New Little House Series

 

Publicity shot from the new “Little House” series, released this week.
We have watched the first episode.

 In the 1970s, our family read aloud the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, beginning with Little House in the Big Woods, set at the time when the narrator, Laura, was four to five years old. As we read through the series, we were captivated by the characters and by the way Laura experiences the frontier as her family moves onward. It’s impressive how the books reflect the history of the American West as it was is being settled. We were quite aware of the author’s negative views of non-white people, especially the original Native Americans who were being displaced by settlers of European descent. 

The first episode of the new TV series starts at the time of the third book in the Little House series. The TV script has depicted Laura as around 11 years old, which gives the entire story a different point of view. The new script depicts more clearly the author’s views about race, downplaying the mother’s hostility to Native Americans. Historically, the Black doctor who plays a large role in this episode was a real person, though I don’t think he was depicted in similar detail in the books. From Wikipedia: 

“Dr. George A. Tann: An African American physician and veteran of the Union Army, Dr. Tann ran a homeopathic medicine practice in Kansas and the Osage Diminished Indian Reserve. He became well known as a pioneer physician in the region and treated both Black and white families on the frontier, including acting as a neighbor to the Ingalls family.”

It seemed to me that the focus of this episode was emphatically turned to “Pa” — the father and head of the household. As in the book, Pa was a restless and ambitious man who wanted to move west and settle the frontier, while “Ma” was loyal but not happy to leave her settled life in “the big woods.” The TV family seems to have been forced to leave for the frontier, though in the books this was not the case. 

In sum, I see many differences between the characters and situations in the script and in the original books as I remember them. More importantly, I’m not sure the TV show captures the spirit of the original — and maybe isn’t trying to do so. There are a whole lot more episodes, which I may or may not watch.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Must History be Repeated?

 

”From 1920 to 1938, the NAACP flew a banner outside its New York City office with the words, ‘A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.’ The words would have been jarring to passersby, but that was the point. It was a provocative graphic statement—something to stop the busy onlookers of Fifth Avenue in their tracks. The stark symbol meant to force the viewer into confronting the reality of the racial violence happening in America.” (source)

This week in Minneapolis: Protest and Death

Another death in Minneapolis this week as everyone knows. The provocative agents of our horrendous federal government are assuming more and more power with less and less restraint. Our leaders from Washington are reneging on commitment to the traditional American legal system. The goon squads can go wherever they like and murder whomever they wish, and they wear masks so that they are not held accountable: no masks is the legal norm. Comparisons with historic precedents (especially the early days of Nazi Germany) are too grim to think about.

(source)

Noval Noir’s memorial portrat of Renee Nicole Good

(source)

A Quote from an Interview with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey

I’m sure you’ve heard that a judge has said that ICE has violated nearly 100 court orders since its crackdown began in Minneapolis, which makes me wonder if you think you can enforce any agreement with Homan and the federal government? That’s the most dangerous question that anybody can ask because we are in a world of hurt that goes way beyond any individual safety if we are talking about a federal government completely ignoring court orders. This is a foundational principle of our Republic. The battlefield that we fight on as municipalities and cities around the country isn’t one of warfare. It’s one of the law. The battlefield that we are going to win on is the law, and a precondition of that necessary fight is that once the law has been determined and a court order comes down, it’s going to be followed. This is something that I get really intense and really pissed off about. This is not optional. You follow the law. We should have everybody, Democrats and Republicans, losing it. It should be deeply concerning, not from an ideological perspective but from an American one. (New York Times interview by Lulu Garcia-Navarro)

Previous Outrages, Commemorated in Murals

(source)

Minneapolis, 2020 (source)

What has happened this week?

Is Winter Ending?

Well, no, winter isn’t ending. We’ve had a bit of better weather but also some bitter weather. We took a walk under cloudy skies, but heard a Red-Winged Blackbird singing. At our house we are having a very quiet time, also pondering the rapid and increasingly alarming political and international scene in our national government. Not much to share with Deb’s Readerbuzz and her Sunday Salon on the weekend, but here it is!

Dreaming of summer and walks along the Huron River.

We cooked a bit, and had a few ready-made meals.

We shopped at the locally famous Zingerman’s Deli, and bought rye bread, salads, corned beef, and pastrami for sandwiches.

Now for my reading this week…. 

Sojourner Truth and Human Rights

The struggle to free the enslaved black people in the United States in the 19th century and the parallel and combined struggle throughout that century to endow men and women of all races with full rights of citizenship, property ownership, and voting, was a long and painful one. Sojourner Truth, who was born in slavery at the end of the 18th century, was a major figure in this struggle. She became a figure of legendary proportions, and in fact, her reputation depends on several anecdotes that were much embellished from the original events in which she participated.

Both the actual struggles, the political participation, and the myths of Sojourner Truth seem especially important now. As I have been reading about her life, I’m thinking about the horrifying way that the successes of that struggle are being reversed in our new political scene right now, this week, today.

Sojourner Truth’s Narrative tells how she was born in a Dutch community in New York, where slavery was less widespread than in the South, but where many Africans were held in bondage until New York ended legal slavery in 1827. Her narrative describes how she was enslaved until she was approximately thirty years old. She details her relationship with her owners, her family, and other people. She describes her religious development as a Pentecostal Christian, relationships with the preachers and leaders who influenced her, and her participation in various religious organizations and congregations. As she participated in many high-profile events of her time, she was conscious of her legend, and contributed in a positive way to being a leader and a proponent of human rights, freedom from slavery, and women’s suffrage.

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth was widely read throughout her life.

As the century progressed, antislavery activists conveniently forgot about Northern slave owners as they pursued the struggle to end slavery in the South. Thus Sojourner Truth’s origins were often forgotten, and she was sometimes thought to have been born on a Southern plantation rather than on a small-scale Northern farm where the language was Dutch, and where she would never have had the Southern accent that’s popularly associated with her. 

This association is especially strong with her most famous speech, delivered at a very early women’s suffrage meeting. You’ve probably heard the refrain of this speech known by the repetition of the words: “Ain’t I a woman.” These words were not reported at the time the speech was given, but were invented by a later proponent of women’s rights.  However, this legendary version of Sojourner Truth’s speech is so widely accepted that the author of the careful biography that I read feels it will never be corrected.

Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter.

What did Sojourner Truth stand for? Even her “Narrative” was the work of a white woman who took down her oral history because Sojourner Truth herself was unable to to read or write. In fact, Nell Irvin Painter’s biography summarizes it: “Everything we know of Sojourner Truth comes through other people, mostly educated White women.” (p. 207)

Painter’s book is fascinating, and very revealing about pre-Civil War attitudes and cultural stereotypes about the relationship of Black and White Americans, and the co-development of views on race and on slavery. Here is the passage that makes me tremble in fear that we are losing the progress that was made in that era and many subsequent eras when it comes to the rights of women, minorities. and non-white people:

 

“Women’s rights meant empowering women in a multitude of ways: securing women rights to their wages, their inheritance, and the custody of their children; admitting women to institutions of higher learning and the professions; and permitting women to vote, hold office, and serve on juries. This broad agenda dovetailed with the needs of Black people, who also lacked a wide range of civil rights.” (p. 261)

An article in the New York Times titled “Republican Men and Women Are Changing Their Minds About How Women Should Behave” summarized a number of recent studies:

“Surveys from 2024 show that support for traditional gender roles is increasing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is happening primarily among Republicans. Perhaps more surprisingly, it is happening among Republican women as well as among Republican men.”

Women being sent back from employment to stay home? Women being shut out of active high-level politics? In the most backward (but powerful) circles even questions of whether married women should be allowed to vote? 

That’s just one example: many news stories have been detailing extreme racism in the firing of high government officials and many overtly racist and anti-woman statements made by the incoming and less qualified replacements. What will become of us? 

We need another distraction…

Another Distraction

What would you think about a few cute bunny images? Again, I’ve looked at the work of the amazing artist Hokusai from 19th century Japan. Here are a few pictures by him and by one of his students to share with Eileen’s Saturday Critters.

Dreaming of Spring

At the Peony Garden in June a few years ago.

 Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Catching up on the Classics

 Reading

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin is a brutal and powerful book. I felt as if it was providing a deep look into past prejudices and how they destroyed their targets: namely, gay men. Published in 1956, it must have been a shock to readers — or perhaps the readers of that time held such negative views of gay men that they were insensitive to the impact of the self-hatred experienced by the narrator. Baldwin is brilliant in describing his character’s clear consciousness of how his peers must have detested him. I wonder if some readers were indifferent to the way the character bows to society’s cruel judgement of him, a judgement that he internalized. I chose this book because I wanted to read about Paris in the 1950s, and of course there is plenty of Paris atmosphere in the book, but it’s the ugly atmosphere of low-life bars and poverty.

In a 1956 review in the New York Times, I found little sympathy for the suffering of the narrator: “Much of the novel is laid in scenes of squalor, with a background of characters as grotesque and repulsive as any that can be found in Proust's ‘Cities of the Plain.’ But even as one is dismayed by Mr. Baldwin's materials, one rejoices in the skill with which he renders them.” (Granville Hicks, “Tormented Triangle,” NYT October 14, 1956)

The Dream is one of the twenty novels in Zola’s series titled Les Rougon-Macquart, published between 1871 and 1893. Each volume in the series highlights a character or a family that typify some aspect of French society in the second half of the 19th century in France. I’m enjoying The Dream, which is about the life of a young girl — an adopted orphan — in a town around 2 hours outside Paris: that is, two hours by the transportation that was available in the 19th century. The plot is slightly exaggerated with the angelic nature of the girl and her extreme religiosity, despite Zola’s famous antipathy to religion. She has a dream to marry a wealthy prince, and the book follows this as if it’s a fairy tale, not a story about an orphan taken in by a middle class couple. It’s lyrical (as the reviews all note) but I also feel a sense of irony in the much-too-happy plot.

I’ve only read a few of the novels in this amazing and fascinating series (maybe I’ve read six of them), and my ambition is to read more, as well as to read some of Zola’s other novels. I think I like his brutal realism better than this maybe fake idyl. 

And Watching…

Hitchcock Classic (1938)

Another Hitchcock classic but not quite as wonderful.  (1936)

All-around classic with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon,
directed by Billy Wilder (1959)

…and my Favorite Classic

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Good Dirt

Finally: a really good book! Just published this week (January 28, 2025). Have you noticed all my lukewarm or very cold reviews lately? This book is different.

Charmaine Wilkerson’s Good Dirt has likable characters, a good plot, and very beautiful writing. It’s full of fascinating historical detail, set in the context of one family’s experience. The central character in the novel is Ebby, a young woman who struggles because of a devastating trauma she experienced at the age of ten: witnessing the murder of her older brother. Most of the action takes place when she is around thirty years old. Recently, she has also suffered a humiliation when her fiancé abandoned her on the day of her wedding. 

Ebby’s parents are highly successful and wealthy descendants of Black and Native Americans who settled in New England during the nineteenth century. The author makes it very clear that the history of all races in the US is American history: not separate, but part of a whole. This theme of the book is both powerful and meaningful, and I enjoyed discovering the author’s viewpoint, which is integral to the novel and very much part of its appeal to me. Her choice of characters and events allows her to present many ideas without being in the least preachy — an impressive accomplishment.

A major character from the historic era in the novel is named Moses; he is a skilled potter who was enslaved in the South where he produced large storage jars of great usefulness and beauty. One of these jars remained in Ebby’s family until the tragedy: her brother’s murderers also toppled and destroyed the jar itself. As part of her efforts to forge a meaningful life after trauma, Ebby records the family stories about the maker of the jar and the family’s experiences in Africa, in the Old South, and in New England.

One good thing about this novel is that it doesn’t try to make everyone happy and satisfied at the end in a fake way, as sometimes happens in novels about bad things that happen to good people. The ending is realistic, acceptably provides a resolution to the story, but not forced. 

Inspiration for the Historic Era in this Novel

From the author’s afterward: “While writing the story of Moses, I visited an exhibit of nineteenth-century stoneware that originated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and traveled to other cities. The show, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, included key pieces by the real-life potter Dave (called David Drake following the end of his enslavement).”

Two Storage Jars, University of Michigan Museum of Art in 2023

As I read the novel, I was constantly thinking about the exhibit titled “Hear Me Now,” which was presented at our local museum last year. Remembering the exhibit contributed to my enjoyment of the novel, which brought a fictional version of the enslaved potters to life, including their search for “Good Dirt” with which to form their useful and beautiful creations. Here are two of the items that impressed me.

Text of the label for the depicted jar:

____________(Potter once known)

Likely enslaved at Phoenix Stone Ware Factory (about 1840)

Alkaline-glazed stoneware with iron and kaolin slip High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Purchase in honor of Audrey Shilt, President of the Members Guild, 1996-1997, with funds from the Decorative Arts Acquisition Endowment and Decorative Arts Acquisition Trust

Stamp: PHOENIX / FACTORY / ED:SC

This object stands apart for its striking decoration. A Black man and woman in fancy dress make a toast. Below, a nursing hog faces off against a two-handled pot evocative of this watercooler. Little is known about the object, and the significance of the imagery is not clear. Some interpret it as a wedding scene, while others read the pot as a presentation piece, intended to showcase the skill of the potters at the short-lived Phoenix Factory

A storage jar by the potter David Drake, probably like the one in the novel.

Update Oct 31, 2025: One of the storage jars in the museum’s collection has been returned to the family of the potter. See this story in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/us/mfa-boston-david-drake-pottery.html

 

Books and Movies

Reading

The first sentence of the introduction to The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, which was published in 1912: “This vivid and startlingly new picture of conditions brought about by the race question in the United States makes no special plea for the Negro, but shows in a dispassionate, though sympathetic, manner conditions as they actually exist between the whites and blacks to-day.” 

The book is a fictional narrative of the life of one man, featuring his observations on what it meant over 100 years ago to be black both in the north and in the south (also in Paris and London). I was amazed at how many aspects of the “race question” have remained unchanged. Only the choice of words (“race question”) is different. So much is the same. The book vividly combines the specific events of one character’s life with insights about the way that being either black or white created a person’s opportunities and experiences. The protagonist/narrator is a black man who can pass for white, and thus experiences life from both points of view.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an author, a poet, a civil rights leader, and a participant in the Harlem Renaissance. His most famous poem is “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is viewed as the Black National Anthem. Johnson was the head of the NAACP from 1920-1930. His novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is an American classic.

The latest Detective Galileo novel was a little disappointing to me. The plot wasn’t as interesting or as compelling and the suspense wasn’t as dramatic as in earlier novels in this series. If you are hooked on this series you can’t miss it!

Reading Next

The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier: a bestselling author whose books
 I have enjoyed reading

Watching

“A Haunting in Venice” stars Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot along with an all-star cast.

Creepy but a little too contrived.

 

The final episode of  “Vera” is very emotional and nostalgic, but with a good mystery to wrap up a great series. 

Blog post shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon

© 2025 mae sander

“James” by Percival Everett

 

Think about what it would mean to be enslaved — utterly enslaved — to a master/owner who detested you and everybody like you. Imagine the worst injustices, cruelties, and aggressions you would be subjected to by totally unrestrained bullys. Imagine how humiliated and angry and desperate you would be. Imagine also how you would feel if these outrages were perpetrated without restraint on your own family and those you loved. Imagine being aware that any response you made could not only result in more punishment and outrage against yourself, but also vast injustices against your family and fellow slaves, or even against enslaved people you didn’t know.

Have you tried to imagine all this? You haven’t come close to what Percival Everett’s brilliant and penetrating novel James can show you about how a slave owner (or any random white person) in pre-Civil-War America could demean a human being who was “owned” and destroy both body and spirit. The absolute power of whites over blacks, even free blacks, at that time is nearly unimaginable, but Everett forces the reader to visualize the horrors. 

James, of course, is a retelling of Mark Twain’s masterpiece Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain forced the reader to see slavery from the eyes of a naive boy with an innate sense of justice, despite his social background. James goes beyond the original for the modern reader because the author’s  eyes are twentieth-century eyes; further, the author gives the character James a dual perspective, both as an educated man (self-educated) and as a helpless victim. 

James is a totally different book, and totally different from most retold stories. Its power comes from the juxtaposition of two visions from two authors and two eras. Impressively, it also captures — and extends — Mark Twain’s humor. In both books, humor enriches and transforms the sadness embedded in the novel. At least that’s how I see it.

The book is a best-seller and award winner, so there are plenty of reviews that unlike this one actually summarize the plot and compare the two versions in detail.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Food Reading, Shopping, and More

 

I’ve redone my refrigerator magnets: now it’s almost all birds. Plus the air plant that lives on the fridge.

These are just the owl magnets.

Downtown Ann Arbor

Downtown: a mural on the upper story of a building. Maybe a desert scene?

At Downtown Home and Garden

Ornaments that look like drinks.

Modeling the L.L.Bean clothes sold in the store. I wonder what his story is!

Painted on the shop window.

I always enjoy visiting Downtown Home and Garden, a store with many different sorts of merchandise and two cats. Besides household goods and L.L.Bean clothing, they have many dog and cat toys and pet supplies, garden tools and outdoor equipment, kitchen tools, and a large Christmas area.

Looking forward to Thanksgiving

Doris Lee: “Thanksgiving” (1935)

Recent Reading

I read this interesting book about the history of cookbooks and African-American
cooking in the 19th and 20th century: Recipes for Respect by Rafia Zafar.

Reading Next

Catching up on Jane Austen.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Saturday Critters, Sunday Salon, 

Monday Murals and Tea on Tuesday 

This Week

New pot of succulents joins my cactus.
I’m sharing this and other things in my life with the Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Watched the Olympics Opening Ceremony

Olympics in our living room…yes to Paris in July! A favorite moment: when they tolled the bells of Notre Dame for the first time since the catastrophic fire.

The bridge was decorated with new murals to celebrate the Olympics.
80 boats carried the Olympic Athletes for a 4-mile trip down the Seine River to the Eiffel Tower
for the final march with the flags of all nations. Best ever opening ceremony!

The torch is lit.

We watched the entire 4-hour ceremony.

Family Visit July 18-23

Miriam finds interesting critters on her run. Time for Eileen’s critters.

We made our traditional pilgrimage to DQ for blizzards.

A fabulous seafood dinner.

One last breakfast before their 9-hour drive.

Time to say goodbye!

What I’m Reading This Week

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a satisfying book. It’s funny and serious at the same time. The main characters are wonderful and memorable (but I'm not going to describe them). Just one example: this description of a very minor character:

“Bernice was also the proud mother of, at last count, eight children, all of whom looked more or less like Bernice in varying degrees of skin color from light-skinned to dark. That was not a bad thing. Nor was it a good thing. Everybody knew Bernice had the kind of face that would make a man wire home for money. The question was, who was the man and where was the money?” (p. 94)

In this novel, good people mostly end up with good things happening to them. Quite a few bad people end up not so happy, maybe even satisfyingly dead. Good individuals from several mistreated or unlucky groups are often rewarded — Jews, blacks, Italians, other immigrants, disabled people, poor people, people who can’t read, people with a secret past, and more. But nobody is a stereotype. 

What saves this book from being a cloying mess of well-meaning fake optimism? It’s hard to say how the author manages, but somehow the evil doers get their just deserts, the survivors don’t gloat, and there is exactly enough revenge on the bad ones and rewards for the good ones.

Vivid writing also is absolutely a key to why this is such a lovable book. Like this description of the sounds heard in a hideously cruel home for mentally and physically disabled people: “moanings, groanings, coos, burps, sighs, growls, yells, chirps, yelps, chortles, cacklings, farts, chatterings, and howlings …” (p. 266)

The NPR reviewer described the writing thus: “McBride's roving narrator is, by turns, astute, withering, giddy, damning and jubilant. He has a fine appreciation for the human comedy: in particular, the surreal situation of African Americans and immigrant Jews in a early-to-mid-20th-century America that celebrates itself as a color-blind, welcoming Land of Liberty.” (source)

The New York Times reviewer describes The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store as:  “a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel.” (source) From The Atlantic: “In McBride’s work, digging deep into the tangled roots of complicated communities is the antidote to misplaced blame and false history.” (source)

I enjoyed reading this Great American Novel. Totally. I’m grateful to my sister who gave it to me as a gift.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander