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

Photo from August 3, 2017

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

- P.J.Grath

 

 

These are dark days for history in the Sunshine State.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

- Gregory Nobles

Northport, MI

August 2, 2023

High Season

A week ago our great-grandsons from Kalamazoo were here with their parents, and this past weekend it was my sisters’ turn to visit from their homes in Illinois. Orchard crews are at last harvesting cherries around my old farmhouse (tarts are ready later than sweets), and though I think every morning that the black raspberry patches must be almost exhausted, that fruit just keeps coming on, with blackberries ripening farther afield. Meanwhile, in the garden, squashes are taking shape, and tomato plants (started from seed) are finally flowering. I’m still waiting on cucumbers but pulled out spent cilantro and transplanted butterflyweed seedlings in the space created. They look good so far.

 

It is summer. High season. 

Sunny Juliet and I got to Lake Michigan again, beating the crowds by going shortly after sunrise. Neither of us has gone swimming yet, though. I’m letting her get used to the Big Lake at her own pace, wading into and out of the gentle waves without urging her one way or the other. Summer here Up North is time for work and play and company. Twin great-grandsons and their parents, sisters, stepdaughters, friends. Some have been here, others yet to come. Sharing places I love is an important part of my life. 

 

Sharing books I love is important, too, and my latest happy discovery – for which all credit goes to the friend who sent me the book! – is Molly Gloss’s The Hearts of Horses, which is hands-down the horsiest novel I have ever read. I was disappointed when The Horse Whisperer turned out to be more love story than horse story; there is a love story in the Gloss novel, too, but horses predominate. – Which doesn’t mean there is any dearth of human interest! 

 

I’ve always wondered at the lack of readership for World War I history. The “Great War,” it was called back when people thought such a global conflict surely could not possibly happen a second time around. (The period between the wars fascinates me, too.) Well, lately WWI seems to be following me so closely it’s treading on my heels. Sarah Shoemaker’s Children of the Catastrophe takes place in the years 1908-1922 (Sarah was last week's speaker in the library Summer Author Series here in Northport); T. C. Corbett’s The Drums of War draws on his diaries from World War I; and The Hearts of Horses takes place in that period, also. Although far from the fighting, some of the farmers and ranchers in Gloss’s novel are swept up in a jingoism that puts their German immigrant neighbors in peril. There is also discussion between the characters of the fates of the thousands of horses shipped over to Europe to become cannon fodder or shell-shocked survivors right along with the soldiers. 

 

The main story of The Hearts of Horses, however, takes place out West. It is no longer open, fenceless rangeland, but big-boned teenager Martha Lessen is determined to lead as free a cowboy life as she can and rides away from home to offer her services “breaking” horses. Martha does not have much in the way of social graces, but, perhaps because she was so sensitive to the feelings of horses, she wasn’t bad at picking up cues about people’s feelings without having to have everything spelled out for her. 

 

…By the time she took work breaking horses for George Bliss, her method was to come into the corral with a little buggy whip and brandish it – she almost never had to touch the horse…. At the same time, Martha always acted as if there was nothing to get excited about, figuring the horse would eventually get the same idea; so she’d begin singing to him quietly….

 

And from a different moment in the story: 

 

It wasn’t clear to Martha how she could be any help to the Kandals, either of them, but she didn’t feel it would be right to leave. She stood a moment trying to think what else she could offer to do [she had fed the chickens and stirred up the kitchen fire already], and when her mind failed her she said, “I’ll just sit down with you, if that’s all right, until the doctor gets here.”

 

A simple story in many ways, The Hearts of Horses goes along in its steady way, documenting, if you will, the lives of fictional people in an isolated community until they are as real to us as our own neighbors. I am eager to read more of Molly Gloss, though I have to admit I hope there will be horses in her other books, too. 

Long, SURPRISING (to me) Postscript:

As I was in the midst of drafting this post, a woman brought in a box of old books she wanted to sell, and one of them was the second volume of a two-volume set showing "the World War," i.e., the one we call World War I or the First World War, in photographs. What are the odds? That war again!

The captions to the photographs are heartbreaking. The soldier sitting in a bombed-out wall opening (second of four above) is writing home from the battlefield:

 

‘JUST BEFORE THE BATTLE MOTHER”

“Somewhere in France,” begins the letter which Clarence E. Ford, Company C, 308^th Field Signal Battalion, 83^rd Div., is writing home, Sept. 1, 1918. “Somewhere in France” was a shell hole in a garden wall at Chateau-Thierry.

 

Following that photograph is one of the First American Army assembling, and below it a detail showing the horses. The caption to a photograph of captured German prisoners (not shown here) has a headline reading: “HATE IS A MANUFACTURED INGREDIENT ON BOTH SIDES.”

I do not focus on the horses for lack of concern for the men. In fact, more than one photograph of a destroyed village notes that the laughter of children is no longer heard there. But since it was a conversation about horses that brought the war home to Molly Gloss’s characters and her readers, I noted particularly any of the war photos showing horses. The last one here is entitled “GASSED HORSES” and reads as follows:

With their ribs sticking out as in death and white mucous [sic] coming out of their blind eyes, these gassed horses are being brought back for inspection. For many of the suffering beasts inspection will seal their death warrant. 

And what can I say after that??? Except, how can human beings do such things to horses -- and to each other, when the world we have been given is so very beautiful? 

No, I do have a more cheerful closing today: Tonight’s guest, the fourth and last in the Summer Author Series (sponsored by the Friends of the Leelanau Township Library), will be Soon-young Yoon, whose book is entitled Citizen of the World: Soon-Young and the UN. I highly recommend her book. It contains short, readable essays on various projects with which she was involved around the world, and it is full of hopeful stories of people making differences in all manner of good ways. That's 7 p.m. at the Willowbrook Inn on Mill Street in Northport.

Flying For His Country

Curtiss Aeroplane Company WWI production facility

[See additional photographs here.] 

 

Imagine: It’s over 100 years ago. You are 18 years old, maybe 17, you are an Irish-American, and your country has just entered the “Great War” (as it was called before a second world war came about) as an ally of England, Ireland’s old enemy. You are not enthusiastic about being on England’s side, but you love the U.S.A., so when your draft number is called, you sign up for and are accepted into pilot training, fully expecting – and prepared -- to die for your country. 

 

So begins the story of T.C. Corbett’s experience of military aviation, edited by his son, Wiilliam, and drawn from his father’s journals, written stories, and an unfinished novel. T.C., or Cy, worked for the Chicago Tribune, in various capacities, for over two decades, and retired to Michigan in 1944, where he lived until age 80.

 

Cy Corbett’s fatalistic expectation of dying as a pilot was not unrealistic. Bill Corbett tells me that one out of 20 U.S. Army trainees lost their lives in flight school accidents, so a flyboy didn't have to go overseas to die, although the odds did not improve all that much with training completed, with one source giving the rate of trained pilots killed in crashes as one in eighteen.

The Standard was a biplane with a too-large wing spread. Struts separated the wings vertically. And crossed guy wires lifted up slightly from the body in a thing called a dihedral, and for safety there was an inch or so of play in the rigging of the wings to the fuselage. Planes today are monoplanes with no struts or guying and have an immensely stronger structure with steel longerons. The old Standard with its low horsepower and high wing spread could be buffeted about like a leaf in a storm. And often was. It was a scary machine.

 

I am only setting the stage here for you to read Cy’s story yourself from the beginning. A young man but a serious student and excellent writer, his own words make the long-ago days of the young man he was, with all the emotions of youth in any era, come alive again on the pages, deepened by thoughtful reflections of the mature man looking back on his life.

 

I was drawn into T.C. Corbett’s story despite the fact that I am roughly midway through at least three other books, so I know others will be, too.

 

The Drums of War: An Autobiography

by T.C. Corbett, 1917-1924,

ed. by William A. Corbett

Mission Point Press, paper, illustrated 

$16.95

For thoughts on my recent (often random) reading, click here. For images and more personal observations, this is the place.

Don't Throw Out the Baby!

Summer is BUZZING!

I get a little nervous when I see articles about purging our lives of "too much stuff," especially when the "stuff" is books. How much would be lost from the world if “old” books were to disappear! Even among those published in my own lifetime (hardly ancient texts but all too easily discarded without a second thought), I find beautiful stories and important ideas still worth thinking over and through. One striking recent example is a Harper Colophon paperback from 1964, Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Looking online for mention of this title, I see that I’m not the only one to find Boorstin’s 1960s thoughts pertinent in the 21^stcentury: This short article from the Atlantic magazine, 2016, is definitely worth taking time to read, though beware – it may whet your appetite for the book! 

 

On one of my other blogs recently, I wrote of Bruce Catton’s Reflections on the Civil War, a book certain to interest readers of Catton’s many volumes on the Civil War.

 

Then a 20^th-century feminist classic, Woman and Nature, by Susan Griffin, called to me to pick it up. Did I read Woman and Nature decades ago? (This is the new edition.) If so, how could I have forgotten it? Griffin takes us on a breathtaking, gender-focused guided tour through the history of science and society at large, relentlessly pressing forward and at the same time presenting each historical moment (and they tend to be quite gruesome) not only succinctly but also poetically.

 

Boorstin, Catton, Griffin -- these books written decades ago are all worth reading today, even if the item you happen upon, like my copy of Griffin's book, is a paperback with the glued binding so dried out that the pages come out one by one as you turn them.... 

 

Ah, but yes! New books? Lots of those worth reading, too, for every interest and every age group.

And tonight at 7 p.m. at the Willowbrook in Northport, Sarah Shoemaker (author of the acclaimed Mr. Rochester, the Jane Eyre story told from “the other side”) will present her 2022 novel, Children of the Catastrophe. Join us for reading, discussion, and refreshments following the author's talk. 

Sarah's will be available for purchase and to have signed. 

Northport -- the place to be!

What I Say?

Summer roses

Sandhill crane family in their summer life
 

Ah, yes, the great Ray Charles! I’ve said a few things myself, though none as well noted as what Ray Charles has said and sung. I do like the motto I came up with for the 30^th anniversary of Dog Ears Books, though: 

 

DISPROVING THE SKEPTICS FOR 30 YEARS

 

And the banner on my “Northport Bookstore News” blog reads: 

 

“We don’t want your data, 

just your business and your satisfied smiles.” 

 

I’ve seen a lot of satisfied smiles already this summer, and that gives me satisfaction and makes me smile. Win-win!

----

 

What do I have to say today?

 

Well, it’s cherry harvest right now, so please slow down for farm workers on our county roads! Watch out for cyclists, too – they don’t always wear highly visible colors. Also, few cyclists signal turns, so watch out for that, too. I was happy to see the farm worker ahead of me this morning signal his left-hand turn. (My unscientific observation over a few years is that drivers in Cochise County, AZ, are much better about signaling turns and lane changes than Leelanau County, MI, drivers, but Leelanau takes the prize for turning on headlights at dusk and as storms approach. Arizona drivers could do better on that count.)

 

The Summer Author Series sponsored by the Friends of the Library in Northport (Leelanau Township Library) got off to a great start this past Tuesday with Dave Dempsey from Traverse City and a presentation based on his book, Great Lakes for Sale, which inspired many in the audience to look into joining volunteer organizations to help protect Great Lakes waters. Next Tuesday’s event (these are all at the Willowbrook at 7 p.m. this year, remember) will feature Jacob Wheeler’s Angel of the Garbage Dump, a truly inspiring story, and you definitely want to read that book, too. One person can make a very big difference in the world….

On the advice of a retired librarian, I have now stocked, in my new book section for young people, several titles from the “I Survived” series. These books are fictional stories based on historical fact. For readers of mature years, I am pleased to have now in stock a volume of Anne-Marie Oomen’s early essays, titled The Long Fields. – Oh, but so many new and used books have come into my shop in the last week! Inventory changes all the time, so don’t think you’ve seen it all before, just because you were here once.

 

And as always, everything old is new again -- with a vengeance! Look at what Rachel Carson said in 1950: “We live in an age of rising seas.” Really! She goes on later (this is in The Sea Around Us): 

 

You do not have to travel far to find the sea, for the traces of its ancient stands are everywhere about. Though you may be a thousand miles inland, you can easily find reminders that will reconstruct for the eye and ear of the mind the processions of its ghostly wave and the roar of its surf, far back in time.

 

The latest rising of the sea, Carson tells us, began as early as 1930, but it is rare, she says, that such a change is observable and measurable within the human life span. So here is a book written over 70 years ago that is highly pertinent in 2023, and that is only one example from the many books this old and older to be found at Dog Ears Books in Northport.

A January 1904 magazine article and a scrap cut from the Detroit Free Press dated November 19, 1907, both found in an old book, have held me spellbound for several days. The article is about an opera singer with eight children living on a country estate outside Dresden; the newspaper scrap announces a proverb contest with “$3,200 in Prizes.” People over a hundred years ago, raising children, trying to win contests – again, very much like our lives today. 

Life! Not always tidy --

Outside of my bookstore, life is busy, too: harvesting black raspberries for the freezer, where they join strawberries and rhubarb, all destined eventually for the canning jars that await; working and playing with my young dog, morning and evening; planting, transplanting, watering, pruning; cooking up chutney and looking ahead to jam; and, always, reading, reading, reading.

Raspberries have climbed the wisteria trellis.

Sunny enjoys picking raspberries, too.

“How’s your summer going?” As usual, it’s kind of a blur. But a good one.

It's time for WHAT?

Mid-county scene, looking north

Looking south

 On the home front

Cucumber vines climbing screen

Parsley going crazy!

Chimichurri on pasta

Cucumber vines have blossomed, and parsley was so bushy and plentiful that I made a batch of chimichurri, tried it on pasta, and recommend the combination. Mixed in avocado the next evening for a tortilla chip dip, and that's good, too.

 

Although daisies are taking their sweet time, I have hopes they will be blooming soon, and meanwhile, I pore over catalogs and books on perennials and dream of paths winding through yard-sized gardens.

 

By the way, have you ever heard of ‘pour-over coffee’? Apparently, it’s a thing. New to me!

 

(That’s the pore/pour lesson. I’ll let sleeping dogs lie for today on lie/lay.)

As for Sunny Juliet, we are varying the tennis ball retrieval game, starting today, so stay tuned!

Always ready...

Now, "Jump!"

My recent, albeit modest stroke of genius

 

You know how you have a brilliant thought while driving or before falling asleep – sometime when it’s too much trouble to stop to write it down – and you think, I’ll remember that. And then so often you don’t? One of those thoughts visited me one evening, like a brightly colored bird that quickly flitted away before my eyes closed, and somehow (this is the miracle) I remembered it the next morning!

 

…I was thinking of the years when Northport was in the doldrums and people who accidently wandered off the M-22 loop would ask in whiny, put-upon voices, “What’s the matter with Northport?” I was sure it was just a matter of hanging on before Northport would turn around, and in the meantime I subbed at the school, picked apples, worked on a garden crew, etc. – all to keep my bookstore afloat.

 

…I was thinking about all the times people had said to me (as if contradiction were unthinkable), “No one reads books any more.” One young father, his toddler riding piggy-back on his shoulders, waved his hands to indicate my array of volumes and told the boy, “Someday all this will be gone.”

 

...I was thinking of when Borders came to Traverse City and what a fabulous bookstore it was (then) and how someone said to me mournfully (as if I had been trying to do something like Borders, when my bookstore idea was so very, very different), “Oh, you just can’t compete with Borders!”

 

Now in 2023 Borders is no more, everyone loves Northport, and people are still reading books. Lots of people! Many even buy books! Hence -- my anniversary motto for Dog Ears Books: 

 

“Disproving the skeptics for 30 years”

 

What do you think? “Three decades” or “30 years”?

(My personal life motto)

 

Authors in Northport

 

Tuesday, July 11, is the first of four evenings in the Friends of the Library (Leelanau Township) Summer Series, with Dave Dempsey kicking off the series this year with Great Lakes for Sale. Remainder of the 2023 series will feature the following authors and books:

 

July 18, Jacob Wheeler, Angel of the Garbage Dump: How Hanley Denning Changed the World One Child at a Time

 

July 25, Sarah Shoemaker, Children of the Catastrophe

 

August 1, Soon-Young Yoon, Citizen of the World: Soon-Young and the UN

 

All four summer author events this year will be held at the Willowbrook on Mill St., each one beginning at 7 p.m. The events are free, and no reservations are required. Books will be available for purchase.

 

Reminders

 

Join Northport booklovers for these events, visit Dog Ears Books Tuesdays through Saturdays this summer, follow “Books in Northport” and share it with friends. Thanks, all! Thirty years!!!