Midlife Crisis Bingo Recap: Buckle Up

In 1993, my partner and I climbed into my Ford Escort to go on a “backroads” trip across the country, inspired in part by William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways: A Journey into America. That book followed the author along literal roads less travelled and featured his conversations with people outside of the usual American gaze. "What does it mean to be an American?" was a guiding question for his trip, and ours.

 

Along the way, my car’s air conditioning crapped out, so we were able to experience America in all its summertime sensory glory: sticky and buggy. And also, this was before cell phones and GPS, so getting lost was very possible. In fact, getting lost was kind of the point.  

 

Most kids today will never know what it’s like to be lost. Their connection to their location is constant, and if for some reason their GPS isn’t working, they can always call their mom. In fact, their mom is probably tracking them right now, following their every move from afar with a Stalk My Grownup Baby app. Hint to young adults: Are you not in your dorm room tonight? Your mom knows this!

 

But back in the day, maps were paper and hard to read. Sometimes you’d go right instead of left or miss the turn. And you’d find yourself at the most amazing place, a place that felt like it was waiting for you to find it. Of course, that was also the moment that the car would start making weird noises, and your paper map would suggest that you were 10 miles from the nearest anything. You wished you had a way to call your mom, but you didn’t see a pay phone. And besides, you didn’t have a quarter to make the call. Your mom was probably out celebrating her empty nest anyway, not sitting around at home waiting to solve your problem.

 

One of the best parts about our trip in 1993 was stopping at just about every roadside historical marker. If you want to go beyond textbook broad-sweep history, spend a little time in the middle of nowhere! You’ll see towns that rose and vanished because of the railroad, groups that pushed others out, and you’ll see how those others fought back. The names of towns and rivers speak all about migration and aspiration.

 

However, lest we get caught up in the glory of purple mountains majesty and amber waves of grain, it’s important to remember that those historical markers are political storytelling. For the Midlife Crisis Bingo square, Buckle Up, I want to talk about How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith.

 

Category Description: Sometimes the way forward involves crossing difficult terrain. Read a book that challenges you, or makes you look something difficult in the eye, or asks you to do hard work.

The author asks the reader to consider the public history around slavery. He visits several sites that feature that story: some plantations, a prison, a New York City history tour, a cemetery, a local Juneteenth celebration, and a site of capture and departure of enslaved people before they were placed on ships to America. Each site offers a slightly different purpose – for instance, “to commemorate,” or “to give voice,” or even, “to make people uncomfortable.” The book leaves the reader with a set of questions about public history. First, in the face of limited historical evidence, how certain do the creators of the sites have to be to make what they say "true?" Second, what are the consequences of foregrounding some narratives (or objects or locations) over others? And third, how central should slavery be in American history and storytelling? Since the publication of Smith’s book, that final question has anchored all sorts of messy conversations on our political stage, leading to the likely possibility that some communities might not even put this book on their library shelves.

 

I don’t think that Smith would consider his work to be a “road trip” book, but I immediately thought about myself as a consumer of American history on my long-ago journey. I’m also struck by the fact it feels like our country’s air conditioner has broken. Things are sticky and buggy, and Smith wants us to lean into the heat.

 

Writing this post sent me on a deep dive into my old photo albums (remember when you took pictures and had to wait to see them until you took your film into the drugstore to be developed?).  I stumbled upon this unlabeled picture from our trip through the South in 2000.

 

I’m sure we just drove by it, snapped a photo, and said, “Weird!” After all, there was no smart phone in my pocket to quickly name and explain and situate every curious thing on demand. But all these years later, I do have a smart phone, and Smith’s book has made me wonder what this site was and why I am filled with unease.

 

Turns out that Wigwam Village No. 2 was built in 1937 in Kentucky to serve people on “automobile vacations.” Eleanor Roosevelt gave it some publicity in a newspaper column, and now it is on the National Register of Historic Places. The tents are not actually wigwams, but no one said that this venue was on the National Register of ACCURATE Historic Places, did they?* The website claims that the motel is “an enduring testament to a time past,” with all the comforts of home (WiFi, cable TV, coffee pots, a swimming pool, and “plenty of hot water”).

 

I seem to recall that things didn’t go so well for the Cherokee people in Kentucky. One of the online reviews (one star out of five!) says, “The place was dirty and damaged, the bed linens had tears and stains.” At first, I misread that as tears of grief, like the kind one might cry on a violent, forced exodus. But no, this historical site must be telling a different story altogether. It occurs to me, uncomfortably, that what we are giving “enduring testament” to with this National Historic Register designation is twentieth century white people’s travel culture, where the land is yours to explore, and your comfort is the most important thing. It’s a memorial to the American road trip, just like the one I was on.

 

Well, crap.

 

History is messy and hard and full of dragons. We have a lot of work to do. 

 

This is a random dragon we found in Cullman, Alabama. It's at the Ave Maria Grotto, which is a four acre miniature city built by a really bored monk in the 1950s. It features 125 replicas of holy places, and also this dragon. The lesson? Keep at it with your weird hobby.

*The National Archives and Records Association has placed a "Potentially Harmful Content" warning on its webpage about Wigwam Village No.2. Does that help? Hurt? Add texture? Do nothing?

Blogtastic! The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Today I’m focusing on bingo square #1 on the 2017 Leaning Stack of Books Diversity Challenge: YA Novel By a Writer of Color. It’s possible that The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is the only YA novel I read last year. I do find that I read fewer of them these days, despite having young adults in my house, because I’m not much into dystopia or dragons. Next year I might put a new square on the bingo card: YA Novel About Humans in a Real Life Situation. But, of course, the line between fictional dystopia and real life is getting more and more blurry…

I was drawn to The Hate U Give because of the buzz around it, but also because it ties into one of the content strands in the courses I teach. The last few years, my students and I have looked at Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson. I teach about education policy, and the purpose of focusing on this event has been to look at the idea of “separation” as a tool. What does segregation do in our society? Why do we intentionally separate people, and to what end? Together, we read parts of James D. Anderson’s Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 to look at the logic Southerners used when they excluded African Americans from the public school system (and how African Americans fought back).  We listen to the This American Life podcast, "The Problem We All Live With, Part 1," to see the modern day version of that problem in the schools surrounding Ferguson, MO. And we read parts of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation by Jeff Chang to see how streets and towns and bylaws and policies were created in the Ferguson area (and most places) to invent and reinvent separation again and again.

But if I’m honest, it was not until I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me that I truly felt what it meant that the law is not on everyone’s side. The distinction between feeling and understanding is important for me. The reason that this book affected me so much is because Coates is writing a letter to his child. He is preparing him for the world, just as I have to prepare my own kids for the world. But in this letter, he is telling his son that he is not safe, that he has to carry the burden of society’s distrust and disdain.  And I felt my privilege in not having to write my own sons such a letter, and I felt through his words the pain of that process. That is what a good book can do, right? In some cases, you see your own truth validated, and in others, you get to walk in someone else’s shoes, or, perhaps, live in their skin.

The Hate U Give, which was nominated for a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature last year, is a debut YA novel that looks at the murder of an unarmed black boy by police. The story focuses on an African American teen that lives in a black neighborhood but goes to a mostly white, suburban school. When she witnesses the death of her friend, she has to navigate her experience of injustice in both contexts.

I always have to dial down my inner critic’s voice when I read YA, because I tend to feel like there’s just too much going on. Too many plot lines! Too many characters! But I suppose that’s what adolescence is -- so much simultaneous intensity. What did really interest me was the move in some communities to block access to this book, as if adults should shield kids from the world they already live in. Or is there a presumption that “YA readers” are white and should be kept separate from racial violence*?

Here’s a great article about Thomas from the Guardian.

*The reason the book was removed from school shelves in Katy, Texas was, supposedly, “explicit language.”

The Top 5 of 2017: #3

If this 800 page novel had stopped after the first half, it would have been my favorite book of the year. I read it during the last week of December, basically non-stop. I had even planned to title this post, “You have never even heard of my favorite book of the year!”

You haven’t heard of The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter by Kia Corthron because it’s a first novel with a clunky, weird title and way too huge for anyone’s book club. I stumbled upon it on a independent bookstore aisle end cap with a sign underneath it that said, “Read this. Now. I mean it.” And I’m really good at following directions.

The story follows the lives of four brothers, and the reader knows they will meet at some point over the course of the novel.  Two are black and come from Maryland. Two are white and come from Alabama. All four live in segregated contexts – but it is the nuance of these contexts that makes the author’s exploration so interesting. What did friendship across race look like, feel like? What did it mean to go to separate schools but to play together in the afternoons?

Ultimately, this is a book about dignity. What happens when we don’t treat people as full human beings? And this story is not, magically, simply black and white.

Now for the bad news. Corthron wanted to write an epic novel here, and ultimately, her story loses itself somewhat in that ambition. You know how yesterday I compared Sing, Unburied, Sing to fine dining? Well, The Castle Cross... is a delicious all-you-can-eat buffet after a long hiking trip. So tasty, but by the second half, I began to bloat. There’s just too much, and the push to cover every intersectionality (e.g. the history of the gay rights movement, disability history, etc.) strains the plot. And the issue that pulled this novel to #3 from its perch at #1 is a giant, GIANT (and unnecessary) coincidence at the end.

Still, this was an amazing read. I recommend it with all of my ringing bells (though if you have problems reading about violence of any kind – warning!). This would be fantastic for a long (very long) plane ride. I was riveted.

The Castle Cross… won the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and as a side note, Corthron is in her 50s. Who says youngsters have all the fun?

You can read an interview with Corthron here.

The Top 5 of 2017: #4

I generally don’t like books that feature ghosts, and this is a novel about hauntings. But the ghosts in Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward are the hauntings of injustices, and they explain the legacy of deep racism on a particular family in a particular place. On the surface this is kind of a road trip book – a family goes to pick up their father from prison in Mississippi. But while most road trip books are about the freedom of the open road, the family here isn’t yet free. The significance of the journey from small segregated town to prison is brutal.

Ward deserves all her notoriety, which includes two National Book Awards (including one for this novel) and a MacArthur Genius Award.  She approaches storytelling like a poet -- there is not a single word in her book that doesn’t matter.  Spoiler Alert: This idea will be a contrast with my Best of 2017 #s 3-1. Stay tuned!

So, basically, I knew this book would be stunning when I sat down to read it. And stunning it was, though I will admit to being more captivated with 2011’s Salvage the Bones. Reading a Ward novel is like going to a restaurant with a master chef. Every bite is meaningful and flavorful and packed with goodness. There’s no extra fat or additives, and you don’t feel bloat at the end. Her writing is, simply, brilliant.

And I’ve been struck this year how we’ve come to associate brilliance and good ideas and smart people and intellectual development with either snobbery or dullness. “Charisma” has come to mean, for the lack of a better word, shouty. I wonder what our world would look like if we read Jesmyn Ward interviews in People magazine and heard her thoughts on CNN – rather than, well, the folks that we do.

This is for sale at zazzle.com. Yay, captalism?

You can read more about Ward here and here and here.

The Top 5 of 2017: #5

This choice might come as a surprise to those of you who know me well. Reading With Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship by Michelle Kuo is a nonfiction account of a very young teacher who does her service with Teach For America in the rural south. I think that the Teach for America organization is problematic in so many ways, most notably for its role in the privatization of the education system and the ongoing policy attack on experienced teachers. But. BUT. I have to say that I was riveted by this account of a young woman’s struggle with her own idealism and privilege in the face of injustice. I enjoyed thinking about the larger philosophical questions that sat just underneath the surface of her writing – What is the role of education if there’s not a larger “point?” What counts as "achievement?" What if you will never see growth gains? Good scores? Is the learning itself – and the relationship that inspires it – valuable on its own terms?

Idealism has been on my mind over the course of this past year. My belief that an ordinary person can have an impact in our society has been shaken, and I find that I am drawn to stories of people who have that faith. It seems as if that is what Kuo is wrestling with here, too.  It’s not as if this book doesn’t have problems, but for me, the problems were the things that generated my questions. And I need to keep asking questions, to keep caring about people and the society we create.

Reading With Patrick was part of my foray into audio books this year. I am in the car a lot, and I have found that I add a solid handful of books to my cosmic shelves this way.

Here’s a little interview with Kuo from the New York Times.

Review of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, is stunning. It really deserves a second read to see all the images and layers and questions, but there’s no way I’m jumping back into this harrowing story right now. Of course, one of Whitehead’s points as he takes his reader on a journey away from slavery is that this story is also the present. The reader should be devastated about this past and also about what we’re doing in our contemporary world.

The book follows Cora, a slave who escapes a Georgia plantation. The first 50 or so pages of the novel is straight-up historical fiction, but then Whitehead creates an alternate world in which the underground railroad is an actual railroad, with stations and trains. Moreover, he gets fancy with time periods. For instance, Cora leaves pre-Civil War Georgia and lands in a version of South Carolina that has skyscrapers and elements of history from the early 20^th century.  The train travels to other states, too, and all of them incorporate different elements of social relations, racism, and the historical record. 

This book has all the terrible elements you’d expect from a story about slavery – so be warned that this will be a difficult read. I had a particularly interesting moment about two-thirds of the way through the story that reminded me of my experience reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. When I read that novel, I was struck by how much of a hopeful reader I am. I really need to believe in the possibility of happily-ever-after. It became increasingly clear in A Little Life that I was going to need to change my expectations. In The Underground Railroad, I also had a prick of awareness that “the North” might not be the magic terminus of this railroad and this story. And that is part of Cora’s experience here, too.  Hope drives her along but her experiences provide evidence that the hopefulness might be fruitless. (Discussion question: Is this ultimately a hopeful book?)

The Underground Railroad is the second terrific novel I’ve read this year about slavery and its legacy. Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, is also brilliant. It would be interesting to read these two books together and discuss the authors’ different approaches and interpretations. However, I’d sandwich a book about rainbows and unicorns in the center, because otherwise your heart might not be able to handle it.

You can find an good interview with Whitehead here (some spoilers included). The Underground Railroad is the current Oprah Bookclub pick and a 2016 National Book Award finalist.

Review of Another Brooklyn By Jacqueline Woodson

Another Brooklyn is Jacqueline Woodson’s new novel – but is it a novel? I don’t know. Woodson is queen of the “prose/poem,” and Another Brooklyn strikes me as a genre-blending work. It is short – just 173 pages, with brief sections of text and wide margins. The language is spare and unflinching.

My first exposure to Woodson’s work was with 2014’s Brown Girl Dreaming. That memoir earned her the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Another Brooklyn is marketed as an “adult” novel, but it is a reasonable choice for older teenagers, too. There is sexual content and some serious themes, but this coming-of-age story will still appeal to younger audiences.

The novel is a snapshot of growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. The main character, August, describes her friendship with four other girls, pulling the reader through the emotions of being  teenagers grappling with family tragedy, first love, religion, and betrayal. In this sense, this book has an “every girl” quality about it. But it is also a story particular to African Americans growing up in this particular time period. August is navigating her family’s journey from the rural south to the urban Northeast. She is navigating issues of class in the African American community. She watches her neighborhood experience white flight and the effects of segregation.  The strength of the story lies in Woodson’s ability to pull the universal and the particular together in a seamless way.

But if I’m honest, I wish that Woodson had put the meet some more meat on the bones of this work. I wanted her to fill up the pockets between the lines. There’s a distance that the prose/poem style creates that I wanted to bridge. I wanted to fall into this story, and the beautiful-ness of it pushed me away.

Critics don’t seem to share this concern. Another Brooklyn was recently longlisted for this year’s National Book Award.

Here’s an interesting interview with Woodson, where she addresses Daniel Handler’s infamous watermelon joke at the National Book Award ceremony. And here's her “By the Book” interview in a recent New York Times Book Review.

Review of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

I know that I haven’t been blogging much. I have been reading, however, and I’m excited to talk about Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I know I’m a bit late to the party about this one, but I’m so glad I finally showed up. This book is in the running to be my favorite of the year.

And what’s remarkable about it is that it’s a debut! Wow, does the literary world have a promising future with this author in it! The story follows a family line from eighteenth century Ghana through the descendants of two sisters, after one sister marries a white Englishman and the other is sold into American slavery. One of the central themes is displacement, and the reader gets to explore all the ways that disconnection from family and identity and place and memory impact individuals and communities. There are a few times when the author tries to bonk you over the head with these themes, but these times are rare in comparison to the subtle magic of most of the writing.

There’s so much to discuss. Hello, book clubs! This would be an interesting book to pair with another intergenerational family story (for example, Anne Korkeakivi's recent Shining Sea) or with a contemporary nonfiction book about race (like, Coates’ Between the World and Me).

If you are someone who has issues with reading scenes of violence, be aware that all the possible, imaginable kinds of violence against adults and children are here. This is a book whose heart is about slavery, and the author insists that you encounter it.

Here’s a recent interview with Gyasi. And here she is on a recent episode of The Daily Show.

Review of Ghettoside by Jill Leovy

There’s nothing like a book about murder to send 2015 out with a bang.

Los Angeles Times Journalist Jill Leovy chronicled every murder in that city over the course of a single year.  She wrote Ghettoside after noting that the media does not cover most of the deaths of young, African-American men and boys. And with that lack of attention comes the lack of resources to solve those crimes or to push them through the justice system.

In her book, Leovy focuses tightly on one particular crime – the seemingly random shooting of a detective’s son in a Los Angeles neighborhood with a particularly high murder rate. We get to know the victim and the victim’s family. We get to know the police division that serves this neighborhood and different detectives’ relationships with the community they serve. And specifically, Leovy introduces the lead detective on the case, and that detective is white. 

The case -- as Leovy reported it in the Los Angeles Times. The red dots represent other murders in the same area.

Ghettoside is a timely book, given our current grappling with relationships between the police and African-American communities across the country. This account is different than others, because it is not focusing on explicit police violence against citizens. We do, however, get to see how the police are still part of the story of “black on black violence,” the kind of violence that so rarely makes the news. Different police divisions do or do not receive priority funds to tackle these often difficult-to-solve cases. Different police officers do or do not come to know and care about the neighborhoods they serve. Different police officers do or do not believe that crimes against black men are as important as any other crimes.

Leovy comes to the conclusion that the problem that this neighborhood faces is that the American justice system does not really operate there. In the absence of a fair legal system, a different set of rules and a different logic of justice took root. The failure is not, she contends, a failure of individual morals or a consequence of poverty; rather, we as Americans have distributed justice, and the means to get there, unequally.

It is worthwhile to think about this book alongside two others that have addressed similar themes last year: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.  It would be interesting to discuss whether people think that it matters – or how it matters --  that the author is white or that the “hero” in the book is white. One thing that Leovy herself suggests is that race is never neutral.

I do think that Ghettoside is most devastating when Leovy simply lists murders. The names go on and on. The book could be reduced to a single essay with just those lists and make as much of an impact on me as this entire work of narrative nonfiction.

You can find a good interview with Leovy here.

Thoughts on The Prize and Between the World and Me, Together

I read two (deeply depressing) nonfiction books this week, and they ended up working together in an interesting way.  I was excited to read The Prize: Who’s In Charge of America’s Schools by Dale Russakoff, because it looked, on the surface, like the kind of book I’d assign in my classes. This journalistic account of the reform effort in Newark, NJ focuses in on the players and politics that were involved in Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million dollar gift to the Newark Public Schools and the changes that the gift inspired (hint about the outcome: the Newark schools still struggle).

Now that I’ve read the book, I won’t be assigning it in my classes – not because it’s not excellent (it is!), but because it is so profoundly dispiriting. Russakoff’s research reveals the flaws of a strategy that imposes outsiders’ ideas onto an unfamiliar context. It also reveals the flaws of a strategy that fails to meaningfully engage community members in considering the value (if there is any) of those ideas. 

The fact that corporate reform hasn’t been successful isn’t news, but Russakoff’s storytelling helps us understand why. Zuckerberg and his alliance of reformers truly believed that the linchpin of Newark’s problem was the teacher contract, and the bulk of his philanthropic project went to dismantling and rebuilding this element of the Newark school system. But Russakoff gets into the schools and walks alongside the “good teachers.”  She finds that the problems involved in teaching are much more complex than just evaluation and tenure. There are questions of how many teachers should be in a classroom. There are questions of social supports and psychological need and supplies and programs. The failure to direct money toward those issues crippled the reformers’ efforts to change the teaching landscape in the city.  

Russakoff also looks at the resistance of community members to reformers’ ideas. This resistance persisted even in the face of the schools’ repeated and ongoing failure to prepare kids for graduation. In some cases, the resistance existed for its own sake – ideas were rejected only because they came from an outsider.  Zuckerberg ultimately turned his attention to different projects – perhaps with greater wisdom, but away, decisively, from Newark.

With heavy heart, I picked up  Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, which just won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Coates begins this letter to his teenaged son by suggesting that there is no “hope” that can be pulled from his writing. His intent is not to give the reader hope; rather, it’s to expose the way that violence against African Americans is built into the very fabric of American values. He suggests that if your idea of justice involves working toward a more perfect set of democratic relationships between groups of people, you are ignoring the fact that the American foundational idea of democracy was built upon owning and exploiting African Americans’ bodies. It is impossible to work for justice through an ideal that incorporates that ownership and exploitation.

Truthfully, I need to read this book again. I think it will take me more than a single pass to fully absorb Coates’ ideas. But one thing that reading this book did for me was to give me a new way to look at The Prize. Russakoff is most interested in the political tangle in Newark. (Whose money? Whose turf? Whose ideas?) But what if we were to look at this school reform episode with Coates’ discussion of violence in mind? What if we were to insert the words “white and black” for “insiders and outsiders?”

The Newark school project aimed to “shake up” a failing system. The effects of that shake up – closing neighborhood schools, removing teachers, switching leaders – were all changes that were “done to” African American residents by external (and mostly white) hands. The reformers struggled to understand why community members would want to send their kids to schools that repeatedly failed them. Perhaps black community members experienced the “shake up” as just another act of violence against their children, another way to impose physical control. Would looking at school reform in Newark as an act of violence change what we can take away from the project?

It’s nearing the end of Nonfiction November, and one thing I’ve noticed about good nonfiction is that it opens me up to conversations I wouldn’t ordinarily have. Both of these books gave me the opportunity to think about my own assumptions about race and social change in new ways.

Thoughts about Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine is a multi-form examination of the ways in which white Americans dehumanize African-Americans in small, daily, escalating ways.  The forms in this book include poetry, short essays, and visual art. Rankine begins with small stories of micro-aggressions  -- friends who make “just” an off-hand comment about race, service professionals who come to conclusions based on race, strangers who shift away on public transportation. All these “small” events collect in the life of the African-American narrator. Then the book turns to larger, more sensational events (e.g. Hurricane Katrina, the killing of Trayvon Martin, the “Jena Six” assault…), which Rankine writes as “scripts.” (And what are scripts? Part of a performance? A pre-written story? So much to discuss!). Photographs, paintings, and other images connect the different poems and essays.

One of the more arresting images from the book -- "Jim Crow Road" by Michael David Murphy. You can google the street in Flowery Branch, GA. Of course, Rankine's point is that this street is everywhere.

Some of you know that I teach classes about education policy. Much of the conversation in these classes centers on the achievement gap, which is the space between white and more affluent kids’ test scores and the test scores of minority kids and kids who struggle with poverty. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that my students’ increasingly relentless and well-intentioned focus on test score data has yielded an unfortunate consequence: they are not really talking about children as human beings anymore. Take out the word “child,” and substitute “growth rate.”

Quantitative data is important. It certainly lets us look at different variables across time and space. It lets us compare contexts. But when data becomes the end goal, it is easy to forget that real people exist under the numbers. And when we don’t think about real people – when we separate physically and emotionally – it becomes easier to dehumanize. 

Please listen to This American Life's "The Problem We All Live With, Part 1" episode if you haven’t already. There’s also a compelling Part 2, but Part 1 knocked me to the floor. That is what we get when we dehumanize. That is the society we create.

What I love about Citizen: An American Lyric is that it asks the reader to sit down and listen. Really listen. Citizenship is a common project, and we owe it to ourselves to take this critique seriously.

You can find interesting interviews with Rankine all over the place. I liked this one. I also liked this essay she wrote in the New York Times.

Review of Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County by Kristen Green

VCU Digital Collections: Farmville 1963 Civil Rights Protest

Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County by Kristen Green showed up for me at the library the day after the murders in Charleston.  The author is exploring the endurance of racism in her own little southern community – and in her family – by revisiting the topic of school segregation. The universe seemed to be pushing me to read this title, so it rose to the top of my leaning stack of books this week.

Prince Edward County, VA was the site of one of the five cases that made up Brown v. Board of Education. The case was significant for two key reasons. First, the civil rights activism that led to the case was generated by high school students, not adults.  And second, after the Brown ruling, Prince Edward County shut down its public schools altogether and set up publicly funded private academies for whites only. The result was that African-American kids did not receive any sort of public education in the county for five years.

Green’s central intention is to tell the story of the school closures, which were part of Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” to desegregation. But her other intention is to explore her own family’s relationship to the story of the school closures. In her research, she discovers that her beloved grandfather was one of the men in the community that promoted the private academy for white students; in effect, he was one of the local architects of the resistance. Moreover, Green herself attended the private school, which remained entirely segregated by race until she was in the eighth grade.

Hank Walker/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images at neh.gov

This personal part of the story (which also involves grappling with the role Green’s multi-ethnic children might have in her family and in the community) is interesting.  Her conversations with others and her own reflection offer a lens into the way that racist systems don’t “just happen,” and they don’t “just disappear.” She interviews her family members and others in the town, and most express a wish to “get beyond” the painful past. But the legacy of the system sits in a deep (though polite) divide in the community that is relational, educational, and economic. And in particular, while the private academy has been reinvented as a independent school that promotes diversity, it is still seen by most residents as “the white school” in town. The public schools, though integrated, continue to have a reputation as “the black schools.”

This is good territory, but Green’s exploration exposes its own shortcoming, which is that Green’s voice is not the voice we need to hear. The most profound tragedy she uncovers is the way that Massive Resistance fractured African-American families. Many parents sent their children away to live with relatives in other states so that they could receive an education. Green learns that Elsie, the African-American housekeeper who took care of several generations of her family, sent her only child away to Massachusetts to go to school, and her daughter never came back. Green’s grandparents did not connect their own political work to prevent integration with the life of a woman who was taking care of their family every day. Years later, when Green interviews Elsie, she finds a distance and a grief around that experience that Green can’t penetrate.

And with that, the reader gets a sense that this book’s real story belongs to Elsie. But Green is the one who went to a good college, earned a journalism degree, and acquired a book contract. Green’s schooling provided an avenue to get her story space on bookshelves and on book blogs. If ever we needed evidence that education is a vehicle to power, this book makes that case.

The Moton Museum, whose development Green describes, houses documents and photographs related to school desegregation in Prince Edward County. Many of the collections are online. Other historical material is available as part of the Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries.

Review of God Help The Child by Toni Morrison

I went to Europe when I was 19, with a Eurail Pass and a backpack full of paperbacks I haphazardly chose from my family’s bookshelf. One of those books was Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. I think this is the actual copy I dragged across the ocean (note the $2.75 price tag!).

I won’t tell you what year it was, but it was well before Oprah picked that book for her Book Club. I chose it because it was small and easy to carry. Little did I know that it would transport me in a way that no other book had. And the ironic thing was that I was buried in that book as Europe rushed by outside the train. My trip to the other side of the world brought me, through a book, back to America.

Honestly, I can’t remember the specifics of that novel now, and I don’t want to re-read it with new eyes. Re-reading disappoints me.  But I do remember that it was such a captivating story, and the characters were so vivid and real. I lived in the book with them.

Toni Morrison is an author on a political landscape. It’s important that she is a lauded African-American writer, when major awards still rarely recognize writers of color. It’s important that she is writing about African-American characters, and African-American women in particular, at a time when books featuring African-American characters are still few and far between. But, honestly, that’s not why I picked up Song of Solomon all those years ago, and that’s not why I loved it. I loved it because it was a really, really good novel.

I imagine that one of the challenges of having such a full knapsack of celebrated books is that everything that you publish gets compared to the rest. Everyone is looking to you to put out the Next Big Thing. Morrison’s most recent book, God Help The Child, came to my nightstand with the glitter of high expectations. And, unfortunately, this was not a novel that blew me away.

Don’t get me wrong -- it is good. I imagine that it will fit nicely into a class on Toni Morrison’s work (and I took one of those in college, after my Europe trip). The story is about the legacy of pain experienced in childhood – physical, emotional, and cultural. The reader follows Bride, who, as a child, helped put an alleged child molester behind bars. But that event has a context. We learn that Bride’s mother felt deep shame over the dark tone of her child’s skin and refused to touch her (and as an adult, Bride only wears white). She grows up to be beautiful, to invent her own beauty, but the reader watches her shrink throughout the novel. Why is that happening? There are several interconnected characters and veins of trauma for the reader to explore in order to understand Bride’s history and to imagine a future for her.

This is compelling territory, but this book is like a sketch. There are the outlines of characters, a smudge of magical realism, a skeleton of a setting. I did not sink deeply into it, and it did not make me travel. It’s worth noting that this is a tiny novel – fewer than 200 pages – and I wonder what it would have been like if each character had been developed (the mother, especially) and if Morrison had filled in all the contours of the story.

Just recently, there was an interesting interview with Morrison in the New York Times Magazine.  And here is another much-discussed interview, where Morrison talks about race and justice.