Correcting for Perspective

During my senior year at Tougaloo, my family hadn’t sent me one penny. I had only the small amount of money I had earned at Maple Hill [restaurant in New Orleans]. I couldn’t afford to eat at school or live in the dorms, so I had gotten permission to move off campus. I had to prove that I could finish school, even if I had to go hungry every day. I knew Raymond [her stepfather] and Miss Pearl [his mother] were just waiting to see me drop out. But something happened to me as I got more and more involved in the Movement. It no longer seemed important to prove anything. I had found something outside myself that gave meaning to my life.

- Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi

If you have read Kathryn Stockett's The Help (which I blogged about here and here) and wondered how the story would go if a black woman had written it, try Coming of Age in Mississippi. Anne Moody’s first paying job came when she was only nine years old. She was paid seventy-five cents a week and two gallons of milk to dust and sweep an old lady’s house. After seeing that the old lady let cats drink out of the milk cans, she didn’t want to drink the milk any more and told her mother why, but her mother wouldn’t believe her, and so the girl continued carrying milk home to her family. She planted and chopped cotton for a while and continued to do housework for white people all the way through high school, but she kept her distance from boys, determined not to be trapped in a life like her mother’s, dependent on a man and having one baby after another. She went to college on scholarship, paying her living expenses by working summers in a restaurant (moving up gradually from dishwasher to waitress) and in a chicken slaughterhouse as a strikebreaker.

It was in college that Moody joined the NAACP, an organization so hated and feared by whites in her home of Wilkinson County that black people didn’t dare to say its name out loud, let alone join, lest they wind up murdered like Emmett Till. Soon afterward she became involved with SNCC, CORE, voter registration drives and civil rights sit-ins. Her life was threatened. Medgar Evers was killed on her 23rd birthday.

The end of the book, like much of the story, may not be what you expect, but it is one black woman’s firsthand experience of growing up poor in rural Mississippi and trying to make life better for her people.

Winter Wednesday Postcard Promenade #4: Through the Middle of the Mitten

Today’s lead image of Magician Lake, Dowagiac, is called a “real photo postcard.” Real photo postcards (RPPs) are distinct from postcards printed from photos, and that difference is important to collectors. The image quality of the real photos, images taken by amateur photographers with inexpensive postcard format cameras beginning in 1907, is wonderfully sharp and clear.

Michigan has over 3,000 miles of shoreline, what with three of the five Great Lakes almost surrounding its two peninsulas, but there are also more than 11,000 inland lakes, as well as inland towns, cities, rivers and farms. Beginning down in the lower-left corner of the map with Dowagiac (you go through that town if you take the train from Kalamazoo to Chicago) and strolling a zig-zag path north and east brings us next to one of my favorite little southwest Michigan towns, Paw Paw,


“Where the waters meet” in Paw Paw Lake. “Fine time, fine place,” reports Helen, using a penny stamp to mail the card to St. Paul, Minnesota, on August 3, 1908. This hand-colored card was produced in Germany.




Just above is the post office Sturgis (we’ve zig-zagged back southeast from Van Buren County to dip into St. Joseph County), shown on a postcard copyrighted 1959 by the L. L. Cook Company in Milwaukee, the image reproduced from a natural color transparency. Notice how we’ve gone from a black and white postcard camera image to a hand-colored to color photography with these first three cards? And do you notice the difference between the soft tints of the early German card and the hard, bold colors of the later "chrome" image?


I’ve posted the Kalamazoo Courthouse before but hadn’t photographed it well, and David and I were married in this building, too, so I'm very fond of this image. Someone addressed this card to an acquaintance in Battle Creek but never wrote a message or affixed a stamp. A good intention gone astray! This is another German-made card, with a note on the corner where the stamp was to have gone reading

Place the Stamp here
One Cent for
United States, and
Island Possessions,
Cuba, Canada and
Mexico.
Two Cents
For Foreign

So Canada, Cuba and Mexico were not considered “foreign” when it came to sending penny postcards? Interesting.

Later in Kalamazoo’s history came the country’s first pedestrian mall.


It was great while it lasted. So were the dime stores. All gone now.

Moving east and slightly north brings us to Battle Creek and Lake Goguac. “Camping alongside this lake so you can easily imagine the rest. Many thanks for your nice long letter....” The ink is quite faded on this card that went from Battle Creek to Minneapolis for a penny in 1909.



Lansing, our state capital, is really the middle of the mitt, at least measuring from west to east. Pretty far south from Up North, but let’s not get political today.


This old card of Sparrow Hospital in Lansing looks nothing like the hospital today. I lived in various apartments in the Sparrow neighborhood during my first few years as a Michigan resident.

How about this C. T. Art-Colortone night view of downtown Lansing? Theatre to the left, theatre to the right! Bright lights and traffic!



The Penrod Studio in Berrien Center produced a more modern daytime downtown scene about 30 years later.

Curwood Castle in Owosso, Michigan (east of Lansing), the lavish home of James Oliver Curwood,


is important to Michigan booksellers and readers of old-time Up North adventure tales. The author built this eye-popping palace in a little Midwestern town and then complained of the crowds that came by to gawk.

Time to go back west and visit Grand Rapids, starting with a look up Monroe Avenue.



Anyone know the name of that theatre on the right? I see “S” and then what could be a “T” following. Can this be yet another State Theatre? And do you notice the texture on the "linen" card?

The peaceful fountain at John Ball Park is featured on a card mailed to Minneapolis in 1908,


while another fountain, this one at the Soldiers Homein Grand Rapids, was mailed to St. Paul with not a single word of message. It was the thought that counted, apparently.


From G.R. we pick up M-37, my favorite road north, and promenade to White Cloud,


“where the North begins and pure waters flow.” I imagine all the vacationers reading that sign over the years, all of them feeling the tension leave their shoulders as they realized they were now Up North for real.

Next comes Newago, and I wish I had a card of downtown, but these fishermen and spectators in salmon season are something different.


The Hardy Dam on the Muskegon River creates another inland lake. Or would you call it an impoundment?


Moving indoors, a black and white postcard camera shot captures rustic furniture in Baldwin at the Shrine of the Pines.



Scenic Lake Idlewild was the Michigan destination of choice for black vacationers between 1912 and 1964.


You can read the story of the resort in a book called The Idlewild Community: Black Eden, by Lewis Walker and Ben C. Wilson and in this article in Traverse City’s Northern Express.


Cadillac Printing Co. in Cadillac printed this scene of its own downtown back in penny-postcard days, and Cadillac is where we stop for this week. Come back next Wednesday for this winter's last Postcard Promenade.

Chance Encounter, Lovely Craft, Common Names

I met Mary Van Arsdel from St. Petersburg by chance on a semi-wild (i.e., not yet developed) bit of land near Aripeka, Florida, in late March. It was my dog Sarah, a sociable canine, who introduced us. Later in the day David and I were driving another area of the shore, and I saw Mary a little way off the side of Osowaw Boulevard. “There’s Mary!” (Someone I know!) We stopped so I could invite her back to the house for a cold beer, and she showed me one of her recent baskets, along with bullrushes and sweetgrass she’d gathered that day.




The next day I had an e-mail from Mary:

“Today was a busy day, but I managed to hang the Black Needlerush (Bulrush) on the line in my backyard. The East sun dries one side and the West sun the other and will take about 2 months to turn a chestnut color. It is hard to believe that a day’s work only yielded ½ bucket. I enjoy harvesting it and it is good exercise. However, this is the last of the Bulrush that I will harvest until next winter.”

This lady, a data analyst by profession, is nothing if not devoted to her craft.

What goes by the common name “sweetgrass” in the South is not the same as our northern Michigan plant. Ours is Hierochlöe odorata, theirs Muhlenbergia filipes or Muhlenbergia capillaris, and while sweetgrass basketry here in Leelanau County has a Native American ancestry, that in South Carolina, where many are drawn by a strong regional tradition, traces its roots to West Africa by way of the Gullah people. What Mary calls bullrushes, by the way, is what I have called sawgrass in my winter posts from Florida’s Gulf coast.

Southern sweetgrass basket-makers increasingly find their supply of raw natural materials threatened and diminished by development, and one solution many of them are turning to is growing their own. Mary has planted in her backyard sweetgrass purchased from Karl Ohlandt, a landscape ecolopgist. Here’s more on Karl’s involvement in keeping sweetgrass from becoming extinct in South Carolina.

Mary lives in Florida at present but told me quite a bit about the South Carolina basket community and the stretch of Hwy 17 where basket-makers hawk their wares. The Gullah basket tradition there is over 300 years old.

Wildflowers, weeds, grasses, trees—plants of every kind and type have names by which they are known in different regions of the U.S. One bookstore customer today told me she is just getting interesting in herbal remedies and cooking and realizes she has to be careful about the plants she gathers. Sometimes, I told her, the name by which you know a plant depends on what your grandmother called it.


And then, of course, sometimes we choose the common names we like the best. My friend Laurie likes dog-tooth violet for the flower I prefer to call troutlily. Its Latin name, the one known around the world to distinguish it from every other plant, is Erythronium americanum--a unique identifier, thus very important, but not nearly as intimate as the common names. Another common name for this wildflower is adder's tongue. Read more about it here.


This is the season for all the wonderful spring woodland wildflowers. Later the forest canopy will fill in, Lake Michigan will no longer be visible through the trees, and few blossoms will remain on the deeply shaded forest floor. All the more reason to get out in the woods now, while the getting is good....