Guest Blogger: Gregory Nobles on Florida's Twisting of American History

Photo from August 3, 2017

 Note: Our guest blogger today is Gregory Nobles, professor emeritus from Georgia Institute of Technology and author of John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman, and The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, the latter referenced in what he writes below, a letter that appeared today (August 2, 2023) in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and appears here with Greg’s kind permission. 

- P.J.Grath

 

 

These are dark days for history in the Sunshine State.

The Florida Department of Education’s African American History Standards Workgroup has recently put forth curriculum guidelines that include one truly bizarre benchmark: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Even with the qualifier “in some instances,” the guideline implies that enslaved labor could be essentially a form of temporary apprenticeship, a useful learning process leading to individual achievement. That’s quite a duplicitous spin on the teaching of American slavery.

But it’s “factual and well documented,” the workgroup asserts. The alleged documentation provides a list of 16 enslaved people — blacksmiths, shoemakers, fishing and shipping industry workers, tailors and teachers — who “took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.” It’s a very short list from a very long history, and short as it is, the individual examples make for dubious documentation.

I happen to have written a recent book about one of the two teachers on the list, Betsey Stockton (1798-1865), and I was stunned to find her trotted out for this sort of patronizing display. Yes, beginning in the time of her enslavement, she became a self-educated, even intellectually exceptional woman. And yes, after she gained her emancipation, she became a celebrated and committed teacher, first as a missionary in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaiian Islands), then as the first teacher in the first Black infant school in Philadelphia, and finally, for over three decades, as the sole teacher in the sole public school for Black children in Princeton, New Jersey. But she did that in spite of her enslavement, not because of it.

Soon after being born into slavery in Princeton, she was given to the household of the Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent Presbyterian pastor in Philadelphia and, from 1812 to 1822, the president of Princeton (then called the College of New Jersey). Green later wrote that she educated herself “without ever going to school at all,” and he was right about that: He certainly didn’t send her. But working in Green’s household gave her access to his substantial collection of books, and she apparently devoured them. By the time she was in her late teens, Green acknowledged that she “has a real taste for literature . . . (and) composes in English, in a manner very uncommon for one of her standing in society.”

Her standing in society, of course, was always defined by her race and gender. Even as a free woman of color, she could never ignore or escape the pervasive racism of American society, in the North as well as the South, and particularly in Princeton, at a time when the College of New Jersey actively recruited students from below the Mason-Dixon Line. Beneath the genteel veneer of this small college town simmered an ugly underside of anti-Black prejudice, at times even outright violence. Being the one Black teacher in such a town could never be easy, but she worked at it day after day, year after year, until the day she died.

Given her circumstances, Betsey Stockton stands as a success, an imposing pillar of the Black community in Princeton, where she is still remembered and revered. But to portray her success as an extension, much less a benefit, of her enslavement is to tear her out of her historical context, to embrace a benign-seeming view of the vicious institution that left its mark on her from birth, as it did so many other Black people of her era.

And yes, like Betsey Stockton, other people born into slavery did use their initiative to make their own mark on society. They were human beings, after all, with intellect and imagination, not mindless automatons merely doing rote labor. But whatever they achieved pays credit to their own effort, not to their enslavement. To suggest, as the Florida guidelines do, that slavery could have been a springboard to success is a cynical attempt to emphasize particular individuals to sanitize a pernicious institution.

“We proudly stand behind these African American History Standards,” the Florida panel concludes, but they’re really standing behind a historical smokescreen. The people of Florida — and all of us — need to see through it.

 

- Gregory Nobles

Northport, MI

August 2, 2023

My Wingèd Memories

Great blue heron, Florida, 2009

 

The Encyclopedia of North American Birds, by Michael Vanner, is far too large to serve as a guide in the field (or woods or mountains), but the big book is unsurpassed for indoor browsing and remembering. The wood stork and roseate spoonbill take me back to Aripeka, Florida, and the house on the island where the Artist and I spent several winter months with our beloved Sarah. A red-bellied woodpecker sometimes visited behind the house, and on the way out into the Gulf of Mexico from Weeki Wachee (other Florida years), on the road to little Pine Island, we saw sandhill cranes on their nest and raising young. The beautiful photographs in Vanner’s book bring the birds very much to life and give fresh color to my memories.

 

Arizona winters felt even birdier, either because we were older or because we spent more time sitting outdoors behind the cabin (especially in the spring of 2020), watching birds. 

Meep, meep!

The cactus wren was our morning rooster, the roadrunner always amusing entertainment. In the nearby Chiricahua National Monument we saw the striking acorn woodpecker, and sandhill cranes by the thousand drew us frequently farther south in Cochise County to Whitewater Draw (where I was thrilled to spot a white-faced ibis, also, one day), although we could see hundreds of the cranes just outside Willcox any day of the week. And in fact it was there, by what the Artist and I called “the ponds,” officially Twin Lakes, outside Willcox that I saw my first vermilion flycatcher, recognizing it from the pages of my field guides. 

Acorn woodpecker: He is really there.

Vermilion flycatcher

Sandhill cranes

 

In the spring of 2020, we stayed in Arizona late enough to see Gambel’s quail chicks. The whole family would come for a morning drink of water, filing along the old railroad ties that served to keep the backyard from washing downhill. They came in single file, and in single file they disappeared again down the hill after their visit. They made me think of a middle-class French family dressed up and out for a Sunday stroll.

 

Down at a neighbor’s house one morning, hoping to see a phainopepla (it never made an appearance that morning), I unexpectedly sighted a painted bunting (like the vermilion flycatcher, a bird recognized only thanks to repeated perusals of field guides) and also had an opportunity to watch orioles (I forget which kind) feeding their young under the porch eaves. Another neighbor had more hummingbird feeders, and thus more hummingbirds, than I’ve ever seen in a single place before. I had a single hummingbird feeder and the occasional black-chinned hummer. 

 

The dearest Arizona bird memory, though, brought back to me by Vanner’s book, is of the little canyon towhee. A canyon towhee would hop around the cabin backyard and under our car, not at all disturbed by our presence. One of my Western bird field guide authors called it the “most confiding” of the towhees (perhaps he meant confident?), and somehow the Artist took that to be its name. “Is that the confiding towhee?” he would ask me. There was something homey and comforting about that bird’s presence in our outdoor, near-home life that spring, such a troubled season in the world at large. I have searched photo files for a picture of it, unsuccessfully, so here is Vanner's:

Canyon towhee in Vanner's book

As you see, he is in many ways just another little brown bird (LBB), but I tell you, he has personality! The feathers on the top of his head are usually semi-erect and give him a perky look. Perky, yes. That word fits the confiding towhee we knew so well.

 

Two Michigan summers in a row, a pair of bluebirds nested in a dead popple tree near enough to our outdoor dining table that the Artist and I could watch the parents feeding their young while we enjoyed our alfresco suppers. That particular popple is history, but I bought a bluebird house at a yard sale on Saturday and hope it’s not too late to attract bluebirds again to my yard. Just have to figure out how to get the box up….

 

Hooded oriole in Dos Cabezes, Arizona

So many birds, so little time -- and so many memories, and they but a small fraction of the memories!

My Darling, Sweetest Girl

Sarah was adopted from the Cherryland Humane Society in Traverse City, Michigan, in January of 2008, at the age of four months.

Sarah died at 8 p.m., November 17, in her winter home of Dos Cabezas, Arizona, aged 13 years, with her family at her side. 

 

Rest in peace, darling, sweetest girl – you will live in our hearts forever.

 

Novel Worth Reading, Physical Copy NOT Incredibly Valuable

Where are we?

Whoever wrote the entry on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings in Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature offers a pretty opinionated view of the writer’s work: 

Rawlings took her material from the people and land around her, and her books are less fiction than vivid factual reporting.

Really? Is that shocking? Did F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway not take their material from people and places familiar to them? Willa Cather and Eudora Welty? Marcel Proust? John Steinbeck? I could go on and on, but so could you, I’m sure. 

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born in 1896, and her first novel, South Moon Under, written from her rural home in Cross Creek in interior northern Florida, was published 1933. The writer of the Encyclopedia of Literature piece acknowledges the author’s “magical description of the landscape” of the area in and around Cross Creek, brought to the attention of other Americans in her most famous novel, The Yearling. But it’s South Moon Under I’ve been reading — for the first time — and on the very first page the Florida scrub habitat springs to life:

Light still hung raggedly above the hammock west of the cleared acres. Here and there a palm shook its head against the faint orange of the sky, or the varnished small leaves of a live oak were for a moment luminous. There was an instant when the hammock reared back against the west; when the outline of each tree-top was distinct; when the clearing gathered about it the shreds of twilight. Then there was no longer scrub or clearing or hammock. Blackness obliterated them with a great velvet paw and crouched like a panther on the cabin doorstep.  

- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, South Moon Under

I can see the palm tree shaking its head and then the black velvet paw of the panther blotting out the trees and everything else. Rawlings does indeed capture the uniqueness of the scrub habitat, its moods and effects on moods as well as its flora and fauna. 

But her artistry does not end there. All the while as you are reading along, lulled by scenery and character and dialect and the small events that form the society of the Florida scrub, a world completely different from the one most of us inhabit (and all the more so in that she was describing it as it was over eight decades ago), Rawlings is building a subtle, almost invisible narrative arc. My opinion is that this surprising first novel has been terribly underrated and deserves far more serious attention. 

I want to turn my attention now, however, to the physical book in my hands and ask you to look at it with me. How can this possibly be a first edition, although the Scribner’s “A” is there on the copyright page?

Look carefully at the pages. The type is not crisp and clear. The binding, however, is in excellent condition, though, isn’t it? For a book from 1933, without a dust jacket, to look so good is -- or would be, if it were that old -- astonishing. Sure enough, when we search online we find that the cloth binding of the first edition was light green, not dark blue, thus the volume that came into my hands is a modern reprint masquerading as a first edition. What individual or company is responsible for its production? There is no hint in or on the book. 

Book piracy is rampant online, and there are few protections against it. Know your book dealer!

Coming soon: Thoughts about literary regionalism. Do you have questions about it?

A Bookish Look Back: In Defense of Lists

Seems like just yesterday that Sarah was a pup

Conversation in the bookstore occasionally turns to the question of lists. The question, more specifically, is: “Do you keep lists of the books you’ve read?” I did not always do so but have now for quite a while, because it’s just too embarrassing to be a bookseller and be unable to remember the title of a book or name of an author one wants to recommend! This morning I looked back at my first list and see that I began the practice in 2009, about 15 months after my first post on “Books in Northport.” 

Bonnie Jo Campbell and me

Since I have been a re-reader almost as long as I’ve been a reader, there are old, familiar names of favorite authors on that list from 2009: Alexander McCall Smith, Farley Mowat, Georges Simenon, Louis Slobodkin, Elizabeth Enright, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Barbara Ehrenreich, Alfred Kazin, and Annie Dillard are there, and so are Michigan’s Mardi Link and Jim Harrison and Bonnie Jo Campbell. James Joyce’s Ulysses is on the list, telling me that 2009 must have been the inaugural year of a little reading circle that will discuss pre-World War I Vienna this July. 

Trudy, Steve, me at one (raucous?) reading circle meeting

Novels Forever Island and Allapatah, by Patrick Smith, remind me that we spent a couple of late winter months that year in Aripeka, Florida. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, is on the list, and I recall my grudging reluctance before that thick volume with the forbidding title — taken on only at the bidding of another book group to which I belonged for a couple of years — and my subsequent delight in the story and gratitude to the friend who had urged it on the group. U.P. Hedrick’s Land of the Crooked Tree was a book the Artist and I read aloud to each other, transporting ourselves nightly from the Florida Gulf Coast to the America’s other “Third Coast,” that of the Great Lakes. Which is third and which is fourth? I’ll leave that quarrel to others. 

It was in 2009 that I read Lisa Genova’s brilliant novel, Still Alice, a book I have not (yet) re-read but one that remains vivid in my mind for the way the author manages to convey the confusions of Alzheimer’s disease from the viewpoint not of a family member but of the sufferer herself. I also read Doug Stanton’s extraordinary Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, the images Doug’s writing conjured up in my head much clearer still, at ten years remove, than those from the movie version of the book. 

I read Harrison’s In Search of Small Gods, which came out that year. There would be still more poetry from Jim following that collection, for we had Jim among us (in a literary sense, although he no longer lived in Michigan) for several more years.

A few classics stand out: Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons; The Count of Monte Cristo, by Dumas (the Artist’s favorite story when he was a young man); Stendahl’s Le Rouge et Le Noir (not at all what I expected), all first readings for me; as well as the careful group re-reading of Joyce’s Ulysses. There were several books about dogs, both fiction and nonfiction (Sarah was still very much a puppy then), and one about a woman’s pioneer experience in the American West, a theme that has recurred in subsequent lists. I read Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks — and went on to read three more novels by Brooks in subsequent years. I read J. B. Priestley’s English Journey (1934) for the first time and have re-read it since. I rediscovered with great pleasure a favorite from my adolescence, Mrs. Mike. 

Besides serving as a record, my “Books Read” lists for each year take me back to where I was at that time in my life, vicarious experiences from books, always, blending with the experiences of my “real” life. Thus titles from 2009 take me back to Aripeka, Florida; to Sarah’s young-dog days; to the beginnings of one book group and the memory of another no longer active; to first acquaintances and deepening friendships with various Michigan writers; and to Sunny Schwartz with her Dreams from the Monster Factory and Rebecca K. O’Connor’s Lift: A Memoir. With Schwartz I met incarcerated men looking for redemption; with O’Connor I flew hawks! And there was Gustav Niebuhr, who urged me (and other readers, of course) to go Beyond Tolerance in building bridges with Americans of different faiths and opinions. 

Most of the titles on my list from ten years ago stir memories. A few, I admit, leave me blank. I see a certain title and ask myself what the book was about, and I may never remember, but it’s also possible that I’ll run across the book again someday and a little light will turn on to illuminate some dark corridor of memory. 

In general, my life is not organized enough to qualify as compulsive, and much of what I thought of (or tried to ingrain in myself) as habit has fallen away over the years, but my “Books Read” lists have acquired increased value to me as time has gone by, and I am very glad to have them. They are like photo albums or like physical books lined up on my shelves, a harvest of pleasure and learning it would be painful to lose. 

Back to the Blue

A good friend here in Leelanau County commented that she didn’t care much for the Arizona high desert, all that “brown landscape.” It’s true, there is not a lot of color in the prismatic sense. I found, however, a lot of local color, to use the term in something other than its literal sense, and I loved being immersed in a culture so different from what I’ve known for most of my life. But it’s good to be home, too.

Home. Michigan. Coming home to Michigan from Arizona feels much more different from years-ago homecomings from Florida, the Southwest itself much more different, mostly in the absence of greenery and blue water (both of which are abundant in Florida), so that what strikes me most this spring on re-entry is seeing Lake Michigan again, Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Leelanau, even the little creeks running everywhere through the county. We were driving a few days ago on a road down by Cedar, and I remarked to David, commenting on a ditch running with fresh, clear water, “In Arizona, that would be considered a river.” More than that, in the Southwest I oriented myself by mountain ranges, whereas now, back home, I have returned to orienting by bodies of water.

Another friend reminded me, when I was rhapsodizing online about Arizona horses, that we have horses here, too. Indeed we do, and also cows, and I have been seeking them out in the landscape. To make sure I see horses every day is one of my personal "goals" for 2015. Cows are good, too. Horses: exciting. Cows: calming.

For yet another friend, who mentioned that I hadn’t posted any photos of the outside of our winter getaway cabin, here's one for Joanne, though it has nothing to do with anything else in this post.

Returning to the land of blue water has also brought me back to new books by Michigan authors, another refreshing source of joy. I have come home to In Pursuit of Birds, by Ladislav Hanka of Kalamazoo, and Testimony of the Senses, by Cory Oldweiler of Leland, to mention only two outstanding examples. There are many more, and I’ll be writing about some of them soon in this space.

My hours for May are Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., except for Memorial Day weekend, when we will be --unthinkably! -- closed to attend a family wedding. Stop by soon when we're open to put your name on the reservations list for the Hanka book, which I will have in stock later this month.

Books are alive and well in Northport, I am happy to report. The first day of the Dog Ears Books season, Saturday, May 2, was filled with friends and customers, hugs and sales. It is a rich life here in the Upper Midwest, on our peninsula on a peninsula in the Great Lakes.

More Old Southern Memories

No, Dawn, you are not looking at spring in Michigan but winter in south Florida, these pictures coming to you from from quite a different place and years after they were taken. Yes, today’s post is a reprise of one of two trips we made to Everglades City and environs. The little waterside restaurant is (was?) in Everglades City. Along the Gulf coast of Florida, common restaurant specialties are blue crabs, stone crabs, and alligator. Sometimes there is mullet on the menu, as well. Remember the line from the song, “Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high”? I always thought the “fish are jumpin’” part was hyperbole, but no! The fish really do jump right out of the water! They hurl themselves into the air! Those are mullet, and their antics never ceased to delight, amuse, and entertain me. Mullet is a small, bony fish, but when you’re in Florida, it’s local, and enjoying local food is a big part of being somewhere else.

Remember the day we went out into the ocean looking for an island with a beach? Here are a couple more scenes from that excursion.

The photo directly above is sea grape. Sea grape manages to be both ubiquitous and wonderful, a neat trick.

Not far from Everglades City is Chokoloskee Island, which is pronounced by Chucka-luskee. There is an old store on the island that dates back to the days of Mister Watson, so memorably captured in Peter Mattheissen’s Killing Mister Watson, which I began reading in Michigan before this trip and finished in Everglades City. Why do I have no pictures of the store? Well, you can see the pictures -- and read about the murder -- here. When we visited the island, there was a sweet little restaurant, colorfully decorated, with a menu that featured interesting vegetarian choices, and towering over the little building and its flowery outside deck was this tall tree. Now that is something you don’t see in Michigan, either! Papaya! It you would like to try growing a papaya tree from seed, click here to see its life unfold.

To the north of Everglades City is a nature preserve called the Fakahatchee Strand, where a remnant of Florida’s oldest cypress trees escaped being felled to become ship masts—or, more recently and much less nobly, garden mulch. Please do not use cypress mulch in your landscaping! Cypress, like mangrove, is crucial to flood control and is “harvested” for short-term profit at the expense of homes and businesses and lives! Companies harvesting the trees will tell you that they replant, but establishing a seedling cypress is infinitely more difficult than planting pines in Michigan fields, because the seedlings cannot survive prolonged, intense flooding exacerbated by the removal of the mature trees. Storm surge easily uproots them and washes them away. In other words, the flooded land from which centuries-old trees is taken will not necessarily be hospitable to seedlings because it is no longer the “same” habitat.

Look up. Look down. There's something to see wherever you look. Look carefully.

‘Strand,’ by the way, is an important word in Everglades vocabulary. In what looks to the first glance like stagnant swamp, there are almost imperceptible moving currents constantly refreshing the water. You might think of the cypress strands and rivers of grass as wet prairies and the hardwood ‘hammocks’ as islands comparable to prairie oak openings. When a delicate natural habitat like this is destroyed, restoring it becomes a huge, expensive project.

My delight in jumping fish was matched by David’s enthusiasm for strangler figs. He could not stop marveling at these subtropical parasites -- but neither could he be serious for long.

Here is a good summary of different kind of Florida habitats. It is another world from Michigan and equally beautiful and captivating in its own unique way. Here in northern Michigan, it’s a very different winter story.