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.
~~~~~
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.
~~~~~
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.
~~~~~
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.
~~~~~
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.~~~~~
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.
~~~~~
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.
~~~~~
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.
~~~~~
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.
~~~~~
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.
~~~~~
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.
~~~~~
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.
~~~~~
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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