Books for Juneteenth

 

On Juneteenth we reflect on the gap between legal freedom afforded by the Emancipation Proclamation and actual emancipation. In the period spanning from the surrender of the Confederacy on April 9, 1865, to June 19, 1865, while Union troops spread the news of freedom, many slave owners, despite knowing the Confederacy had surrendered, kept this crucial information from those they enslaved.

 
Worth noting is that the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to Confederate states. Lincoln did not free slaves in Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia - Union states where he actually had the authority to do so. While Maryland, West Virginia, and Missouri ended slavery in early 1865, Delaware and Kentucky did not abolish slavery until well after Juneteenth. 

Juneteenth 

Books About Racial Identity / Race Relations

The following novels examine racial identity and race relations in a variety of ways, styles, and genres. Book lovers (like me) in search of fiction that not only entertains, but also examines the human condition, will find what they’re looking for. Particularly those who are interested in how black and white people often struggle to understand, accept, and get along with each other. Getting in the way are superficial prejudices along with issues central to who we are, why we differ, and how we nonetheless are tied together by our commonalities. The gap dividing the realities of our lives as fellow Americans and the more perfect union we're still headed toward remains in place.

 

*****

Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour – Darren graduated valedictorian from his high school, yet rather than moving on to higher education, he works at a Starbucks. He and his mother live in a spacious home, he is the manager at his job, regularly hangs out with his best friend, and he has a beautiful, supportive, girlfriend. So, he is content.

On a whim he talks a customer into trying a different drink than usual. From this interaction the man offers Darren a career opportunity. Darren and two other recruits go through what seems more like a fraternity hazing period than job training, and Darren (who is the only African American) is given the hardest time. He receives the nickname of Buck due to his previous place of employment, but its racial overtones are obvious. For every advantage that results, such as making good money from his sales abilities, there is a downside, such as alienating people he used to be close with. The plot veers from plausible to over-the-top as he eventually ends up running a worldwide top-secret organization that cranks out black salesperson success stories. Whether earnest or satirical in intent - Black Buck is a unique, easy read.

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Caucasia by Danzy Senna - For biracial people a layer of complexity is added to the racial identity equation. If one’s skin color is light enough to pass as white, such as is the case with Birdie (but not her sister Cole who fits in with other kids at the Afrocentric school they attend), passing can create an easier life. Is a half-truth equal to a lie?

Readers who love action-filled plots will find this book set in the 1970’s to their liking, as will those looking for introspection on social issues. When Birdie and Cole’s parents split up, their black father takes Cole away from Boston to see if racial equality can be found elsewhere. Birdie is left behind with their white mother, but they end up on the run, living under false identities. Birdie longs for a reunion with her sister and is wary of betraying her mother. Understanding yourself from a cultural viewpoint can get complicated when you belong to two sides but society insists on choosing one.

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Colored Television by Danzy Senna -  Readers who are interested in matters of race, particularly biracial/mixed/whatever you wish to call it identity, will find much of personal appeal to examine between the pages.  The protagonist of Colored Television is Jane, a woman in her 40's who is an author, a wife, a mother, a teacher, a dreamer, and a desperate underachiever. Her husband Lenny is an abstract artist who does not sell much art.  For a year while Jane's friend Brett is out of the country, they get to enjoy a luxurious home setting, and Jane finds the focus to finally finish her second book that she has been working on for a decade. It is an opus dedicated to mulattoes.

When Jane's agent and the editor who receives the manuscript reject the sweat of her labor, and all appears lost. That is, until Jane finds an opportunity to leave the lonely, frustrating, rejection-filled world of novelist behind and enter the fast-paced world of TV writing. Doing so means being dishonest to Brett, and to Lenny, and to herself. I recommend Colored Television to anyone who enjoys contemporary stories about the balancing act of marriage / parenting / career / artistic motivation / and the temptations of the other side where the grass is always greener.

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Erasure - by Percival Everett - Erasure is about an author named Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed Monk. Monk is African American and the novels he writes are high brow, experimental fare, not everybody's cup of tea. With his latest book having gotten 17 rejections without finding a home yet, Monk is primed to rethink his literary priorities. They get nudged further when a first time novel that he considers to be pure drivel and blaxploitation and offensive to those who value quality literature ends up becoming the darling of the publishing industry.

Monk dashes off his own ghetto story and sends this work of parody to his agent. Under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, Monk's satire is a hit that lands him a 6-figure publishing deal and later a 7-figure movie deal. Nothing can stop its momentum, not even him insisting on changing the title from My Pafology to Fuck. Maintain integrity or complete the act of selling out - otherwise known as take the money and run. Be yourself or erase your identity to install a more lucrative one. This is Monk's dilemma.

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The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow – A girl is haunted by events that are only vaguely remembered but form the fabric of each passing day. A father who has vanished without a trace. A mother who left this world in the splashiest of ways, taking her own life along with those of her other children by leaping from the roof of a building. There is a witness and a survivor. This book is the latter's story. 

She is her father's black daughter and her mother's white daughter. Her racial identity is thus both and neither, dependent on how one sees her, or how she chooses to see herself.  Along with her blackness and her whiteness and her status as one who has been taken in upon being abandoned, she is a proven survivor. The narrative moves back and forth in time, told from multiple perspectives, revealing the back story in as random a manner as the markings of heredity. Beneath longing, loneliness and confusion is muted hope that a fall from great height can turn into flight.

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Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee –This book features characters from To Kill a Mockingbird years later. Jean Louise (aka Scout) is now a grown woman contemplating marriage to Henry who remained in their hometown of Maycomb, Alabama and followed the footsteps of her father Atticus into the law profession. If Scout wishes to return home and marry a father figure, she's all set. She now lives in New York City, a far cry from the small southern town she was raised in.

Much has changed from the period in which the events of Mockingbird take place to the 1950's setting of Go Set a Watchman. Closet bigots who once had enough good manners not to let it show in polite society now feel free to express hostility openly. Count Henry and even Atticus among those more willing to hear out the KKK than the emerging NAACP. Changing times to them means putting up a more aggressive fight against progress. Amazingly Scout has been clueless about her father's true social/political views until he is about 70 years old. Once in the know, she feels betrayed and must figure out how to come to terms with it. Perhaps the Atticus Finch we know and love from the classic is simply too good to be true. Maybe the Watchman version is the more realistic depiction of a flesh and blood man, rather than an idealized one, because his hypocrisy is made plain.

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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store - by James McBride - The story starts off with discovery of the remains of a corpse at the bottom of a well. Over the course of the rest of this book, we meet the Jewish and African Americans who peacefully co-exist during the 1920's and 1930's in the neighborhood of Chicken Hill. They are separate communities sharing the same soil, meaning that relationships forged between some of them is inevitable. A third demographic, non-Jewish whites, makes up the balance of the community.

This novel is not a murder mystery so much as it is a story of place, of the people who inhabited it for a spell, of what eventually gets washed away by water and time, and what is left behind as legacy. Believe the hype. Read this highly praised book.

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Kindred by Octavia E. Butler – A wonderful blend of science fiction with literary fiction. The main character (Dana, a black woman recently wed to a white man in 1976) must keep an ancestor (who is white) from dying on several separate occasions to sustain the family lineage. She doesn't need to keep Rufus (who she first meets as a boy) alive to old age, just long enough for him impregnate the woman who will give birth to the most distant relative Dana is aware of.

To protect Rufus she is repeatedly transported to the era of slavery. He summons her subconsciously and perhaps consciously as he grows older whenever he is in grave danger. Dana can return to 1976 only when her own life is in immediate peril. The vehicle of haphazard time travel is used to show that what happened in the past impacts our present and shapes our future.

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Little Bee by Chris Cleave - Dual narration alternates between two women. Sarah is a white magazine editor from England. Little Bee is a black undocumented refugee who gets out of a detention center after escaping from a violent landscape and must now stay under the radar.

The two women are as different from each other as the places they are from. Sarah is older, a mother, a wife when she first meets Little Bee along with being another man's mistress. Little Bee is a teenager from a small Nigerian village which is rich in oil, but the wealth generated by black gold does not make it to someone in her position. What reaches her is violence, the barbaric cruelty of men. Learning to speak like those from a safer place is not sufficient to stop them from ejecting Little Bee. Being born into privilege like Sarah does not mean tragedy cannot come calling. Despite superficial differences, common humanity allows them to connect with one another.

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The Man by Irving Wallace - This is a fictional account of the first black president. Senator Douglas Dilman isn’t elected to the position, but rather, the president, vice president and others ahead of him in line are killed. The time is 1964 and Dilman is overwhelmed by an avalanche of responsibilities and pressure, plus being burdened by a lack of confidence in him from those in his cabinet.

On the job training is especially challenging when it's the most difficult job in the world, particularly when many are resentful of your ascendancy, condescending about your ability to be up to the task, or both. There is no shortage of crisis for Dilman to deal with on the national and international stage. Once navigated, there's the matter of deciding whether to run for re-election. Barack Obama later became our first non-fiction POTUS. His election makes it seem that we have come a very long way from 1964 but looks can be deceiving. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, sometimes fiction is far beyond the logistics of reality, and then there are occasions when fiction accurately predicts a reality we haven’t gotten to yet.

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Pym by Mat Johnson - An African American Literature professor’s primary focus is on examining Edgar Allan Poe’s only full-length novel. Poe’s race makes his writing inappropriate for the syllabus, which costs the professor his job. The name of the book is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Chris believes it holds the key to understanding White-Black race relations. After being fired, he and various members of his inner circle head off on a quest. Their destination is Antarctica. On this frozen terrain they discover a lost race of creatures representing Whiteness that Poe wrote about in his novel.

When the world as we know it seemingly comes to an end, the motley crew members are perhaps now the lone civilized survivors of Armageddon. And they have become slaves of the primitive creatures in Antarctica. If they can escape, the opposite of the place they are being held captive, a tropical island representing Blackness that Poe also wrote about, possibly awaits.

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The Sellout by Paul Beatty –Nearly every sentence of this book is a rambling, rapid fire joke with multiple punch lines delivered. Authored by a spoken word poet, it seems written to be listened to rather than read silently to yourself. The plot involves a black man who was home schooled by his social scientist father, with every lesson being about racial identity. After his father is murdered by cops, the son inherits the family farm along with acquiring settlement money. He lives in a California town that has literally been erased from the map. In addition to providing neighbors with incredible fruit, stellar weed, and crisis counseling in times of mental emergencies, he is on a mission to reclaim recognition that the town exists.

He is friends with the last living cast member of the Little Rascals, a man named Hominy who voluntarily insists on being the narrator's slave. I don't have an explanation for motive beyond noting that this book is wildly satirical with every line meant to be taken with a large grain of salt added to the social commentary. Besides being a slave owner, he attempts to bring racial segregation back to their town one location at a time, starting with a city bus driven by his crush. Readers are hit with every cultural reference under the sun along the topsy turvy way.

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When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole – This story of gentrification is made even more sinister than it is off the page. The setting is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY rapidly undergoing changes. The Gifford Place community has been predominantly African American for generations, but lately a lot of the black folks have been moving away, and in their place has been the arrival of affluent white people. A black woman named Sydney Green encounters a white man named Theo and his soon to be ex-girlfriend on a walking tour of the neighborhood. Sydney disapproves of what the tour is highlighting and what it is leaving out, the latter being contributions by the majority black population. She decides to create a tour of her own to counter it, and unemployed Theo volunteers to be her assistant.

Sydney does not hold back from expressing displeasure with gentrifying white people. Theo shrugs this off though and is not without charm. Since Sydney is conveniently single just as Theo is in the process of becoming, a potential love connection is in the making. The book is written in alternating first person point of view perspective - each chapter from Sydney's viewpoint followed by one from Theo's. Peculiar circumstances pile up and suspicions rise from mild to full blown conspiracy territory. Why are so many of their neighbors here one day - gone the next? When did the neighborhood bodega change hands and become a far more upscale store? Why isn't Syndey's best friend answering her texts? What does the company that's building a hospital in the neighborhood have to do with the various ominous things that are taking place? We find out in the closing pages as the book races towards a thriller genre conclusion.

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24 Children's Books by Black Authors

Plus 1 more with my highest recommendation

Caribbean Heritage Month

 

Here's a free ticket to the beautiful islands of the Caribbean, courtesy of some book reviews written and recorded by a native son of St. Thomas, USVI. 

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@mudhousebooks #booktok #blackhistorymonth ♬ Stir It Up (Live - Boarding House, San Francisco 7/7/75) - Bob Marley And The Wailers

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Pride Month Book Recommendations

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Why is #Pride in June? https://t.co/CeY9vM29pK

— TIME (@TIME) June 3, 2024

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Following are some Pride Month reading recommendations from Roy's Book Reviews

  

                                  Honorable mention?

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Unless there is a VERY GOOD reason, and there are very few of those, the gender of who people are attracted to and love and build lives with certainly not being one of them...

The War on Peace in Prose

War – What is it good for? Absolutely nothing in the real world, but on page it can make for compelling reading. The fighting may be in the foreground of the plot or may serve primarily as backdrop to the story. Central characters may be soldiers, or veterans, or civilians going about the process of living while others kill and are killed around them. Perhaps a truce has already been called that ends the fighting, but not the impact on shattered lives.

The following books are examples of such compelling reading material

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All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr – Set in Europe during World War II, the narrative features a German orphan boy who is handy at mechanical fidgeting, including the self-taught ability to fix radios and finding which transmissions can reach him. One is picked up from France, sent by the great uncle of a blind girl that it is his destiny to one day meet. 

Much takes place between Werner hearing the broadcasts of Marie-Laure's great uncle and finally crossing paths with her. Due to his talent, rather than being sent to work in the mines Werner lands in an academy that trains German boys to become soldiers. Marie-Laure ends up alone when her father is taken prisoner. Left behind by him is an invaluable gift - a rare gem removed from the museum to be kept safe from treasure seeking Nazis. Along with its monetary worth are rumored magical properties that can heal disease. Marie-Laure is unaware that it is in her possession until figuring out clues sent by her father. While we read on to see when and how fate will lead Werner to Marie-Laure, the war that Hitler thrust the world into rages on.

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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon –A novel about the immigrant experience, particularly that of Jewish people who came to American shores from Europe to escape Nazi persecution. Being set in wartime means that violence and survival instinct are on display during the frozen battlefield portion of the narrative. It also is about magic and illusion and escapism and the earliest days of the comic book industry.

Last but not least, we are presented with a love story. Two actually - one straight and one gay. Given the time period, the latter is clandestine, forbidden, and ultimately heartbreaking. If you are drawn to sprawling stories that take place over many years in which spectacular events take place, pick this book up.

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Freeman by Leonard Pitts Jr. - History buffs interested in a post-Civil War setting will be enthralled. Those who take interest in this nation's troublesome history of race relations will be drawn in and will shake their head at the realization that centuries old truths stubbornly remain valid to this day. Those searching for bittersweet love stories will find them here, and most importantly, readers will empathize with the well-developed characters.

Sam, a runaway slave who once worked for the Union Army, is determined to find his wife even though this means leaving the safety of Philadelphia behind to return to the war-torn south. Tilda is being forced at gunpoint to walk until finding a place that the man who enslaves her believes his rights as a slave owner will still be honored, despite the result of the war. The third primary character is Prudence, a white woman who goes from Boston to Mississippi to start a school. While the events of this story take place after bloodshed on the battlefield has officially ended, long lasting effects dominate the lives of those in search of a new meaning for freedom.

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Home by Toni Morrison – Frank Money is a veteran of the Korean War, haunted by blood-soaked memories of his time there. Now back in America, returned to its unique brand of racism against black people, he finds himself with a peacetime rescue mission. His sister is in bad shape, and so he must return to the hometown in Georgia that he loathes, taking a journey from one trauma inducing location to another. It is the last thing he wants to do, and the only challenge capable of shaking him from a crippling sense of apathy and PTSD.

Much has changed over the course of the years since Frank last set foot in the town where they were raised. Plenty remains basically the same. Home is there to provide familiar comforts, even though our return to it is inevitably in the form of a different version of ourselves. Even when it is a place that was run away from, home is what one hopes remains when the war and the running is done.

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The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian – This book jumps back and forth between the years 1943 and 1955. The earlier setting takes place in an Italian countryside during World War II. Mussolini's Italy became an ally to Hitler's Germany during the war, but initially German soldiers treated Italy like an occupied nation rather than viewing its citizens as brothers in arms. During this period of uneasy alliance, the wealthy Rosati’s host parties for the Germans, the two adult sons serve in the military, and their sister falls in love with a German soldier whom she believes to be more humane than most of his comrades. Their cozy relationship with Germans is a recipe for resentment from their less prosperous neighbors who are distrustful of the Nazis and anyone who chooses to associate with them.

In the 1950's, the second plot revolves around a serial killer who for unknown reasons is targeting members of the Rosati family. Two detectives try to hunt down the killer. This fast-paced novel races along on a dual track. We learn the identity and motivation of the killer in its final pages. If you enjoy whodunnits, or war novels, or historical fiction with a dash of romance, or art history – you will be rewarded with each of these elements.

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The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah –This novel is about German occupation of France during the WW II that centers on the heroism of French women- two in particular, sisters Isabelle and Vianne. Isabelle is the more rebellious of the two, not content to sit at home and wait to be saved when she can go out and do some saving of her own. She joins a group of rebels that help the cause of defeating Germany any way they can, such as escorting to safety various pilots who survive their planes being brought down by the German military. Vianne has a young daughter in her care, so she is not able to be as reckless as her sister.

Vianne’s husband joins the fighting and is captured. A German soldier is billeted in their home. After he is killed to protect the hiding Isabelle, a far less decent Nazi takes his place. The narrative alternates between Isabelle's exploits and Vianne's struggle to survive Nazi occupation of her town and home. A third thread takes us to 1995. An elderly woman who recently moved into an assisted living complex has been invited to an event in France. We understand that this woman must be one of the sisters but must wait for her identity to be revealed.

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Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi –The narrator of this graphic novel is a young girl growing up during the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war who reveals impactful events to us in matter-of-fact fashion, such as her one day being a student in a co-ed, non-religious bilingual school - the next day a student in an all-girls school with the wearing of veils now obligatory. The contrast between the stylistically simple black and white illustrations and the brutal inhumanity of what is taking place is startling - like a pre-school children's book and a Rated R horror flick merged into one.

Loved ones are introduced on one page, killed a page or two afterwards. Tragedy just keeps coming. Yet we also can't help smiling in certain places as this stubborn, resilient girl puts together a punk rock look, or goes shopping for music by acts some readers will remember from the 1980's, scoring posters of Iron Maiden and Kim Wilde that her parents sneak into the country, or when she takes a forbidden puff of a cigarette in the basement and declares herself to have reached adulthood. Regime changes are detailed at a dizzying pace. No matter who is in charge during any given period, repression in one form or another is present, as is danger. Permanence is a foreign concept to this Middle Eastern world. Her immediate family is the only constant, but how long can it last when the only reliable guarantees are sudden change and arbitrary violence?

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The Plot Against America by Philip Roth – This book asks the hypothetical question - what if FDR had been defeated in his run for a third term by the charismatic Charles Lindbergh whose main campaign promise was to keep the US out of World War II while having a darker motive for acquiring power? It is told in a macro way, as well as going micro and showing the impact of Lindbergh's fictional presidency through the eyes of a boy in a Jewish family in Newark, NJ. Instead of being about fighting against tyranny overseas, it’s about hope of avoiding war being used as lure to spread antisemitism in America.

Parallels between the 1940's of Roth's imagination and our current political climate are striking. Simply switch the idea of a man who ascends to the presidency aided by a foreign government (Germany) with the idea of a man ascending to the presidency aided by a foreign government (Russia). Switch a celebrity with no previous political experience having an improbable, meteoric rise to the White House with a celebrity who – actually, no theme switch is necessary here. Switch people being thrown into concentration camps because they're Jewish with people being thrown into detention centers because they crossed a border in hope for a better way of life. The American way is something that can be taken for granted until it is under assault.

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The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen – The narrator is the product of an absent French father and Vietnamese mother. He leaves Vietnam for America and establishes a new life with other refugees in Los Angeles, secretly reporting back to communist superiors in his homeland.  As a spy he toes the line between identity as a capitalist and as a communist who will never spiritually leave his native land.

This novel explores the nature of being two sided.  The narrator is both unfeeling and remorseful, a sensitive soul and a cold-blooded killer, a loyal friend and a lone wolf, the conqueror and the conquered, Western and Eastern, Caucasian and Asian. These ideas are explored with beautiful command of language. The closing section features the most vivid torture scene I can recall since reading William Goldman's Marathon Man years ago. I suppose I should provide a trigger warning for those who steer clear of graphic violence on page. If you can look past that, you will find an astute book of compelling ideas.

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The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien – This book is written from the perspective of down-in-the dirt participants of the Vietnam War. It’s about bonding with your fellow man and then watching him die before your eyes. It's about surviving to tell a jungle tale, not so much the true details of what did and didn't happen, but how it felt to know that the next minute might be your last...or the last for the guy sitting next to you. It's about being steeped in mud and surrounded by death, some of it brought about by your own hands, most of it something that you're helpless to stop and so are forced to grow familiar with. It is about the things soldiers carry, physically as well as emotionally, to remind themselves that a world at peace awaits those lucky enough to make it through hell and return to wherever they came from. Not that home will be what it once was, because war permanently alters everything that it does not destroy.

Billed as fiction but it feels like a memoir so split the difference. O’Brien writes beautifully about awful circumstances and tragic events rendered mundane by repetition. It is a time capsule filled to the brim with things held on to, and things lost.

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My humble contribution to the genre - THE RIDE HOME

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Some fascinating historical photos from around the world (A (thread) 🧵)

A woman tests a stroller intended to be resistant to gas attacks in Hextable, England in 1938, not long before the outbreak of World War II. pic.twitter.com/6r7ca2vHav

— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) May 26, 2024