To Mask or Not to Mask (Big Sigh!)

Open, uncrowded spaces!

 

The Big Question – Again!

 

August is here, the summer of 2021 is two-thirds over, but we have not heard the last of COVID-19. Leelanau County, leading Michigan with over 70% of the population vaccinated, is filled with eager vacationers from all over the country, and in many other places the vaccination rate continues to lag, despite a resurgence of cases, hospitalizations, even deaths. 

 

A friend called me on Friday evening to discuss the question of remasking. She and I and our husbands are all over 70, so – perhaps not “compromised” but definitely in the at-risk demographic. Here is a map of the U.S. showing statistics, but the text is worth reading, too. Eighty-eight percent of those infected are among the unvaccinated: you can subtract 88 from 100, right? Twelve percent (12%) of COVID cases involve vaccinated people? That’s what my friend wanted to discuss with me. Recall that the vaccines were never advertised as 100% effective, the first numbers given ranging from 91-97% effective, as I recall, and Pfizer now reporting a drop in effectiveness after four months to 87%.

Well, people living and working in Northport have a Facebook page that I joined shortly after it began, and it was on that page that I posed my question – Remasking? Never stopped masking? – to other people in our business community. My friend and I during our phone conversation had heaved a few big sighs over the remasking question, and the number of sighs coming from me increased after I posed the question to the Facebook group.

 

It was intended as a simple question. I wasn’t asking for medical advice or looking for an argument, only trying to get a feel for how others in business in my community were feeling about this health and safety issue. We all see license plates from Florida, Texas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Alaska, etc. – and everyone who drove from those places traveled through other places (as do the Artist and I when we go between Michigan and Arizona), so how are others feeling about risk these days?

 

Omigod, the brouhaha that ensued! 

 

I had asked another question in the past week about the local source for all the big logs I’d seen being trucked south through the village, and the same thing happened with my mask question that happened when I asked about the logs: First responses were simple and to the point, but very quickly ideology came rushing into the picture, with sides lining up and throwing spitballs at each other. One person not only referred to the slippery slope argument (more entertainingly titled, I always feel, the camel’s nose) but made one of his own. No one (yet) has called anyone else a fascist or a communist, but the terms ‘dictator’ and ‘socialist’ have been thrown around. Ye gods and little fishes!

 

Yes, it’s freedom of expression. Yes, that’s what democracy is all about. But does every question have to be a political football? Really? I mean, everyone on the site already knows which side everyone else is going to join. Nothing new is being said, and no minds are being changed. Oh, one new thing was said: Jean-Paul Sartre was called a utilitarian. No, sorry, he was not a utilitarian. Existentialism and utilitarianism are poles apart. I mention this to the handful of people who will care….

 

Meanwhile, on Saturday in my bookstore I noticed that about half of the people coming in were masked. I wore a mask myself most of the day and will be doing so in other crowded indoor situations.

Sigh!

 

Among My Current Books

 

I read two novels from beginning to end this past week, began one nonfiction book and am continuing my reading of another. 

 

100. Akers, W. M. Westside (fiction)

101. Hicks, Joyce. Escape From Assisted Living (fiction)

 

The novels were as unlike each other as could be. Westside is a noir fantasy, set in an imaginary New York in a Prohibition Era that was never quite like this. The action rarely slows, and I can’t say I followed every twist and turn, but the writing is good, and I could picture the settings as I read, which is always something I look for in fiction. To my thinking, the novel cries out for an animated film adaptation. I’m told that Martin Scorsese has bought the rights and that the book’s author is writing the screenplay, though, so we’ll see what develops.

 

Escape From Assisted Living has no murders (one small mystery as a plot thread) but could legitimately be termed a “cozy” read. I enjoyed it. Again, good writing, interesting and varied settings, and a main character I did not identify with but for whom I felt affection and empathy.

 

I will read the sequel to Escape From Assisted Living but probably not the sequel to Westside. Noir fantasy is just not my genre. I read The Hunger Games and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo but not the sequels to either book. I’m not boycotting, just limiting my intake.

 

A friend loaned me the U.K. edition of Diary of a Young Naturalist, by Dara McAnulty, a book I'm enjoying enough that I put two copies on my new book order list for the coming week, anticipating that some of my customers will want to read it, too. The author is very young, an extremely gifted writer, passionate about nature (especially birds), and on the autism spectrum. And we’re on “the other side of the pond” as we read it, so altogether we enter another world in more ways than one.

 

I’m about two-thirds through The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, by Mary Helen Washington, a writer who came to my attention because she wrote the introduction to my edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Although the style of The Other Blacklist is academic, with requisite citations and the usual repetitions, it makes for fascinating reading, and I am learning quite a lot about how 1950s black artists were targeted and persecuted as “subversive,” whether or not they were officially affiliated with the Communist Party. The official government line was to counsel patience, gradualism, and urge “universal” rather than “racial” themes on black writers. In other words, writing about the black experience at all was suspect. Like Native American children sent to boarding schools to learn how to be white, black artists also were urged to leave color behind – as if white America would ever let them! – if they wanted to succeed nationally. Talk about Catch-22!

 

 

Peasy and the Larger World

He loves his yard.

I’ll confess that Peasy met our most recent visitors (last Sunday and Monday) only while on-leash. And he barked. When we dined outdoors, he watched from the porch window (not barking, please note), and the next evening we occupied the porch for several hours while he lay patiently outside the front door. He is getting used to people coming and going – I hope! Part of managing a reactive dog, however, is not putting the dog unnecessarily into stressful situations. And since Peasy is so bonded to me, he’s more relaxed when I’m more relaxed, so that there is that aspect, too. 

He's good about waiting.

But he is learning. He is very patient when we don’t want to be bothered, and then, when we are ready to pay attention to him and play with him again, he is all wiggles and kisses and overflowing happiness! He is just wicked cute, that little guy! He waits like an angel for permission to approach his food dish or go through a door or jump out of the car. And he is much, much better about not lunging like a cobra when we drop things on the floor. In those respects, his sweet, nonchalant behavior now approaches – normal!

 

So there you are – the world chez nous, as we slide into the beginning of August, with a hint of September in the air. I hope the summer has been treating you well and that you are enjoying books and the outdoors in equal measure.

Glow, Little Glow Worm – Don’t Give Up!

 What on earth put that song into a crowded dream filling my imagination just before I woke a couple mornings ago at 5:30 a.m.? How many years must it have been since I heard the Mills Brothers singing the little glow worm song on the radio, and how much other music, how many other songs, would have come between that long-ago day and this dark morning? “Glimmer, glimmer!” What pulled that song out of some dim, long-buried storage bank and put it into my head with its surprising lyrics and close harmonies? What is it that brings a memory like that unexpectedly to the surface?

 

The leaves were the color of sweet potatoes and of the summer sun when it sets. They had begun to fall from the branches….

-      Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

 

Halfway through The Warmth of Other Suns, I was fully engrossed, nearly mesmerized, by the three particular stories the author tells, the half-century tapestry in which those particular appear as threads, and by Wilkerson’s writing itself. She incorporates historical records and statistics smoothly into the epic, always and in every line remaining, above all, a writer. Her phrase about leaves “the color of sweet potatoes” is one small example of an almost novelistic style that makes every scene vividly alive. I read the book before falling asleep and when waking up. 

Then at my bookstore one afternoon (during the midafternoon lull), I was surprised by how quickly I fell into another book I hadn’t meant to read, just peek into, Page Smith’s Trial By Fire, Volume 5 in his 8-volume People’s History of the United States. It is probably no coincidence that Howard Zinn used the same title for his own one-volume history of our country, as Page Smith, while a professor of history, considered himself – and was considered by others – very much a “populist” historian, writing not for a small academic audience but for Americans at large.

It was the final paragraph of his short introduction to Volume 5 that stopped me in my tracks and then quickly made me want to go on to the first chapter: 

 

What cannot be sufficiently emphasized is that since people do not exist for the convenience or the scrutiny of historians, a certain violence, or at least, disservice, is inevitably done to the full and breathtaking complexity of the truth whenever someone, assuming the role of a historian, attempts to deal with life in the mode called “history.” This is most notably true in writing about black people in America [my emphasis added]. …I am continually and painfully aware of my deficiencies as an uncertain practitioner of the art [or history] and nowhere so acutely as in trying, as a white man, to comprehend the nature of what we call today, somewhat glibly, “the black experience.” 

-      Page Smith, introduction to his Trial By Fire

 

Trial By Fire was published in 1982, that is, 38 years ago, while The Warmth of Other Suns bears a 2010 publication date. The older book’s author was a white man, the newer one written by a black woman, Smith a historian, Wilkerson a journalist who had to become a historian in researching her book, both of them prize-winning American authors. Something told me that reading these two books in tandem would be an even richer experience than reading only one could possibly be, although either is clearly worth any American’s concentrated time.

Because that is the question, isn’t it? How did we get to where we are now? 

I have already learned from Smith that our country’s founders had doubts and fears from the very beginning about the new union’s ability to hold together and not break up over the issue of slavery. And it should surprise no one that Wilkerson’s migrants – Ida Mae Gladney, who moved to Chicago during Depression era; George Starling, who fled Florida citrus groves for a new life in New York’s Harlem following World War II; and Dr. Robert Foster, whose successful career in California could never have been achieved by a black man in his native Louisiana – encountered prejudice and barriers in the North in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, despite the absence of the odious Jim Crow laws that had held them down in the South.

As Page Smith noted,

 

Slavery was not, of course, the only sin Americans had to answer for to the Almighty. Racial prejudice was everywhere apparent in the North….

-      Smith, ibid.

 

That racial prejudice that Wilkerson’s migrants encountered in the 1950s was all the more nerve-wracking because of its unpredictability.

 

There were no colored or white signs in New York. That was the unnerving and tricky part of making your way through a place that looked free. You never knew when perfect strangers would remind you that, as far as they were concerned, you weren’t equal and might never be.

-      Wilkerson, op. cit.

 

Understanding our nation’s past cannot change the past. That should go without saying. Historical understanding is vital, however, if we hope for a better future, because in addition to generals and battles, state laws and federal policies –always, then as now, consequences fell on individuals and families, ordinary people just trying to live their lives, and so, now as then, people’s lives are at stake, children’s futures are at stake. 

But neither are we obligated to accomplish a half-century’s worth of progress in any 24-four period [since ‘ought’ implies ‘can,’ as the philosophers say]. We can, however, brighten the corners where we are (as the old Sunday school song advised), and I see people doing that everywhere I look. Road builders are laying down fresh new pavement, farmers are harvesting corn, painters are painting, quilters are quilting, and on it goes. One foot in front of the other, one day at a time. A smile, a word of encouragement, a sympathetic ear, opening our hearts and stretching our minds a little every day as we go about our ordinary lives. 

We simply cannot afford to be distracted by angry shouters throwing red herrings across the path and trying to prevent understanding. The true enemies are not our fellow Americans on “the other side” but those who would divide us into “sides” to enhance their own power gains.

Sept. 20 - Sunday morning

I began writing this post a couple of days ago. Last night I woke in the wee dark hours and finished reading Wilkerson’s book before the sun was up. She thoroughly and beautifully accomplishes the tasks she set herself, collecting oral histories and presenting intimate portraits of three selected migrants, while also searching out and distilling and incorporating newspaper, literary, and scholarly accounts of the Great Migration, from the beginning of the movement to the present, to pull that 50-year sweep of history together and examine and critique what has been said of the southern black people who moved north from 1915 to 1970 and separate truth from myth. Informative, compelling, important, and brilliant!

And now, two days after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and having come to the last page of The Warmth of Other Suns, I can’t help thinking once again that the temptation (while I certainly understand it!) to give in to weariness over the news or hopelessness over current politics – that temptation to give up – can  very well be seen as what has been called “white fragility.” Or is it “liberal fragility”? "Bourgeois fragility"? Whatever it is, we cannot afford it. 

Ruth Bader Ginsberg did not give up. Immigrants and migrants moving to strange new places for what they hoped would be better lives did not give up. Survivors of all kinds, in hellish situations, with their very lives at risk, did not give up (obviously), or they would not have survived. How delicate and fragile are we 21^st-century Americans in these admittedly difficult times but – let’s face it – in material circumstances many immigrants and migrants and survivors would find enviable, even idyllic? Cowboy up! Cowgirl up! 

I am giving myself this pep talk, too, you understand, not preaching from some high-and-mighty place above the fray. Glow, little glow worms! Brighten the corners where you are.

 

 

Christianity and Cruelty

Yes, that’s a contentious headline for today’s post, but what I have to say may surprise anyone looking for an indictment of religion, this or any other. Read on. Agree or disagree? Let me know.

This is Black History Month. If I ever read the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, it was a long time ago, so that’s the book I chose to begin in this first week of February. It is not pleasant reading: Douglass tells stories of life under slavery that rival the horrors of 20^th-century concentration camps. It’s hard to say what the “worst” of these horrors might have been, but the author singles out religious slave-owners as the cruelest:

In August, 1832, my master attended as Methodist camp-meeting held in the Bay-side, Talbot county [Maryland], and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both these respects. It neither made him to be humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.  – Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

When young Frederick’s ownership passes out of the family following several owners’ deaths, and when after that he is released from bondage to a cruel “breaker” of slaves, he eventually comes to “the best master I ever had, till I became my own master,” a certain Mr. Freeland.

Another advantage I gained in my new master was, he made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion; and this, in my opinion, was truly a great advantage. I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most appalling barbarity – a sanctifier for the most hateful frauds – and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholding find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.

This apparent indictment of religion comes from the first-hand experience of one born into slavery, who knew various masters, and who did not escape to freedom until his 21^st year. 

Is religion then to be cited as a cause of cruelty, a logical rationale for slavery, just as many indict it as a cause of war? I have written about religion and war on another occasion, so anyone who knows me or has read this blog will not be surprised by my position, which is that while certain teachings may, under the guise of religion, help rationalize slavery or war, religion itself, Christianity or any other, does not provide the initial idea or impulse. If it did, how to explain the Abolitionist movement in the North, predominantly inspired by religion, “professing that slaveholding was incompatible with Christian piety”?

How to explain the deep faith felt by Frederick Douglass himself?

In order to make my case, I must briefly leave the slave narrative and even the issue of slavery in American history and turn to a field of current research that will at first seem far removed from my main subject. The research field is that of reasoning and statistics and how our intuitions lead us into hasty conclusions we are persuaded to abandon only rarely and reluctantly. The book laying out this story (less dramatic from one point of view but relevant to every single living human being) is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011).

Let’s start with Kahneman’s statement that our minds prefer causal explanations to statistically more accurate explanations. In a golf tournament, for example, a player who does well on Day 1 will generally not do as well on Day 2, whereas a player who performed badly on Day 1 will generally improve on Day 2. Statistically, this is explained by a law called “regression to the mean,” a law of demonstrated predictive value that runs so counter to our intuitions that we invariably prefer to “explain” the deterioration or improvement with causal stories. During one Winter Olympics, Kahneman writes,

I was startled to hear the sportscaster’s comments while athletes were preparing for their second jump: “Norway had a great first jump; he will be tense, hoping to protect his lead and will probably do worse” or “Sweden had a bad first jump and he knows he has nothing to lose and will be relaxed, which should help him to do better.” The commentator had obviously detected regression to the mean and had invented a causal story for which there was no evidence.

The less evidence we have for a prediction, Kahneman instructs us, the more we need to realize the bias of our expectation that the future will replicate the past, and the more we need to moderate predictions by allowing for regression to the mean.

The business of predicting sports outcomes seems very far, I realize, from any story about religion and cruelty, so I need another piece from the statistician’s bag of tricks, namely that the more extreme a case, the greater likelihood of regression to the mean. Kahneman makes up a news story, “Depressed children treated with an energy drink improve significantly over a three-month period” and says the claim it makes is perfectly true. Because depressed children constitute an extreme group, there is every likelihood that they will show improvement three months later, and this would be the case no matter what they did during those three months. It is only our human preference for causal stories that makes us want to attribute improvement to the energy drink. This is the reason that a control group is necessary to establish a causal link.

Returning to the original question about cruel slave-owners professing Christianity, I am certainly not going to try to explain them out of history, but I want to contrast them, one extreme group, with another extreme group, the Quaker Abolitionists in the North. If we look at a group comprising all professing American Christians during the 1830s, both the Quaker Abolitionists and the cruel slave-owners can be seen as extremes on opposite ends of a Christian continuum of reaction. Obviously, then, Christian principles and beliefs alone cannot be said to cause both a defense of the cruelest practices of slavery and a spirited and dedicated attack on the same institution (and neither would the cool-headed, rational statistician be surprised to find the most behavior change at the two extremes).

But this is unsatisfying, isn’t it? Statistics, while demonstrable, give us no explanation at all and leave us with nothing whatsoever to conclude about the relation of religious belief to behavior. This is where I want to put forward my own theory--untestable but not incongruent with either the experience of Douglass or the research of Kahneman—that it was the cognitive dissonance created by the conjunction of Christianity and slavery that drove one group of slave-owners to outrageous cruelty while simultaneously driving religious Quakers to take up the Abolitionist cause.

The term ‘cognitive dissonance’ does not appear in Kahneman’s book, but he does discuss cognitive ‘ease’ and ‘strain.’

Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

The reflective mind, in an attempt to resolve a contradiction or eliminate dissonance, will always reach first for a familiar bias. Slaveholders and Quakers began with different biases and thus naturally reached different conclusions, just as those who initially believe religion’s effects are beneficial will reach different conclusions from those who initially believe religion’s effects are harmful. Is religion, then, neutral? What do you think?

The institution of slavery was decidedly not neutral. Douglass describes his yearning for knowledge and freedom, his feeling of being “broken in body, soul, and spirit,” and then finding within himself the strength again to resist.

The battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free. The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself. He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection....

Both the slave and the slave-owner lived slavery’s contradiction in the mind, but the slave lived it also in his body. Little wonder that daily experiencing of such a contradiction would drive many masters to cruelty, alcoholism, or both; less wonder that the hunger for freedom could never be eradicated in the slave.

Douglass remarks that while some think there could be no fellow feeling among slaves, he found his fellow slaves “noble souls.”

We were linked and interlinked with each other. I loved them with a love stronger than any thing I have experienced since. ... I believe we would have died for each other.

Common experience, recognition of one another as human beings, and their shared desire for freedom for knowledge and freedom bound them to each other.

-- Here I must leave off for today. I am less than halfway through Douglass’s and Kahneman’s books, and my whole tying together of the two is probably premature, but I cannot help trying to bring together these two very different books I am presently reading, going from one to the other with a fascinated mind....

Visiting the Past Yet Again

David had an appointment in Traverse City, so we drove in early and went downtown. I wanted to pick up some tickets at the Opera House for a couple of the National Writers Series events. We parked back behind Front Street along the Boardman River and reminisced about the old Ray’s Coffee House days as we strolled this charming passage to Front Street. I recalled even earlier days, back when Thompson News Agency occupied the space that has been Kilwin’s Chocolates ever since. We walked down the block to the building that used to be called the “Arcade” and visited my friend Gloria in her bookstore, So Many Books, So Little Time. I want to add, “So true!” The next time I visit that shop, I won’t have to rush off somewhere else so soon, and Gloria and I will have more time to catch up on each other’s lives. I’ll have time to look at more books, too.

Earlier David and I had ventured south of downtown for coffee. Does anyone recognize this building on Union Street? To pose a more unlikely question, does anyone remember when it housed Dog Ears Books? That was back in 1994-1996. I met a lot of wonderful people there and loved the Old Town neighborhood, but after commuting for a couple of years I was happy to move my bookstore back to Leelanau County. (There’s no place like home!) Coffee at Old Town Coffee was really good. We’ll go back there again, too, on a more leisurely day, and we;ll have a bagel or muffin with our coffee.

Appointment successfully concluded, we made a trip to Oryana Food Co-op. I hadn’t planned that stop and didn’t have a bag with me, but today the co-op was giving away a free bag with each purchase! That worked out well! 

But what did I buy at Gloria’s store? Because you might guess I would find something, rushed as I was, and you would be right. America Today, published by the Macmillan Company in 1938, was a school textbook written by Roy F. Nichols, William C. Bagley, and Charles A. Beard. The name Beard got my attention, but what really caught my eye—and the reason I bought the book—were the illustrations by George M. Richards. Yes, I bought it for the pictures!

It turns out, however, that the text is interesting, too—interesting to me for reasons most likely not intended by the authors. The book, you see, is a history of our country following the Civil War. The first chapter is entitled “Greater Wealth and Bigger Business,” the first section is headed “The New America,” and here is the first paragraph of that first section:

The United States has changed continuously since it was founded. Every few years has seen such great alterations that people have been constantly talking about a New America. The greatest changes, however, really occurred after the War Between the States and were so important that we can speak with accuracy of the nation thereafter as a New America.

One notices instantly the name given to the conflict: not the Civil War, but the War Between the States. Having read that paragraph, I must read on. The second paragraph in the section dispenses quickly with a description of the country before the war, a nation characterized by smallness—small farms, small towns, small businesses and small railroads. Then the third paragraph:

In politics as in business local activity was the most important [before the war]. There were national elections and voters were interested in the government at Washington, but that was far away. They knew more about state government and local interests. They talked of states’ rights and the interests of the South and in many communities they thought more of local rights than they did of national development. In fact the North and South had quarreled over this question when the South thought that the North was trying to injure her prosperity and power. The War Between the States was the result.

And so we brush off our hands and move on quickly to the new industrialism. Well, I am fascinated and amazed. The word slavery never appears! Nor does the word slave. There is no mention of the “peculiar institution” whatsoever. A passing reference to “cheaper labor” in the cotton fields of the South is brought in so as not to leave that region out of the story of industrialization, but nothing more is said of those laborers. In fairness, nothing is said of the laborers in the New England mill towns, either. The authors have other fish to fry. 

They are eager to Go West! That’s where the (Big) New America really lies—in the Westward Expansion, in the stories of railroads, cowboys, miners...

...and Indians. The reticent curtain drawn over slavery is not brought into play in the saga of the West. Chapter II, Section III is frankly titled “Conquering the Indians.” Here the authors admit that the white man was naturally viewed as an enemy by the Indians:

He took their land, he killed their buffaloes, he wanted to force them to live on small ranges of poor land....

To make matters worse, the government bungled. The affairs of the Indians were looked after by government agents, who were all too often interested in getting rich. These agents cheated the red men. They sometimes let the Indians have liquor [authors do not say that agents ever sold liquor to the Indians] although this was strictly forbidden by the government, and sometimes they let them have guns and ammunition which later were used against United States soldiers. This ill-treatment gained the Indians many friends in the East who felt that the Indian wars were caused by persecution....

Treaties made, treaties broken, warfare and reservations.

In fifteen years, between 1865 and 1880, the government spent $22,000,000 to fight the Indians and suffered the loss of some 600 officers and men. How many Indians were killed we do not know [my emphasis added].

It will be interesting to read on to see how the writers of this textbook narrate the rest of the story, which they could only give through the Great Depression and the New Deal, the Second World War not yet having arrived, but here in the opening chapters I am struck by two features: the description of the Civil War as the War Between the States, completely omitting any mention of slavery; and the very different treatment given to the warfare carried out against the Indians in the West. I suspect that the textbook authors were wary of offending white school boards in the South but had no reason to feel concern for the feelings either of black Americans or Indians. The story of slavery could not be told without embarrassment to white Southerners, while the story of “Conquering the Indians” carried no such political danger, but neither former slaves nor Indians on reservations play a part in the story of America Today as it marches forward.

The book does not present a completely sugarcoated history of the United States. It acknowledges resentment of immigrants, the ugliness of poverty and tastelessness of the newly rich, political corruption, and the indifference of the major political parties to the very real problems caused by widespread financial collapse in 1893.

Strange as it may seem, these grave problems were not given the attention they needed by the leading politicians of the day. Neither the President nor Congress did much of importance to help the people who suffered most when depressions came. To these only the minor parties tried to give serious attention. The Republicans and the Democrats fought against each other in the elections, but the questions they agued about had nothing to do with improving the conditions in the country which caused panics and hurt the farmers and laborers.

Interesting? Yes. All too familiar, also. But I keep going back in my mind to the nineteen-century wars, the one between the states and the prolonged war against the Native Americans. Anyone knowing nothing of American history could read this book and have no idea that Africans were brought here as slaves. The reader with no knowledge of our country would have no idea that there even were--and are--black Americans. As for Native Americans, the “Indians” of the glamorous Wild West, the reader from another planet could only conclude that they retreated to their reservations and played no more part in national life.

Did children of color have this textbook in their schools? I can’t help wondering.  

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.