strength and inventiveness. A few years ago, I was able to visit the statue of Astrid Lindren outside the Junibacken, museum devoted to Swedish children's literature (especially the beloved Pippi) in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a thrill, as you can see.

In my next post, I will share more books that I loved as a child that influenced me as an adult.  What were your favorites?