Coming of Age in Mississippi

That is paint, not bird poop, on the table.

Author: Anne Moody

Category: I’ve heard of this book here and there for years. This past summer, one of the teen volunteers where I work told me that this book was on her summer reading list. She said it was really good…so I decided to check it out.

My thoughts: It started off a little slow, but eventually I really got into this book and I really liked it. Like Between Shades of Gray , Coming of Age in Mississippi made me cry. It ended up being a very gripping read, and renewed my admiration for those who were on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a movement of young people, and Anne Moody was one of them. The victories they won were fought with actual blood, sweat, and tears.

Anne Moody grew up in rural Mississippi in the 1950s. And she heard about brutality toward blacks throughout the state, concerning people she knew, like a classmate who was beaten up by whites because he was suspected of making salacious phone calls to a white woman, and people she didn’t, like Emmett Till, who was murdered when Moody was a teenager. When she went to college at Tougaloo, she became involved in the Movement, first by joining the NAACP. She participated in sit-ins, and was beaten and insulted by angry whites. This reminded me of something that Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns said in her lecture at the University of Memphis back in February. She said that so many whites were so invested in keeping blacks down that they missed some of their own potential—because when you keep someone down, you spend so much energy and waste so much time doing that and nothing else.

One part of the book that made me sad was when Moody mentioned Medgar Evers. He spoke at her college and at meetings she went to while living in Jackson, Mississippi. And she saw him the last night of his life. I really admire Medgar Evers, and I don’t think he gets enough credit for all he did during the Civil Rights Movement. He investigated Emmett Till’s murder and helped Till’s family get out of Mississippi after the men who killed him were found not-guilty. He was truly in the thick of things, and it cost him his life. And, unfortunately, I had never heard of him until I saw news reports about his killer finally being convicted, in 1993.

Anne and her fellow civil rights workers were under a constant threat for their lives. People they knew had been killed, and they were verbally and physically attacked all because they were trying to get American citizens to register to vote. This book really reinforces the danger people faced so that people like me could do something as basic as vote in an election or even walk into a store through the front door. I try to never forget that.

The narrative ends in 1964, right at the beginning of Freedom Summer, which would bring more bloodshed. Coming of Age in Mississippi, however, was published in 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Since that time, Medgar Evers’ killer has been convicted and died in prison. There are hate crime laws all over the country. But only last year, an unarmed black teenager, not unlike Emmett Till, was killed in Florida…At the end of her book, Moody wonders if the lyrics to “We Shall Overcome” will ever ring true. Some days, it seems to be so. Others…well, it makes you wonder.

Great passage: Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears. I know once I got food, the fear of starving to death would leave. I also was told that if I were a good girl, I wouldn’t have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.

Up next: Night Film

When We Were Colored

Author: Clifton Taulbert

Category: I first heard about this book in 8th grade, when there was an excerpt from it in my literature book. Last month, I saw it at a library book sale, and it was only 50 cents, so I got it.

My thoughts: Like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, this book reminds me of the experiences of my family in the 1950s. When We Were Colored is a memoir about the author’s experiences growing up in Mississippi during that decade. He was raised and nurtured by a network of relatives, and his life revolved around school, church, and the seasons of chopping and picking cotton. At one point, a young Clifton is able to pick 200 pounds of cotton in one day—which was a very big deal. But his family also deals with the strict Jim Crow laws that ruled over his family and other blacks in the South with an iron fist. Taulbert mentions how the community rallies around Joe Louis, and people move heaven and earth to hear his fights on the radio. At this time, Joe Loius was a hero bordering on being an idol to those in Taulbert’s community. Because of being kept down by segregation, they clung to successful blacks. A Joe Louis victory allowed the cotton pickers to live vicariously through him and hold their heads a little higher.

Clifton Taulbert also mentions how racial codes, which were so strictly enforced during the day, “slipped at night,” and as a result there were many people in his community who were biracial, or “high yellow,” as they used to say. Taulbert mentions that many light-skinned blacks moved North and passed for white, and never came to visit the South again. The author also mentions others who migrated to Chicago, like in The Warmth of Other Suns (indeed, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney from Warmth was originally from Mississippi). The author also mentions how the importance of education was hammered into him by his Uncle Cleve and Mrs. Knight, a white lady for whom young Clifton raked leaves. He and Mrs. Knight, in their heavily segregated world, were able to forge an acquaintanceship if not an actual friendship. People in these communities had to fight hard for access to a good education, and some fought really hard, because education was seen as a means to achieve the American Dream.

I read this on a family trip with my mom and aunt, both of whom were no strangers to cotton picking and country life. They were able to answer questions about terms in the book like “snapping cotton” and Gloversmain grease. My mom told me that my aunt Shirley once picked 400 pounds in one day (Go aunt Shirley!). My mother, by her own admission, was pretty lax with the cotton picking. She told me she’d pick just enough to fill her sack, then sneak off and read under the shade of a tree (I don’t think my grandfather ever found out—which is lucky for my mom, because my grandfather was pretty stern).

I said before, I liked this book because it reflects a lot of the experiences of my family. I admire the work ethic of the people in this book, because in spite of their country treating them like second-class citizens, they worked hard and supported each other, and did their best to lift up the children of the community. That work ethic leads me to a great passage from the book…

Great passage: There was a strong work ethic when I was growing up in the South. Every colored person worked from the time he was old enough to drag a sack through the cotton fields. The work was back breaking, exhausting and sometimes degrading. It often required a mother to leave home in the morning and go prepare breakfast for a white family before her own children were fed. Everybody worked, because in spite of everything, most of the older people still clung fast to the belief that if you worked hard, you would get a slice of the American dream.

Up next: The Age of Innocence…again

There Are No Children Here

Good book. Comfy blanket. Dorky socks.

Author: Alex Kotlowitz

Category: I had heard about this book in passing over the years, but was intrigued to start reading it after it was mentioned in A Hope in the Unseen.

My thoughts: This book was very good, but hard to read. I probably would have finished it earlier, but I couldn’t read too much at once because it was just so depressing. It raises a lot of questions with no solutions. There Are No Children Here is set in the Henry Horner Homes, brutal housing projects in Chicago, in the late 1980s. The story follows two young brothers, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers (that’s actually how their names are spelled—autocorrect does not approve) as they navigate this cruel world where drugs are sold, gangs run rampant, and murder is the norm. Their mother, LaJoe, has seven children in all at the age of thirty-five.

Reading this book, I was reminded of The Warmth of Other Suns. The occurrences in There Are No Children Here reveal the ugly underbelly of the Great Migration’s successors. Blacks who migrated to Chicago were forced to live in slummy sections of the city. Low-income housing (the projects) was built in the middle of the 20th Century ostensibly to provide shelter for the urban poor. But what was meant to be a solution created a much bigger problem. I was also reminded of the 1970s sitcom Good Times , which was set in Chicago, while reading this book. During the opening and closing credits of Good Times, the Cabrini-Green housing projects were featured. My mom said she never cared much for Good Times because nothing good ever happened to the Evans family until the very last episode. Reading this book, I see that this is how things are—in that way, the series reflected real life (that is, until that miraculous last episode when the stars suddenly and perfectly aligned for the Evans family). There are small victories for the Rivers family (Pharoah, who is more sensitive than his brother, gets second place in the spelling bee), but there is not a Deus ex machina that pulls the Rivers family out of poverty. There Are No Children Here reveals how people get trapped in this cycle of poverty, and it is very hard to break that cycle.

The book takes its name from a quote from Lafeyette and Pharoah’s mom, LaJoe: “But you know, there are no children here. They’ve seen too much to be children.” It’s really hard to read about these children who have witnessed so much horror and despair in their young lives. Lafeyette in particular is afraid to get close to people because he doesn’t know if they will either be a bad influence or end up getting killed. And, unfortunately, a quick Google search reveals that Lafeyette and Pharoah do not have real-life fairy tale endings. It’s also unfortunate that this cycle of violence is still going on in Chicago. And there seems to be no end in sight. There have been so many young lives snuffed out. Then I think about Cedric Jennings from A Hope in the Unseen, and if there are any differences between his situation and that of the Rivers family. What separated Cedric from Lafeyette and Pharoah was that he, Cedric, had a really strong, driven mother, a much better support system and way more stubbornness and drive. I think the key to getting out of poverty is access to a good education. However, that in itself is not exactly easy.

Great passage: For the first time, Pharoah, now ten, began to wonder aloud about being black. “Do all black people live in projects?” he asked his mother. “Do all black people be poor?” He was upset that Michael Dukakis hadn’t chosen Jesse Jackson at his running mate. “He might of won then,” he thought aloud. “Why don’t people elect black people?”

P.S. Even though Good Times was, at times, depressing, it was still funny.

Up next: Twilight Sleep, by my beloved Edith Wharton

Call the Midwife

Granola with a side of midwifery.

Author: Jennifer Worth

Category: I had never heard of this book until September, when the miniseries on which it is based came on PBS.

My thoughts: This book is wonderful! I really enjoyed the miniseries (almost to the point of obsession), and when it ended I thought, “I must read the book.” I have a great affinity for midwives, because my late maternal grandmother gave birth to thirteen healthy babies with the aid of a midwife (and, hopefully, some sort of painkiller). Call the Midwife is about the experiences of Jenny Lee (Worth’s maiden name), a young nurse trained in midwifery. She goes to live and work with the nuns at Nonnatus House, who are expert midwives, in the late 1950s. Nonnatus House was located in the East End of London, and is a gritty setting for our refined young nurse. I don’t ever remember reading a book with such a palpable sense of how everything smelled. Worth really makes it clear the odor of her environment, from the gross-smelling, filthy streets that house neighborhood brothels to the pungent ladyparts of her patients (who, bless their hearts, didn’t have access to daily baths). Worth is a great narrator—smart, funny, and compassionate. And she clearly knew what she was doing in regards to midwifery (lucky for all the East End mommies and babies she helped deliver). And she injects humor into a story that has its share of horrors—I shall not soon forget the story of Mary, a teenage Irish prostitute whose friend (and fellow prostitute) died after a horrible back-alley abortion.

In the TV series Call the Midwife, I particularly loved the character of Chummy, an awkward but endearing aristocratic nurse. She isn’t as prominent in the book, though, unfortunately. Worth writes that she thought the very tall Chummy was “a bloke in drag” upon first meeting her (an aside—I love the word “bloke.” I strongly believe that it needs to find its way into American English.) The nuns of Nonnatus House made me think, honestly, of how I would imagine a sorority house to be (with some very chaste sorority sisters). The women live together in close quarters, and personalities clash. Worth realizes that even though the nuns have taken vows of poverty and chastity, they are still human. However, she realizes that they are more flexible and understanding than one would expect nuns to be (I really don’t have that much experience with nuns, but I’ve heard a few stories of terrifying nuns from people who went to Catholic schools. Call the Midwife humanizes nuns a little, in my opinion).

The book is set in an interesting time period for England—the late 1950s. It’s after World War II, but the specter of war is still present via the huge craters in the earth from where the Germans bombed the East End during the Blitz. The immigration of African and West Indian immigrants also exploded during this time. Birth control was introduced just a few years after the story is set, and this severely limited the number of babies the midwives were called upon to deliver (but I’m sure the mothers were happy). Like several of the books I’ve read this year, Call the Midwife is quite far removed from my life. I’ve never even been to London, much less the East End. However, not only did I love this book, but I’ve been recommending it a lot to people. I feel as though people who are far removed from the life and experiences of those depicted in the book can still find inspiration in the book and be moved by it. Perhaps it’s because we all had a woman in our lives who undertook the painful and extraordinary journey of bringing us into this world.

Great passage (which illustrates Worth’s humor): Her mother was in her element, and bursting with pride. She was also just about bursting out of her tight-fitting purple taffeta suit. (Why is it that women always dress so outrageously for weddings? Look around you, and you will see middle-aged women in things that should have left behind with their twenties, drawn tightly across expanding backsides, pulled in at the waist, emphasising folds of flesh that would be better covered; ridiculous hairdos; ludicrous hats; kamikaze shoes.) Bella’s mother and several of her aunts had fashionable veils to their hats, which made eating rather difficult, so they pushed their veils up, and pinned them to the tops of their heads, which made the hats look even more absurd.

Up next: I have no idea! Any suggestions?

The Guns of August, Chapters 10 – 14

My thoughts: This section was a bit difficult to get through, to be honest. Chapter 10 starts off discussing Turkey (who ended up taking sides with Germany), then segues into a naval battle (which involved Turkey) between Britain and Germany. The section about the naval battle was cumbersome for me—I suppose that means I wouldn’t make a good sailor. One notable thing about this chapter is that Tuchman mentions that passengers on an Italian steamer witnessed part of this naval battle. Among these passengers, writes Tuchman, were “the daughter, son-in-law, and three grandchildren of the American ambassador Mr. Henry Morgenthau.” Barbara Tuchman, our esteemed author, was one of those grandchildren of Henry Morgenthau! But she was only two years old at the time, so I’m pretty sure she remembered nothing.

These chapters also mention the German invasion of Belgium. Perhaps I should back up and explain why the Germans decided to invade Belgium in the first place. The Germans wanted to stick to the Schlieffen Plan, which decreed that Germany would invade and defeat France, then focus on Russia. This was designed to prevent Germany from fighting a two-front war (because those are NEVER a good idea). And the way to France was through Belgium.

Chapter 11 documents the battle at Liège in Belguim, about which Tuchman writes, “The prodigal spending of lives by all the belligerents that was to mount and mount in senseless excess to hundreds of thousands at the Somme, to over a million at Verdun began on that second day of the war at Liège.” In other words, the prototype for how brutal World War I was to become began in that Belgian city. Although the city’s citizens had some fight in them, they eventually fell to the Germans, who mercilessly shelled the city. Their defense of the city reminds me of the poem “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay (which was written in 1919). The last lines of the poem are “Like men, we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” The brutal treatment of the Belgians by the German army did not stop at Liège, and the invaders cut a deadly path across the country.

Chapter 14 documents the Battle of the Frontiers, which was when things got really ugly. The French were slaughtered by the Germans in the Ardennes forest (which, because I’m a huge fan of Band of Brothers, I know was the sight of The Battle of the Bulge thirty years later during World War II). We see that the desire to stick to military plans by both the Germans and the French led to really bad consequences. The French’s military plans did not include plans for defense—they were really big fans of offense. So they didn’t plan on how to respond to German attacks. The Battle of the Frontiers was the moment, perhaps, that everyone realized that it would not be a quick war. It was when a war of movement became a war of attrition. The French, at least, realized at this moment what happens to the best laid plans of mice and men. Tuchman writes, “Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers—danger, death, and live ammunition.” That is a very hard and age-old lesson. But, unfortunately, no one knew how long the war would be or how many lives it would cost.

This part of the book, while interesting, was not as engaging to me as the first ten chapters. I think that’s maybe because the beginning of the book was more history related, whereas Chapters 10 – 14 are more about military strategy. But Tuchman proves time and again that she was a wonderful writer. And because of this, I kept reading. The most striking thing about this book is that Tuchman wrote with her eye to the future—she constantly reminds us why the first month of the war is so relevant to how the rest of the war, which in turn influenced the entire 20th century, played out.

Great passage: The German march through Belgium, like the march of predator ants who periodically emerge from the South American jungle to carve a swath of death across the land, was cutting its way across the field, road, village, and town, like the ants unstopped by rivers or any obstacle.

The Guns of August, Chapters 1 – 9

History and cake

Author: Barbara Tuchman

Category: I’ve wanted to read this book since 12th grade

My thoughts: Dear reader, I’ve decided to write about this book in stages. The Guns of August is a project, a monumental thing. So I’m going to divide and conquer (since I’m reading about war strategies of various countries, I couldn’t resist a battle metaphor). Interesting side note: the events in this book happened almost 100 years ago this month.

The Guns of August opens with the funeral of Britain's King Edward VII, which occurred in 1910. This marked the end of an era (pardon the cliché). In a few years after the funeral, Edward’s nephew Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany would no longer be monarch, for starters. Other monarchies (like the ones in Austria-Hungary and Russia) would vanish as well. After the war, the map of Europe was recreated, and empires began to crumble.

The first few chapters are about the war plans of the countries involved (Great Britain, France, Russia, and Germany), and their alliances. I remember, in high school history class, learning that entangling alliances were one of the causes of World War I. At the time, I thought that it was as if the countries of Europe were mean girls, and if one is mad at another, all her friends are mad at that country, too (I was in high school, and surrounded by mean girls). Keeping track of those alliances is a bit tricky. The French couldn’t stand Germany because of the 1870 war that Germany won. Russia and France were in an alliance that stated one would protect the other in the event of a German attack. England was willing to help out France, and to protect Belgian neutrality in the event of a German invasion. This led to a tense environment that was akin to a balloon continuing to swell and swell until it finally pops. That “pop” is the murder of Archduke Ferdinand (of Austria-Hungary) by a Serbian nationalist.

When the Archduke is killed, Russia agrees to protect Serbia if Germany aids Austria. Because of all those alliances and understandings (and because Germany did, in fact, violate Belgian neutrality), France and England become involved. And this, dear reader, is how a war becomes a world war.

The first few chapters also introduce some of the main players: the Kaiser, Chief of the German General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, Czar Nicholas of Russia (whose physical resemblance to his cousin King George V of England is FREAKY; they look like twins), and Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, who famously said of the eve of England’s declaration of war on Germany, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.” Also, Winston Churchill is also present, as he was First Lord of Admiralty for Britain at the time. No doubt he learned a thing or two for when he had to lead his country through war less than thirty years later. And despite all the plans and war strategies, no country thought the war would last for very long. European wars in the decades before World War I had been relatively short. Britain’s Lord Kitchener was the only one who foresaw a long war.

One interesting thing is that Barbara Tuchman wrote The Guns of August right in the middle of the Cold War. So we, as modern readers, know more than she does in regards to how this story plays out. When she was writing this (in 1962), Germany was still divided and the Soviet Union still existed. As a child of the ‘90s, I remember hearing about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the drama and chaos in the Balkans. From the year of Edward VII’s funeral, until seeing images of people taking pickaxes to the Berlin Wall and hearing unfamiliar names like “Bosnia” on the news at the end of the 20th century, so much changed in European and world history. The Guns of August documents the slide into world war that caused these decades of change. That makes this book monumental.

Great passage: Although the defects of the Russian Army were notorious, although the Russian winter, not the Russian army, had turned Napoleon back from Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and British in the Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the siege of Plevna and only succumbed later to overwhelming numbers, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a myth of its invincibility prevailed.

P.S. As seen from the above passage, Barbara Tuchman could really construct a sentence!

P.P.S. Did you know, dear reader, that during World War I the British monarchy changed its name from the Germanic House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the (very British) House of Windsor? Here in America, sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage.” Luckily, only the first name change stuck around (because…liberty cabbage? Really?)

A Hope in the Unseen

There's a book in my lap!

Author: Ron Suskind

Category: I first heard about this book two years ago. I filed it away in my mental “to read” list. I recently came across it again, and this time I actually decided to read it.

 My thoughts: This is a wonderful and inspiring book! A Hope in the Unseen is the story of Cedric Jennings, a star student at Washington, D.C.’s troubled Ballou High School. Being the star student makes Cedric a target, and he is pretty much a loner there. Also, Cedric’s father has been locked up for armed robbery and drug dealing for most of Cedric’s life. Cedric and his mother live in a rough neighborhood where drug dealers hang out on every corner. Before his senior year, Cedric participates in a summer program at M.I.T. Then, he is accepted into Brown University. But his journey does not end there. At Brown, he has to negotiate relationships with people who come from very different backgrounds than him, and grapple with knowledge that others have long been exposed to (Cedric had never heard of Ellis Island before he went to Brown). But Cedric, though flawed, is not only a fighter—he’s a survivor.

 The book exposes issues of race and class in the Ivy Leagues, and how lower-income minorities being accepted into and enrolling in Ivy League schools can be something of a double-edged sword. It’s a big victory, for sure, but there are some intangible roadblocks that these students have to overcome in addition to dealing with being away from home and handling with a rigorous courseload. So, Suskind mentions, the dropout rate among minorities is high (I don’t know if this has changed in the 14 years that this book has been published). Cedric absorbs all of this and fights against it.

 Although Cedric makes you want to root for him, sometimes his behavior is frustrating. He had to be a loner to survive his rough-and-tumble high school, but he continues his behavior of solitude at Brown, where people clearly want to get to know him. However, he manages to make a friend, Zayd Dohrn (whose parents are none other than Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn, former members of the Weather Underground). Like I said, Cedric is a fighter, which is very admirable. He’s powered by faith, hustle, an iron will…and more than a little stubbornness. Cedric reminded me of Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—she was also a tough, impoverished kid who didn’t let obstacles defeat her (yes, I know that Francie is a fictional character). I’m glad that the story did not end with Cedric’s acceptance to Brown, as if the acceptance itself is a happy ending. It’s important to see the highs and lows of Cedric’s Brown experience.

 A couple of interesting things: Cedric goes to Brown in the fall of 1995, and there’s such a sense of that time in this book. There’s mention of SWV (who are making a comeback!), Smashing Pumpkins, the Million Man March, Jerry Garcia’s death, and the O.J. Simpson verdict. Also, Cedric discusses the Notorious B.I.G. with one of his fellow students, and I recalled, with a slight jolt, that Biggie was very much alive at this point. Also, before the first chapter, Suskind includes a quote from Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” As I’ve mentioned before, I love a good Tennyson allusion (or, in this case, a direct quote). So after seeing that, I knew I’d like this book. Speaking of “Ulysses,” the last line of the poem is “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” This, it seems, is Cedric Jennings’s mission.

 Great passage: He still hears the echo from rutted Southeast Washington and presses through gusts of thankfulness and survivor’s guilt to figure out why he escaped when so many—who are so much like him—did not. As he searches and learns more in classes and discussions about the country’s immigrant past, the phrase “a hope in the unseen” continues to resonate.  

 Up next: Since Cedric reminded me of Francie Nolan, I’m rereading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn