Let’s See Where We Are

Still in the ghost town in Cochise County. Still moving through grief by getting outdoors every day with the puppy and otherwise feeding my book addiction, notes here picking up where I left off the last time:

 

4. Irving, Washington. A Tour on the Prairies (nonfiction)

 

Often my bedtime books are more serious in nature, in part because if I am all wound up in a novel, it’s easy for me to stay awake reading all night. Not that Washington Irving’s 19^th-century horseback travels on the Great Plains were dull, by any means. In fact, it seems he was quite the eager, adventure-loving companion, it seems. Not a sleepy Rip Van Winkle guy at all!

 

5. Swan, Walter. How to Be a Better Me (nonfiction)

Walter Swan (from the 10-cent sidewalk table outside the Friendly Bookstore in Willcox) had plenty of lessons to impart and decided to put them between the covers of a book. Homespun Western commonsense.

 

6. Maxwell, Gavin. A Reed Shaken by the Wind (nonfiction)

7. Ferber, Edna. Show Boat (fiction)

8. Simeti, Mary Taylor. On Persephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal (nonfiction – uncorr. proofs, 1986)

 

I wrote quite a bit about the Maxwell book before I’d finished reading it, and that “quite a bit” can be found here. The same is true for Edna Ferber’s Show Boat and Mary Taylor Simeti’s On Persephone’s Island. The next book on my list, number 9, was sent by a friend back in Michigan. (Thank you, Laurie!) I’d seen the book before and not been drawn to it by the title, but my interest was piqued by looking more closely and seeing that the author was the creator of “Downton Abbey.” There are no heroes or villains here -- every character is a mix of admirable and repulsive qualities, and Fellowes is at his best when speculating on complicated motives. The Keillor novel is exactly what you would expect from the storyteller from Lake Woebegone.

 

9. Fellowes, Julian. Snobs (fiction)

10. Keillor, Garrison. Pontoon (fiction)

I include an image here (above) of book endpapers to illustrate why I was drawn to the light novel that spawned the 1950s Debbie Reynolds movie. The girl in the story was raised on a houseboat on the Mississippi River, so it is a book for my little houseboat book collection, and the story is innocent and charming, if thoroughly predictable.

11. Sumner, Cid Ricketts. Tammy Out of Time (fiction)

12. Jance, J.A. Unfinished Business (fiction)

13. Jance, J.A. Until Proven Guilty (fiction)

14. Abels, Harriette. Mystery on the Delta (fiction – YA)

 

Next came a mini-binge, as I devoured two murder mysteries back-to-back, followed by a YA mystery that was a cinch to solve early on, but, again, it was a story with a houseboat theme.

 

Then this past weekend I read two more serious nonfiction books, both of which moved me deeply. Kirkus Reviews thought Harlem is Nowhere, by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, “suffered” from not fitting clearly into one particular genre, being neither strictly academic nor strictly popular. (What was that reviewer thinking? Sounds like marketing talk to me.) From my point of view, the genre-bending, genre-overlapping qualities of the book made it a rich reading experience from a very gifted writer. I was transported in time and place and felt as if I had been there, with Rhodes-Pitts as both a well-informed guide and my personal friend.

She had some surprising nuggets for a bookseller, too. While I knew most of the names of important Harlem people mentioned, a new one to me was book collector Arthur Schomburg, whose collection of black history, literature, art, etc. was eventually bought by New York Public Library with a Carnegie Foundation grant. The collection included “more than 5,000 books, 3,000 rare manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and portraits, clippings albums, and several thousand pamphlets.” Rhodes-Pitts spent many hours in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which she calls “as much a community center as a library, and a little bit of home. Highly recommended. 

 

Finally, a new friend back in Michigan sent me a copy of her memoir in manuscript, the story of finding and losing all too soon, to cancer, the love of her life – and going on from there, as one must following loss. Much familiar territory for me, but new ground, also, and Mary Robertson is a lovely writer, with a frankness and, perhaps surprisingly, a sense of humor that brought me to both tears and laughter, often at the same time.

 

15. Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa. Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (nonfiction)

16. Robertson, Mary E. I’m Sorry For Your Loss: One Woman’s Journey Through Love, Loss & Recovery (nonfiction – ms.)

 

So now the question is, what book will I finish next? It probably won’t be my current bedtime volume, Anthony Trollope’s North America. Trollope gives us a fascinating window into American life during the Civil War away from the battlefields; however, he gets carried away on many long, detailed digressions into earlier American and Canadian history that occasionally try my patience. I am most entertained when he describes cities and towns in his time that I have known in my own, and I was very sympathetic to his disappointment at not seeing the real “prairie” he hoped to see, for all the cornfields that had taken the place of those seas of grass. I felt the same way years ago in southwest Michigan after reading James Fennimore’s Oak Openings: I so wished I could go back in time to see that prairie as it was before clearing and cultivation, before houses and barns and electric and telephone poles and lines. Just as it would be thrilling to see the West without barbed wire everywhere! But this is one of the glories of reading -- magically slipping away into a past we never saw with our own eyes.

Book Review: VIRGIN SOUL (or, "What were the Sixties really like?")

“What were the Sixties really like?” When a younger friend asked me this question, in a moment I suddenly felt many years older, realizing that what was “just yesterday” to me was a historical period to my youthful friend. But how to answer her question? I’ve been thinking about it for years now (haunted by the question still, obviously), as another two decades have slipped past. Here's an overview from Wikipedia to get you started, if you were "born too late" to be one of us, but --

There can be no single answer to what the Sixties were like, because they were different for everyone who lived through them, even if only American experience is considered. How old were you in the Sixties, for starters? A little child, a college student, part of the workforce, or someone “over 30,” one of those the young were told not to trust? Male or female, black or white or yellow or red or brown? Living in San Francisco or Chicago; Selma, Alabama; Aberdeen, South Dakota; or in the wilds of Maine? Rich or poor or in-between?

Student, lawyer, secretary, grocery store cashier, factory line worker, teacher, or Peace Corps volunteer? A draftee in Vietnam, conscientious objector in El Paso, refugee in Toronto, or a protestor at Berkeley? Singing and playing in a rock-and-roll band? Member of the Black Panthers or Students for a Democratic Society, or Young Republicans, or the Country Club?

There were peaceful demonstrations, and there was violence, and there was the undeclared war, and there were drugs, and there was also the continuation of American suburban life, with big weddings and brides in white. Toward the end of the Sixties there was the Pill, but all along there were pregnancies (planned and unplanned), abortions, and young families, some hippies, others mainstream. And for those in their ‘teens and 20s, there was exciting music, poetry everywhere, plenty of available sex and drugs, a lot of lofty ideals, and a minefield of dangerous pitfalls.

That's why I say there is no telling what the decade was “really like,” except in terms of individual lives, but if you weren't there and want a close-up view I just read a new novel that presents a convincing picture through one particular window.

Virgin Soul

by Judy Juanita

NY: Viking, 2013

$26.95

We meet the novel's protagonist, Geniece Hightower, in Oakland, California, in the summer of 1964. Just out of high school, she enrolls in Oakland City College, “City,”

. . . a raggedy, in-the-flatlands, couldn’t-pass-the-earthquake-code, stimulating, politically popping repository of blacks who couldn’t get to college any other way, whites who had flunked out of the University of California, and anybody else shrewd enough to go for free for two years and transfer to Berkeley, prereqs zapped.

Geniece is a journalism major. Right away meets Huey Newton. Right away she loves sitting on the campus lawn, listening to the “black intellectuals and the white boys from the W.E.B. Du Bois Club talk.” Quickly she learns that light-skinned black students (“yellow, high yellow, sandy yellow, mellow yellow, sandy mariney, light brown, peach, or caramel skin; the line stopped there”) had one hangout, darker-skinned blacks like herself another. She lives at the Y (10 p.m. curfew) and works 20 hours a week at the county welfare department in Oakland. She’s launched into life but still has her aunt and uncle’s warning in her head:

“We want you to be a virgin until you graduate from college. If you’re not a virgin, you won’t graduate. Once you have sex, you can’t think about anything else.”

Judy Juanita’s novel is divided into four main sections, one for each of Geniece’s four years of college. Sophomore year she is introduced to Black Muslims and has her hair cut into a natural: “Sleek, short, very African.” She wonders what “being in love” feels like and if she is in love. No longer living at the Y, she allows a boyfriend to hold political education classes in her apartment, and she cleans and cooks for those who attend.

I knew I was becoming militant. I just didn’t know if I wanted to become a militant. Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, the protesters, the sit-in demonstrators down south were my heroes. I loved them from a distance and on paper. But the militants I met, mostly the guys on the soapbox on Grove Street, were harsh and abrasive and condescending to everyone, not just white people. And they made people do things. . . . I didn’t want that kind of power over people. I just wanted it over myself.

Huey Newton isn’t the only real person readers encounter in the pages of this work of fiction. Bobby Seale is there, and Stokeley Carmichael, too. The war in Vietnam is audible always in the background.

Junior year is a turning point for Geniece, as one black group goes one way and the Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self-Defense another. She enrolls at State and lands a work-study job in Admissions, date-stamping application entries from all over the world.

Lives came out of the words: how little money one’s father made; the off-the-wall place one had traveled to; family crises; serious illness defeated; political activity noted like a badge of honor – “I belong to the W. E. B. Du Bois Club.” They weren’t afraid: “I participated in the freedom rides.” Stuff I never mentioned: “The protest changed my whole life.” State was a destination for radical students: “I’m a child of a union family.” Dissidents. The streets of Berkeley were the pull for people bucking the system. Nonconformists. State was pulling people like me. I was not an in-between. I was a junior facing a cast of thousands wanting to be right where I was, a part of something big, essential, swimming in the big ocean.

In the course of her college career, it is not until her junior year that Geniece sees herself at the center of social change taking place across the country. Before that she felt like “an in-between”; now she is, as people said in the Sixties, “where it’s at.” But she is not yet where she will be at the end of her senior year. . . .

I don’t want to give away too many details of this story, because it’s the details that make the central character’s life a real one and make that time period come alive. Her social and sexual and romantic relationships are important to her development as an adult. Her feelings for journalism wax and wane, but editing the Panthers’ newspaper is an important job she takes very seriously. Also with the BPP, she confronts the question of guns for self-defense, and a volunteer job through the Tutorial Center introduces her to two young, self-sufficient black girls neglected by their battered mother. Education is not limited to the classroom. (It never should be.)

But Geniece Hightower is determined to graduate in four years, so she wisely avoids serious involvement with drugs. While music is part of her life, it also remains, like Vietnam, in the background. Race, class, and gender relationships – politics within and beyond the university – the future she will have as a Black American woman – this young woman maintains ties to her family at the same time she is finding her own way in the world.

Personal, political – political, personal – yes, this was the Sixties. Judy Juanita gives readers a very real look at that exciting and turbulent time through the eyes of her strong, questing protagonist. There are pages when the prose lifts into lyricism, so it should be no surprise that the author’s writing has for years encompassed poetry as well as reporting. This is her first novel. I’m glad she wrote it and hope it won’t be her last.

An Old Question Asked Again -- The Book or the Movie?

The film "A Lesson Before Dying," starring the incomparable Don Cheadle. was based on a novel by Ernest J. Gaines.  I couldn't help thinking, when reading the book recently, that it would make a powerful movie, and I'd thought about how I would depict various parts of the story -- for instance, the event at the store that takes place before the book starts but almost has to be the beginning of the movie -- so I was interested to see how the film had been done and happy to have a chance to watch it on DVD only days after being immersed in the world of the book.

Horizons are not wide for the people in the black Louisiana community that is the setting for both book and movie. This claustrophobic world is seen directly in the film, where tall fields of cane wall in the roads, houses in the quarter are small and dark, and prisoners’ cells in the old courthouse building are like cages in a zoo. To stay there in Louisiana, his own teacher had told Grant Wiggins, would mean his defeat and possibly his death, so if he wants to save his own life he must leave the South. Mr. Wiggins, or “Professor,” as many call him, wants to leave but is kept home for now while he waits for the woman he loves to be divorced from the husband who abandoned her and her children, and his frustrations increase when his old auntie and her friend, the godmother of a young man in their community sentenced to death, insist on his involvement in the young man’s last days.

Several characters and incidents in the book were not included in the movie, and while I understand that film has to compress a story, I was disappointed that Paul, the one white deputy who treated Jefferson with respect and who came to wanting friendship with the teacher (also, the only nonracist white character), was left out of the movie. In this story no one person has all the answers, but several have something to contribute, and they make these contributions by listening and reaching out to each other. The teacher has as many lessons to learn as the prisoner, and the deputy also learns from the relationship that grows between the two black men.

Another character in the book passed over in the film is the young girl who takes over the schoolroom when the teacher is called away. Vivian, Grant’s beautiful girlfriend, thinks Grant's student is in love with him, but he tells her no, she is just looking to him to be a savior, like everyone else. (Isn’t this often part of a student’s infatuation with a teacher?) Expectations of family and community weigh heavily on Grant Wiggins, and what he does with the burden and how it changes him is as much a part of the story as Jefferson’s transformation.

In the end, Jefferson goes to the electric chair on schedule. (The movie ends before his execution; the book continued through it.) He had not killed anyone, but he is executed as a murderer nonetheless. From the beginning of the story Jefferson’s death was never in doubt, but in the end he goes to his death like a man, as his godmother wished him to do, knowing he was a man and knowing that people cared about him, and that, as the author presents it, is an important victory for him and his community. He was not a mindless "hog" (the comparison was made by his defense attorney in an attempt to avoid the guilty verdict) but an upright man. The story is what happens between the verdict and the execution, to both the convicted man and his teacher. Theirs is hardly a straight or easy road. It is hard, it is slow, there are numerous setbacks – it is life, condensed into a few weeks. Every day, every sentence, every word spoken by the characters counts.

The movie is very good, but if anyone had to choose between novel and film, I’d advise reading the novel. There is always so much in the pages of a book that cannot be translated to screen, for one thing. And while the film does an excellent job presenting the visual aspects of the story, the beauty of the actors almost distracts from the characters’ struggles at times. Most significantly, however, the movie doesn’t have time for all the dialogue in the book, and in the writing of Ernest J. Gaines, “action” mostly occurs in dialogue.

The other Gaines novel I read after this one, A Gathering of Old Men, also begins after a shooting, so that the story is not the shooting itself but about – and again, this is revealed in characters’ speaking -- lifetimes spent in discouragement and humiliation. The most important act of the old men's lives is this act of finally standing up, each old man claiming to have been the shooter. In A Lesson, Jefferson had to walk like a man. In A Gathering, the old men had to stand up like men at last. It's the standing up and walking that are important. As the teacher told Jefferson, we're all going to die. It's how you live and how you treat those who love you that matters. 

Dialogue is even more important in A Gathering than in A Lesson, with characters telling their lives and constantly challenging one another, and a reader hears this dialogue mentally while reading, almost like watching a play or a movie. It’s the importance of dialogue that made imagining both books as movies irresistible. But nothing is missing in the books, I realize, after having seen the excellent film version of A Lesson Before Dying, because as we read, we see the movie in imagination, fuller than any film can be, even with the best actors.

Ernest J. Gaines: If you haven’t read any of his books, pick one up soon. Read the book first, and then see the movie. It's worth seeing, just not a substitute for reading the novel.