The Heritage Month Project: The Lives of Housewives With Shirley Jackson and Erma Bombeck

The Women's History Month portion of my Heritage Month Project has provided me with an opportunity to do some thinking about two women writers who worked in times that were close together in terms of timeline but different in terms of what was going on in society. They also both wrote about the lives of housewives. 

I am talking about my obsession, Shirley Jackson, and Erma Bombeck.

Shirley Jackson

While Shirley Jackson is known today for writing literary horror, during her lifetime she also wrote memoirish essays for women's magazines, work that paid rather well and was well received. She turned out two collections of these things in the early 1950s, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. In 2015, fifty years after her death, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings was released, which included more of her housewife work. It's been fifteen years since I've read the first two books, but at the time I found one of them "just so well done." The same is true of her housewife essays in Let Me Tell You, which I've been reading this past month.

These essays are drole, but they don't focus on being funny. They are not jokie. There is no reaching to get a laugh, because making readers laugh isn't the point. The family members who appear in the essays are well-defined characters. Whether they are true to life or not is another thing, but from essay to essay they stay true to the characters Jackson created. 

Because these essays were written so long ago, some of them seem like historical documents. The one on teenagers' need to conform, for instance. That was an issue in the 1950s? Who knew? Jackson gives the best explanation for the teenage desire to sacrifice individuality for the crowd that I've ever seen. 

What Jackson doesn't do in the housewife essays in Let Me Tell You is complain about doing housework. I kept waiting for that, but it never came. She certainly doesn't glorify it or say anything to suggest it is women's God given role for which they should be grateful. Housework isn't a good thing, it isn't a bad thing. It's just a thing.

Erma Bombeck

Around the same time Jackson was writing for women's magazines, Erma Bombeck, a humorist who wrote specifically about being a housewife and mother, began writing a column for a local newspaper. It wasn't until the mid-sixties, however, that she became a syndicated columnist and the '70s and '80s were her era.

Being old as mud, as I am, I remember Erma Bombeck. It is difficult to exaggerate how successful she was. I remember being surprised to see her as a guest on some evening television special. I was totally blown away when I learned she was pulling down half a million dollars a year, because that was real money back then. I didn't know until recently that she had an eleven-year gig on Good Morning America or that she developed and wrote for a sitcom. It was not a successful sitcom. However, this was before stand-up comics were getting their own shows. To me the failure of the show is far less significant than the fact that a woman got a chance to create one. 

I have huge respect for Bombeck's achievement. I was just never a fan of her writing. It may have been because I was younger and felt the things she wrote about were somewhat dated. I may have found her humor obvious and contrived. I can't even recall. I tried to read one of her books this past month and just couldn't get through it. Bombeck's success must have put her under tremendous pressure to produce content for the columns and appearances she was making, which Jackson probably didn't experience. The "rush to publish" could easily have had an impact on her writing. 

Is Writing About Housewives a Good Career Move?

In the foreword to Let Me Tell You, Jackson's biographer, Ruth Franklin, says that Jackson "considered herself at least a part-time housewife." A lot of the writing she did about that part-time life was done in the early 1950s, a period we think of as the Golden Age of Housewifery, the era I've read that trad wives look back upon with nostalgia. Yet an article in The Guardian from 2016 raises the question of whether critics didn't take her seriously for a long time because of "her busy sideline producing funny tales about life as a housewife and mother for women's magazines."  The era when being a housewife was most highly accepted was also a time when being a housewife marked you as lesser? Twisted much? 

Bombeck, on the other hand, was writing during the second wave of feminism. Women were leaving the house. You'd think that would be a really bad time to be trying to make a career writing about housewives. But, no, Bombeck did fantastically well. Two theories about why, both my own:

1. While Jackson didn't complain about housework, Bombeck did. She made it okay to complain, and her housewife readers appreciated that. 
2. Bombeck's housewife humor was nonthreatening. Readers could embrace this housewife stuff at the same time that women were turning their backs on it in order to do other things. Jackson's housewife writing was nonthreatening, too, but there wasn't anything going on culturally at that time that would make people seek it out for comfort the way they might have in the '70s and '80s.

Hey, Maybe Networking Does Help Writers

In Haunted Houses in The New Yorker (2016), author Zoe Heller says that Jackson and her husband were part of a social set that included Ralph Ellison and Bernard Malamud, and I've seen several other references to them knowing those writers. But I don't know what that means. Jackson lived in Bennington, Vermont in the 50s and 60s. (There's not much there even now.) What access did she have to these writer friends? How much did being part of group of writers help her? (Note: I have not read Ruth Franklin's Jackson bio, which might address those questions.) 

However, even I knew Erma Bombeck was friends with Art Buchwald, a high profile humor writer of the period, and I believe there may have been other humor writers she was connected with. All men. In those days, it would have been helpful to be tight with men in your profession. I recently learned she was also friends with Phyllis Diller, a stand-up comic who specialized in housewife humor. These names mean nothing to you now, but these people were a very big deal in Bombeck's day. More so, I'm guessing, than Bernard Malamud was in Jackson's. Coverage in the press of friendships among well known writers/comics could benefit all of them.  

Don't Let Your Mind Wander

Jackson did more than one type of writing. In addition to the housewife memoirs and the literary horror, she wrote short stories. As I said earlier, the question has been raised as to whether or not the housewife work hurt her with critics of her time. But the refusal stay in a lane may not have helped her, either. The literary world does like its labels and pigeonholes. So does the publishing world. There's nothing like a nice clear book category to make marketers happy. Because Jackson did different types of work, it may have been difficult to define her during her lifetime.

Bombeck didn't just stay in her lane, she owned it. She wrote about housewives and mothers. People liked reading about housewives and mothers. People knew what they were getting with her. The publishing world knew how to sell her. Everything fell into place.

Life After Death

I believe Shirley Jackson has always maintained a bit of a reputation, even if it was primarily for her short story, The Lottery. Horror fans have kept up interest in her work as well. Recently, though, she's been experiencing a comeback. Part of that is due to her children's efforts to manage her estate. (Well done, guys.) Part of it may be that she's been dead more than half a century, and the 50-year anniversary might have triggered some attention. Then there was Netflix's beautiful version of The Haunting of Hill House in 2018. That could well have encouraged readers to go back to her books. I think she's doing pretty well right now, though probably not for her housewife writing. 

Erma Bombeck is all housewife writing.  A play about her was being staged a few years ago and the University of Dayton runs a writers' workshop named for her, but it can be difficult to find her books in libraries or places like Libby. She's been dead for just under 30 years, and her time for a revival of interest may still be coming. Also, humor writers may not age well.  A 2022  Guardian article claims that Bombeck's friend, Art Buchwald, who died in 2007, has been forgotten. Finally, humor about women's lives is more common than it was in Bombeck's day, and it's not just about being a housewife or a mother. Readers can find more up-to-date material. 

Housewife Writers

Though both Jackson and Bombeck self-identified as housewives, they were also both writers. The extent of Bombeck's career demands and the money her writing earned her may have meant that there came a point where she was no longer doing housework. I don't know that Jackson ever made enough money to be able to pay for someone to take over housework for her. 

While their lives as housewives had an impact on their writing, it's hard to determine what kind of impact their writing had on their lives as housewives. Did the writing become such a big factor for them that they were no longer living the experience they were writing about? 

Getting Serious About Humor: A Humor Question

You have probably heard about some national security folks in the U.S. accidentally including a journalist in a group chat in which they were discussing military strikes. I heard about it the night before last and ended up sitting in bed scrolling on BlueSky, which I don't usually do. But there was some hysterically funny stuff turning up there about this situation. 

"To stop receiving security material from the White House, hit UNSUBSCRIBE."

I laughed out loud at that one, though it doesn't seem that funny now. Maybe you had to be in bed to get it.

Or how about the skeets with something like "Me listening to White House war plans" with a clip from some movie of an actor playing a bored military guy with a telephone held to his ear? I've seen that one twice.

There was also a Maxwell Smart joke I liked, though I can't remember how it went now. And a really good one with a photo of Putin looking at a cell phone and saying, Hold it, guys. P. Hegseth is typing.

I got up yesterday morning, and I thought, You know, Gail, this is kind of frightening. We have no protection. We have no one to protect us at all.

Then I went back on BlueSky to look for more laughs on the subject.

Why Are We Laughing About This?

Now, I must say, I don't find BlueSky a particularly funny place. I'm slowly working on creating my bubble of writers and publications there both of which I'd expect to stay on topic. My experience on Twitter was that if you can get a big enough bubble, you don't get a lot of other material. But I don't have a big BlueSky bubble at this point. I see a lot of stuff there, and there's not much in the way of humor coming through. Mostly outrage.

Over the last couple of months, there's been a lot of truly...ah...fascinating...stuff going on in the world. But I haven't seen many people cracking jokes about it. Not what you might call creative vs trolling "people humor" coming from the general public. The professional humor writers on, say, The Daily Show, are working these things, but people on the Internet are too busy keeping track of how much money Elon Musk is losing and writing about how happy that makes them to have any time and energy left to think of funny things to say about anything. They may believe that the situation is so dire that there's nothing funny to say.

Until that group chat. Oh, now, we have something funny to say.

My theory about what's going on:

• Accidentally adding someone to a military planning group chat rises (or descends) to the level of farce--a ridiculous situation and buffoonery--in ways that saber-rattling and risking healthcare do not. The group chat thing could easily be in a movie. It will almost certainly be a SNL sketch this weekend unless, God help us, something bigger comes up first.  
• It's okay to enjoy farce, but it's not okay to enjoy being the bad guy threatening countries whose citizens never saw us coming for them. 

Come On, Guys. We Can Do More with This.

The mere fact that there is a military planning group chat is funny. It's incongruity humor--planning a military attack on a group chat the way a bunch of kids might plan, you know, kids' stuff. Except kids would know how to do it.

Group chats could inspire more humor for a day or two before they become overdone:

The Health and Human Services Group Chat: This would include RFKJR being RFKJR as well as Dr. Oz trying to be doctorish.

The Kennedy Center Group Chat: In which Donald Trump organizes entertainment for the performing arts center.

The Department of Education Group Chat: This one would include professional wrestlers being the voices of reason in discussions of student loans and staffing shortages

The Month of La Francophonie and International Francophonie Day with Catherine Leroux

In addition to being Women's History Month, March is The Month of La Francophonie (also called Francophonie month), a time to celebrate French language and culture. March 20th, which I have missed by a day, is International Francophonie Day, again celebrating the language and, also, supporting language diversity. The date corresponds with the anniversary of the Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation in 1970 in Niger, formed to work toward Francophone cooperation. 

This year's theme for International Francophonie Day is Je m'éduque, donc j'agis (look I got the accent marks in!), which means I educate myself, therefore I act. This tends to be my personal mantra (in the sene of a repeated statement rather than a sound to aid meditation), anyway, and it seems hugely appropriate for the times we live in, whether you're talking language or anything else. 

I have observed La Francophonie Month a couple of times here at Original Content. This year I read the L'Avenir by French Canadian author Catherine Leroux. And I read the English language version, The Future, translated by Susan Ouriou, because my French reading involves picking out words here and there in, say, the intro paragraph of a magazine article. Reading a novel is way beyond me. 

A Couple of Preliminary Thoughts

The French cover is much better 

Some people have raised the question of reading works in translation. Have you read the original, at all, if you've read a translated version? Or are you reading the translator's version? I can't answer that. I'm just saying I'm aware that reading French in translation raises that question.

In Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America author Philip Marchand writes that at some point French Canadians were viewed (by nonFrench Canadians, I guess) as being jolly, fun-loving folk. This was never my perception of my Franco-American family. Many of them died young and that's not including my uncle, Joseph Elie, who lived four hours (I do a bit of genealogical research) and his three siblings who didn't even make it that long. There was a cousin who survived his military experience in Korea only to be killed on the way home when his military plane crashed. Growing up, I heard stories about aunts or uncles coming home from family funerals, answering a phone, and hearing the voice of the recently deceased or harp music. My father and his Franco-American buddies he'd grown up with would sit at the kitchen table and talk about how the Bible says the world will end ("Soon") and where the next war would be fought ("Here.)

My point being, I was well prepared for the dark world of the French living in Fort Detroit, The Future's setting. (Couldn't manage the accent mark there.)

The Future as a Dystopian Novel

Having read Ghost Empire and knowing how far south French explorers and settlers made it onto what would become the United States also set me up to find the basic premise of this both alternative history and dystopian fiction very believable. In the world of The Future, Fort Detroit is a French city, having never been taken over by the British or ending up with the Americans. A character explains that Poles, Irish, and Italians did come to Fort Detroit because they could practice their Catholic religion there. But the Catholic churches, schools, and hospitals encouraged them to learn French, and that was why French survived there, even after Ontario banned French education in 1912. (That really happened, though the ban was lifted in 1944.)  Nonetheless, I don't know how invested American readers reading this in English will become in the French aspect of the book. While there certainly is a very specific culture in Fort Detroit, I don't know that English readers will recognize anything particularly French about it, though some of the characters speak in particular way. "How d'ya explain them leavin' the Francophones in peace for the next hundred years?" The children have an even more distinct manner of speaking that may be a French patois, in terms of its structure. (That's a wild guess.) If we were French readers reading this in French, however, we'd have no doubt we were in a French world. 

But there are many other fascinating things here for us English-speaking folks.

Fort Detroit has fallen on very hard times. Houses are abandoned. People with money who got out, got out. There is not much police presence or help from them. Things are so bad that someone runs a bus tour "Decouvrez les ruines de Fort Detroit." We see this kind of thing for traditional real world old forts all the time, but this bus drives/tears through the area where are characters live. These people are left to band together to help each other.  A former musician now runs greenhouses and gardens. A nurse runs a clinic in his house.

It almost seems post-apocalyptic, except there was no apocalyptic event here, which is a fascinating part of this story. Economically, things start going bad in the 60s when the WASPs and Americans are doing well, but everyone else lived in slums with immigrants "coralled in districts that were built too fast and went up in flames at the slightest spark." Blacks were banned from living outside their own district.  "White Francos had more freedom to move around, but like the other proles, they lived among the rats and got saddled with the dirty jobs." There were strikes, demonstrations, and a rebellion. The rich left with their businesses, and the poor were left with unemployment, pollution, a bankrupt city. Oh, and drugs. Lots of drugs.

This is the kind of thing that could really happen. I'm sure some would argue that there are places where it is happening.

The Children of The Future 

I didn't realize that the bulk of the people we see in the first section of The Future are older, until we got to the second section, where the children are. In Fort Detroit, many children are orphaned by drugs and some really bad parenting, and they escape to live together in a park within the city.  They have their own, you might say, administrative structure, with their own manner of speaking. Social services is another thing Fort Detroit doesn't have, and these kids are free to live or die as they will. We (by which I mean I) slowly realize that this children's world has been leaking into and out of the adult world of the city that we've been reading about.

I found this section difficult at first. There are a lot of kids, and they all have strange names. There is a sense that there is a Lord of the Flies thing going on here or a lost boys (in this case children) of Peter Pan. There's some magical realism here, too, something I'm not usually very fond of.

But I was won over by these very young people who in many ways are stronger than the grownups in the city.

The Mystery of The Future

Gloria, our protagonist, has come to Fort Detroit because her daughter, a drug addict, was murdered there after which her grandchildren disappeared. Gloria is there to look for those girls who, for all she knows, are dead, too. It is her foray into the children's park to look for them that eventually brings the children and adult worlds together. 

En Conclusion  

The Future is a somewhat demanding book, in the very best sense of the word. Leroux has written other books I'm now interested in, and she's won awards for her translation of other writers' work. 

I may have a favorite French Canadian writer now. 

 

The Heritage Month Project: "Monster, She Wrote" by Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson

At last, I am writing about Women's History Month reading! I am beginning with Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction by Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson. This is another book from my To Be Read stash on my Kindle app. I'm not much of a fan of horror and only dabble in speculative fiction. However, the women's history aspect grabbed me on this one.

Monster, She Wrote is what might be described as a popular history. There's a section for each author covered, and within that section is an overview/critique, a list of the author's best works, and a list of similar authors. That last section I particularly liked.

The authors begin with women writers of Gothic novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since, they say, "There's a strong argument that horror as it exists in the twenty-first century evolved from the Gothic novel..." They cover six women in this section, the two best known (because I've heard of them) being Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Ann Radcliffe. Now six is not a statistically significant number. But I was still surprised there were that many, in part because conventional wisdom tells us that women in the past just could not and did not work. 

Later sections of the book tie time periods to subjects such as ghost stories, the occult, pulps, and paperback horror. I was particularly interested in women writing in various fields in the twentieth century. These writers moved around with work, some writing for television as well as paperbacks. Or, like Shirley Jackson, writing horror as well as domestic stories for women's magazines. I like the idea of not allowing yourself to be tied to one thing. 

The last section, The Future of Horror and Speculative Fiction, included interesting people whose work I'm now interested in reading. In fact, I've already read a short story by Helen Oyeyemi.

The Housewife Writer

For some time, I've been interested in women who self-identify as housewife writers. There aren't a lot of them, but I am trying to focus my Women's History Month reading on that. I'm not talking about homemaking as women's God-given role, what they are born to do. I am talking about homemaking as life maintenance, eating and putting clothes on backs and who does that for themselves and others? Why is that not considered as significant as roping a steer or running a store? I have a theory. 

In their section of Monster, She Wrote called Haunting the Home Kroger and Anderson say, "Historically, women have been consigned to the domestic realm, running the household and caring for children." "Many of the women profiled in this book struggled with that dichotomy: the pressure to care for home and family, and the need to tend their writing career. Haunted house fictions play upon the complex fears and concerns about domestic issues that woman have long grappled with."

They include Shirley Jackson in that section. I consider her to be the ultimate housewife writer. More on that before the end of the month.

 

U.S. Support for Heritage Months Appears to Have Disappeared. You Can Do Something About That.

You can read anywhere

This year I am doing what some might call identity reading--I'm reading books by authors who are members of groups that have been marginalized in the past or still are. I'm doing that by planning my reading around Heritage Months, months that have been dedicated to recognize various groups. Last month I read for Black History Month, this month I'm reading for Women's History Month.

I used the U.S. Department of State's list of heritage months, which existed in February. It does not exist now. Back in February, when I wrote about this, I carefully made a list of those heritage months, though it doesn't include which heritage groups are recognized on which calendar months. You can also find an archived State Department Celebrates Heritage and History Months from a different administration that looks pretty similar to the page that disappeared. 

You Actually Have the Power to do Something 

You can read anytime

If the removal of that material from the government website is something that concerns you, you can take positive action to compensate for its absence.

You don't need a government agency's guidance to read about women, Arab Americans, Jewish Americans, immigrants, LGBTQ Americans, Hispanic Americans, or Native Americans. Google any of those topics, and you'll find agencies and libraries with book lists. 

More important than reading about these groups, read books by authors who are members of these groups. It doesn't matter whether you buy their books or get them at a library, whether you read a traditional or e-book edition. Read something. If you like what you've read, use your voice to tell people.

• Tell people on Facebook, BlueSky, Twitter, or any other social media platform you are part of.
• On Goodreads? Do a Goodreads review.
• If you can tolerate Amazon, do an Amazon review.

These are important actions for supporting all writers, at any time. You can do these things now for these groups of writers.

A Suggested Schedule

Here's the schedule I'm using for the rest of my Heritage Month reading project. You'll notice a few blank months. I definitely will need them to spread out the reading on some of the months honoring multiple groups. But, you know, we can read and support authors and groups any time of the year. 

• March: Women's History
• April: Arab American History
• May: Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Island Heritage Month; Military
  Appreciation Month; Jewish American History Month
• June: Immigrant Heritage Month, Pride Month, Caribbean American Heritage Month. 
• Sept. 15 through Oct. 15: Hispanic Heritage Month 
• November: Native American Heritage Month. (That wasn't part of the Department of State's website. Make of that what you will.) Military Family Appreciation Month

You may find organizations that support other heritage or history groups. You can read and support anyone you want.

Reading and supporting someone is doing something. 

I'm Thinking of Making Introvert Humor a Specialty. New Story Behind the Story

Image from Netflix

My most recent humor writing, An Introvert's Nightmare, was published at MuddyUm earlier this week. It is far more about being introverted than it is about Megan Sussex, who, if her lifestyle show is at all accurate, is quite extroverted. 

This piece was time sensitive, in that "With Love, Meghan," which did, indeed, trigger the dream described, released last week and anything written referring to it would need to be published soon. This is significant, because in addition to being introverted, I am quite a slow writer. This may only be the second time I've written, submitted, and had something published this fast. Maybe it's the third. I don't know. It's unusual for me, at any rate.

One of the issues I was dealing with here is that this piece is pretty much an essay. Borderline memoir. That cuts down on the number of places I could submit it, because some humor sites don't accept essays. Additionally, as a reader of on-line humor, I don't want to sit in front of a screen reading a lot of text. Thus, the judicious use of subheadings.

MuddyUm requires their writers to use kickers, a line above the title that helps define what the piece is. I came up with "Introvert Humor." Now I'm thinking maybe I could do more of that.

The Heritage Month Project: "The Cooking Gene" By Michael W. Twitty

I know it's Women's History Month, but I had to finish my last read for Black History Month! It was a good book. Pretty amazing, in fact.

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty is another book I've owned for some time but didn't read. I was attracted, I'm sure, by the culinary history aspect. But now that my body is shot and I'm limited in what I eat, reading about food, itself, doesn't interest me as much as it used to. I've started following gluten free Facebook pages to give you an idea how my mind runs these days.  

This book, though, isn't just about food.

Twitty is a food writer, culinary historian, independent historian, and historical interpreter. I'm not sure if he's a cook/chef, though he does cook as part of his work as a historical interpreter, demonstrating food cooked as slaves would have done it in the south. For my last unsold book, I did research on independent historians for one of the characters, and I am delighted to be able to point to The Cooking Gene as an example of the kind of work that historians who are not connected to an academic institution can produce. 

And as a food writer, Twitty does very fine work, too. If he cooks a third as well as he writes, he must be very good with that, too.

What Twitty is doing with The Cooking Gene is using his family history to connect with the history of slaves in this country and tying it together with food. We get genealogy with this book, just as we did with Pearl's Secret, though Twitty has the benefit of DNA testing, which Neil Henry didn't have when he was doing his family research. Twitty did more than one DNA test and got dramatically more information than I got with the one Ancestry.com test I was willing to pay for. He also had a personal genealogist. Here's something you never hear: "If I win the lottery, I'm hiring a personal genealogist!" Just so you know, I'm saying it now.

Twitty travels to different parts of the south where his ancestors lived and writes about the different foods that were common there, as well as historical issues for each area. Once again, I'm supposed to know a little history. When I thought of crops in the old south, I thought of cotton. But it wasn't just cotton. It was tobacco (which I sort of knew about) and rice (which I didn't). As nasty crops to work with go, rice sounds the worst.

Twitty makes an interesting point about cotton: We think of cotton as having a huge impact on the enslavement of Blacks, but it did more. It had an impact on immigration in the north, because of all the cotton fabric mills that employed them. Evidently the so-called "Americans" who didn't want to work in the fields in the south, meaning we needed unpaid slaves, also didn't want to work in the mills in the north, so we needed underpaid immigrants. Which raises the question, what did "Americans" want to do?

The issue of immigration in the north connects with my people, because French Canadians came into this country in the nineteenth century to work in those mills Twitty mentions. But that's a story for another month. 

While I was reading this book, I was acutely aware that Twitty was raised knowing a great deal more about Black cooking than I was raised knowing about French Canadian or even Franco American. But, again, that's for another piece of writing.

This was a great book to finish my Black History Month reading, since it relates to two of the other three books I read. As I said, it does some of what Neil Henry does in Pearl's Secret. But it also covers  grim material like The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. It's grimmer, in fact, because when Twitty writes about auction blocks and Black men and women being stripped so white shoppers can check them out, that was real. Readers can reassure themselves that The Underground Railroad is fiction. The Cooking Gene isn't. 

I've had a good month of reading. Time to move on to Women's History.

Retooling Writing: A Story Behind the Story

 Last week Books Are Our Superpower published my piece, I Came for the Genealogy and Stayed for Something Else. This was a revision of my blog post The Heritage Project: A Black Man's Search For His White Family by Neil Henry. It was the second time I was able to publish a revision of a post I did here for publication at Books Are Our Superpower, the first time being This Year I Am Using Heritage Months to Plan My Reading, a revision of a Time Management Tuesday post. 

As I said earlier, reworking material for different markets is often done. I've been interested in reworking some old OC posts as well as the posts I plan to write for this year's Heritage Month Project. The first draft is done here, anyway, so we're only talking revision. Revising could involve restructuring a piece, as I did with I Came for the Genealogy, or it could mean adding new material. It's interesting work, but not terribly taxing.

Is This a Good Use of My Time Given What's Happening at Medium?

I don't know how long I'll continue with this, though, because the bottom has fallen out of the Medium publishing platform as far as readership is concerned. If you look at the eleven (eleven!) pieces published with mine by Books Are Our Superpower on February 27, no one is getting a lot of attention from readers as far as claps are concerned, even though that publication has 66,000 followers. More people could be reading and just not responding, but the claps are a quick and dirty way for a  reader to see what's going on with other writers. 

Another way is to read Medium articles about publishing on Medium. Readership and income has been plummeting for many writers there since last fall. To give you an example, in the past I've had three articles chosen for what is called the "boost program," meaning they were selected for further promotion. Those three articles made anywhere from $80 + or - to over $600. The Heritage Month article published on February 9 of this year was boosted and made $11.28.

I just realized the other boosted articles were all humor. Maybe that just does better on Medium, though self-help and tech are supposed to be the big draws there. Not that I write either of those. 

At any rate, I am rethinking what I'm spending my time on this next year. I won't be changing my goals, but probably my objectives. 

The Heritage Month Project: "The Underground Railroad" By Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Underground Railroad, and while I don't know what other books were being considered for those awards that year, I have to say I have no problem with The Underground Railroad taking the top spots. It is a great read, both character- and plot-driven and very substantial. You finish this book, and you feel, Now, that was a book. 

The Underground Railroad is the story of an American slave, Cora, living in the early nineteenth century south. The time is significant, I think, because we know the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) is long in her future, assuming she's even still alive when it comes. The beginning of her tale is heart-breakingly grim, about life on the plantation. But it's a kind of heartbreak most of us have heard about before. It's not until she enters the underground railroad that something unique happens.

What happens is that The Underground Railroad turns into alternative history. 

The historical underground railroad was an informal network of people who helped American slaves escape into free states, where they might end up being captured and returned to the south, or into Canada, where slavery had been against the law since 1834, when Great Britain outlawed it in its empire. The railroad metaphor for the system was enhanced by the use of the terms "conductors" for guides, "depots" or "stations" for buildings where slaves could be hidden, and "stationmasters" for the people who owned the homes or otherwise were responsible for a building, accepting and hiding slaves there.

Whitehead's alternative underground railroad involves a real railroad that is truly under the ground. When Cora gets onboard, she begins a journey story in which she makes stops that provide her with respite but only for a while. 

Her first stop is in South Carolina where we immediately understand that we're not in the historical south anymore, because one of the first things Cora sees is what is called a skyscraper. Life is a lot better for Blacks in South Carolina, which has what might be called an enlightened attitude. But there's something not quite right here, in a very futuristic scifi kind of way. Sure enough, South Carolina has a little eugenics thing going on. Before this can become an issue she has to deal with, Cora finds out she is being hunted by someone who makes his living catching and returning escaped slaves to their owners. 

She boards the railroad again.

A second stop has a Holocaust feel and another a utopian commune vibe. The ending reminded me of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, which makes sense. The Handmaid's Tale is a story of a woman caught in a nightmarish future, and The Underground Railroad is a story of a woman caught in a nightmarish past.

I'm not totally comfortable saying I enjoyed a book dealing with a historical issue that is so painful. But the alternative history aspect helps to give distance. Black experience makes some great source material for genre writing. 

Other Alternative History Dealing with Black Experience

I loved Dread Nation by Justina Ireland. It's a zombie story and there were no zombies in the nineteenth century, so while the young Black women in this book are trained as zombie hunters as sort of cannon fodder to protect young white women with money, I can be assured this never happened. Right? As I pointed out in my original post, zombie stories supposedly are never just about zombies, and Dread Nation isn't. It definitely deals with race and politics.

Dread Nation has a sequel! Deathless Divide. Oh, I often recall one of the zombie hordes attacking a town in a scene in this book. Do not know why. Again, this isn't so much about zombies. It's about race and gender. 

More Genre Writing From Black Authors

• Science Fiction and Fantasy 
• Mysteries and Thrillers  I've read My Sister the Serial Killer
• Historical Fiction Several things here look good. So many books. So little time.
• Essays and Memoirs I've read a couple of these and am presently reading The Cooking Gene.

The Heritage Month Project: "Pearl's Secret, A Black Man's Search For His White Family" by Neil Henry

Pearl's Secret by Neil Henry is an older book, published in 2001. It's been on my To Be Read Shelf for a number of years. I probably bought it because of the genealogy and history aspect. I didn't know much about it beyond that.

By the time I finally started reading Pearl's Secret, I thought it was going to be a Finding Your Roots thing. That worried me since I stopped watching that show, because I find it so formulaic. ("Your ancestors suffered horribly. How does that make you feel?") Then I thought the book was going to be a memoir of Henry's experience hunting for his white family members, maybe some nerdy stuff about hunting high and low. You do get a little of that. Genealogical research was much more of a chore before the Internet, even if today sites like Ancestry.com are only as accurate as the strangers who are doing the posting there.

But what the book really is is a family history as it relates to race, first through the Black side and then the white side of Henry's family, once he connects with them. I personally think family histories relate to the greater histories families lived through, and Henry's story supports that.

Henry describes his childhood in Seattle as the youngest son of a surgeon and a librarian as being Leave it to Beaverish. It was an idyllic suburban life interrupted by episodes of racism. He's invited by a couple of little white girls in his neighborhood to come over and play only to be chased down the street by their grandfather when he goes to the door. Not at all surprised he remembered that years later. In his family there is talk of the value of having light skin and good hair while at the same time feeling great respect for their Black history and culture. Believe me, no one was talking about French Canadian achievements and listening to French Canadian music when I was growing up. My mother's side of the family didn't know they had any kind of achievements or music, which I suppose can easily happen when your name is Adams.  

Henry's own story of being adrift while attending Princeton and working for Ben Bradlee at The Washington Post tended to drag for me, because I've read about guys going to private schools and having good jobs in journalism before. His grandparents are nice people, but he doesn't talk that much about them. The relatives who are the stars of his family show are his parents, who experienced life under Jim Crow and survived and overcame it. Their stories are riveting, shocking. Seriously, I am shocked by how little I, who have taken a history course or two and read a few history books, have known about the Jim Crow era until recently. I kept talking about these people at the dinner table while I was reading about them. 

Netflix! Where are you? I would watch this mini-series.  

I don't want to say too much about the Beaumonts, Henry's white family, because there's sort of a creative nonfiction thing going on here, with a narrative climax that I don't want to give away. Though I will just say, "boll weevil." Yes, I had heard the name, just as I had heard "Jim Crow." I had no idea the significance, though.

Regarding Peal's secret, itself--That's a bit of a surprise, too. It's not that she was a Black woman hiding her white background or a Black woman passing as white, because she was neither of those things. Her secret is something else. 

Pearl's Secret is a great example of how reading about people you are less familiar with opens up opportunities to see something different, to add to your personal knowledge base. My feelings about this book reminded me of reading Don't Hold Me Back, a picture book memoir written and illustrated by the late artist, Winfred Rembert. Rembert was a few years older than me, but not a lot, and I actually met him. In his book, he writes about growing up in the south at the end of the Jim Crow era. I found it disturbing that someone nearly my contemporary had to pick cotton as a child and saw the bodies of lynched Black men hanging from trees. Now I realize that growing up poorish in rural Vermont when I did, without weekly news magazines or a daily paper coming into the house, was probably a great protector for little Gail in terms of what was going on in the rest of the world.

James Marriott, a columnist with The Times (London), wrote a few days ago that "Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable."  It's also inconceivable if we never knew it happened.