Tag Archives: Slavery

April 7, 2013 · 10:46 am

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Known WorldWell, I’ve done it now. I’ve finished every Edward P. Jones book ever written … and I see no signs that more are forthcoming anytime soon. Anyone out there who knows otherwise, please do share!

Not to play favorites, but among Jones’ three indelible titles, his single (thus far) novel gets the preferred spot. I’m definitely in collusion with others as it won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (which, with its €100,000 prize, is one of the most generous in the world). With such lauded original text, the audible version – most expertly read by Kevin Free and oh so highly recommended – naturally won a 2004 Earphones Award, too.

World begins and ends with death, one peaceful, the others horrifically violent. In between the almost-400 pages (or 14+ hours stuck in the ears), the (very) nonlinear narrative falters once during Counsel Skiffington’s hallucinogenic wandering after he burns down his plantation. The rest is, indeed, history … of a not-so-well-known phenomenon of slave-owning African Americans in the South. Within the World‘s first five words, the “master” is dead: in July 1855, Henry Townsend, 31, leaves behind a wife … and a plantation of more than 50 acres which he owned, together with 33 human beings that were also his property. Henry himself was a former slave, whose freedom was bought by his parents when he was still a child, and yet whose allegiance and loyalty to his former owner, William Robbins, never wavers. Robbins, no less a complex character, is a white farmer who owns the largest plantation in fictional Manchester County, Virginia, who lives a double life – one with his white wife and daughter, the other with his slave mistress, and their two young children.

Jones’ storytelling jumps decades backwards and forwards, from before Henry’s birth, well into the next century with references to future historians working in the 1950s and even 1970s. Jones moves sometimes unpredictably between characters and experiences, between generations and social classes. He is not always patient, and doesn’t wait for the reader to make immediate connections, and yet he is partial to certain repetitions, including the reappearance of Tessie’s doll made by her father Elias which she will hold onto through her final hour at age 99, and the reunion of Minerva and her sister after 20 separated years marked by her sister’s reaction that begins “‘You done growed.’”

In spite of the movement in time, place, and people, the pieces merge together to create a Known World that haunts, shocks, and long-after resonates with the fates of a disparate community. Henry’s death sets in motion inevitable changes and unexpected events in the lives of his parents, his wife, his in-laws, his friends, his former master, and especially his slaves, as the intricate mosaic that once defined Henry’s existence shifts, transforms, and disappears.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2003

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February 21, 2013 · 12:05 pm

Etched in Clay: The Life of Dave, Enslaved Potter and Poet by Andrea Cheng, woodcuts by the author

Etched in Clay Absolute details surrounding the life of Dave the Potter are limited and uncertain. What remains of his life story almost two centuries later, is scattered with uncertain words, including ‘sometime,’ ‘about,’ ‘believed to be,’ ‘might,’ ‘possibly,’ and other such noncommittal qualifiers. The few surviving documents prove an enslaved teenager was bought by the Drake family, co-owners of Pottersville Stoneware Manufactory in Edgefield, South Carolina, in whose service he became a talented potter whose creations have survived, in small numbers, and become museum-worthy art pieces.

As if paralleling the sparse details of Dave’s life, Andrea Cheng replicates that sparseness in her slim novel-in-verse; she echoes the poetic etchings Dave added to his pottery by enhancing her verse with etched woodblock prints of her own. The result is a gorgeous, contemplative, artistic memorial to a creative life that survived unspeakable hardship while creating lasting, even subversive, beauty.

Dave’s considerable skill – recognized and lauded … and exploited – cannot save him from the horrors of slavery. His first wife was sold, and later his second wife and her two sons taken from him, as well. He himself is bought and sold within the Drake and related Landrum families. And yet, although literacy is illegal among slaves, Dave is taught to read and write, which enables to etch his name (his objections, his miseries, his screams) into the wet clay and the guarded words he can never say out loud: “horses mules and hogs – / all our cows is in the bogs – / where they will ever stay – / till the buzzards take them away =.”

As much as I’ve appreciated, learned from, and enjoyed Cheng‘s titles over the years (I think I’ve read all but four of her almost two dozen books), this, her latest, is clearly, undoubtedly, most definitely my favorite thus far. Here’s the irony: the subject of Etched in Clay just might be the furthest from her personal experience. Cheng has written numerous books inspired by her Hungarian heritage (Marika, The Lace Dowry, The Bear Makers), although she’s better known for her titles highlighting the Chinese American experience (she’s been part of a hapa Chinese American family since college) including The Key Collection, Shanghai Messenger, Only One Year, and The Year of the Book; Clay is definitely her first, and thus far her only, book with the history of American slavery at its core. So much for ‘write what you know.’ Every so often, talent just trumps all.

Tidbit: In the ending “Author’s Note,” Cheng credits Leonard Todd and his book for adults, Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of Slave Potter Dave, for sparking her initial interest in Dave’s story, and later for “helping me so much with this project.” For interested readers, Todd’s website is a treasure trove of further information. The Smithsonian, by the way, owns two of Dave’s pieces (!); click here to see one of his poem jars collected by the National Museum of American History.

Readers: Middle Grade

Published: 2013

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Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, .Biography, .Nonfiction, .Poetry, African American, Chinese American

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January 29, 2013 · 4:16 pm

Jefferson’s Sons: A Founding Father’s Secret Children by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Jefferson's SonsLet me start with what has been deemed as historical record. According to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation – which not only owns and operates Jefferson’s legendary home, Monticello, but maintains the most comprehensive website focused on “Monticello, Jefferson, his family, and his times” – this is the official word on Jefferson’s relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings: “The claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello, entered the public arena during Jefferson’s first term as president, and it has remained a subject of discussion and disagreement for two centuries. Based on documentary, scientific, statistical, and oral history evidence, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) Research Committee Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (January 2000) remains the most comprehensive analysis of this historical topic. Ten years later, TJF and most historians believe that, years after his wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson was the father of the six children of Sally Hemings mentioned in Jefferson’s records, including Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings.”

That the man who wrote the very words of the Declaration of Independence – “all men are created equal” – not only kept slaves (he owned some 600 human beings during his lifetime), but even fathered at least six slave children, has been a “Paradox of Liberty” for hundreds of years. [If you're interested in finding out more, be sure to check out the online exhibition, presented by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, in partnership with TJF.]

Author Kimberly Brubaker Bradley meticulously takes Jefferson’s history as it was officially recorded at the time of her writing – while clearly acknowledging that historical evidence is not immutable – and creates an unforgettable story (soulfully read by Adenrele Ojo who correctly says ‘Monti-cello‘ like the instrument!) of the complicated relationships within a significant, mixed-race family. Sally Hemings’ children are a secret that everyone in Monticello knows, but no one ever acknowledges: her four surviving children – three sons and one daughter – call their father “Master Jefferson,” just as all the other plantation slaves must do.

Focusing on three characters – including Jefferson’s sons Beverly and Madison – Bradley imagines the lives of the slave children, growing up – and serving – their white relatives; although protected from the worst hard labors, Jefferson’s own progeny are hardly “created equal.” To contrast the comparatively easier lives of Jefferson’s children, Bradley chooses as her third protagonist another (historically documented) plantation child, Peter Fossett, who, unlike Beverly and Maddy can openly love, admire, live with his father, but will be subjected to watching his family splintered and sold.

Intended for younger readers, Bradley navigates admirably through challenging territory, voicing the confusion children must confront in a senseless world they are born into, that they cannot possibly understand. Sally must explain the incomprehensible, conflicting laws that make her children both white (seven of their eight great-grandparents were white – which in itself is a heinous history) and slaves (the child of a slave is also a slave) at the same time. She must prepare at least two of her children for their white destinies by age 18, at the cost of losing each forever … to freedom.

Whether read as history or fiction, Sons is an unflinching look at America’s tragic enslaved past. As African American History Month begins this week, Bradley’s enlightening, fascinating novel is an extremely timely reminder that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are hard-won “inalienable rights” meant for one and all.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2011

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December 26, 2012 · 9:33 am

The Spy Lover by Kiana Davenport

Spy LoverThe Spy Lover lingered on the top of my must-read pile for months, mainly because I just needed a break from the death and destruction of war (seems to be my reading theme for too much of this year!). I wasn’t wrong to be afraid: set during the U.S. Civil War, the horrific, insanity-inducing body count looms large on almost every page, making the haunting, multi-layered love stories that much more precious and lasting. That love – between family, friends, lovers – can outlast the man-made evils of war is stunning testimony to the human capacity to nurture, bond, and survive.

Johnny Tom, who escapes famine and death in his native China, arrives in the new world only to be repeatedly enslaved. From the spirit-breaking labor of the Hawai’i sugar plantations, he escapes to the mainland, only to be kidnapped and shipped to New Orleans where he is offered up on the auction block as a cheaper alternative to black slaves. His brief respite as a free man, contentedly sharing life with his hapa Native American wife and their daughter, is stolen from him when the Civil War breaks out, and the town’s men are conscripted to serve in the Confederate Army. Refusing to fight for slavery, he defects to the Union side, answering promises that his loyalty will be rewarded with citizenship upon victory. He stays alive talking story, managing to turn away from the racist barrages, concentrating on nurturing the weaker and younger with his tales of travel, relationships, and survival when nothing else is left.

In another camp, Johnny’s teenage daughter has escaped her own slaughter, only to witness to thousands and thousands of unthinkable tragedies. Thinking the only way to find her father will be through her own military service, Era Tom is caregiver, comforter, savior … and spy. She tends to the Confederate wounded with genuine empathy and selfless caring, even as she gathers intelligence for the other side. She will not serve the slavers, and yet she will do everything she can to keep their butchered boys alive. When she falls headlong in love with a soldier whose mangled arm she helps to remove then hopes to heal, she must somehow find a way to justify heart, mind, and soul with her traitorous emotions …

Relying on her own ancestral history, bestselling Hawai’i author Kiana Davenport renders a little-known, vital moment of American history and bears testimony to its remarkable Chinese American survivors. When the Civil War finally ended, the U.S. government abandoned Chinese and Chinese American soldiers, revoking their promise of citizenship. Post-Civil War, Chinese Americans fell victim to one of the most virulently racist, anti-Asian periods in American history, marked by murderous purgings of whole communities throughout the American West. Racism became institutionalized, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remained legal until 1943, but effectively enforced until 1965 when race-based immigration quotas finally lifted. Not until 2003 – almost 150 years! – were Civil War soldiers of Chinese descent recognized very posthumously with citizenship; the descendants, as Davenport notes, are still denied veteran pensions.

History – often presented via sterilized facts and surreal figures – always becomes more real with names and faces attached. Davenport vividly journeys coast-to-coast with her fearsome ancestors, stopping in some of the most gruesome, blood-soaked battlefields, and to dream and hope in some of the most majestic open frontiers. Their intertwined stories beckon … you merely need to turn the page and listen in.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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November 27, 2012 · 8:40 am

Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad by Melanie Kirkpatrick

Please allow me to share a so-called North Korean political joke: “Kim Jong Il and Vladimir Putin … decide to … see whose bodyguards are more loyal. Putin calls his bodyguard Ivan, opens the window of their twentieth-floor meeting room, and says: ‘Ivan, jump!’ Sobbing, Ivan says: ‘Mr. President, how can you ask me to do that? I have a wife and child waiting for me at home.’ Putin … apologizes to Ivan, and sends him away…. Kim Jong Il … calls his bodyguard…. ‘Lee Myung-man, jump!’…. Lee … is just about to jump … when Putin grabs him and says: ‘… If you jump out this window, you’ll die!…’ Lee … tries to escape Putin’s embrace and jump…: ‘President Putin, please let me go! I have a wife and child waiting for me at home!’”

Ghastly humor aside, the tragic joke barely disguises the inhumane policies of the world’s most secretive, repressive regime. In Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad, former Wall Street Journal journalist Melanie Kirkpatrick documents the desperate, dangerous flight of North Koreans toward an uncertain new life. Drawing parallels with American slaves seeking freedom 150 years and continents apart, Kirkpatrick traces North Korean journeys through a network of clandestine routes, safe houses, and courageous individuals willing to compromise their own safety to help others.

For North Koreans attempting to escape starvation, torture, repression, and worse, the “new underground” begins just over the border in China. Because of China’s official political support of North Korea, the Chinese government refuses to recognize escapees as refugees (even though China has signed the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees). Nor does China allow the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to operate in the country.

North Koreans in China live constantly under threat of arrest and repatriation. Women are often trafficked, sold as “brides” in response to a shortage of partners in China (due to that country’s history of male preference that has created a “sex imbalance … [of] epic proportions).” The children of these North Korean/Chinese unions perhaps suffer the most, trapped in stateless limbo: The fear of exposing a North Korean mother’s illegal status prevents a Chinese father from officially registering the child who, in effect, doesn’t exist and therefore has no access to education and healthcare.

Within and beyond China, remarkable heroes extend the escape networks into numerous Asian countries as they work to send North Korean escapees to freedom in South Korea and beyond. These heroes include: Steve Kim, founder of 318 Partners (named for Article 318 of the Chinese criminal code which sent him to jail for aiding North Koreans in China); “Mary and Jim,” a retired couple, who run orphanages in China for mixed children abandoned by missing North Korean mothers and desperate Chinese fathers (the undocumented status of these children makes them ineligible for adoption); and “Mr. Jung,” who has undergone face-changing surgeries to repeatedly fool Chinese authorities while rescuing South Korean prisoners of war held illegally in North Korea since 1953.

The tenacity of such brave individuals is sharply contrasted with the failure of the world – especially South Korea, the United States, even the United Nations – to confront and combat North Korea’s atrocities. Kirkpatrick convincingly argues that escaped North Koreans – from starving children to highly-placed officials – will prove to be the best weapon against toppling the despotic, third-generation Kim regime.

Kirkpatrick is a methodical writer, and Escape from North Korea is a solid, matter-of-fact title that falls somewhere in between the unrelenting brutality of Blaine Harden’s recent Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, and the flowing narrative of Barbara Demick’s lauded 2010 National Book Award nonfiction finalist, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. As literature, Escape from North Korea is efficient at best; it reads like a series of separate articles patched together. Certain details are unnecessarily repetitive (such as explaining yet again who North Korean founder Kim Il Sung is, two-thirds through the book). Other details seem oddly missing and sometimes surprisingly inaccurate. Kirkpatrick refers to the underground railroad-multiplying organization LiNK (Liberty in North Korea) as “founded at Yale University in 2004 by two Korean-American students,” but identifies only one founder (whose story is one of the book’s most inspiring). Meanwhile, however, Kirkpatrick neglects to tell readers about the never-named co-founder who was actually already a California college graduate when LiNK began.

Quibbles, inaccuracies, and typos aside, Kirkpatrick undoubtedly offers an eye-opening opportunity to explore an overlooked, pressing topic. She shares with readers the harrowing testimonies, the wrenching struggles, and the inspiring successes. Regretfully, in its current incarnation, Escape reads like a powerful draft waiting for a diligent editor’s transformative prowess.

Review: Christian Science Monitor, November 26, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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November 6, 2012 · 9:22 am

Unspoken: A Story from the Underground Railroad by Henry Cole

In our hyper-connected world of constant chatter, quiet is a difficult-to-access, precious commodity. Take a sweeping look around you, take a few minutes to turn everything off, and grab a copy of this spectacular, wordless book. That’s right – no words, beyond the author’s dedication (to a librarian!) at book’s beginning, and his illuminating note at book’s end. Yet in between, you’ll find a young heroine’s story that speaks volumes …

As a young girl goes about her daily chores on the family farm, she notices small details that make her look once, twice, and again. Her initial fear turns into courage by the light of her lantern, as she offers a hidden biscuit, then a slice of pie and a drumstick to an unseen visitor in the dark barn. Through a peephole under the stairs, she witnesses the angry soldiers who promise a reward to betray a human life, but her unspoken vigilance proves to be the best reward of all.

Unspoken, which pubbed just last week, has already been named one of New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2012. Even without that latest (well-deserved) honor, if creator Henry Cole‘s name or his illustrations seem familiar to you, that’s probably because one of his dozens of books happens to be And Tango Makes Three, which he illustrated for authors Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell. For all the wrong reasons, Cole has practically been an annual household name especially during Banned Books Week: Sweet Tango led the “Top ten most frequently challenged books of 2010,” was at the top of the list for five years in a row (with a respite at #2 in 2009), but then was conspicuously absent in the latest 2011 list (oh, how fickle the naysayers!)!

Having experienced only too well that sort of censored silence beyond his control, Cole’s decision to create a silent book – and such a marvelous one at that! – surely resounds with a sense of sweet victory. In his “Author’s Note,” he shares highlights from his family’s long-ago history on their Virginia farm during the Civil War, and adds, “I wanted to tell – or show – the courage of everyday people who were brave in quiet ways.”

What did I say about speaking volumes?!!

Readers: Children

Published: 2012

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Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, African American, Nonethnic-specific

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November 2, 2012 · 1:04 pm

A Walk Across the Sun by Corban Addison

Of the debut novels by non-Asian men writing about Asia and Asian characters that I’ve read thus far this year, three stand out: Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, Brandon Jones’ All Woman and Springtime, and most recently this title by Virginia attorney Corban Addison. The one clear detail the trio share: none shy away from unrelenting violence.

In spite of the horror, Son is stupendous storytelling, while Woman‘s narrative arc never moves beyond maudlin debasement. Walk lands somewhere in the middle, its violent content balanced by a love-story gone awry. Two privileged teenage sisters, Ahalya and Sita Ghai, living in southern India’s Tamil Nadu, survive the devastating 2005 tsunami with little more than their lives. Entrusting an associate of their father’s to deliver them to the safety of their convent school, they instead end up trafficked to a Mumbai brothel.

On the other side of the world, DC lawyer Thomas Clarke is still reeling from the death of his baby daughter, and his subsequent desertion by his Indian-born wife. His high-power corporate law career takes a sharp downward turn, and he makes the drastic decision to take a temporary posting with an international anti-trafficking NGO – based in Mumbai, where his estranged wife has returned to her family. His new job takes him on a brothel raid that rescues Ahalya out of her horrifying situation, but not before Sita has been sold elsewhere. Thomas’ impossible promise to Ahalya to find Sita takes him to Paris, then back to the States on a wild chase involving an insidious drug, child, and sex trafficking international operation.

If you choose the audible route, while you might appreciate actress Soneela Nankani’s accurate pronunciation, her too-young voice devolves quickly into grating when performing the Thomas-focused narrative. Alas, Nankani’s reading probably won’t be the only reason to roll the eyeballs: as timely and critical as the topic of trafficking and sex slavery is, Addison’s novel stalls at just readable enough.

Almost 400 pages (or 15+ hours stuck in the ears) of too-much Thomas is quite the challenge. For a man trying to win back his wife, he certainly places himself in compromising positions. Perhaps to counter his infidelity, his high-minded hero morals are what drive him to fight sex-trafficking in Mumbai, and yet he lets his college buddy take him to a popular club filled with high-priced women, where the friend abandons Thomas to buy his expensive bedmate for the night – and yet Thomas says nothing. Really?

Excuse-filled ‘I’m only human’-protagonist aside, too many plot choices are plain unbelievable, even in the realm of fiction: on the drive home from a beach weekend, Thomas unsuccessfully (but conveniently for his story) chases a black SUV (of course) after a mother screams her young daughter has been kidnapped; as heinous as Ahalya’s experiences are in the brothel, they hardly resemble the real-life monstrosities trafficked young girls face; and, most implausible of all, (*spoiler alert*) in spite of the number of evil men Sita is shuttled through (and not that anyone would ever, ever hope otherwise), she remains unviolated throughout her incarcerations. Again, really?

As crucial as the eradication of trafficking is throughout the world, as literary investment perhaps the better choices lie in nonfiction: Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s pivotal Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is a highly recommended first choice. Addison’s own website also offers numerous resources to “Learn More,” and “How to Help.” Whether or not you read Walk is a personal choice; fighting the evil portrayed within is a universal imperative.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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September 29, 2012 · 10:24 am

Conquistadora by Esmeralda Santiago

I think I must have been a Boricua in a former life. I can’t seem to stay away too long from La Isla del Encanto (especially my favorite Isla Culebrita), and I get the fiercest cravings for Bebo’s and mofongo (it’s all about a full belly). So how thrilled was I to get an invitation to visit a friend’s book club to discuss Conquistadora, an epic historical novel set in Puerto Rico. Alas, alas, if I tell her fellow Boricuas what I really think, it’s likely they will never invite me back … so the truth might just have to stay here.

As a girl growing up in 18th-century Spain, Ana Larragoity Cubillas – a señorita de buena familia (you’ll hear that moniker often!) – discovers the journals of an ancestor who was one of the first visitors two centuries prior to Puerto Rico when it was still called Borínquen. Ana’s adventurous aspirations come to fruition when she marries into a family that has inherited considerable holdings in Puerto Rico. Ana, her husband Rámon, his twin brother Inocente, plan to tame the sugar plantation that they name Hacienda los Gamelos (yes, House of the Twins). Ana’s romantic notions of wild island life are hardly what her reality turns out to be, and yet nothing will make her give up the challenge to achieve her Hacienda dreams – not murder, not motherhood, not widowhood, not epidemic deaths, not betrayal after betrayal.

Slavery, colonialism, the evolving role of women, gender power plays – such important storytelling potential quickly sinks into messy, missed opportunity. The narrative, with its telenovela twists and turns, relies heavily on eye-rolling moments to sustain a sort of train-wreck momentum: Ana’s furtive premarital couplings with her convent schoolfriend (a distant relative of the twins) who gets relegated to saintly spinsterhood most of her life, the ménage-à-trois-marriage Ana endures with both twins, too many white male characters’ forcible production of a shocking supply of hapa slave offspring.

Beyond the narrative, most characters prove to be predictable one-note caricatures: driven Ana, weakling twins, wallflower Elena, wannabe Severo, hysterical Lenore, doting Eugenio, spoiled Miguel. The few moments of grace belong to the long-suffering – dare I say – noble slaves: Olivia who dreams of telling her future children her whole life story because she never even learned her own mother’s name, José who lovingly immortalizes the cholera-dead into a piece of beautiful mahogany because all that is left of his loved ones are scattered ashes. As the book ends with Ana barely in middle-age, I fear a sequel must be in the works.

Conquistadora is not my first Esmeralda Santiago title: her debut, a resonating memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican, was definitely my favorite; its sequel, Almost a Woman, proved disappointing, which was my excuse for not picking up the next sequel, The Turkish Lover; her predictable novel America’s Dream remains unfinished; and now her latest might have to be my last. I confess the only reason I made it to the end had to do with my belly (did I not mention cravings?). Yes, really – the friend who so graciously invited me to meet her Boricuas, promised to reward me with Pastelon de Amarillos. I admit it: I will read (almost anything) for amazing food! After alternating between the 432-page book and the almost 18-hour audible version narrated by a subdued Santiago herself, I can only hope I’ve earned tomorrow night’s dinner.

Readers: Adults

Published: 2012

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Carribbean American, Latino/a, Puerto Rican

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August 9, 2012 · 1:44 pm

March by Geraldine Brooks

“‘I’ve always imagined paradise as something like a library,’” the titular March expounds. Is that not a perfect thought?

Alas, while March is Geraldine Brooks‘ most award-winning – that yellow circle on the cover announces its 2006 Pulitzer Prize – I must confess it was my least favorite; if I had to rank Brooks’ fiction, I’d go with Year of Wonders, Caleb’s Crossing, People of the Book, and then finally March.

[If you choose to listen to March, you'll be read to smoothly enough by Canadian actor Richard Easton, with only the occasional overwrought moments (perhaps accurate to the text, but a bit too much stuck in the ears). As countless audibles have multiple narrators, I was surprised that Easton also reads Mrs. March's chapters, a production decision that seemed unnecessarily dissonant.]

Many of you probably have read Louisa May Alcott’s canonical Little Women, or at least seen some production of it, either on film or the stage. In March, Brooks attempts “to create a character for the absent father,” who in Alcott’s original, is away serving the Union troops as a minister in the south during the Civil War. As Alcott based Little Women on her own family, Brooks “turn[ed] to the journals, letters, and biographies of Alcott’s father, Bronson,” to create her own Mr. March.

Brooks’ Mr. March “goes off to war at the ridiculous age of thirty-nine,” as his wife observes. An idealistic thinker and passionate abolitionist, March’s wartime experiences with slaves, soldiers, civilians, and survivors – including his reunion with a remarkable woman he met 20 years earlier with whom he shares horrifying secrets – prove brutal, wrenching, and almost fatal. His difficult letters home to his little women are interwoven with his own remembrances of things past, from his travels as an itinerant 18-year-old peddler from Connecticut to a pencil-making apprentice to husband, father, scholar, preacher, rich man, poor man in Massachusetts. As he tries to make sense of the devastations of war, he’s forced to rethink his beliefs, his actions, his very life.

So why did March drop to the bottom of my Brooks list? Perhaps my contrary nature is blinding me, but Mr. and Mrs. March both, for all their admirable ideals and convictions, are ultimately unsympathetic characters. The mister’s guilty whimperings and self-lashings begin and end the book, while the missus’ ‘no-really-I-don’t-blame-him-but-woe-is-me-anyway’ whining overwhelms her short four chapters. Surely Alcott had reason to leave Mr. March a minor character, and Mrs. March secondary to her four daughters … given how they turned out in Brooks’ imaginings, to keep them from center stage was probably the wiser choice.

Tidbit: One of my favorite books ever is Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Jean Rhys gives unforgettable voice to the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Sea is one of many, many parallel novels, as this genre is called, which includes such notables as Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde); Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind); Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) or his Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (from Cinderella); and even Michael Cunningham’s (overrated 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning) The Hours (from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway).

Readers: Adult

Published: 2005

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February 22, 2012 · 9:42 am

Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans by Kadir Nelson

Happy 280th birthday to George Washington today, even if his official federal holiday (since 1879 by an Act of Congress!) always falls on a non-birthdate: by the Julian calendar, GW was born February 11, on the Gregorian February 22 [those colonials changed calendars in 1752], but the official holiday is designated to recur annually on the third Monday of the month, which means the holiday will never actually fall on GW’s natal day! Since the 1980s, a nod to Lincoln (birthday February 12) was added, to make it Presidents’ Day – although for families with children, this nebulously named holiday has become an excuse for mid-winter break. Hope the long holiday was good for all. Oh, but I have digressed …!!

In the splendiferous Heart and Soul, the original George W. appears on page 12: he’s looking straight ahead, mounted on the back of a sleek horse on the banks of what is presumably the Potomac River … and standing beside him is a slave, with hat in hand, head slightly bowed, his profile filled with grave consternation.

Kadir Nelson, this year’s author award winner and illustrator honoree of the Coretta Scott King Book Award, is not rewriting history: George Washington’s life clearly would have not been George Washington’s life without slaves, either at home or on the battlefield. “Through the fruits of our labor and our volunteer soldiers, we had helped free America from England, and yet we were stuck in a country that kept most of us as slaves.”

Taking the welcoming, storytelling tone of an aging grandmother who has seen too much, Nelson has history to share: “No parent wants to tell a child that he was once a slave and made to do anther man’s bidding. Or that she had to swallow her pride and take what she was given, even though she knew it wasn’t fair. Our story is chock-full of things like this. Things that might you cringe, or feel angry,” the knowing elder explains. “But there are also parts that will make you proud, or even laugh a little. You gotta take the good with the bad, I guess. You have to know where you come from so you can move forward.”

From the early 1600s to the founding of a new country, from the horrors of plantation life to Lincoln’s War, from the failure of Reconstruction to the hopes for building freer lives in the Wild West, our storyteller recounts African American struggles and contributions to the founding, building, and growing of a country in flux. She wanders north with the Great Migration and to Harlem for jazz, glamour, and the vote for women. She survives the Great Depression and World War II, celebrates equal rights and the death of Jim Crow, and listens on the National Mall to “”I have a dream …’”

As thorough and personal as the story is, Kadir Nelson’s extraordinary pictures are what will linger and enlighten. Every page holds wonder and admiration: the tiny little boy in his tattered shirt standing in front of the slave quarters against a sky so impossibly blue; the searing portrait of Harriet Tubman, tired but determined against the rich hues of the falling dusk; a young woman standing behind her father in near-darkness, her encouraging hands on his shoulders as if gently willing him to read; the portrait of a southern family migrating north, dressed in their Sunday best with all their worldly possessions piled into and onto a dilapidated jalopy, the sheer joy of making magical music of a Harlem big band; and perhaps the most touching of all – the gnarled, wizened hands cradling a stars-and-stripes “I voted” button offered up as proof of survival and celebration.

“We have come a mighty long way, honey, and we still have a good ways to go, but that promise and the right to fight for it is worth every ounce of its weight in gold. It is our nation’s heart and soul.” AMEN to that …

Readers: Children, Middle Grade

Published: 2011

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Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Nonfiction, African American

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