Reading and Watching This Week

I reread There, There by Tommy Orange, which I originally reviewed in 2018 (link)
I am now reading the newly-published sequel. My recent visit to the Museum of the American Indian
included an exhibit about broken treaties between the US and the Native Americans. Totally relevant here!

A Beautiful Bird Book

Thanks to Deb at Readerbuzz, who reviewed this last week, I bought a copy —

there was a great price on amazon.com.

I’m reading this wonderful book a little at a time. It’s very packed with information about birds.
The large format enables images of many birds at their full size.

The details of each bird’s capabilities illustrate the general way that birds are adapted to life on earth.

New on Streaming

I have only watched a few of the episodes from the first 12 seasons of Vera, but now started the new one.

Finally Read

Finished this book on my second attempt. 

Colson Whitehead is a brilliant writer. During the last few years, I’ve read four of his literary and historical novels which are fantastic. Zone One was published in 2011 — a very different type of book. It’s about an apocalyptic future where a plague is turning humans into living skeletons that eat not-yet-turned humans. “There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth.” (p. 108)

The book is centered around one character who goes by the name Mark Spitz (because he can’t swim). He is a very average American, but somehow a survivor. Whitehead  shows Mark Spitz’s consciousness of the apocalyptic scene that has replaced a recognizable America — especially New York. There are wonderful observations of middle-class people who had a comfortable life until faced with disaster. Food descriptions help to set the horrifying atmosphere in a nightmare world: Whitehead is a wizard with working food descriptions into the narrative to make it come alive. I marked many passages; here’s one about Mark Spitz:

“On impulse he purchased a deluxe combo juice at the café on the way out and decided not to say anything when the pimply skel dropped a banana slice into the blender. He hated banana. He drank it anyway, blowing into the striped straw to dislodge a plug of pulp, and stepped out to the sidewalk into the rush-hour stream of the dead on their way home, the paralegals, mohels, resigned temps, bike messengers, and slump-shouldered massage therapists, the panoply of citizens in the throes of their slow decay. The plague was a meticulous craftsman, dabbing effects with deliberation.” (p. 133)

Mark Spitz works with others to try to restore humanity by destroying the living skeletons and disposing of the corpses — anyone can see that they are zombies, but Whitehead is such a clever writer that the word never appears in his text. A search of the Kindle edition turns up only one use of the word which is on the copyright page as a keyword for library searches!

I’m really happy that Whitehead turned his fantastic gifts to creating novels that I’m more enthusiastic about. I think he’s one of the best authors writing now.

Strange Weather We’re Having!

Tuesday, February 27: Record High. Detroit was 73°

Wednesday, February 28: More than 35 degrees colder!

Temperature dropped as low as 19° F by Thursday morning.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Readerbuzz and Eileen’s Critters.

 

February Videos, Murder Mysteries, and Other Reading

February has been so busy that I didn’t have time to write very many reviews. For today’s Sunday Salon (at Readerbuzz), I decided to say a few words about the books I’ve read this month, and the one streaming video series I watched. What is the Sunday Salon? It’s a place to link up and share what a group of bloggers have been doing during the week plus it's a great way to visit other blogs and join in the conversations going on there.

On PBS Masterpiece

A PBS Masterpiece Mystery: Magpie Murders (from 2022)
Two interlocking mysteries become strangely unified! Really entertaining.

Crime Fiction

Police Inspector Peter Diamond detects in Peter Lovesy’s novel Bloodhounds.
Notable: a mystery-reading society debates a vast list of classic crime fiction.
Then the crimes begin! Which member pulled off this locked room mystery?

Three novels by Icelandic Noir author Lilja Sigarðardóttir in one volume. 

I’ve read the first one, Snare, and it’s good. The focus is on the criminals.

I’ll be reading more.

Miscellaneous Reading

An early dystopian novel by Colson Whitehead: Zone One.
I’m still trying to get into this one, but it puts me to sleep.
Too bad, I liked Whitehead’s more recent books.

A fascinating essay by Japanese writer Tanizaki: In Praise of Shadows (1933).

Tanizaki described the impact of electricity on the shadowy traditional Japanese homes, as well as the effect of modern plumbing and other innovations. He wrote:

“I always think how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science. Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the products of our industrial art—would they not have suited our national temper better than they do?” (In Praise of Shadows, p. 52)

Amusing and ostentatiously philosophical, food historian
Massimo Montanari presents A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce.
I’ll have more to say about this one!

The history of Italian pasta has its roots in Roman, Greek, Arab, and Jewish cuisines in the Mediterranean region, which Montanari documents in detail. (He notes that pasta in China had an equally long but completely independent origin, with no influence on Europe.) The history of tomato sauce begins in Mexico long before the Europeans arrived there, and it reached Italy via Spain. The now-classic dish became totally Italian only in the 19th century. Very interesting food history! Montanari writes:

“In reality, products … never work by themselves. Cooking mixes them and puts them into play, making them interact. Basil is exquisite, but nobody eats basil by itself. Chili peppers are exquisite, but nobody eats just chili peppers. Pasta is exquisite, but nobody eats pasta without sauce. To be sure, cooking starts with ingredients but, above all, it relies on recipes. … Even the most autochthonous recipes, the ones based on ‘local’ products, are never so completely local as to exclude contributions from diverse origins.” (Montanari, p. 13)

A preachy warning? Literary Theory for Robots

Already Reviewed

Two Oz books, reviewed here: Wandering around in the Land of Oz

A book and a film, reviewed here: Reading and Watching

A book full of intriguing ideas, reviewed here: Algorithmic!
Watch out: I have another post coming about this book.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Colson Whitehead, “Crook Manifesto”

 

I’ve been looking forward to Crook Manifesto, the sequel to Colson Whitehead’s great novel Harlem Shuffle. The publication date was Wednesday, so in preparation, I reread Harlem Shuffle, and liked it just as much as I did the first time. Unfortunately, I am finding the sequel somewhat disappointing. It’s a pretty good book, full of action, comic detail, and accurate descriptions of life in Harlem during the 1970s, but it doesn’t reach the high standard of the first volume or of the two other brilliant novels by Whitehead that I have read -- The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys. (The three first books were blogged here, here, and here) 

Whitehead's main character, an entrepreneur by day and a fence for various thieves and burglars by night, is named Carney. In Harlem Shuffle he's the center of all three individual stories. In some ways, he is an Everyman: Whitehead seems to view him simultaneously as an individual and a representative of a type of man of his time. For this, Carney reminded me of Langston Hughes' character Simple and his penetrating and seemingly naive views of Harlem in the 1950s. 

Carney is complex and we know what's in his head in Harlem Shuffle, but not so much in Crook Manifesto. He's not the center of the stories any more, which dilutes the effect of knowing his conflicts over honest business and family loyalty versus his criminal side gig. He is loyal to his wife Elizabeth, who comes from a higher social stratum than he does, and to his children, but neither book presents Elizabeth as a fully-realized character. In reading Crook Manifesto, I felt that this omission was even more troubling.

One of the three stories in Crook Manifesto features Pepper, Carney's shady associate and family friend. Pepper is not as complex or thoughtful as Carney, so his story is more of a crime drama with historic asides than the richer drama of knowing how Carney thinks. It's not at all bad, in fact quite exciting, but just not as deep as Harlem Shuffle, in my opinion.

Both books have a strong awareness of Harlem history. Harlem Shuffle does it delicately and discretely, but Crook Manifesto is somewhat obsessed about injustice and government amplification of Black poverty as well as about a number of other issues that emerged in the 1970s. The underlying reasons for unequal results between Black and White people may have been obvious at that time; however, the characters' language at times seems too much like a present-day New York Times editorial about racially-based economic discrimination. In some passages, I found that the choice of words seemed more appropriate for a twenty-first century writer than for the characters in the novel who speak them. Also, the length of their socioeconomic analysis can be longwinded and a bit pompous: in Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead shows you how social conditions affected the characters; in Crook Manifesto, he lectures you about it. Here's a quote from a character in the novel that shows what I have in mind:

"Before the current fiscal crisis and all the cutbacks, Pierce said, there were decades of urban renewal projects that obliterated communities and industrial zones in the name of progress. 'Ramming the highways through, bulldozing so-called slums, but they were places people lived—black, white, Puerto Rican. Knock down the factories and warehouses, and you wipe out people’s livelihoods, too. The white people take advantage of those new highways out to the suburbs and flee the city into homes subsidized by federal mortgage programs. Mortgages that black people won’t get. And the blacks and Puerto Ricans are squeezed into smaller and smaller ghettos that were once thriving neighborhoods. But now those good blue-collar jobs are gone. Can’t buy a house because the lenders have designated the neighborhood as high-risk—the redlining actually creates the conditions it’s warning against. Unemployment, overcrowded tenements, and you get overwhelmed social services. It’s started—the breakdown... it’s years of shitty urban planning biting us in the ass. You see it in Harlem,' Pierce said." (Crook Manifesto pp. 257-258). 

Colson Whitehead is a genius at making people and events come to life -- all of the four books of his that I've read are brilliantly written with a fantastic sense of timing and sense of humor. Crook Manifesto has lots of this writing, but unfortunately in some instances, I found it to be somewhat overdone, and not just for ironic or comic effect. Here's a paragraph about a Harlem restaurant run by a woman from the south known as Lady Betsy. Carney eats there one day, and his thoughts are merged with the history of the place. It's brilliant -- but flashy. 

"In the midst of the daily Jim Crow tribulations and humiliations, Lady Betsy’s family had assembled the instructions for an eternal feast. A refreshing scorpion spike of heat lay hidden in the collards, and the mac and cheese was a symphony of competing textures, but the chicken was divine, fried in the very skillet of heaven. The house dredge was no mere spicy dusting of cornmeal but a crispy concoction of buttermilk, flour, and dream stuff. To penetrate that wall of batter and gain the meat inside was to storm the keep of pleasure. Local politicians and famous songsmiths posed with the owner in photographs, amid framed citations and plaques from the spectrum of Harlem organizations—the big, the small, and the spurious. A tour bus used to make a special trip uptown and white people from all over the country—perhaps kin to the same white people who had persecuted Lady Betsy down South—poured out of the vehicle to partake, until an incident in which a neighborhood rummy exposed himself in an especially aggressive anatomical display. That put an end to the anthropology." (Crook Manifesto pp. 170-171). 

Harlem has been central in American Black history for at least a century, and I like to think of Whitehead as a superb present-day writer in a wonderful line of predecessors. For example, in 1925, literary scholar Alain Locke edited a book of essays, poetry, and other writing by Harlem authors titled The New Negro. It featured work by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others in the Harlem Renaissance. Since that time, many authors have written fiction and essays set in Harlem. Just a few examples: Chester Himes' detective novels including Cotton Comes to Harlem, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, and James Baldwin's autobiographical writing such as Another Country. 

Although I wasn't thrilled by the newest Whitehead book, I consider him to be definitely one of the best current American authors and extremely worth reading.

Review © 2023 mae sander

Shared with the Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz

Colson Whitehead: “The Underground Railroad”

 

The Underground Railroad, published 2016.

Imagining what it would be like to be a slave in the Old South is so painful that mostly, we don’t exert ourselves and do it. Colson Whitehead’s imagination in The Underground Railroad is so powerful that reading this narrative of slavery and dispossession of one’s own self forces me to imagine the horrors of being owned and having no agency to do anything but suicide or infinitely risky flight from home. He conveys with feeling the existential dread of how you and your parents or you and your children could be sold separately and never be reunited. 

Whitehead’s narrative creates such a vivid picture of both the mental and the physical torments suffered by American slaves before the Civil War that it’s almost unbearable to read. Despite the pain, it’s worth reading not only because it’s history but also because he’s a great writer. The plot is suspenseful and absorbing, the characters are likable or despicable, and the details are vivid. The facts about atrocities like the Fugitive Slave Laws and the resulting vicious Slave Catchers are compelling, moreso than in normal history books. A poignant device Whitehead uses is quoting of advertisements for runaway slaves at the start of each chapter: these contemporary descriptions of human chattel have always been an object lesson on the terrors of the institution of enslavement. Above all, what I found important in this book is that it's written entirely from the point of view of kidnapped Africans and their descendants.

The title of the book, The Underground Railroad, evokes a historic image, but in the novel, one does not find the famous Underground Railroad that existed before the Civil War which was a network of safe houses and secret routes known to “conductors” like Harriet Tubman and other infinitely brave heroes of American history. Whitehead’s novel creates a metaphoric version that paradoxically, is a literal railroad, with engines and freight cars that runs through underground tunnels to take escapees away from their enslavers. This concrete visualization of surreal underground tunnels and frightening engines contributes to the unreality of the whole historic nightmare. The Guardian review explained it this way: "Whitehead has taken that historical metaphor – the network of abolitionists who helped ferry slaves out of the south – and made it into a glistening, steampunk reality."

The New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani describes the book as “a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery.” The following quote from this review provides an insight about the variety and depth of the writing:

“One of the remarkable things about this novel is how Mr. Whitehead found an elastic voice that accommodates both brute realism and fablelike allegory, the plain-spoken and the poetic — a voice that enables him to convey the historical horrors of slavery with raw, shocking power. He conveys its emotional fallout: the fear, the humiliation, the loss of dignity and control. And he conveys the daily brutality of life on the plantation, where Cora is gang-raped, and where whippings (accompanied by scrubbings in pepper water to intensify the pain) are routine.” 

Whitehead also plays with history in various other ways, especially the way he portrays and exaggerates the extreme anti-black laws of North Carolina. The result of his counter-historical choices is to highlight the attitudes and evils of the enslavers; for example in his version of the town where the character Cora is hiding, a lynching occurs almost every day. 

Museums and historic houses that one visits may present the history (including slave cabins) of the Africans who did the work in the Old South, made their enslavers rich, and never received the profits, even for their distant descendants, even to this day. In the novel, a "museum" in the North Carolina town forced the hiding fugitives, including Cora, to play a role in very falsified narratives about the transport of Africans to the US and about their lives on the plantations. Cora was forced to enact a false image of slavery in this museum. Her thoughts as she looked out of the exhibit where she and other fugitives played the role of a boy on a slave ship or a woman servant:

"The stuffed coyotes on their stands did not lie, Cora supposed. And the anthills and the rocks told the truth of themselves. But the white exhibits contained as many inaccuracies and contradictions as Cora’s three habitats. There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers. The enterprising African boy whose fine leather boots she wore would have been chained belowdecks, swabbing his body in his own filth. Slave work was sometimes spinning thread, yes; most times it was not. No slave had ever keeled over dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle. But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it. Certainly not the white monsters on the other side of the exhibit at that very moment, pushing their greasy snouts against the window, sneering and hooting. Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach." (p. 116). 

Compared to the imaginary museum where Cora is on display, the African American History Museum in Washington, which I visited last week seems to me to be sincerely honest and accurate, as well as historically broad and detailed. However real and accurate it is in conveying the injustices done to African Americans for 400 years, though, this museum  didn’t work on my emotional imagination the way that Whitehead’s narrative does. He forces me to perceive enslavement in its true raw and poisonous viciousness, and to portray those who owned other humans as something below humanity themselves.

Note: This is the first time I have read this prize-winning novel, and I have not seen the TV miniseries based on the book. I've read a couple of other books by Colson Whitehead and I'm looking forward to the upcoming publication of his new novel Crook Manifesto next July.

Review © 2023 mae sander

"Harlem Shuffle"

Colson Whitehead's newest book (published in August) is Harlem Shuffle, the adventures of Ray Carney, a resident of Harlem. The three sections of the book take place in 1959, 1961, and 1964. As far as I can tell, Whitehead gets all the details of that era in Harlem -- and in the USA -- right. These details of Carney's picaresque life, and that of his even more criminal cousin Freddie make it a fun book to read: Movies. Food. Diners. Traffic. Danger. Robbing a hotel safe. The ever-changing streets of Harlem and New York City. Apartments good and bad. Furniture...

Wait, why furniture? Because Carney is the owner of a furniture store: a good businessman, improving his business in each of the three sections of the book. In addition, Carney's a good family man, very fond of Elizabeth, his faithful wife, who works as a travel agent specializing in creating safe itineraries for black people who want to avoid hotels and towns where they will be turned away or put in danger. Ray and Elizabeth have two beloved children named May and John, and an idealized home life (except that Ray is often out). Unfortunately, Ray Carney is also a crook, participating in a variety of thefts and cons in cooperation with Freddie and several lowlifes that he knows, some of them former associates of his late father, who was also a crook. Well, if he had just been a decent stay-at-home family man it would have been a rather boring book. 

Discrimination and various prejudices against people of color seems to be the one part of popular culture in the book that's virtually unchanged until now, maybe excepting the denial of hotel or dining accommodations. Futile actions against inequality, such as the protests and sit-ins of the 1960s, seem all too similar to what's happened recently (lots of words, not much change). The characters in the book live with the institutional biases against them, and deal with the inequality they experience, but their lives proceed anyway. This is in extreme contrast to the horrendous result of discrimination described in Whitehead's earlier book The Nickel Boys. That was a very sad book (blogged here). This one is not so sad, but still enlightening.

It's a good story, wonderfully told. Whitehead's descriptive abilities are a joy to read. I loved being immersed in both the plot and the many descriptive details. As always, I cultivate awareness of how authors use food to create atmosphere in a book. Whitehead is especially wonderful at spinning out analogies between food and other things going on. Some examples of food in the novel:

At a Chinese restaurant  "There was a fish tank with greenish water over by the kitchen door. Something moved inside it. Red-and-orange dragons writhed on the wallpaper, roiling like clouds....The cookies were stale and the fortunes discouraging." (pp 85-86)

A family memory, and a lesson, from a petty crook called Pepper:

"His grandpa Alfred had kept a steel-drum smoker out back in Newark, on Clinton Ave. He'd do ribs, brisket, make his own sausage. Grandpa Alfred's father had been a butcher and cook on an indigo plantation in South Carolina and passed down the mysteries. 'You throw chops on some coals,' Pepper's grandfather said, 'that's one way to cook a piece of meat. Few minutes later, you got that black on it, you're done. But barbecue is slow. Put it in that smoke, you got to be ready to wait. That heat and smoke is going to do its work, boy, but you got to wait.' 

"One was fast and one was slow, and it was the sane for stickups and stakeouts. Stickups were chops -- they cook fast and hot, your'e in and out. A stakeout was ribs -- fire down low, slow, taking your time." (p. 175)

Characterizing a diner: "Sometimes when Carney jumped into the Hudson when he was a kid, some of that stuff got into his mouth. The Big Apple Diner served it up and called it coffee." (p. 175)

Two criminals called Bumpy and Chink cultivated a perhaps-undeservedly favorable public opinion: "Take the publicity trick with the hams. Bumpy had started the Christmas good-will giveaway, handing out turkeys to the Harlem needy from the back of a truck. Chink followed suit, tossing out free hams the day before Easter, sometimes to people who were unaware that he'd killed their husband or son. Or were too hungry to care." (p 226)

A man who cooperates with the police against the mob, just wanting to do his civic duty, disappeared: "Washes up in New Jersey three weeks later, throat cut so bad his head is barely hanging on. Like a Pez dispenser." (p. 244)

Finally, a very long interchange about Carney's cousin Freddie's experience during the riots in 1964 that followed the police murder of a young, innocent, unarmed Harlem boy. This really shows Whitehead's writing power to use food to illustrate a point:

"'It was nine o'clock,' Freddie said. 'I get out of the subway to look for a sandwich and the streets are full of people. Raising their fists, waving signs. Chanting, "We want Malcolm X! We Want Malcolm X!" and "Killer cops must go!" ... I'm hungry. I don't want to deal with all that. I'm trying to get a sandwich....

"Freddie followed the crowd to the station house on 123rd, where a CORE field secretary with dark horn-rimmed glasses and a red bow tie listed demands: Police Commissioner Murphy must resign; set up the long-requested civilian review board...

""This old lady elbows me in the stomach, we're packed in. Hot. All these angry Negroes in one place, and they are pissed -- but all I want is a sandwich. I start heading back up to 125th and people are all buzzing, saying the police have beat up and arrested some CORE people. That was that! Boom -- it was on... Rocking cars throwing shit through windows.

"'I'm like, how am I going to get my sandwich in all this mess?

"'On 125th, everybody's closed or closing up early because of the unrest. That Cuban place with the pickle they put on the meat is closed. Jimmy's, the Coronet's got its lights out. That's when I really got hungry -- you know how you want something more when you know you ain't going to get it? Negroes are wrapping chains around those security gates and then pulling the gates off with their cars. Then they break the glass and step inside. I'm a simple man. Put something between two slices and I'm happy. But how am I supposed to get a motherfucking sandwich with all that going on? People running up and down, screaming. I'm like, damn, this riot stuff will cramp a brother's style.'

"Freddie had no recourse but to split uptown and hit Gracie's Diner. 'Got my ass a turkey sandwich, finally. And it was good too. But that was some wild shit, man.'" (pp 217-219)

When I wrote about Whitehead's earlier book (here), I said "Clearly the twenty-first-century reader is challenged to question how much progress we've made to date, in achieving the vision of a better society." While this book is much gentler than The Nickel Boys, the challenge is still here.

Review © 2021 mae sander.

Tallahassee, Florida: The Nickel Boys

Tallahassee, Florida.

When I was in high school, my parents, brother, and sister went to Tallahassee, Florida, for the summer, while I arranged for myself to stay with my aunt and go to a special summer school. My mother brought back with her a set of beautiful watercolors which she did in her kitchen there: she said she loved the high humidity because she liked to wash the colors while the paper was damp, and in Tallahassee summer weather, this worked well. Above is one of these beautiful paintings, which currently hangs in my daughter's house.

The Nickel Boys, winner of the Pulitzer
Prize in Fiction for 2020.

I thought about these idyllic scenes with cows and green grass as I read a novel that takes place in and near Tallahassee: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. Although it's a famous prize-winner, I knew little about the book. You probably know more than I did, as it was a best-seller and widely reviewed.

The Nickel Boys shocked me with its power and skill and immediacy. It made me think about the two worlds of Tallahassee: the bucolic farm scenes my mother painted and the cruel and unjust world of the central character, the boy Elwood, a bright and ambitious boy -- but he is destroyed by his society. The date of my family's stay in Florida, and thus the date on this painting, is just at the time when Elwood was a boy, a bit before the main action of the book, which particularly made me connect the book and my mother's paintings.

All the time I was reading it, I was thinking about "Black Lives Matter," which to me calls forth the time in the book when Black Lives didn't matter to anyone but themselves and when systematic racism was the norm, in fact was almost required of whites. And how we need to work on the way the set of injustices is still embedded almost invisibly in our society. Or as it's stated in the novel about the white southerners:

"Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom. Take him away from his family, whip him until all he remembers is the whip, chain him up so all he knows is chains. ... After the Civil War, when a five-dollar fine for a Jim Crow charge— vagrancy, changing employers without permission, 'bumptious contact,' what have you— swept black men and women up into the maw of debt labor, the white sons remembered the family lore." (p. 191). 

The novel invokes the Black experience in Tallahassee, the setting of The Nickel Boys but it could be anywhere in America. I grew up in St.Louis, where it wasn't seriously different. You know that special summer school I went to? I think there was no more than one Black student, if any, in a hand-picked group of several hundred students in several academic areas, representing the entire urban and suburban area. St.Louis remains in the news for instances of injustice and bigotry, but I'm getting off the topic.

The beautiful story of Elwood's childhood optimism emerges as we learn of his school experiences with one good teacher, and as he's encouraged in his hopes by his reading of the speeches and actions of Martin Luther King, particularly by a recording of one of King's speeches. Whitehead makes extremely effective use of quotes from King throughout the book. Clearly the twenty-first-century reader is challenged to question how much progress we've made to date, in achieving the vision of a better society. And the hopes of the boy Elwood are clearly such a futile set of hopes.

Abuses are common in Elwood's life. A rigged system subsidizes white home buyers, not Blacks like Elwood's grandmother. A rigged system sent him to reform school -- the Nickel School -- when he hoped to go to college. At Nickel, Elwood lived a life in torment in a hideous place called the White House. Systematic and legally mandated injustice meant the Black inmates of the reform school mainly had bad oatmeal to eat. School managers sold the more wholesome food meant for the boys, especially that meant for the black boys, to the town diners and drug stores -- Elwood was forced to help deliver this food to the town businesses. The book is full of extremely specific examples, but the reader can never lose sight of what they meant for society 60 years ago, and what they still mean now.

The cruelty of cheating the boy-inmates of the food intended for them becomes critical in the final scenes when state inspectors arrive to see the situation at the school. A show is put on for the inspectors, and the boys know it, though they enjoy the moment. Briefly:

"The three house fathers stood before the serving trays, which that day were filled with the food the students were supposed to get every morning: scrambled eggs, ham, fresh juice, and pears." (p. 176). 

"The other students made so much noise when they saw what the kitchen had cooked up for lunch— hamburgers and mashed potatoes and ice cream that would never see the inside of Fisher’s Drugs— that Blakeley told them to keep it down. 'You want them to think this is some kind of circus we running here?'" (p. 180).  

"Perhaps Nickel was the very afterlife that awaited him, with a White House down the hill and an eternity of oatmeal and the infinite brotherhood of broken boys." (p. 189).

At the end of the book, in some thoughts of a minor character who didn't experience the Tallahassee life, says much about the current way that this history continues to haunt America:

"She had grown up in the same country with the same skin. She lived in New York City in 2014. It was hard to remember sometimes how bad it used to be— bending to a colored fountain when she visited her family in Virginia, the immense exertion white people put into grinding them down— and then it all returned in a rush, set off by tiny things, like standing on a corner trying to hail a cab, a routine humiliation she forgot five minutes later because if she didn’t, she’d go crazy, and set off by the big things, a drive through a blighted neighborhood snuffed out by that same immense exertion, or another boy shot dead by a cop: They treat us like subhumans in our own country. Always have." (p. 206). 

If you read this book, I think you will know what is meant by "Black Lives Matter." I hope so. If you leave a comment here that says "all lives matter" I won't publish it, because either you just don't get it, or you accept the evil of the racism of our society.

Review by mae sander for mae's food blog at maefood dot blog spot dot com. © 2020.