Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the yJanuary 1, 1863
A Transcription
By the President of the United States of America:
A Proclamation.
Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:
"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
"That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States."
Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit:
Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth[)], and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.
And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.
And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.
By the President: ABRAHAM LINCOLN WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State....more
Having read a book my grad class (of teachers) chose to read, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Blacks and Native Children and the Construction of Having read a book my grad class (of teachers) chose to read, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Blacks and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism by Eve Ewing, they decided to read this book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education by Jesse Hagopian, whch I also had not read, as it also is being released this month.
Maybe you from time to time get tired of listening to commentary on race? Well, with the widespread denunciation of DEI, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, and the like, if the People in Power are successful, you may never have to hear about Race in any public setting, including schools and universities, or in businesses! Wouldn't that be a relief? We can just make America great again in part by whitewashing some of our most brutal past. As with Original Sins, this book and others like it could be burned, as other books have been burned (or censored, or kept from libraries in this country.
But author Hagopian begins his book with three statements you might consider:
"If we teach that the founding of the United States of America was somehow flawed—it was corrupt, it was racist—that’s really dangerous. It strikes at the very foundations of our country"—Mike Pompeo, former CIA director and secretary of state {see Eve Ewing's Original Sins]
"We’ve never been a racist country"—Nikki Haley, Republican presidential candidate {Tell that to the descendants of slaves, and re: Jim Crow]
"With sufficient general agreement and determination among the dominant classes, the truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale that the masters of men wish"—W. E. B. Du Bois [cf. 47's assertion that Ukraine is responsible for Russia's invasion of their country, or the erasure of black history going on as usual, but more openly than ever]
Lat night at the Chicago Teaching Union I heard a discussion pertaining to issues addressed in both books, featuring Ewing and Seattle history teacher Hagopian. Again, as with Ewing's book I knew much of what is in it--it tells us of the attacks on DEI and civil rights and calls on us to resist--but I still say for the general reader that it is a necessary encapsulation of the present moment--written by a great teacher and humane person. ...more
I hereby repost this review of a book just out, as DEI is condemned by the present administration and Civil Rights offices are closed. The gutting of I hereby repost this review of a book just out, as DEI is condemned by the present administration and Civil Rights offices are closed. The gutting of the Department of Education that is seen as too woke and negative about white supremacy. All aspects of government seen as "racist" because it focuses on race? On equity? Because a"free market" approach to morality will just work things out? Or is it "replacement theory" fears? Get all the people of color to leave the country? Universities condemned for researching equity issues? All this is nothing new (see this book). We are not living in a post-racist society, obviously.
I went to a book publication roll-out for Chicago's own Eve Ewing's Original Sins, and the grimness of the message was countered in some ways by her personal energy, enthusiasm, political commitment and humor. The book is relatively short, weaving two strands of American racist shame together but it then situating the history of racism within the context of schooling that played an important and ugly role in the creation of a racist American society. So, timely, need I say. And yes, pertaining to that DEI issue that Amazon/Goodreads will have to deal with: Will Jeff Bezos have to put an end to the reviewing of DEI -related books? And if so, where would you start? This book, obviously, will be one of the first to be thrown on the white supremacist fire. When someone asked what we should do with her book she said read it, rededicate yourself to antiracist principles, pass it on and/or throw it at a fascist!
Ewing is a kind of literary force in the present moment, in my estimation. She wrote Ghosts in the Schoolyard about the closing of dozens of Chicago schools in poor neighborhoods. She wrote 1919 (poetry in part based on the mostly forgotten race riots of 1919 in Chicago), middle grades fiction, and she's writing comics series for Marvel! A former Chicago elementary school teacher, she (for Chicagoans) graduated from Northside College Prep, U of Chicago, and grad school at Harvard. She's a Sociologist of Education at the (typically conservative) U of Chicago.
She warns that the book is primarily descriptive and not prescriptive, which is to say it goes over a lot of well-known ground of racist history, though maybe some readers will not know the central role schools have played in that history. She frames her view of school in part by using Foucault's Discipline and Punish to show how blacks and Native Americans have historically been silenced by and otherwise disciplined by schools.
She cites David Stovall's article (I'll get the citation soon) favoring the "abolition" of schools as we know them to help us create a different society. Anarchist principles for breaking down the traditional structures of schooling.
Ewing dedicates her book to all her great teachers who didn't silence her, and to all the great teachers she knows, has worked with, and whom she knows will read her book. She knows there are today many many great teachers, and many great schools. When she was in school she always was respected as someone who could contribute to discussions. She was not silenced.
This book, while not (to me) breaking particularly new ground, is a good source of information linking schooling to racist societal practices. Some readers (I hope) will be shocked by some of her information, if they had not heard it bwefore. And it is really well-written and engaging, as grim as it is, written for a popular audience, primarily for teachers and administrators, and maybe parents, I think, but after all the horrors it ends hopefully with a discussion of "braiding" (sweetgrass, Indigenous hair braids) as a metaphor for moving forward together. She's not very specific about what we can do to change our approach to a new foundation for schooling beyond creating (Nel Noddings's) "ethic of care" in schools, but this book--just published last week, early February--will be an "it" book here in Chicago, for sure, and maybe nationally. I read it with my grad class (of teachers) who also attended the book event at UIC.
One thing I appreciated as the book moves along is that she talks more and more (as Dr King did, later, too) about the destructive forces of capitalism that in part depend on racist practices--if you were a person of color you had to move to limited areas--reservations, "ghettoes," destroying the cultures of Native Americans and blacks and others--Asians, Mexican-Americans--in different ways to move on its (white) goals--as one central structure in the process of building the US....more
MOVE: The Untold Story of an American Tragedy 92024) is anAudible Original production written by Curtis Bryant and Kevin Arbouet, narrated by Tariq TrMOVE: The Untold Story of an American Tragedy 92024) is anAudible Original production written by Curtis Bryant and Kevin Arbouet, narrated by Tariq Trotter. I listened to it, running less than six hours, apparently based on a podcast, as it comes to you in segments. Maybe if you are over sixty (or younger, if you live in Philadelphia) you will recall the bombing of the MOVE residence and neighborhood in 1978, the only time in recorded American history that the American government actually BOMBED American citizens (with C4!!!!, and this was in addition to their firing over TEN THOUSAND rounds and as a [not quite] final insult, deliberately burning the residence and nearby housing and their inhabitants to the ground. True story. Women and children inside! Unarmed!
Then the “authorities” jailed the surviving residents for several years for “inciting a riot,” and gave the bones of the murdered women and children to a local university to study!
I know you want to know: What did MOVE do to deserve this fate? I can’t wait to say that the small family that refused to come out of the house had FOUR (only 4) unloaded guns. They were vegan, wore dreadlocks, were guided by a guy, John Africa, who everyone assumed was a cult figure (I did, too, initially) in that he asked all of the folks who joined him (most of them black) to change their last names to Africa (not his original name, either).
MOVE annoyed neighbors, but had never been convicted of anything beyond a misdemeanor, though the PPD and Mayor Frank Rizzo were so annoyed and embarrassed by them and their refusal to leave the neighborhood that they exploded in rage. They were NEVER violent, but they had asserted their rights. At one point there was a trial where none of the group were indicted for the murder of a police officer, though it is clear now from the evidence that this officer was killed via “friendly fire.” Decades later, some apologies wwe made for all this shining moment in American history.
Lots of research went into this story, which is a kind of bare-bones introduction to much recorded history, well-documented. Though you do get actual transcripts and recordings of participants. The testimonies are chilling. Echoes of the a---whupping of hippies and yippies and war resisters by Hizzoner Mayor Richard M. Daley during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. ...more
There! Finished reading the epic of achievement of August Wilson's century cycle, a play written for each decade in Pittsburgh, seen from the perspectThere! Finished reading the epic of achievement of August Wilson's century cycle, a play written for each decade in Pittsburgh, seen from the perspective of black Americans. This one, Radio Golf, (2005), is very different, in that for the first time Wilson centers the play on middle class blacks, community leaders, businessmen, prospective politicians, people who have "made it," with a recurring strong woman character, who are confronted by a lower-middle class worker and an older man, lower class. In short, Wilson hopes that all these different classes come together in the twenty-first century.
The guys with money, Harmond Wilks, a real estate developed and possible mayoral candidate, and his friend, Bank Vice President Roosevelt Hicks, are involved in a redevelopment project that happens to require the demolition of the house owned by eight-year-old Old Joe Barlow, kin of Aunt Ester, the moral center of all the ten plays, recently deceased. Old Joe hadn't been paying his taxes and the property got seized and sold to Wilks, but did Wilks lawfully buy the place?
And to what extent are both Wilks and Hicks being used in their advancing positions by the powerful white community, as in being tokenized or "Black-faced," used by them as the face of projects, yet trivialized in the process? A laborer in the area helps us see some of the ethical dilemmas.
The ten play project is one of the very greatest achievements in world theater history, great plays, great dialogue, characters, social issues, humor, spirituality, music. Highly recommended. The best? Fences is at the top, and then The Piano Lesson, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone. Radio Golf (Hicks, a golfer, does a golf tips show on radio) is very good--none of them are less than very good for different reasons--but don't start here. And see them on the stage, on films, read them. ...more
King Hedley II (2005) is August Wilson ninth play in his ten-part series, The Pittsburgh Cycle, set in 1985 Pittsburgh. It bears similarities to all tKing Hedley II (2005) is August Wilson ninth play in his ten-part series, The Pittsburgh Cycle, set in 1985 Pittsburgh. It bears similarities to all the other plays, and features some similar characters--businessmen, dreamers, strong women, mystics/religious folks, angry rebels--and the mention of the (possible?) death of one we met in the very first play, Gem of the Ocean, the mystic healer Aunt Ester, aged 366. This is like all Wilson’s plays in the series, very good, but not among my favorites. But it has the feel of a Greek Tragedy, with an impulsive autocratic violent mc. Maybe a touch of King Lear, too, al that operatic raging.
Guns play a central role in this play, as King Hedley, out of prison and broke and angry, carries one, and we watch as one gets passed from character to character. And you know what Chekhov said about putting a gun on the stage in Act I; by the end of the play it must be fired. Oh, and there's a machete on stage, too, uh oh.
Hedley is the MC, who wants to marry Tonya. He lives with his mother, Ruby. As usual, these women are the moral bedrock of the play, the stability, as the men struggle. Hedley and his long time buddy Mister are selling (obviously stolen) refrigerators in hopes of opening their own business, but Tonya wants a life now, and she doesn’t want to live with a criminal. Elmore, Ruby’s sometime lover, returns, and he wants to marry her. One of these men get their way. One sub theme is the difficulty of creating enough econoimic stabikity to create a foundation for relationships.
Stool Pigeon is the crazy/religious/mystical seer in this play, moving in and out of the action as a Chorus figure, commenting on the action. His opening soliloquy sets the stage, the first opening soliloquy in all of Wilson’s plays. He’s the Truth sayer.
“The people wandering all over the place. They got lost”--Stool Pigeon
King does not quite have the soaring drive of Fences or Piano Lessons or Ma Rainey or Joe Turner, but it is a worthy entry in the series. It has some gorgeous language and dialogue and fascinating characters, as usual. So much poetry; so much pain.
*Cats and dogs play a central role. Stool Pigeon’s opening speech begins with commentary to a cat to stay away from the bones he is saving for a dog. Bones. The past.
This book features a preface by Wilson that had been published in the New York Times in 2000 about his series and its purposes. In it he makes his case that Aunt Ester is the most important figure in the whole series, at the moral center of the represented black experience in each play....more
Since I am generally a completist, and had read all previous eight volumes of Chester Himes’ Harlem Cycle series featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and GraveSince I am generally a completist, and had read all previous eight volumes of Chester Himes’ Harlem Cycle series featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, I finally got my hands on the ninth, Plan B, which was published in French in 1983 and published in English in 1993. The series is set in the sixties and focuses on Harlem, seen through the perspective of two angry, frustrated and sometimes violent black detectives. The action is often raucous, profane, hilarious, insightful, rough around the edges with flashes of brilliance and offense. I read them in part because I had read Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series set in LA which was said to be in part inspired by Himes: Books that explore a range of black experience in the context of crime. And Himes was always on my tbr list; I am only now (2024) getting t him, and he's great, on the whole.
Himes began Plan B in 1967-68, but it was never completed. He wrote what I thought to be the completion of the series, Blind Man with a Pistol, in 1969, and both books have some similar themes, so I think of Pistol as a somewhat tamer view of the late sixties civil unrest than Plan B. Neither of these books are really detective fiction, though both include Coffin Ed and Gravedigger. Working with Himes’ notes that describe the intended ending of Plan B, Michael Fabre and Robert E. Skinner “finished it.” Himes died in 1984, having worked, in his waning years, in declining health, to complete it, but he came up short, and many feel he may never have really decided how to finish it.
Plan B is a pull-out-all-the-stops apocalyptic novel describing a violent black uprising or revolution inspired by his reading the news from France about the late sixties riots, and other racial violence, such as the killing of Rev. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In an interview, Himes said he had wanted to "depict the violence that is necessary so that the white community will also give it a little thought, because you know, they're going around playing these games. They haven't given any thought to what would happen if the black people would seriously uprise."
The book is apocalyptic--uber-violent, including lots of killing and sex. War is societal breakdown, and this is all about that. It begins with a chapter ending in a angry killing by Gravedigger of a pimp, and another early chapter depicts the chaos that might defy American textbook depictions of post-slavery “Reconstruction” as a kind of chaotic destructive occasion of rage on the parts of both Southern Confederate whites and freed slaves.
2024 brings us a film seen as shocking but not unrealistic, Civil War, but that film is a relatively tame vision compared to Plan B. The book details the efforts of community leader Tomsson Black to ignite violence in Harlem in order to create a radical change in racial relations. Whites do counter-attack, as one might expect, so thus it becomes all-out war.
If you are easily offended, do not even consider reading this book, because it is meant to offend. And shock. Himes uses humor to deflect criticism in his earlier books in the series, but there’s not much humor here. Mostly rage. But there are some remarkable passages in it, to be fair. Some brilliance, and lots of disorder, within a big outrageous mess that comes close to what I think Himes intended it to be, his masterpiece, though he also doubted anyone would actually have the courage to publish it. Percival Everett says it, even unfinished, or finished by others, is one of his three best books.
Himes loves Harlem and its people, but the whole series is a solid indictment of a society that created Harlem in the first place, a place of poverty and despair and fraudulent preachers and drug addicts and all.. So for inspiration for violence Himes loved Faulkner, but it reminded me of some Cormac McCarthy works at their most racially violent. Dystopian fiction. But worth a look if you take a deep breath and hang on.
I don’t know how to rate it, frankly. Some parts are 5 stars, no question. Some of it seems indefensibly nihilistic, by far his darkest vision of the world. And he never finished it, so can you say it is a great book? Kafka wrote some unfinished novels we now call classics, but none of them such as Plan B where Himes destroys the very world he set out to create in his series. Crazy book. Maybe a kind of warning? I guess today I’ll say 3 stars....more
“The effect of such storms of wind, or snow, or rain, is abject physical terror, due to the realization of perfect helplessness”--Matthew Henson, the “The effect of such storms of wind, or snow, or rain, is abject physical terror, due to the realization of perfect helplessness”--Matthew Henson, the valet who was the first black man to reach the north pole.
I found this book by National Book Award poet Robin Coste Lewis in the Black History Month display at my library and picked it up because of its title, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (2022) and because it is multi-genre, a blend of poetry, photographs and erasures from the writing of Matthew Henson. The first half of the book, with its white type on black pages, emerged from Intimacy, a multimedia collaboration with visual artist Julie Mehretu.
Then, old hotographs? When her grandmother died, Lewis found a box of polaroid photographs in a box and a family member suggested she write a book about them. So she kinda does, meshing it with Henson connections and other pieces. The photographs seem usually unremarkable to me 9though some stand out), partly because I once had bags of such family photos, though I still have numerous albums.
But the point for her is that they represent a secret history, an emblem of a secret black life unknown to most white Americans. She never comments on the photos directly, but instead writes obliquely connected poetry, commentary on her life, her family life, black life.
Then she connects her life with the frozen journey of Henson. And the journey of hundreds of thousands of people in the Great Migration--not north in her family, but west to LA.
I like the artifact, beautifully produced hardcover by Knopf.
What’s one point of the project? “I am trying to make the gods happy. I am trying to make the dead clap and shout.”
"I remembered you then, not from the past, but from a bright inkling inside my body that some would later call the future."
“My body a constantly ripening orchard seen only by satellites”
“His face is a whole flock of starlings, which suddenly alights upon me—me, bare winter tree.”
Not just a personal history but black history, private, apart.
I have just read the first two plays in August Wilson's decalogue, the Pittsburgh Cycle, one play per decade of the twentieth-century. These first twoI have just read the first two plays in August Wilson's decalogue, the Pittsburgh Cycle, one play per decade of the twentieth-century. These first two plays, The Gem of the Ocean and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, focus on post-slavery into the Great Migration, where some chaos continued to reign: Former slaves traveling north, separated from their families, tried to find them, and some of them we find had been kidnapped and forced into farm labor whether through prisons (or otherwise chain-ganged and passed on to farmers who needed labor. More slavery, post slavery. White southern plantation owners were not happy to lose their cheap workforce, of course, and didn't always treat their former slaves well, so millions traveled north, and others tried to. One character in Wilson's Joe Turner Come and Gone is a People Finder for people separated from their families.
Shana Keller's picture book Do You Know Them?: Families Lost and Found After The Civil War, illustrated by Laura Freeman, was inspired by ads she discovered had been published in many northern newspapers paid for by those searching. The book includes the actual scripts from those ads. Rhe story in the picture book focuses on one girl's drive to make enough pennies to pay for an ad, which turned out to be successful.
The story is simple and ends unsurprisingly, but it is nevertheless inspiring and useful at uncovering an important and anguishing aspect of history. Freeman is a much-lauded illustrator, and this work further confirms her expertise as the layouts and key images highlighted are engaging. The story here supports Wilson's similar work on the trauma of family separation in the early Jim Crow era....more
“They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone Ohhh Lordy They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone Ohhh Lordy Got my man and gone”
Update, 4/29/24: I saw a produc“They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone Ohhh Lordy They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone Ohhh Lordy Got my man and gone”
Update, 4/29/24: I saw a production at Chicago's Goodman Theater that was very highly reviewed, and I agree, it is terrific. Directed by Chuck Smith, a long time director known for his interpretations of Wilson plays. I met him and members of his cast, who love the dialogue, the musicality, the history.
“From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrive dazed and stunned, their heart kicking in their chest with a song worth singing.”
Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986) by August Wilson is the second installment of his decade-by-decade chronicle of the black American experience, known as The Decalogue, or The Pittsburgh Cycle, where each play in each decade is located. Joe Turner is set in 1911.
I understand that of Wilson's own plays it was his favorite. The original working title of the play was Mill Hand's Lunch Bucket, the title of a painting by one of his influences, Romaire Bearden. The title Joe Turner's Come and Gone--which is a better title for this play--is a line from the refrain of “Joe Turner," an early blues song based on an actual Jim Crow guy named Joe Turney, brother of Tennessee Governor Peter Turney. Joe Turney was part of a group who kidnapped or falsely imprisoned blacks attempting to leave the south during Reconstruction, after they saw they were still being persecuted after the Civil War granted them freedom.
The play is set in Seth and Bertha Holly’s boardinghouse, with a lot of characters. In a away, the heart of the story may be in this passage, this need to find our song and sing it:
“Now, I used to travel all up and down, this road and that. . . looking here and there. Searching. Just like you, Mr. Loomis. I didn’t know what I was searching for. The only thing I knew was something was keeping me dissatisfied. Something wasn’t making my heart smooth and easy. Then one day my daddy gave me a song. That song had a weight to it that was hard to handle. That song was hard to carry. I fought against it. Didn’t want to accept that song. I tried to find my daddy to give him the song. But I found out it wasn’t his song. It was my song. It had come from way deep inside me”--Bynum, a conjure man who lives in the Holly house
But it is also a play about men and women going north during The Great Migration; many were damaged in many ways, separated from and searching for their loved ones, chiefly a man named Herald Loomis, traumatized by having been imprisoned and separated from his wife Martha and their daughter for seven years, though he has been searching for them for several bitter years afterwards.
*Also central to this play is the question of what a relationship is for, what it needs to be. “That's all you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other”--Bertha. One sad realization Loomis has is that he has forgotten how to touch (approaching Mattie, who is looking for her lost husband Jack).
*The play is a mix of naturalism and expressionism, with Bynum the central character connected to the supernatural. He's a "conjure man." Call it poetic or magical realism. Archetypal characters such as healer Bynum, like Aunt Ester in Gem of the Ocean. Myth, magic, superstition, and faith abound and are intermixed.
*Defeated, angry Black men are at the center of numerous August Wilson plays, none angrier than Herald Loomis.
*A little fuzzy on what Jim Crow was all about? You hear it mentioned still today. See if you can tell why. Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation, separate but unequal treatment. Named after a Black minstrel show character, the laws—which existed for about 100 years, from post-Civil War through the late sixties, technically—were meant to deny blacks the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education, get adequate housing or other opportunities. Those who attempted to defy Jim Crow laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence and death.
*“I once wrote this short story called ‘The Best Blues Singer in the World,’ and it went like this—’The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.’ End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story"--Wilson
* Chicago's Goodman Theatre was the first theater in the world to produce the entire 10-play cycle, in productions which spanned from 1986 to 2007. But many US city theater groups have now produced the whole cycle....more
Gem of the Ocean (2003, produced at Goodman Theater that same year) set in 1904, first play in August Wilson’s De“Columbia, the gem of the ocean. . .”
Gem of the Ocean (2003, produced at Goodman Theater that same year) set in 1904, first play in August Wilson’s Decalogue, aka Pittsburgh Cycle, depicting African American experience--one play for each twentieth-century decade, almost all set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where he grew up. Wilson’s extraordinary lifework—completed just before his death in October 2005—is “one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken” (The New York Times).
My first time reading it, ty to friend DT, who teaches Wilson's plays, and who nudged me to read all ten of them this year. Gonna do it! And see as many of the plays as I can. Chicago's Goodman Theater has produced all of the plays, and I saw a couple of them, but I have this goal now to see them all this year or next.
The key figure in this play, the moral center, is (she says! ) 285-year-old Aunt Ester, a freed slave who with mentee Black Mary, welcomes into her (sanctuary) home Solly Two Kings, who was also born into slavery and scouted for the union Army, and Citizen Barlow, a young man from searching for a new life and in search of redemption after he steals and another man dies for the theft.
The death by drowning of the accused man ignites his co-workers, who have gone on strike and are rioting. Caesar, the local law enforcement official, is a kind of equivalent of a black overseer, and owner of a bakery, gouging his fellow blacks in the process of enriching himself. In the riots, he arrests several people and shoots another.
Citizen Barlow escaped Alabama, as whites there blocked exit to blacks who wanted out of the South. Whites there insisted blacks stay and work; they needed people to get work done but were unwilling to pay them fair wages or treat them humanely. Solly Two Kings (named after Kings David and Solomon) has to rescue his sister from Alabama, too. So this is the onset of the Great Migration, the roughly 1910-1970 surge north, (when roughly half a million of the the 7 million blacks who came north came to chicago!).
Confederate whites were angry about the end of slavery, which had proved a great economic boon for them, of course. Thus, freedom didn’t turn out to be a completely happy occasion for southern blacks, but as Wilson points out, living in the north wasn’t a piece of cake for them, either.
“The people think they in freedom. That’s all my daddy talked about. He died and never had it. It aint never been nothin but trouble. . . You got to fight to make it mean something.”
Solly invites Citizen to activism with him: “Your mama trying to tell you something. It’s a heavy load being a citizen.”
But Wilson might make some readers uncomfortable, ala Frantz Fanon and Andreas Malm, recalling our own American Revolution and the Civil War itself: Solly suggests that sometimes violence just may be necessary. As a long-time pacifist who historically sides with MLK’s and Gandhi’s non-violent resistance over Malcolm X’s “By any means necessary,” supporting a ceasefire in the middle east but supporting Ukraine, seeing the need to change the world in order to save it, I’m listening, thinking about it. I’m also an old-school environmentalist Edward Abbey MonkeyWrench Gang guy, too. An AIM advocate.
“God said different things. He said “smite my enemies,” then “turn the other cheek.” That's just gonna get you two broke jaws”--Solly
Caesar has no problem with violence, after all: “You know whose fault it is. I'll tell you whose fault it is. It's Abraham Lincoln's fault. He ain't had no idea what he was doing.. He didn't know like I know.. Some of these niggers was better off in slavery.” He’ll kill the underpaid and near-starving who speak up (pre-unionization) to their/his bosses.
So Citizen comes to Aunt Ester for a “soul-cleansing,” which turns out to be a pretty exhilarating spiritual journey to the City of Bones (the bones of their ancestors) “What is your life worth, Mr. Citizen? That what you got to find out.”
Aunt Ester gives Citizen a metaphorical “boat” to travel on made from the once-legal Bill of Sale of her as a child slave.
Spoiler alert: When the mill is set on fire, all hell breaks loose, recalling Nat Turner’s Rebellion in North Carolina. Solly: Yeah, I burned it down! The people might get mad but freedom got a high price. You got to pay. No matter what it cost. You got to pay. I didn't mind settling up the difference after the war. But I didn't know they was gonna settle like this. I got older I see where I'm gonna die and everything gonna be the same.. I say well at least goddamn it they gonna know I was here! The people gonna know about Solly Two Kings!”
Amazing theatrical experience I have yet to fully have, not having seen it yet, but will rectify that this year if at all possible. ...more
Timely picture book celebrating the role Ida B. Wells played in the women's suffrage movement. Black men were allowed to vote in 1870; white women couTimely picture book celebrating the role Ida B. Wells played in the women's suffrage movement. Black men were allowed to vote in 1870; white women could vote thanks to the passage of the 19th amendment, but it was not until 1965, the year of the Voting Rights Act!!!! This is a well-researched book with lots of information relevant to the 2024 election. Every step of the way there was resistance and violence against women and blacks for being recognized as human beings, when they were legally allowed to vote, but the emphasis in this book is positive on the persistence of women such as Wells to never give up. We learn who she is and why she was of historical significance, marching for justice....more
National Book Award for Fiction, 2024! Runner-up for the 2024 Goodreads Historical Fiction category.
James (2024) as you probably already know is PerciNational Book Award for Fiction, 2024! Runner-up for the 2024 Goodreads Historical Fiction category.
James (2024) as you probably already know is Percival Everett's rewriting of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, or now, James, to give him more respect. Since everyone is either reading it or recently has read it, and has read Huck Finn, I won't spend too much time on the plot, except to say that it is quite often early on faithful to Twain's tale, then departs from it in useful ways increasingly as we proceed.
As you may know, Huck Finn, once seen as the coming-of-age anti-racist Great American Novel, has been cancelled by folks on the left and right in recent years, and so is taught less and less, alas; on the left, it is decried for the use of the "n" word throughout, and maybe because doesn't quite take the horrors of slavery seriously enopugh, written as it was by a white writer? On the right, twisted logic has it that it is racist because it is anti-racist, anti-slavery and critical of American history and the American South (you have by now heard the defense of slavery for all that blacks supposedly "gained" from the horrific and indefensible desecration of black human beings.
But to my mind Everett both rescues Twain's book from the trash heap of literaray and cultural history and also critiques it in admirable ways. Everitt, a creative writing and literary theory professor at Stanford, takes a look at slave language as he has Huck speak "slave" dialect for social and political purposes even as learns to read, and read political and racial philosophy, write his own slave narrative, and speak--as Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington and countless others--in the language of the white "educated" majority.
Twain's book is the tale of the coming of age of a young white boy who escapes the torments of an abusive father with his friend who is escaping slavery. But Huck is young, and his understanding of slavery comes to him as it seemed to come to a lot of American, gradually, naively, or even deliberately passive about it (as was true even of Lincoln). Twain titles his book "Adventures" and sometimes seems to highlight the humor in some situations, but Everett knows that the Underground Railroad was no adventure. Everett's book emphasizes the brutal violence of this era for blacks, at the hands of cruel "masters" and their overseers.
And without saying too much here, Everett has James commit violence (as he did in his last book The Trees). The systematic rape of black women slaves is not something many people really want to read about or want to recall in American hsitory, but Everett importantly goes there, sharing that James's wife and daughter had been sold to a despicable "breeding farm."
For more than half of the book I felt this was good, but less inventive than The Trees, or Erasure, or I Am Not Sidney Poitier and so many others. It's part of a very fine tradition such as J. M. Coetzee's rewriting of Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe, in Foe, where the mute black islander speaks, or Dickens's David Copperfield mapped onto contemporary opioid-riddled Appalachia in Demon Copperhead. Of course we need to hear the black perspective on slavery as James does when he reads a slave narrative. But finally I thought it became powerful in the study of langauge, in its endorsement of stories--and here, black stories, of course--in the writing of American history and the formation of selves. I liked many of the new revelations and confrontations in this book that Everett knows will raise questions for all readers. Highly recommend....more
“A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on the subway train and killin“A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on the subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today’s news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol.”
Chester Himes’s Blind Man With a Pistol (1969), the last completed Harlem novel, is a kind of chaotic book, with stretches of brilliance and silliness, rage and laughter. This book was at the time intended to be his last Harlem novel, but when he died he left an incomplete manuscript titled Plan B where he supposedly takes the gloves off in his description of Harlem in the late sixties. But Blind Man could well have ended the series, too, as it has an air of finality to it.
But the overall impression in the novel is chaos, with riots and subsequent murders, fraud and looting. The book opens with a pants-less man running from a sex worker's apartment, and ends with plenty of black people dead. Some of the craziness would seem to allude to Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, especially some of the surreal scenes. And Himes's solid indictment of a society that created Harlem in the first place, a place of poverty and despair,can also be seen in Ellison, of course, though in these books, some of the characters are admirable and/or fun.
The NYPD wants Coffin Ed and Gravedigger to find out who started the riot, (as is often the case, passing the blame on outside agitators coming in) as if it were just a criminal activity and not a response to limitations placed on them by white-favored society. So sometimes in this book there is random violence, and sometimes it seems like Himes is calling out the Black Power movement and what it failed to accomplish, leading to political failure:
“Propped erect on the front bumper of a gold-trimmed lavender-colored Cadillac convertible driven by a fat black man with a harelip, dressed in a metallic-blue suit, was the statue of the Black Jesus, dripping black blood from its outstretched hands, a white rope dangling from its broken neck.”
The Black Jesus reminds me of similar moves in Flannery O’Connor’s work.
Himes isn't really interested here in providing a mystery to be solved. His goal in this book is to make the point that most violence (including some of the rioters), is like a blind man with a pistol, without aim, without strategy, without a point. Coffin Ed and Gravedigger don’t have much patience with a randomly violent black power movement, but they also indict a US society that allows so much poverty, waiting to explode.
Gay men are one focus of this particular volume. Coffin Ed at one point calls them freaks, but Grave Digger reminds him: Black folks are often discriminated against as freaks, as less than white folks, and Coffin Ed is anyway by any definition a “freaK” having had acid thrown in his face, followed by poorly done skin grafting. At one point they both stop an assault on a gay black man, so this maybe gets closer to Himes’s view.
The book is fiction, so it’s not a coherent critique of racism in this society, in the late sixties. Some looting punks accuse Coffin Ed and Gravedigger of siding with whites but these punks are using the opportunity to break into stores without any coherent political critique or plan; Ed and Gravedigger tell them to get lost and grow up, though Gravedigger does acknowledge the rage he sees in many in Harlem, too.
There is always sexism in these books, often played for laughs, though some women are depicted as getting their revenge on men who target them, but in this one the slurring of women does not work well. Himes’s work on women pales in comparison to his mentee Walter Mosley, who honors the rich legacy of family leadership many women have established. Okay, it’s a period piece, the book is intended as holding up a mirror to Harlem.
The riots were social chaos. Gravedigger nor Ed nor Himes himself can really help us understand the riots in any systematic way for us in the novel. This one ain’t a whodunnit; it’s a novel about racism that leaves us with images rather than pronouncements.
Erasure (2001) by Percival Everitt is a smart satirical novel about the racist assumption of the (white) publishing industry that black authors must wErasure (2001) by Percival Everitt is a smart satirical novel about the racist assumption of the (white) publishing industry that black authors must write from stereotypical perspectives on the lives of some black people. Ghettoes. Exploitation. Blaxploitation. Think: The Wayan Brothers comedies about black grads of film and theater school who can only get roles as gangsta rappers and thugs. The Cosby Show territory. I thought of Sonny Chye’s graphic novel, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Liew, that explores similar territory with respect to Asian actors in the film industry. American Fiction, a 2024 Academy-award -nominated film with Jeffrey Wright also nominated as best actor, is based on Everitt’s novel, and I just saw it and liked it a lot. Success is the best revenge for Everitt? Read on.
The protagonist, Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a professor of English literature, whose siblings like him all have doctorates, has written many critically acclaimed novels but has never attained popular fame nor fortune (ah, like Everitt; this book seems like auto-fiction in that respect). One day he sees that a black woman has written We's Lives In Da Ghetto, which becomes a national best seller, and she a critical sensation. So authentic! Though Ellison learns the author went to Oberlin, worked in the publishing industry in New York, and wrote the novel after visiting relatives in Harlem for a couple days. This enrages Ellison, especially when he sees the author has a six-figure book contract and a movle deal.
Ellison himself (like Everitt) has been told his work is not "black enough". He decides to write a satirical response to We's Lives In Da Ghetto (which I read somewhere may have been based in part on Richard Wright's Native Son [1940] and Sapphire's Push [1996]. He calls his own novel My Pafology, before changing its title to Fuck. His pseudonym is Stagg R. Leigh ("Stagger Lee" is an American folk song about the murder of Billy Lyons by "Stag" Lee Shelton in 1895 Sensationalizing black violence and poverty in popular culture is the key issue here). The entire short novel is included in the book, which humorously achieves widespread popular and critical acclaim.
Ellison makes it clear that he is black, has been the victim of racism, and loves black artists and authors, even those writing in vernacular black English, but for instance. his tastes in music include Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker and Ry Cooder, among others. In other words, don’t pigeonhole him!
Everitt teaches literary theory and creative writing, so I liked his references to theories of language about the nature of “erasure” through narrative:
“Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing”-- Roland Barthes, in The Death of the Author
But I also like the other references to “erasure” of identity in the story, as Monk’s mom has Alzheimer’s--her memories are daily erasing, and his gay brother’s identity suffers from another kind of erasure as well. Monk’s sister is killed (erased!) as she works in the nineties in an abortion clinic. The past erases over time in some ways for Monk’s family. Did love and laughter ever exist? Yes, love is real as evidenced by Monk’s devotion to his mother, and the wedding of the family maid, and so on. This is a rich novel which I highly recommend, though if you saw the movie, Everitt’s book is grittier and potentially more offensive (or even funnier?) than the more light satirish film....more
10/2/24: Reread for Fall 2024 Detective Fiction class. Why this one? A colleague who has taught lots of detective fiction said this was his favorite, 10/2/24: Reread for Fall 2024 Detective Fiction class. Why this one? A colleague who has taught lots of detective fiction said this was his favorite, maybe his best. I've read all ten of them. I read it twice this year, and now on reread I would say it is one of the three darkest ones, including the last two, Blind Man With a Pistol and Plan B. I would say the structure is all about comedy, but there's an undercurrent of rage (A Rage in Harlem, #!) about the very fact that places such as Harlem exist, with no jobs, black folks providing drugs and sex workers for Manhattan white folks. Black detectives in Harlem exist in part to create safe passage for the Manhattanite white folks paying for what Harlem has to offer, and policing black folks who have little to do but steal and con each other.
Original review, 1/9/24:
What’s it like in Harlem in the summer of 1960? One thing This and other books is about is to give you a sense of what it is like to live there:
"Colored people were cooking in their overcrowded, overpriced tenements; cooking in the streets, in the after-hours joints, in the brothels; seasoned with vice, disease and crime. An effluvium of hot stinks arose from the frying pan and hung in the hot motionless air, no higher than the rooftops — the smell of sizzling barbecue, fried hair, exhaust fumes, rotting garbage, cheap perfumes, unwashed bodies, decayed buildings, dog-rat-and-cat offal, whiskey and vomit, and all the old dried-up odors of poverty."
This 1961 novel is the 6th in Chester Himes’s Harlem Cycle and it’s fast-paced, violent, and sometimes amusing, though it's less funny than the first five ones. Dion Graham is the fine audio narrator. Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones take on heroin in Harlem, as in something like 3 million dollars of horse/smack in 1960 dollars. Early on we meet an albino giant, Pinky and his dwarf buddy. As I wrote in my review of the last one in the series, everyone in these books seem to be depicted as either physically or morally a "freak" or monster, and usually the one equates to the other. Pinky and his buddy are “freaks,” as is their pursuer detective Coffin Ed, damaged by having had acid thrown in his face and multiple skin grafts. And he’s in a state of rage against the world, often taking it out on the world even as he does his job of solving crimes.
When they seem to have caught the perpetrators, they find a man swallowing bags of heroin and Ed punches the guy hard in the stomach, making him regurgitate the bags. . . but he also later dies. So this would today likely lead to a second degree murder charge, but in this book it only leads to our violent duo getting (temporarily) suspended. Then Gravedigger gets shot and Ed, enraged as usual, bent in part on revenge, is on the case by himself following a prostitute named Sister Heavenly (a former prostitute who is one of the most interesting characters you'll ever meet in a book), who has her own container for heroin, a dog. Later on, eels are also storage containers for smack. Trigger warning: Animals do get hurt in this book.
So, yeah, this is violent, the body count is high, monstrously so, but this romp, a mad wild goose chase for a trunk filled with. . something. . .. leads us to an ending much like The Maltese Falcon or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (which is to say that nobody's gettin' rich on this caper). It may well be one of the best plotted of his books, with great comic characters, and the most memorable scene involving the use of Nitroglycerine to blow a safe that you have ever read....more
As of late December 31, 2023 I am caught up with Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series with Blood Grove (2021). It’s 1969, and Easy is approached by whaAs of late December 31, 2023 I am caught up with Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series with Blood Grove (2021). It’s 1969, and Easy is approached by what appears to be an unbalanced Vietnam vet, Craig, who wants Easy to find a man he thinks he stabbed to save a woman in distress in a blood orange grove (blood, get it?). A complicated resolution, with a sort of cameo help from Mouse, Etta, Christmas Black, Jackson Blue, Fearless Jones, and Melvin Suggs.
Feather’s brother shows up, a surprise, and he seems to pull her into the hippie drug scene, maybe. Easy is as usual a suspect and beaten up by white cops at various times in a complicated plot involving mobsters, missing money, a femme fatale, and way more. A smooth read with great dialogue and characterization, as usual, nothing new. I usually forget to say that the best reader of this series is Michael Boatman, just superb. I’d rate this 3.5, over all. ...more
Walter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe (2016), # 14 of his Easy Rawlins detective series set in LA, 1968, the year when Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were both assWalter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe (2016), # 14 of his Easy Rawlins detective series set in LA, 1968, the year when Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were both assassinated, and that’s important because all of the books are essentially about the black LA experience of the sixties. As Easy says, I was brought up in the south in the thirties and forties, and LA is for me the most racist place I have ever lived.
He’s a PI, a property owner (including some rental properties), he’s a vet of WWII, he adopted two kids as a single Dad, no longer smokes or drinks, and yet the only break he can get when crime is in his vicinity is a kind of “Get Out of Jail Free Card” he has from one of the most powerful members of the LAPD, Melvin Suggs, a white guy who treats him like a human being who can actually contribute something to do the resolution of some crimes.
I like how in every book Mosley takes a close look at society in the year in which the novel is set, and he always has Easy mention books that we should read to get background on black history (or, history that doesn’t erase the black experience, one that humanizes it for readers).
I also like Easy’s bff Mouse, essentially a criminal who is the informal bodyguard for Easy. He’s funny. Sure, he’s a kind of typical trope in detective novels, but that kinda guy is a favorite in every detective series I’ve read (for example, Matt Ballou in Lawrence Black’s Matt Scudder series, or Patrick Kenzie’s friend Bubba Rogowski in Dennis Lehane’s series).
Mouse introduces Easy to Rufus Tyler, an old man everyone calls Charcoal Joe. Joe’s friend’s son, Seymour (young, bright, top of his class at Stanford), has been arrested and charged with the murder of a white man. In steps Easy, now working for a detective agency.
I found this one to be sort of average in the 14 ones I have read so far, maybe 3.5. Maybe a little under the bar, as there were maybe too many subplots and characters to follow. But he’s as good as they get over all. ...more
“If trouble was money in Harlem, we’d all be millionaires.”
The first book in Chester Hime’s fifties-focused Harlem Detective series, in spite of its t“If trouble was money in Harlem, we’d all be millionaires.”
The first book in Chester Hime’s fifties-focused Harlem Detective series, in spite of its title, A Rage in Harlem, is kind of a farcical romp. Well done and fun. l I listened to it read by Samuel L. Jackson, who emphasized the humor and rich characterization. It’s about fifties Harlem culture and not about the two detectives, really.
So then it was surprising that book two in the series, Real Cool KIllers, begins with brutal violence; it’s meant to be macabre, entertaining in a Pulp Fiction kinda way, as a white man walks into a Harlem bar and all hell breaks loose: a knife is drawn, an axe is produced, and at one point the unusual sight of a large white man running in Harlem from an injured black man creates a lot of attention.
And a dead man, soon enough, from a gunshot. So what’s going on? You need detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson to find out. One theory is a bunch of punks who call themselves the Real Cool Moslems, dressed in approximations of Muslim attire. The book came out in 1958, so that surprised me. In the process, Coffin Ed, who once had acid thrown in his face, responds quickly and violently when one of the punks throws perfume on him (I don’t know why), but Coffin Ed thought it might be acid.
There’s more violence and less farce in this book than the first one, though all the characters come to life entertainingly, maybe most clearly our detectives (though we don’t get back stories about them, they are just tough cool guys cleaning up the hood). There’s a group of teen girls that figure in importantly, and Coffin Ed’s own daughter gets involved, too, so this is finally no light-hearted story, though it is finally very entertaining. Lots of great dialogue.
There’s more rage in this one than A Rage in Harlem. And there’s a surprise in the resolution. Great social commentary. What can it mean for white guys to drop in Harlem bars? As Grave Digger says to one white guy, “You force us into ghettos and then want us to protect you when you stroll into those ghettos as if you owned them.” There’s a powerful story that gets revealed here of abuse. A really great and sometimes disturbing read. Since I am also reading Walter Mosley you can see his influence on Easy and all the social commentary on black-white relations....more