Bookstores, Libraries, Paperbacks, and Hope

Bookstores and Libraries Together

I have written more than once on this blog about how I see booksellers and librarians as colleagues, not competitors. Today I want to take a different angle and look at the places themselves and how they operate in our communities. Again, I don’t see it as a competition. Both, in my view, fulfill essential functions, some but not all of which overlap—which is why both are essential. 

 

Both bookstores and libraries provide books to the reading public, hold author events (often collaboratively), and offer breathing space away from life’s hustle and bustle. A bookseller, like a librarian, is happy to answer questions and to make recommendations (although I am not the swiftest when asked on the spot for a recommendation). Our missions and our realities overlap.

Bookstore event

Library event

Coming back to add something about audiobooks. Library patrons (anyone with a library card) can order audio books through Libby. I believe those are free to borrow. Bookstore customer-friends can buy audio books through Libro.fm and choose a specific participating indie bookstore’s portal, e.g., Dog Ears Books.

A library’s advantages over those of a bookstore are probably obvious. As a local tax-supported institution, a library can loan its books out with no charge. People who worry about accumulating books need have no concerns on that score, either: they simply read borrowed books and return them. In Michigan, moreover, if a local library doesn’t have a particular book a patron wants, the book can be borrowed from another library in the state, and in Leelanau County our township libraries provide many other township contacts and services besides books.

Julie, our lovely librarian in Northport

It may be harder to see at first glance what a bookstore can offer that a library cannot, and a shop specializing in used and rare books will obviously be different from one stocking and selling new books exclusively, but I do see a few ways that my business has an edge over publicly funded libraries, and maybe—I’m not sure here; what do you think?—a lot of it boils down to eccentricity.

 

I don’t have to answer to a boss or a board of directors or local officials or even, except to the extent that my business must be profitable to remain in existence, public demand, which means I can give shelf room to authors whose popularity peaked 100 years ago (they are here to be rediscovered by younger generations), to books in foreign languages (despite Americans’ resolute devotion to monolinguism, as if there were something unpatriotic in knowing anything other than Yankee English), and to beautifully bound classics (for readers who like to see volumes permanently available to them on their home shelves and not just ephemeral words on the screen of an electronic device). Being “my own boss” allows me to curate a collection in line with my personal values, taking a long view on what’s worth reading, rather than having to de-acquisition books that popular culture considers past their shelf life. 

One of the few librarians I found difficult (he was not trained as a librarian, I should make clear) once justified putting a major philosophy classic and a major literary classic in the books-for-sale section on the grounds that “they’re just old books.” Yes, they were, and important ones, too. And to be fair, I have to say that the librarian in question needed shelf room for books his local public wanted to read. His was not a research library. Whereas, if I think a book has value (in the broad sense, not the narrow monetary sense), I can keep it on the shelf year after year, waiting for the person who recognizes its importance.

There’s more. Having grown up in the era of the nuclear arms race, I always tend to think apocalyptically, and so I can’t help wondering sometimes if e-books don’t constitute a danger to printed books. I am not thinking about sales figures but about the continued existence and availability of important works into the future. Think about the way that digital storage formats change over time. Quickly! Add to that the possibility that digital texts can be altered before delivery. I see part of my mission as preservation. 

 

If the Internet vanished tomorrow, do you have a good dictionary in your home? A copy of the U.S. Constitution? A book of maps? Plays, poems, novels? I started to use the names of playwrights and poets and novelists in that last question but then deleted them, as there is no way to list all whose work deserves to be preserved. 

So when I put on my shop door the sticker reading “Bookstores Save Democracy,” I mean no disrespect to libraries, which also serve to save democracy. Our missions are completely compatible.

 

Disappearance of MMPs

A comment on a recent post asked me if the coming elimination of paperback books by publishers would have an impact on my business. What’s happening is that so-called “mass market paperbacks,” the kind I refer to as “grocery store books,” are being phased out, not the better bound “trade” paperbacks. Trade paperbacks (which are much easier to hold open and read and may take the place of hardcover books as first releases, as they are much less expensive) will continue to be published. 

 

Robert Gray wrote on “Shelf Awareness” this Thursday that he had a “curious double response” to the news that new mass market paperbacks would no longer be published. Years ago their affordability seduced him, and yet he could not remember the last time he had bought one. 

 

I remember when a new bookstore came to the town where I grew up. It was on the main downtown street, all the books were new, colorful paperbacks, and all hovered around a price of 35 cents. My first purchase was a red (I remember the cover) 35-cent paperback copy of Catcher in the Rye. A few years later, when I purchased at the university bookstore a paperback copy of James Joyce's Ulysses, it was a larger format and carried a whopping price of $2.95. That book, with tape-reinforced spine, is still in my possession 60 years later.

One problem with cheap paperback books, other than cheap paper, was that their glued binding did not hold up well over time, which accounts for the prices of collectible paperback books with original covers intact, the illustrated cover often accounting for most of the value of the book.

Hope: Life’s One Essential? 

I was told there are only three essentials in life: someone to love, someone to be loved by, and hope for the future. I have been mulling over that wisdom and have provisionally concluded (willing to listen to arguments) that hope is the most essential. Because, think about it: if you love and are loved but have no hope for the future, won’t you be tempted to follow the example of Stefan Zweig and his second wife, who committed suicide together? Yet even alone, even downright miserable, if you have hope for the future, that hope can include the possibility of finding someone to love. --But then (I go on to reflect), love, once known, never really vanishes, does it? To have a future, however, demands that we hold onto hope.

But what do you think? Or should I ask, how do you feel?

 

 

Note to customers: I have restocked Blood Brothers, by Elias Chacour, with David Hazard. Talk about hope! Wow!

Spring WILL come again!

Northport World News

  

UPDATE 9/3/25

Sorry, but the hours announced below for this week might not work out at all. Car trouble to deal with. I'll get to town when I can....

----

What does Labor Day mean for you? This year, for me, it means that school will start soon and the mentoring program at Northport will start up again, so I should be reunited with the student I mentored last spring. I look forward to that. Otherwise, it’s time for me to think about fall hours, maybe taking Mondays as well as Sundays as days off. As for the Monday holiday itself, I’ll probably be open, at least for a few hours. Maybe Tuesday will be my holiday. 

Traverse City author Robert Downes has won a book-of-the-year award from the Historical Society of Michigan for his nonfiction book, Raw Deal: The Indians of the Midwest and the Theft of Native Lands. Long ago (but recent enough that I remember it: 1991) Bob Downes and George Foster started the Northern Express, a local weekly covering the local Grand Traverse region scene. When they sold the paper, his partner went back to accounting, and Bob turned to travel and writing. Latest of his books, Raw Deal begins with indigenous prehistory and follows Native Americans east of the Mississippi up to the present day. I’ll have to restock soon, because I had only one copy left when Bob stopped in on Friday. Graciously, however, he signed that copy.

Another nonfiction book that’s been getting raves from my customers is The Turtle and the Mitten: An Epic History of Michigan, by Aaron Helman. Aaron’s book is more general Michigan history and addresses various periods, one topic at a time, beginning with Detroit and then going back to Pontiac and Tecumseh, forward to the Toledo Strip (read the book to find out what this is, if you didn’t grow up in Michigan), and so forth. An accessible and entertaining introduction to our state’s history, The Turtle and the Mitten is finding a wide audience.

That’s Up North literary news. Farther afield, Geraldine Brooks has won the 2025 Library of Congress Prize for American fiction, and I could not be more pleased. I think there’s only one of her books that I haven’t read.

At home, I had another visitor and a chance to catch up on family news. The next evening, Wednesday, it rained, so mowing grass was out of the question, and I set aside my halfway sort of backup plan to spend the evening on bookkeeping. A rainy evening invited relaxation. Providing Sunny Juliet with a fresh, juicy bone, then, I settled down on the porch with a novel instead, feeling beyond cozy…. 

My “Shelf Awareness” newsletter had recently shown a chalkboard outside a bookstore somewhere with one arrow pointing in—to BOOKS—and the other pointing out—to CRUEL WORLD. Fiction, however, does not have to be (and isn’t even primarily) “escape” literature. The book by Nevil Shute that I dove into the other evening, Pied Piper, set in the early days of World War II, certainly was not. The novel's protagonist, an "elderly" English widower (he is 70!!!) whose pilot son has been killed, recounts what began as a getaway fishing vacation in the Jura region of not-yet-occupied France. As the war comes closer and closer, he was persuaded to take charge of a young brother and sister whose parents, determined to remain at the father’s League of Nations job in Switzerland, want their children home in England, safe from the war, and he agrees to see the young ones home. For one reason and another as he crosses France with the original two children, his entourage of dependents grows (hence the novel's title), and the dangers and risks of travel mount precipitously when the Germans invade France, their planes bombing the roads and their soldiers occupying towns and villages. The old man (as the author calls him) with the growing band of children in tow is an Englishman—the enemy! Will he be able to save the children? Military occupation, abductions and disappearances, accusations of disloyalty, civilians as enemies—it all felt much closer to home than I would have thought possible a year ago.

The journals I’ve been keeping for about nine years bear Roman numerals and titles. My current volume is XIV, and its title is “So Far.” I use those two little words often these days. I wrote to a friend that “so far” my health and strength are holding out, “so far” I’m managing this and keeping up with that. In my eighth decade, though, I know the day will come when “so far” turns into “no longer.” It’s inevitable. I have friends who no longer hike or no longer drive--well, the list goes on, but I'll stop there.

 

I only hope and pray that "so far" becoming "no longer" will not be the case for our country and that we do not reach a stage when women are “no longer” allowed to vote, when Americans can “no longer” travel across state and national borders, when speech dissenting from government propaganda and a dominant party line is “no longer” free, etc., but curbs on freedom are already underway, with others under serious discussion by influential members of the Republican Party and supporters of the president.

(What makes the setting aside of Constitutional protections and provisions even more maddening is that the people going along with it have the nerve to call themselves “conservative”!)

How many of you have ever read any books by Studs Terkel? He interviewed Americans on his Chicago radio program from 1952 to 1997, and many of the stories he elicited from interviewees found their way into books. The first I ever read was Working, and immediately I became a Terkel fan. One of the latest books in his long list (not quite his last) was Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times, first published in 2003. 

 

For Studs Terkel, hope never died, and the same was true for most of the people he interviewed, though various of them defined hope differently and found it in different ways and places. More than one person in the book found hope in the struggle itself. At least one found it in taking action. Not in seeing light but in lighting the way themselves or even going forward in the dark.

 

I intended to make a gift of Hope Dies Last to a friend, but he assures me he will return it after reading, so I have now decided that it will be a book I’ll loan out to anyone who expresses an interest. Let me know if you are interested. I’ll start a list. 

 

Keep the faith, 

my friends. 

Keep hope alive.

You can do it! Extend yourself!

In Need of Loving Care!

 

Eat a good breakfast!

Are you taking care of yourself? You need to. It’s been a rough week, and the road ahead doesn’t look any smoother. 

Dinner, too. Keep up your strength. (See that spinach?)

Now here, not that anyone asked, is my take on what’s going in in Washington: 

 

There is waste in every organization, and the federal government is many, many organizations, so of course there is waste. Serious, close, careful review of government programs with an eye to trimming budgets and reducing and eliminating waste would be make perfect sense, but that’s not what we’re seeing. 

Shutting down programs overnight is nothing but wanton, wholesale destruction. It’s as if you decided that an apartment building was inefficiently heated, so you immediately razed it to the ground and left its residents homeless. Shutting down foreign aid and medical research is a twin disaster-in-the-making, inviting world pandemics the like of which we have never seen before.

 

And to think that all this destruction is not being carried by responsible elected officials or vetted appointees but----! Well, if someone had written our current America as a novel even as recently as ten years ago, it would have been considered too wildly unrealistic for belief. 

 

***

 

But let’s shove that mess off the table and look for a minute at the soothing world of books. At least, I want to start with books, but it won’t take long for me to work in a metaphor and get beyond bookshops and libraries.

 

Books have always been threatened….

 

As time has gone by, threats to the survival of books have become more and more serious. The materials that make up books almost from the beginning and especially since the invention of printing have gotten progressively worse. Rag paper replaced vellum, paper made from shorter fibers replaced rag paper. Alum sizing of paper—a process which allows the paper to be printed on—replaced gelatin sizing and, in the process, made the paper highly acidic. Pasted-on endbands replaced sewn-on endbands. Binder’s board (a specialized cardboard) replaced wood for covers.

 

Accompanying the decline in materials was a similar decline in structure. Now the most common binding is the ironically named “perfect” binding. [The irony is unintentional. As a conservator, the writer sees irony in a term where others well might not.] It is an economical method of binding that unfortunately does not stand up to heavy use or allow for repeated rebinding. Modern hardback books are seldom satisfactorily rounded and backed and consequently their text blocks pull away from the spine even as they stand on the shelf. 

 

-      Saving Our Books and Words exhibit label, quoted in A Degree of Mastery: A Journey Through Books Arts Apprenticeship, by Annie Tremmel Wilcox

 

A beautiful story --

The quoted passage above calls up a series of thoughts for me. 

 

First thought: “Books have always been threatened” might seem to echo the challenging or banning of book content but actually has to do, we learn quickly, with the way the physical book is threatened by the physical world. It’s a specific example of the general truth of the law of entropy. Put simply, in time, things fall apart, order becomes disorder.

Second thought: Some things fall apart faster than others, and some books fall apart faster than others. As a dealer in used, old, and rare books, I see this on a daily basis. Cheaply produced novels from the early 1900s, e.g., much-beloved adventure novels collected by those who read and loved them when young, are often characterized by brittle pages turned brown with time. A cheaply made book is like an old, cheaply made violin: Quality not inherent at the beginning does not accrue over time. On the other hand, books originally printed on high-quality paper and bound with care can last for centuries. They are living messengers from past generations of human beings and can still speak to us today. What a miracle!

 

Third thought: My late husband, the Artist, could usually identify a book club edition right away when he picked it up, without needing to look for a blind stamp on the lower back board or checking the dust jacket to see if it lacked a price. He could feel the difference in the bargain edition’s flatter spine. He had both an eye and a feel for quality in materials and production in all manner of objects. It was the reason for his large collection of beloved Harris tweed sportcoats (34 of them!), and it broke my heart when local consignment shops had no interest in these garments because they were more than a year old. Well, yes, Harris tweed clothing is not “fast fashion,” to be worn a couple times and discarded! The garments are made to last! 

(Thank heaven one young Leelanau man, much taller than the Artist, was able to wear one of David’s sportcoats. He has a pair of the Artist’s cowboy boots, too. I’m glad there are some people who recognize and care about quality in all realms of human life.)

 

Fourth thought: In the story of book conservation, I cannot help seeing a metaphor. It is natural to me, personally, to see truths of inert materials naturally extending to the world of life, and it is natural to human language in general to work this way, but I’ll not be taking up that larger topic today. I’ll just tell a little story to illustrate my point.

 

Many years ago, editing a book on welding for a faculty member in a university school of engineering, I was struck by the way the writer’s facts about chemistry worked as metaphors for human connections. Some pairs of metals, I learned, can never result in a strong and lasting bond. No matter what degree of skill the welder brings to the task, that weld will always be weak. Different pairs when welded together, however, form a strong and lasting union. That is, some metals are, as it were, antagonistic to each other, like those little Scottie dog magnets—and others have such a natural affinity for each other that when welded together they are as strong as if they had never been separate. Think true friendship. Think strong marriage. Think soulmate. 

 

And so, as metaphor, I see in those quoted paragraphs on book conservation a truth applicable to American government today. It is not only the quality of human “materials” that is problematic (to put it mildly) in the current White House administration. Lack of experience is a problem, too, as is the abandonment of any criteria of qualification, other than partisan—no, more like personal--loyalty in crucial and essential government appointments. But beyond ignorance, inexperience, and lack of skill is the deepest, most chilling problem: These people have no loving concern for their work. They are not careful conservators of what has been laboriously constructed over almost 250 years “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Instead they seek to destroy what generations have built. Dismantle, if you want a gentler word, but there doesn’t seem to be any gentleness in an approach aimed at inducing trauma. This is the standard shock-and-awe approach employed elsewhere by our country but only now unleashed on the U.S. federal infrastructure.

 

I always seek to end each of my posts on a positive note, and that’s difficult this week, as a gang of unelected young men wet behind the ears has been given free rein to run roughshod through the financial data of every American, but maybe revisiting the Second Law of Thermodynamics can cheer us up. Did you follow the link to watch the video? If not, do it now. I’ll wait….

 

Okay, ready? At the moment, our country has pretty clearly descended into chaos, and chaos is a hallmark of despotism. In the interest of remaining calm, let’s step back and simply call it disorder. Our political system is horribly disordered at present. Things are not just falling apart,  but are being torn apart. Think vandals in a library. The destruction is intentional, not accidental, and order will not be spontaneously restored.

 

But there is still hope! Hope lies in the fact that the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems, and human beings are not a closed, isolated system. As a species, as a nation, as the population living in this present moment, we are continually drawing energy from other sources, and this energy is available for rebuilding and reordering society, as has been done in the past following periods of chaos and destruction. 

 

The arts are a source of energy on which we can draw, as are skilled craft, any manual work done with loving care, care for the earth and its creatures and each other, and so on and on. I have no plans to become a book conservator, but I do care for books that come into my little world, and I also care for the people who come to my shop seeking books, conversation, strength, and community. I try to use language with care, in this blog and elsewhere. Even if we are stumbling around in the dark much of the time, it’s important for us to do our best, whatever we are doing. Our poor, beautiful, irreplaceable gift of a world is so in need of our loving care!

 

Also, while this may seem a contradiction of the laws of energy, I find that when I expend energy in positive directions—when I focus on my writing (as I have been doing here) or contact my members of Congress or simply prepare a satisfying meal or play Frisbee with my dog—I do not feel my strength and energy depleted but renewed. And yes, the natural world around us is available as a source of strength.

Beautiful, life-giving sun!

This is the good news: I am not a closed system, and neither are you. The earth’s human population is not a closed system. We have sources of strength and energy all around us. Draw on them now! 

And that's my positive message for today from Northport. Bon courage, my friends!

Where all the women are trying to be strong!

Forty-five Years Later?

 

On Waukazoo Street in Northport, Michigan

First, some bookshop news and blog notes:

 

Reminder: Dog Ears Books is open four days a week this winter, Wednesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

 

Reminder: you can order audio books through Libro.fm and choose Dog Ears Books as your bookstore on the Libro.fm site, and we will earn a little something from each audiobook you buy that way. It will help us get through the winter. Thank you!

 

Blog note 1: This blog, Books in Northport, has been around since September of 2007. It has always been free and will be free as long as it survives. I make my living as a bookseller, not as a blogger. Neither will I be moving to a Substack account, although many professional writers and independent journalists are there now, and I encourage you to follow a few, upgrading to a paid subscription if you can afford it, especially those whose work is crucial to giving us real news, e.g., Dan Rather, Heather Cox Richardson, and others. The importance of these sources will increase sooner than you might imagine.

 

Blog note 2: Call my blog a “labor of love” or call me a graphomaniac – however you want to characterize it and/or me, I’ve stuck to this project for over 17 years. Some of you have been with me from the beginning, while others are brand-new readers, but I appreciate every single one of you, however long you have been reading. My morale this year, however, could use a little extra support (I’ll be trying to provide support for the morale of my readers, too), so I encourage you to (1) sign on as a follower, (2) comment on posts, and (3) send links to your family and friends for posts you find particularly meaningful. There is no financial advantage to me in this, only personal satisfaction.

 

That’s it for bookshop hours, audiobooks, and blog! Now, for some book thoughts --.

 

Still relevant!

George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, an “instant classic,” first appeared in 1949 and hung over us like the sword of Damocles for 35 years. When the fateful year of his title passed, we in “the real world” heaved a sigh of relief. It didn’t happen! We’re still free! Did we then become complacent? Oh, gripes about government continued, with “Big Brother” now used as an epithet. It took until 2019 for worry about corporations keeping tabs on us to start catching up with worry about government. In 2023 concern over corporate surveillance surpassed the worry about government. 

Where are we now? Is Big Brother watching us? Follow-up question: are Big Government and Big Corporations separate? 

 

In Orwell’s novel, was the fictional Big Brother an individual modeled on Stalin or a figurehead personifying the ruling party of the totalitarian state? Follow-up question: Does it matter? 

 

In the novel, there is no life of significance without Party membership, and for Party members there is no such thing as private life, as they are frequently reminded by ubiquitous posters and ever-on telescreen messages: “Big Brother is watching you.” Is it ironic or just pitiful that Americans in the 21^st century have not waited for the government to install telescreens in homes but rush to put their own personal lives online in videos for all the world to see, even grooming their toddlers as video stars? Follow-up question: How will that play out in the future of those children? 

 

Admittedly, this blog of mine has not been restricted to book reviews and bookshop news, and over the years I’ve shared quite a bit of my personal life, from photographs of my dogs to an account of my husband’s death and my cross-country trip home to Michigan without him. It's been kind of a memoir in installments. (This blog is not AI-generated. I am a real person, as well as a live bookseller.) I do, however, maintain a degree of privacy and intend to keep it that way.

 

January 30, 2025, Up North

However, back to the book --.

 

Winston, the protagonist in 1984, lives in constant uncertainty and fear. He doesn’t have to worry that he is breaking the law because there is no law! There are only bad thoughts. But if he is suspected of having them (as we pretty much know from the beginning he will be), there will be no possible defense. He is guilty when accused, accused because guilty, and all that remains is for him to confess and name names, specifically the name of his lover, since he is not supposed to have a private life. But no, that’s not all he has to do. He can’t just give a name. He must be broken. 

 

We Americans in 2025, forty-five years after the date Orwell's book predicted world totalitarianism, can keep our lives relatively private if we choose to stay offline and buy local with cash. All of us can do our best to seek truth and hold onto it in a whirlwind of public lying and stories that change from one hour to the next. Certainly we can ration our viewing of “reality” videos and so-called “news,” even completely unplugging for days at a time. 

 

All that done, even so, it’s hard to live in a country whose leaders have turned their backs on law. 

 

When, as now, in the last week and a half, the rules change day by day … and people appointed or elected to run government are not restrained by laws or held accountable for breaking them … and individuals formerly in positions of authority are persecuted because they believed in and followed laws and testified against law-breakers … then, with or without constant surveillance, with or without thought police continually monitoring our posture and facial expressions, we have been taken hostage by the world of 1984.

 

And yet--. And yet--. 

 

This morning on a back road I came upon a pickup truck that had run off the road and was half-buried in deep snow, and a little way up the road a man was walking. “Is that your truck? Do you need a ride?” He did. 

 

In the afternoon the sun came out and shone for hours, and our cold northern Michigan world was so beautiful. Shadows on snow are so beautiful! Sun on snow is so beautiful! 

We can still help each other and see beauty in the world, and each one of those small moments is important. Each such moment is resistance to tyranny.

 

In the wake of the Wednesday night air tragedy that resulted in the loss of 67 lives, the Blamer-in-Chief wasted no time in pointing the finger—in an absurd direction, naturally. It is his way. He does not want Americans to come together, either in joy or in sorrow and certainly not in understanding and love and mutual aid. Instead he wants all eyes fixed on him, his followers’ eyes in endless admiration, his opponents’ eyes filled with fear. He incites hatred, constantly whipping up frenzies as Americans with different agendas consider each other from across the political and moral chasm he keeps digging, very intentionally, deeper and deeper. He’s got the whole country in a dire game of the prisoner’s dilemma, and as long as he can keep us from joining together, he will keep pulling the strings and jerking us off-balance.

 

I must believe more people will finally see his naked narcissism and incompetence when it begins to affect their lives--although when hardships fall on MAGA families, of course he will tell them it’s someone else’s fault. It’s always someone else’s fault. President Harry Truman’s famous motto was “The buck stops here.” In the DJT White House, the buck doesn’t have time to catch its breath before it's thrown in someone else’s face. And it’s hard not to react to the absurd nonstop blaming with anger, but we cannot live every waking moment in outrage. It’s important to deny the Blamer his childish satisfaction. It’s also important for us to continue to love each other and love the world, our poor, broken world.

 

What helps you remain hopeful about our ability to heal the world? What strategies do you have to contribute to healing yourself and others? For putting the pieces back together again? To mend the world? 

P.S. Watch this. She pretty much covers everything, where I only gave sketchy hints.

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.