Category Archives: African American
Little Rock Girl 1957: How a Photograph Changed the Fight for Integration by Shelley Tougas
Take a careful look at this book cover … no exaggeration that “a picture is worth a thousand words”!
The day is September 4, 1957 and 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford is on her way to her first day at Little Rock Central High School. “Nine African-American teenagers, who would forever be known as the Little Rock Nine, were supposed to arrive at the all-white high school … and make history together.” Meanwhile, Hazel Bryan, a white teenager, walks behind Elizabeth, “… her face twisted with rage. ‘Go home, n****r!’ she screamed. ‘Go back to Africa!’” At that moment, Will Counts, a newspaper photographer for the Arkansas Democrat, clicked the photo and made American history.
Little Rock Girl is one of six titles thus far in the Captured History series from Compass Point Books, which “explores how a single moment captured on film can influence society and change the course of history.” Indeed, author Shelley Tougas uses the powerful photograph to tell the story of the brave Little Rock Nine students and their pivotal participation in the long fight for integration. Tougas devotes the first chapter to Eckford whose first-day experience was even more frightful because she did not get the message the night before about the fateful morning’s plans.
Four decades later in 1997, President Bill Clinton held open the front doors of Central High for the Little Rock Nine. Photographer Will Counts was also there. And so was Hazel Bryan Massery. Counts was able to take a very different photograph this time … one that would be used for a poster titled Reconciliation, now sold at the Visitor’s Center near the school. For the full story – inspiring and disturbing both! – and its aftermath, you’ll have to read the book.
Author Tougas effectively pulls together history, memories, and, of course, many photographs to present a mesmerizing, multi-layered mosaic of our challenging past. The title photo “told the story of segregation in an instant. But it did more than tell the facts – it provoked a reaction.” Change is still in motion … “and the state of America’s inner-city schools can be seen as evidence of racism in disguise.” Little Rock Girl, however, ends with the greatest hope, with a visit to Central High by one of the Little Rock Nine, Melba Pattillo Beals, who remembers being welcomed by a young African American boy: “‘Welcome to Central High School. I’m the president of the student body.’” Beals’ reaction is understandably tearful: “‘… I was expecting something other than this black child. This had been my dream, my vision. This was why I had endured all the pain and physical punishment – so this boy could stand there and say that. It was amazing.”
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long and Jim Demonakos, illustrated by Nate Powell
Houston, 1968 is a tough place to be different. The Long family has just moved from San Antonio to a Houston suburb where Jack Long has taken a new job as “the race reporter” for a local television station. At home, his wife watches the horrific broadcasts from Vietnam while his children aren’t quite sure about the neighborhood kids who pass the time going “n****r-knockin’.” Jack’s attempts at fair representation and reporting get him threatened with “Stick with your own kind or you’ll get fired.”
Civil rights protests have reached local Texas Southern University, a historically African American institution, making it a hot spot for news coverage. There Jack Long meets Larry Thomas, an African American activist and professor, who comes to Jack’s aid during a potential volatile situation. A friendship is tentatively forged, then reinforced to include both families … but hard-won trust can be too-easily broken and color lines prove difficult and dangerous to cross.
Based on co-creator Mark Long’s childhood experiences, Silence is a chilling reminder of the not-so-distant race wars that nearly imploded the country. Capturing a little-known event – a peaceful campus protest turned violent which ended with false accusations of murder – Silence provides stark testimony from multiple viewpoints. Small moments so memorably depicted here by illustrator Nate Powell – a blind child unknowingly bringing in a KKK rally flyer attached to the front doorknob, an angry father slapping his own son in uncontrollable frustration after being humiliated by a store clerk, a mother desperately wailing for her hit-and-runover young child, an old friendship irrevocably broken – give this graphic memoir unflinching strength.
The final quote at book’s end returns to the title, and belongs to Martin Luther King, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies … but the silence of our friends.” The implied question can’t be ignored: what would you do?
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Freedom’s a-Callin Me by Ntozake Shange, illustrated by Rod Brown
From the power duo who created We Troubled the Waters comes another memorable volume detailing the African American experience – this time, re-imagining the death-defying, life-saving journey from slavery to freedom along the Underground Railroad.
Combining powerful verse and richly textured paintings, Ntozake Shange and Rod Brown begin in the fields, where the horror of “that whip bouncing off somebody’s back” means a momentary “chance to get / right out of here” while the brutal overseer is otherwise engaged. In spite of attack dogs, hunger, and exhaustion ahead, the mere possibility of “ah may may be free” drives the dangerous journey onward.
Season after season, brave souls attempted freedom by “followin the north star,” relying on “this one good white man [who] got a clue for me,” choosing “death or freedom,” outrunning the slave trackers, mourning the “one of us [who] didn’t make it north,” and doing anything and everything possible to get to “freedom’s land” … until “finally ah am ridin through free air.”
From the legendary Sojourner Truth to “treacherous” slave hunters, to a wealthy abolitionist who may “look jus’ like mastah / oh but he aint,” to all the brave heroes – black and white – who never gave up on the promise of freedom regardless of personal cost: “Lawdy Lawdy we been blessed / Glory Hallelujah”!
As we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. today, we must also remember the heroes whose names did not survive history, but whose selfless deeds helped ensure a better future. Freedom’s a-callin’ us all: listen carefully and ensure that the courageous, all-too-often anonymous struggle for equity and justice continues throughout the world …
Readers: Children
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Poetry, African American
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste + Author Interview
Maaza Mengiste‘s voice, delivered by telephone many thousands of miles away, sounds impossibly young and happy. She’s easy to talk to, easy to laugh with. She’s in Rome for another few months, enjoying the spring sun, sipping another cup of tea in a nearby café, and watching the many American tourists wandering by.
Her idyllic life for the moment seems at odds with her own early past — filled with uncertainty, inexplicable violence, and constant fear. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Maaza was just 3 years old when the 1974 Ethiopian revolution broke out, ousting a 3,000-year-old monarchy and replacing it with the brutal Derg regime that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives before its collapse in 1991. Maaza was too young to understand what was happening, but perceptive enough to retain shattering images of that horrific time that have stayed with her through the years. Decades later, Maaza pieced together those memories to write her award-winning, critically acclaimed debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, published in early 2010.
At the core of Maaza’s searing work are one family’s hellish experiences during the 1974 revolution. The family’s patriarch — the good doctor Hailu — is a prominent, proud man highly trained to alleviate pain, cure illness, and save the dying. And yet he can do nothing for his beloved wife who lies in a hospital bed, shriveled, exhausted, and ready to pass on. Hailu’s elder son Yonas gravely tries to hold his family together, but is himself helpless when his young daughter becomes seriously ill and his wife Sara is crushed by the fear of potential loss.
Unlike the controlled, watchful Yonas, Hailu’s younger son Dawit is still idealistic, still fueled by a rash temper that once put a fellow student in the hospital when Dawit, too young to understand rape, witnessed that student committing a vicious crime against a family servant. Dawit is devoted to his dying mother, emotionally dependent on his sister-in-law Sara, and in love with a headstrong young woman. He looks on in anguish and disgust as the new regime claims his childhood best friend, who uses complicity as a way to escape his deprived past spent in a mud shack adjacent to the luxury of Hailu’s two-story home.
The revolution shatters the family’s lives: Hailu’s humanity, Yonas’ responsibility, Dawit’s ideals will all be tested. As if working pieces of an intricate puzzle, Maaza presents an epic historical moment too few of us know of, laying the most atrocious acts next to radiantly tender moments and juxtaposing utter cowardice with utmost bravery. The result proves unforgettable.
Based on the strength of that single novel, Maaza was chosen by the 10×10 team to write the Ethiopian chapter of the 10×10 documentary film. Her enthusiasm about the project is palpable, and she admits she is most excited about connecting to the Ethiopian girls. Almost shyly, she reveals her own experiences when, at age 7, she left the comfort of her family to escape the growing danger of remaining in Ethiopia and traveled alone to the United States as a tiny refugee. For over a decade, she grew up in a group home run by a Christian couple in a small town in Colorado: “No one has ever heard of it; it’s on the border with Kansas,” she says. She remained there, living with a revolving group of other refugees, until she graduated high school and left for college.
Maaza softly admits to her isolated youth as “difficult, and I wouldn’t want to wish it on anyone.” She adds, “maybe that’s why I feel so connected to the plight of children.” [... click here for more: author interview appears on pages 5-11]
Author interview: 10×10: Educate Girls, Change the World Book Club Kit, April 2011, pages 5-11
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Love Twelve Miles Long by Glenda Armand, illustrated by Colin Bootman
Trust me on this one: Debut author Glenda Armand‘s Love Twelve Miles Long is THE perfect book to share today.
“This was a special night,” the story begins, “Mama had come to visit …” Mama and her young son Frederick are slaves, forced to live separate lives, their moments together precious and brief. Mama walks 12 long miles to visit her son, but “‘[t]he way I walk makes the journey shorter.’” Mile by mile, she tells Frederick about her sojourn toward reunion: “‘Every mile is special … Each mile is for something different.’”
The first mile is for forgetting … about the pain and exhaustion from her endless labors out in the fields. But the second mile begins her remembering: her inquisitive son, how happy he makes her, how proud she is of him. She remembers to listen to the night sounds around her, to look at the stars that light her way. She spends the sixth mile in prayer, “‘… that one day we will all be free.’” She sings, she dances, she gives thanks, she hopes, she dreams … and finally she reaches the twelfth mile which is devoted to love. And there at journey’s end is her beloved son … yet all too soon, she will hug and kiss him one last time as he falls asleep, just before she must slip out into the moonlit light, alone once more.
Rendered in rich, glowing watercolors by award-winning Carlos Bootman, Armand’s first-ever book is a true story, oh so gorgeously told. Mama’s name was Harriet Bailey; her son changed his last name to Douglass when he escaped from slavery. Just as Mama hoped and dreamed, Frederick Douglass grew up to “‘ … do big and important things.’”
Newbie she might be, Armand will certainly continue to ‘do big and important things’ with her writing. Back in 2006, Armand won Lee & Low Books‘ New Voices Award, and her winning Love just hit shelves last month. Let’s hope Love finds a home in every library, public and private. Surely this is one gift that will keep on giving for decades to come.
Readers: Children
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Biography, .Nonfiction, African American
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Without a doubt, this is Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie‘s best work to date. While her debut, Purple Hibiscus, was engrossing, and her short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, included stand-out gems, both titles pale to the exceptional Yellow Sun.
Gentle, innocent Ugwu enters the home of radical university professor Odenigbo as a houseboy, ready to learn (and eat!), eager to please. He is at first wary of but becomes quickly enthralled by his new master’s elegant lover, Olanna, the daughter of wealthy, prominent parents who have provided her every elite privilege, including a British university degree. Olanna comes to visit, and returns to stay; master, mistress, and servant eventually become four when Baby comes along, and meld into an impromptu family.
While the impassioned Olanna immerses herself in the intellectual life she shares with her “revolutionary lover,” her twin sister Kainene, a practical businesswoman, slowly builds a home with Richard, a British ex-pat wannabe writer more enthralled with his adopted country than his own roots. Inseparable when younger, Olanna and Kainene have become estranged in adulthood; their bond will be irrevocably damaged by personal betrayal, until unspeakable tragedies briefly reunite the sisters once more.
As the flawed, searching lives of Ugwu, Odenigbo and Olanna, Kainene and Richard intertwine, diverge, and overlap, their ethnic Igbo community declares independence from Nigeria and becomes the new nation of Biafra. The almost-three years of war between Biafra and Nigeria are marked by heinous acts of violence, forced migrations, deprivation and famine, brutal conscription to repopulate the depleted Biafran military, and tragedy to last generations to come.
Adichie, who was born to an Igbo family seven years after Biafra fell to Nigeria, clearly inherited her family’s experiences: she dedicates Half of a Yellow Sun (named for the demi-sunburst in the middle of the Biafran flag) to both her grandfathers who did not survive the war, and her two grandmothers who did. She adeptly alternates her chapters between “The Early Sixties” and “The Late Sixties,” as she purposefully distorts time, adding an additional layer of literary jarring to a horrifically tumultuous historic period. As the war claims millions of lives, no one is left untouched … not even the wide-eyed Ugwu who will find it nearly impossible to block out his own shocking crimes.
Immersing yourself in the almost-500 pages (or finishing nearly 19 hours of the audio version gloriously read by Robin Miles) is a surely a rewarding experience. But so effective is Adichie’s tightly controlled storytelling – terrifying yet never maudlin, inspiring but never sentimental – that turning the last page comes with a sense of bittersweet withdrawal, as if suddenly Baby’s chatter is silenced, Richard’s proud Igbo ramblings are finished, Ugwu’s wonder ceases, and Olanna’s searing pain will never ease …
Readers; Adult
Published: 2006 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, African, African American
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Following up two unforgettable novels that earned her a MacArthur Fellows Program “Genius” Award (which comes with a no-strings-attached $500,000 “stipend” over five years!) in 2008 was surely going to be hard work.
Last year, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie debuted her first short story collection … here’s the irony: given her spectacular personal literary history, to not compare these 12 short stories to her two novels (Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun), at least for me, proved impossible. And ultimately, Adichie is much more the accomplished novelist than she is a short story writer. Still, that’s not to say that these stories are inferior in any way; some, in fact, are haunting gems.
The collection opens with one of the 12′s best, “Cell One,” about a pampered young man who steals from his own parents, whose dissolute lifestyle eventually lands him in jail, his changing development observed and narrated by his knowing younger sister. Other standouts include “A Private Experience,” in which two very different women – one a young Isbo Christian medical student, the other an older Hausa Muslim mother – climb into a shop window desperately seeking refuge during a ethnically-motivated massacre, “Ghosts,” in which an elder professor meets a colleague who he thought was long dead, and ”Jumping Monkey Hill,” in which a young Nigerian woman writer participates in a writing workshop run by a renowned academic who embodies all the colonial entitlement and appropriation of the overprivileged white man.
Unlike in her novels, Adichie is no longer grounded in her native Nigeria in her short fiction. She examines and confronts stories of Nigerian locals at home, as well as Nigerians abroad, both established immigrants and recent arrivals. Most of Adichie’s peripatetic characters are women; many are overwhelmed by their dislocation: a wife and her children living in the U.S. while her husband philanders at home, a young wife via arrangement whose doctor-husband has surely misled her, a woman reunited with her husband who barely recognizes the gentle student she married, and a young woman who escapes the advances of her so-called “uncle” and eventually falls in love with a foreign stranger.
In spite of the undeniable strength of Adichie’s stories, her novels embody the greater power. With that earlier proof of assured achievement, her readers will undoubtedly anticipate more lauded work to come.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, African, African American
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste
Decades ago, I went to college with one of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s grandsons. Beyond the seemingly ubiquitous images back then of Ethiopia’s barren natural disasters and widespread starvation, that worldly, quiet, thoughtful young man was my first real encounter with Ethiopia … at least the diaspora. Even then, I was instantly struck by the vast divide between those distant tragedies and the life of royal descendants, a memorable early lesson between the haves and the have-nots.
That divide looms large in Maaza Mengiste‘s searing debut novel that chronicles one family’s hellish experiences during the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia that ousted a 3,000-year-old monarchy, replacing it with the brutal Derg regime which destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives until its collapse in 1991.
At the family’s head is the good doctor Hailu, a prominent, proud man highly trained to alleviate pain, cure illness, save the dying. And yet he can do nothing more for his beloved wife who lies in a hospital bed, shriveled, exhausted, and ready to pass on, even as her family cannot let her go. Hailu’s elder son Yonas gravely tries to hold his family together, helpless when his young daughter becomes seriously ill and his wife Sara is crushed by the fear of potential loss.
Unlike the controlled, watchful Yonas, Hailu’s younger son Dawit is still idealistic, still fueled by a rash temper that once put a fellow student in the hospital when Dawit, too young to understand rape, knew a vicious wrong was being committed between student and family servant. Dawit is devoted to his dying mother, emotionally dependent on his sister-in-law Sara, in love with a headstrong young woman. He looks on in anguish and disgust as the new regime claims his childhood best friend, who uses complicity as a way to escape his deprived past spent in a mud shack adjacent to the luxury of Hailu’s two-story home.
The horrific revolution is about to shatter the Hailu family’s lives: the father’s humanity, the elder son’s responsibility, the younger son’s ideals will all be tested. As if working pieces of an intricate puzzle, Mengiste presents an epic historical moment too few of us know of, laying the most atrocious acts next to radiantly tender moments, next to utter cowardice and utmost bravery. The result proves unforgettable.
Tidbit: Make sure to check out the comprehensive 10×10 Book Club Kit for Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, African, African American
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
From the age of 16 when she took a biology class at a community college (making up for a failed high school freshman year because “she never showed up”), award-winning science writer Rebecca Skloot has seemingly spent the majority of her life preparing to write this book.
Along with mitosis and kinase inhibitors, Skloot first learned about the ubiquitous HeLa cells, “‘one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years,’” the professor told the class. HeLa was instrumental in developing the polio vaccine and furthering cancer research, while the drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease owe their origins to HeLa. Eventually, cloning, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping would also become possible because of HeLa, and five Nobel Prizes in the last 10 years alone would be awarded for HeLa-dependent research.
Back in that classroom, Skloot also learned that HeLa cells originated from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who had died at age 31 in 1951 from cervical cancer. Her cells proved “immortal,” living longer outside her body than within. The professor added, “almost as an afterthought,” that Lacks “was a black woman.” Then class was over.
“I sat thinking, That’s it? That’s all we get? There has to be more to the story.” As if in preparation to find out that “more,” Skloot went on to get her undergraduate degree in biology, then studied writing in graduate school. She spent 10 years tracking down Henrietta’s story, gaining unprecedented access to Henrietta’s children and extended family, many of whom still live in the Baltimore area where Henrietta’s immortal cells were originally extracted at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Skloot would develop a vital bond with Henrietta’s youngest child, daughter Deborah, who was only a year old when her mother passed away.
The result is spectacular. Part mystery, part memoir, part scientific adventure, part family saga, part tragedy (of epic Greek proportions), Skloot’s accomplishment can’t be overpraised. The less you know before you open the pages, the more intense your reading experience will be … so try not to dig further. Just know that you need to read this book.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, African American
Some Sing, Some Cry by Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza
Sometimes my inability to process dialects actually has an upside … because now I can just turn on the audible versions and be read to in my old age. So if you have the choice, I highly recommend the audible recording of Some.
Yes, at 26.5 hours (it’s 576 pages in print), we’re talking time-ly, but worth the commitment all the way through. While Robin Miles‘ performance consistently draws you in (she falters briefly when she sings – in spite of a gorgeous voice, her notes occasionally wander too far), the most important reason to listen comes at the very end when the authors Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza – who also happen to be sisters – speak about their 10-year journey to write the book. Shange, who created the seminal piece, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, spent half of that decade off, recuperating from two strokes which still linger in her speech. Listen to the interview as she vibrantly reveals how the legendary Maya Angelou helped get her reading and writing back …
Which leads to this epic saga, covering almost 200 years and seven generations of the extended Mayfield family. Music binds and divides the clan, with many of the characters embedded in the diverse music styles – spirituals, blues, jazz, rock ‘n roll, and everything in between – that provide quite the soundtrack for much of American history.
With the end of the Civil War, matriarch Ma Bette is thrown out of the only home she’s ever known, Sweet Tamarind, now sold to antebellum carpetbaggers. Ma Bette imparts a final goodbye to the late Julius Mayfield, her “Pa-lover” – her father, the father of her children, her former owner. With her granddaughter Eudora in tow, Ma Bette makes her way to the Charleston home of her daughter Blanche, who “[d]id so well for herself,” enjoying a privileged life among the city’s colored elite. Blanche is less-than-welcoming of her unrefined “Geechee”-island relatives, and Bette and Eudora are forced to make their own way in Lil Mexico, the city’s colored enclave.
Generation by generation, the Mayfield epic unravels, overlaps, separates, and dovetails again; Ma Bette with her seeing powers is never far, even in eventual death. Eudora, whose life begins with such diligent promise, suffers brutally. Of her two daughters, Elma the elder never learns her true origins, while Lizzie the younger tries desperately to escape her own violent memories. Their children eventually scatter, some fulfilled, others forever troubled. The music, however, always reunites them …
The dense novel is certainly ambitious … and if you listen, you will most likely finish. Besides, you must get to the final sisterly interview!
Admittedly, Some proves uneven in both story and style: Too many strong Mayfield women succumb to worthless men, too many repetitive tragedies desensitize the reader, too many impossible chance meetings happen, too much attention is given to musical history over Mayfield family history. Indeed, the pivotal decades from World War II into the 21st century are rushed through in the final 70 pages, diluted by too many distant characters. Ironically, the undeniable strength of the book’s first half made me long for a separate, second book to fill in the blanks, rather than feeling the ultimate disappointment of missing the post-war homecoming, the civil rights era, the anti-war movement, even the decadent disco years, with the latest Mayfields. I’m convinced … they still have their stories to tell …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, African American
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