Seven years ago, Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shetterly discovered a great untold story in her own hometown.
Shetterly, 47, grew up in Hampton, Virginia surrounded by “extraordinary ordinary people,” men and women who toiled daily at NASA’s Langley Research Center, including her own father. But it wasn’t until a holiday visit when her husband asked a question—prompting her father’s story about the black women who calculated the trajectories of the first orbital space flight—that the gravitas really sunk in.
“These women’s lives intersected so many of the signature moments of what we call the American century,” Shetterly noted, “so why has it taken decades for us to tell their story?”
Flanked by colorful NASA backdrops and a full off-white astronaut’s suit, Shetterly shared her “aha moment” in front of a record-breaking crowd at Case Western Reserve University’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. convocation. Several schools bused in students. NASA employees milled around the lobby, passing out literature about other “hidden figures” and giving stickers to young people in attendance.
The four women at the center of Hidden Figureswere NASA mathematicians who broke barriers—”intrepid women of science who also saw themselves as instruments of social change,” Shetterly said. “They exemplified your MLK theme this year of hope and solidarity.” Dorothy Vaughan was the first black supervisor in NASA history, heading up a team of “human computers.” Katherine Johnson worked with the Space Task Group, calculating the launch of astronaut John Glenn’s first orbit around the Earth, while Mary Jackson integrated the University of Virginia to become NASA’s first black aeronautical engineer. Christine Darden became one of the leading experts on sonic boom research.
“It was very important to me that ‘American Dream’ be in the subtitle of this book,” Shetterly declared. “And the most important scene for me in the movie was the first one, where a little black girl in big glasses — like me — is standing at the blackboard factoring quadratic equations.”
As Shetterly dug into the research, the number of women who had worked at NASA began to rise exponentially. “A thousand women working as professional mathematicians, getting up and going to work at NASA, every day for decades,” she said. “Why didn’t we turn them into professional role models and use them to pull generations of young people, particularly young women, into science careers?”
Johnson, as a black woman born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, had just a two percent chance of finishing high school and a life expectancy of 35. Today, she is a lucid 98-year-old. “These women had excellent educations at HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges & Universities],” the author said, “and when the doors opened, they were as prepared as well as anyone.”
Shetterly, herself comfortable with calculations, landed in the financial sector after graduating from the University of Virginia, working at investment banks J.P Morgan and Merrill Lynch, before switching gears to publishing. In 2005, she moved to Mexico City with her husband Aran, where they spent 11 years publishing an independent magazine, Inside Mexico.
Shetterly sold the Hidden Figures book proposal to William Morrow in 2014, and received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the research. Almost immediately, Hollywood came calling. Within months, she was working as an historical consultant on the film adaptation before her book was even finished. It landed in theaters this winter and, to date, Shetterly has watched the movie six times and counting.
“I’m thrilled with how it translates to the screen,” she said, beaming. Academy voters agree with her — the adaptation has been nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture.
So why did these black women remain in the shadows? Part of it was the classified nature of the work, Shetterly conceded. But the most egregious reason was the unrelenting segregation of the workplace itself, with separate offices, bathrooms and lunchrooms. The human computers wore skirts and heels every day, “their hedge against being mistaken for the cafeteria worker or the cleaning lady.”
Sexism also played its part. Computing was considered women’s work, Shetterly said, and defined as sub-professional. It often meant women solved the same problems and carried the same workload as their male counterparts, but were relegated to less pay, prestige and credit: “If today’s America gets a case of double vision when trying to focus its gaze on a black female mathematician or scientist, just think of the blind spot these women existed in sixty years ago.”
Of the four women Shetterly featured in the book, Johnson and Darden are still alive. Last May, NASA honored Johnson’s three-decade career with a new 40,000-square-foot Langley research facility named for her. “I have always done my best,” she said at the ceremony. “At the time it was just another day’s work.”
The Evening Road returns Laird Hunt to Indiana, where the Anisfield-Wolf winner lived on his grandmother’s farm during his high school years, and where his feel for the rural Midwest and its uncelebrated people has few equals in American literature.
This seventh novel springs from one of the nation’s most troubled wells. Hunt tells it over a single summer night, anchored in the bloody lynching of two men – Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp — in Marion, Indiana August 7, 1930.
“The events of that evening gave rise to the poem ‘Strange Fruit’ by Abel Meeropol, which was made famous as a song by Billie Holiday,” Hunt, now 48, writes about the source of his new novel. “At least 10,000 people (some put the number as high as 15k) flooded into the medium-sized town to attend the lynching, while the considerable African-American population of the town either stayed indoors or got out of town. While I don’t know if any of my family members attended the lynching that day/night, I found it strange and troubling that in all the years I lived with my grandmother on the farm, I never heard a whisper about what was an event of national significance and implication.”
Into that silence flowed The Evening Road, a haunting and disturbingly lyrical novel told in the voices of three women: a red-headed, big-chested secretary named Ottie Lee Henshaw trying to reach the lynching; Calla Destry, a light-skinned, intelligent and angry adolescent caught up in the mayhem, and, for the final 13 pages, the “touched” Sally Gunner, known for conversing with angels after she took a blow to her head.
Hunt is marvelous at characterization – Neverhome, his Civil War novel, rests on the mesmerizing authenticity of Ash Thompson, an Indiana farm woman who passes as a man to fight for the Union. And Kind One, his Anisfield-Wolf winner, gives readers two sisters who overthrow their 19th-century bondage on a remote Kentucky pig farm, then chain up and work the owner in return.
The Evening Road runs closer to home, chronologically, although Hunt is still liquid with his coordinates: an old crone recounts a version of Kind One almost as a spell while she is fixing Ottie Lee’s hair. Ottie Lee herself is a foul-mouthed, small town beauty with a lecherous boss and a quarrelsome husband. She falls in with three men trying to reach Marvel, as Hunt calls the town. She has wit and resourcefulness, as well as a cruelty that seems rooted in the grim past.
“The world can shut your mouth for you sometimes,” Ottie Lee reflects, having stumbled on a Quaker prayer vigil that mixed blacks and whites. “Get so big right there in front of you that it won’t fit in your eyes.” She also hears out a politician, firing up a picnic crowd he plans to lead to Marvel. He calls the lynchings “a torch of clarity to burn bright across the countryside during hard days. . . It is a difficult thing, a harsh thing, but it will burn things clear. Bring us back into balance. The hardest things always do.”
After 140 pages, Hunt leaves Ottie Lee. The second half of the book belongs to 16-year-old Calla, whose parents died in a laundry fire and who is boarding with a foster family in Marvel. She has stubbornly defied them to meet a beau, and winds up alone on the road trying to leave, but not before the crowd envelopes her: “Some were laughing like it was a true carnival, and others had on hard faces like they were marching to war. Some didn’t have on any expression at all, like they were killed folk had clawed themselves out of the cemetery just to walk into town and look glass-eyed up into the courthouse trees.”
Calla commits three brazen acts of defiance as she travels, and Hunt lets readers ponder how she and Ottie Lee run in parallel and diverge. Sudden blooms of violence pock the story, even as Hunt refrains from depicting the murders in Marvel. Instead, Calla wonders why whites “thought they needed to lift people up into the air to kill them. Their saints and sinners both. . . I hadn’t read the papers yet, hadn’t heard any accounts to turn the sky of my memories black and send me drifting forward through the dark. That would be during the days to come.”
The Evening Road may be a bucolic title, but its beckoning is urgent. Once more, Hunt draws up sorrow and dark light from the murderous past. The politician’s mother says “place like this glues itself to your bones; you don’t scrape it off.” Rather like Hunt’s masterful new novel itself.
Journalist Isabel Wilkerson keeps her readers connected to history.
During the summer Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro, Wilkerson gave context to swimmer Simone Manuel’s historic gold medal by bringing forward the long history of blacks being barred from public pools and beaches — and she did it in a mere 300 words. Likewise, when Clevelanders rejoiced over their first NBA championship, Wilkerson pointed out the triumph rested on LeBron James being a child of the Great Migration. She regularly uses her Facebook page to profile politicians, activists and entertainers whose ascension in popular culture lies in the Great Migration — the mass exodus of six million African-Americans between 1910-1970 from the rural South to all corners of the United States.
“Now, more than ever, we need to know our country’s history,” Wilkerson, 55, wrote after the presidential election. “Our current divisions are neither new nor surprising and persist because we do not truly know and have not reckoned with what has gone before us.”
Who better to shepherd that reckoning than Wilkerson herself? A public intellectual and expert on the Great Migration, she captured these journeys in The Warmth of Other Suns, named one of the best nonfiction books of all-time by the New York Times and winner of an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2011.
So what can the Great Migration teach us about our current political climate? According to Wilkerson, it’s all connected. “No adult alive today will live to see a time when the time of enslavement was equal to the time of freedom,” she told Krista Tippett, host of the podcast On Being. “And so that shows you that this history is long, and the history is deep.”
Since the publication of Warmth seven years ago, Wilkerson has positioned her Facebook page as a font of stories connecting the Great Migration with the headlines of today. Nearly 50,000 people follow these timely posts, which mine her smart commentary on race, politics and current events.
After Minneapolis resident Philando Castile was shot and killed during a traffic stop in July 2016, Wilkerson wrote, “These are times when the wisdom of the ancestors comes to bear.” She left readers with a quote from activist Ella Baker: “Remember, we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses all mankind.”
Wilkerson’s dedication to these stories earned her a 2015 National Humanities medal, which she was awarded alongside musician and author James McBride (who also won an Anisfield-Wolf award — for “The Color of Water” in 1997). President Barack Obama singled out Warmth as a “masterpiece,” adding that because of her efforts “one of the most important chapters in our history is told in a book any young person can pick up and read.”
Every evening in her four-story Brooklyn townhouse, author Jacqueline Woodson and her partner gather their family around for a meal and a ritual: Each person shares one act of kindness they’ve given that day — and one way kindness found its way back to them.
Celebrated for Brown Girl Dreaming and Another Brooklyn, Woodson, 53, writes literature with family at its core. Each Kindness, her 2012 picture book, considers two schoolgirls and a missed chance at friendship. “How does one walk through this world and be kind without even giving it a second thought?” Woodson said she wondered as she wrote the work.
With wit and warmth and a bit of edge, Woodson told a packed auditorium in Beachwood, Ohio, how she thinks on the page and in person about “identity, empathy and belonging.” Her hosts — Beachwood City Schools, Hawken School, Laurel School and the Cleveland office of Facing History and Ourselves — collaborated to prepare their students for Woodson’s visit. The educators want to foster empathy and belonging in “our divided country,” as Hawken’s headmaster Scott Looney put it.
In writing more than 30 books, Woodson said she said she works to quench young readers’ thirst for texts in which they can see themselves: “For a lot of people of color, we have had a long history of windows and very few mirrors. I wanted to grow up and fill that hole and. . .have it overflowing.”
Jacqueline Woodson signs books after her talk on identity and belonging.
Woodson recited from memory the opening pages of Brown Girl Dreaming that recount her birth in Columbus, Ohio. She grew up a voracious reader in South Carolina and New York City. She insisted that it was opportunity, not talent, that propelled her from her Bushwick neighborhood to win a National Book Award in 2014 and become the Young People’s Poet Laureate for the Poetry Foundation.
“You throw a stone [in Bushwick] — you’ll hit 25 Jacqueline Woodsons. It’s not like I’m some superstar. I was lucky,” she said. “But there were so many creative geniuses in my neighborhood — people who danced, who sang, people who should have been judges or at least really good lawyers.”
Joking that dyslexia had caused her to approach the stage in the wrong direction, Woodson highlighted her adaptive behaviors: “I am a very slow reader and a slow writer. I read everything out loud.” She said she wrote Brown Girl Dreaming in verse because that was how her memory works, and she primes it by reading poetry and listening to eclectic music, sampling Black Eyed Peas and Glen Campbell and Tupac all in one sitting.
She was also generous in citing other writers, quoting Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Kwame Alexander and the documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck, whose new movie “I Am Not Your Negro” releases February 3. And she is an enthusiast for family viewing of “Black-ish,” a television series she named the best of 2016 for the New York Times. (The Woodson clan chaffs as it waits a day after it originally airs to catch it on their streaming service.) “We love it more than anything else that has ever been on television,” she wrote. But the real appeal is its role as a conversation starter.
“Every single day at our table, we’re talking about race. We’re talking about class…” Woodson said. “It’s important to be comfortable having those conversations around the dinner table.”
Late at night and through eight grueling years, literature helped sustain the outgoing president of the United States.
In a wide-ranging interview with New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani, Barack Obama reflected on the centrality of reading and the titles that have given him insight and solace, particularly in fiction. He mentions just completing Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” and putting Maxine Hong Kingston‘s “The Woman Warrior” on the Kindle of his older daughter Malia.
The conversation shows a deeply reflective man in the midst of shaping his second act. At 55, he leaves the White House a relatively young man, and he is eager to return to writing. Composing a memoir, drawn from journals Obama kept during his two terms as Commander-in-Chief, will be his first order of business.
Before transitioning into private citizen, Obama invited five novelists to break bread — Colson Whitehead, Zadie Smith and Junot Diaz (all three Anisfield-Wolf award winners) along with Barbara Kingsolver and Dave Eggers — to hear their perspectives on the craft and compare notes on culture and storytelling.
“I figured after all my criticism of his policies I wouldn’t be high on his list for anything but clearly there’s room at his lunch table for dissent,” Diaz wrote on Facebook. “He burned with optimism and faith invincible.”
Much like Edith Anisfield Wolf, Obama believes in the power of the written word to better us: “When so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify — as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize — is more important than ever.”
Type “scientist” into Google and what images do you find? As author Margot Lee Shetterly would describe it, the results are pretty pale. They are “mostly male. Usually white.”
But the Virginia writer knew this convention to be false. She grew up surrounded by blacks in STEM. Her father spent 40 years working in NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Her aunts and uncles overwhelmingly made their way into engineering and technology. To Shetterly, “the face of science was brown like mine.”
It makes sense, then, that her first book, “Hidden Figures,” was sparked by a visit home, when her father casually mentioned that her former Sunday school teacher, Kathleen Land, worked for NASA as a mathematician. Shetterly, 47, followed that thread and spent the next several years researching these little-known “human computers,” women who, for decades, were tucked away in footnotes, their contributions to flight and space exploration gathering dust.
“Hidden Figures” brings four particular women out of the shadows — Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden.
Through careful interviews and painstaking research, Shetterly tells their stories. The book begins in 1943, with the country in the throes of World War II. A labor shortage and concurrent pressure from civil rights leader A. Phillip Randolph forced the government to put out the call to women of all races to work as mathematicians at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — the predecessor to NASA.
As each woman — Vaughan, Johnson, Jackson and Darden — joined these ranks, she was shown to racially separate facilities and lunchrooms. Shetterly asks readers to imagine “the chutzpah it took for an African-American woman in a segregated southern workplace to tell her bosses she was sure her calculations would put a man on the moon.”
But these women pushed back in ways both significant and measured. One colleague, Miriam Mann, would swipe the “colored computers” sign off their designated lunchroom table every day, daring supervisors to put it back. Jackson found herself telling her boss’ boss that his numbers were incorrect, only to have him come to apologize after he realized she was right.
Taraji P. Henson (left, in pink), Octavia Spencer (center left) and Janelle Moane (right, on desk) star as three NASA mathematicians in “Hidden Figures.” The book explores their journey, as well as a fourth woman, Christine Darden, who does not appear in the film.
Incidents of resistance also show up in the movie adaptation of the book, starring Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson, Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan and Janelle Monae as Mary Jackson. (Darden, who didn’t join NASA until 1967, doesn’t appear in the film.)
All three deliver solid performances, making the viewer comfortable in a world where equations run off the tongue as easily as a recipe in more conventional fare. While Henson’s character receives most of the screen time, it is Monae’s character that elevates the film above a one-note exercise. Jackson’s story — fighting to become the first African American aeronautical engineer at NASA — is worthy of a film of its own.
Both the movie and book make us wonder: How much promise and potential was lost in the teeth of Jim Crow? How much help did Jim Crow give the Russian’s space program?
Over the past year, I’ve been asked many times about the correlation between Japanese Americans and Muslim Americans.
I recently completed a documentary film, Good Luck Soup, which chronicles my family’s experience in the decades after the World War II Internment Camps. Many suggest that the Japanese American experience of the 1940s mirrors the Muslim American experience of today. While there are similarities, the starkest isn’t between Muslims and Japanese Americans, rather, it’s between the American public of the 40s and today. Both periods used fear to rationalize crude, racist and hateful gut reactions towards people who are not considered “American” because of how they look, pray and culturally associate.
While these references are alarming, I don’t believe our nation would allow it to happen. What I do fear is the ease with which many have degraded, isolated and vilified an entire religion (1.6 billion Muslims in the world, of which 3.3 million live in the United States) on social media, national television, in print publications and within private conversations. Hateful rhetoric can mutate into something far more putrid than a registry or political action. It can become a belief.
Clearly, there is a current threat from terrorists and maniacs claiming allegiance to ISIS, just as there was a threat from the Japanese, Germans and Italian armies during World War II. But, one shouldn’t need to be Japanese American, or Muslim American, to know the dangers of labeling and stereotyping an entire race, ethnicity or religion. At one time or another, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish or Puerto Rican people (just to name a few) have all been blanketed with harmful misconceptions. We may not all know the sting of prejudice, but at the very least, we should all be able to understand that someone in our family tree was disliked because of their heritage, and not their actions. We should all be mindful of where our families come from and prevent our histories from dissipating with time.
Unfortunately, racism does not die easily. It festers and is passed down more like an inherited illness, from parent to child and then to grandchild, and continues to foment hatred and disdain through each generation. I know this because my family has seen it. In 1942, my grandparents were incarcerated in internment camps because they were Japanese. After they relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, they were called Japs and gooks as they assimilated into a predominantly black and white region. In the 1970s, my father was called a chink for eating at a restaurant within a certain Cleveland neighborhood. And in the 1990s, my siblings and I were called Japs, chinks and gooks, on a regular basis, while growing up in an east-side suburb of Cleveland.
Japanese Americans report for physical examinations in Denver on February 22, 1944, before being sent to the internment camps. Photo courtesy Good Luck Soup film.
The collective experiences of these three generations taught me that racism is learned and passed down from parent to child. Fifty years from now, will young Muslim Americans growing up in Chicago, Cleveland or Miami hear the same stereotypes, slurs and accusations that their parents or grandparents hear today? Will they be told to “go back to your country,” and labeled as a terrorist? I hope not.
But, if we don’t learn to address war, race and terrorism with the levels of complexity that they deserve, our society will repeat the same ignorant acts. Unfortunately, the fear rippling through the American public today seems akin to the fear of the 1940s. Can the children and grandchildren of those who interned my grandparents do better?
Matthew Hashiguchi is an award winning documentary filmmaker and Assistant Professor in Multimedia Film & Production at Georgia Southern University whose work focuses on the diverse cultural, social and ethnic stories of American society. Matthew’s work has screened in film festivals throughout the world and has been featured in various outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and Al Jazeera.
How does one structure a year in reading?
The New York Times published the answers of 47 writers and artists who reflected on the books they chose over the past year. Their responses create a fascinating skein of reading and thinking, and include essays from four Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recipients. The entire conversation, which weaves from basketball hall-of-famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to filmmaker Ava DuVernay to former House speaker Newt Gingrich to author Maxine Hong Kingston, is enlivening, a hopeful way to face into a new year.
Praise for “The Underground Railroad,” the stupendous fall novel from Anisfield-Wolf winner Colson Whitehead, threads through these reflections. Salman Rushdie read it; so did the YA-writer John Green, Anne Tyler and Judd Apatow.
Maxine Hong Kingston, who won a 1978 Anisfield-Wolf prize for “The Woman Warrior,” came up with the longest and the widest-ranging list. She sampled Charles Darwin and Nora Ephron and Andrew Solomon’s “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas on Depression.” He won an Anisfield-Wolf prize for “Far from the Tree,” another landmark, luminous work of nonfiction.
Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust expended her entire essay praising “March,” the three-book graphic memoir by Congressman John Lewis recounting his formation in the crucible of Civil Rights. These books in turn are based on “Walking with the Wind,” Lewis’ classic accounting of his life, which won an Anisfield-Wolf award in 1999.
Another graphic work attracted the praise of Junot Diaz, who kicks off the New York Times compilation recommending “Ghetto Brother,” a history of a multiracial Bronx, drawn and created by Julian Voloy and Claudia Ahlering. Diaz, who won an Anisfield-Wolf for his novel “The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” also highlighted another nonfiction title: Wesley Lowery’s “They Can’t Kill Us All.” Diaz writes that “Lowery more or less pulls the sheet off America” in a book subtitled “Ferguson, Baltimore and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement.”
James McBride, whose 1997 memoir “The Color of Water” is still taught widely in universities, strikes a bluesy note in an essay that divides books “into categories like saxophone players.” He read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” and then — to shake off some of its disturbing currents – turned to the manuscript for “Two and Two,” a forthcoming memoir from Rafe Bartholomew. McBride highly recommends this portrait of New York’s oldest saloon.
Samantha Power, who won both a Pulitzer and an Anisfield-Wolf award for “A Problem of Hell,” read books last year that illuminated her work as the United States ambassador to the United Nations: Madeline Albright’s “Madame Secretary” and Clark Clifford’s “Counsel to the President.”
The list from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was flavored by two Anisfield-Wolf winning authors: “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson, and “Charcoal Joe,” the latest detective novel from Walter Mosley. The basketball legend also read poetry, specifically “Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth” by Warsan Shire, a Kenyan-born Somali poet. Meanwhile sublime novelist Colm Toibin read 2013 Anisfield-Wolf honoree “My Promised Land.” Toibin described Ari Shavit’s nonfiction work as giving him “an increased sense of the complexity of Israeli heritage.”
Back in the United States, filmmaker Jill Soloway thought about making a pilot as she read “You Can’t Touch My Hair” by Phoebe Robinson. And Jacqueline Woodson recently held up her copy on PBS’s “News Hour” as a galvanizing book from 2016.
However one navigates a year, it is bettered by the company of a good book. The selections in this compilation are a bracing place to start.
Marilynne Robinson – she of the incandescent, Pulitzer-winning prose – wasn’t thinking about her celebrated fiction last month, even though she took clear pleasure recalling its pull in 2015 bringing President Barack Obama to Iowa to interview her. Instead, the winner of Lifetime Achievement from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize dwelt last month on her 1989 nonfictionMother Country.
“I can report that I’ve been sued only once – and that for a book about nuclear waste disposal by the United Kingdom that makes the Irish Sea the most radioactive water in the world,” she told a Dayton audience aboutMother Country. “If I wrote only one book — that would be the one.”
Observing that “my fiction and nonfiction come from different parts of my head,” Robinson smiled wryly, her cascade of white-gold hair giving her the aura of a prophet. At 73, she wielded gravitas on a panel of literary stars. She asserted that war crimes and environmental assaults were evils that get buried in willful acts of not-knowing:
“There are things we choose not to know that are absolutely as dangerous and destructive as what we think we know,” she told some 300 listeners at Sinclair Community College in downtown Dayton.
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize – established to commemorate the accords that ended the Bosnian War – has honored 60 writers in its 11 years. “The secret to peace threads through all of them,” said Sharon Rab, founder and co-chair. “These books have fine-tuned my sense of what is acceptable, and, more importantly, what is not acceptable.”
And the most recent lineup of authors gathered in November under a slate gray Dayton sky, exemplified some of the best work in contemporary letters.
“As a realist, I don’t believe in peace; as an idealist, I have to believe in it,” noted Viet Thanh Nguyen, honored for The Sympathizer, a political novel whose narrator spied for both sides in the Vietnam War. By squaring up to atrocity, Nguyen argues, “we can also imagine the best that humanity is capable of, and in that way provide a vision, a way to overcome the momentum of past conflicts and inherited bitterness, the inertia of accepting our brutality. A strong dose of unsentimental realism, mixed with a touch of wild idealism – that is one way to imagine what I attempted” inThe Sympathizer.
Banned in Vietnam, the novel is being taken up by some U.S. military academies. “The significance of the Vietnam War is it is one more episode of perpetual war that the United States is engaged in,” Nguyen said. “This is something that Americans must confront.”
James Hannaham, runner-up for the Dayton fiction prize for Delicious Foods, told the audience that his uncle, an art professor “has a motto I’ve internalized: Fear No Art. I’m always gravitating to those things I’m afraid of.”
Indeed, crack cocaine has a major role in Delicious Foods. As Hannaham read literature “attempting to deal with the legacy of slavery,” he found “these books would set the story in the past. At some point I realized I didn’t have to do that, and it seemed to be a way to make a significant contribution to the genre.”
Although he gave a copy of his novel to filmmaker Ava DuVernay, Hannaham said he isn’t particularly drawn to Hollywood. “One of the miracles of fiction is the thing can get made,” he said. “It’s artisanal. You sit alone in a room with your thoughts. . . No one is telling you what they think 14-year-old white boys want to see.”
Rab, who works to bering peace prize books into classrooms and conversation, said the nonprofit is adding a new wrinkle this winter: a chance for stakeholders to help rebuilt the National Library at Sarajevo in Bosnia, which was firebombed during the war. More than two million books were destroyed. The peace prize’s “Fly With the Doves Book Circle” donates a new book to rebuilding Sarajevo’s collection for every $25 contributed on the website.
“We plan to send a complete set of DLPP award-winning books to Bosnia as our gift to them,” Rab said.
Wil Haygood, who thoughtfully guided the writers’ presentations, said his travels had given him a sense of the sacredness of books, including during the conflict in Somalia, where he witnessed boys and men risking their lives to hide and save them.
“During our own Civil War,” Haygood said, “Abraham Lincoln gave instructions to his military leaders: Keep as many libraries open as you can. . . Not every place did, but even in the midst of war, many were.”
Cross the American criminal justice system, and – if you are unlucky — prepare for crushing debt.
Here are a smattering of the possible fees awaiting defendants: for court appearances, for room and board in jail or prison, for court-required drug testing, counseling or community service, for a public defender or for electronic monitoring.
Late fees and collection penalties compound these debts into punitive amounts, especially for anyone living in poverty. In 2011, the city of Philadelphia sent bills on unpaid criminal justice debts to more than 20 percent of its residents, with a median debt of $4,500.
One notorious example surfaced in a Department of Justice investigation of the Ferguson Police Department in Missouri. It showed the town of Ferguson set more than $3 million in revenue targets for criminal justice fines and fees in 2015, meant to cover more than 20 percent of the town’s operating budget.
“It’s become painfully obvious after Ferguson — where the courts were an ATM for the municipality,” said Ohio Supreme Court Justice Maureen O’Connor, “and there is no justification for that.”
Yvette McGee Brown, a former Ohio Supreme Court justice, added, “People of color have been complaining about this for years. Poor people have been complaining about this for years.” She pointed out that “a $100 fine may be no big deal” to a judge sitting on the bench, but catastrophic to a citizen making $7 per hour. “Our orders have real impact on people.”
“We’ve created the equivalent of a modern-day debtor’s prison in fees, fines and bail that basically puts a price tag on freedom,” Smiley told the Cleveland audience.
Judge Ronald B. Adrine, presiding judge of Cleveland Municipal Court, is a national leader on combatting the scourge of fines, fees and bail falling most heavily on the poor. “Looked at from any objective standpoint, [defendants] who are low income, low risk, these people are being absolutely preyed upon,” he said. “We’ve allowed numerous people to fall into this crack and be piled on so that they can never climb out of this hole.”
One consequence: these debts prevent citizens from getting a driver’s license in many states. A year ago the White House convened a seminar on this topic, and Adrine described it as transformative. He returned to Cleveland and convened the city’s 14 municipal judges: “We changed nonviolent misdemeanors,” he said, “so that you are allowed to get out on your signature [instead of posting bail].”
Asked point-blank by Smiley if the U.S. criminal justice system is fundamentally fair, Adrine said, “I believe it is fundamentally fair but not always fair.” Judges, he stressed, “are not trying to let out vicious criminals on the street. But we want to make sure that people who are low risk are not destroyed by being kept in jail.”
McGee Brown said the role of poverty cannot be overestimated. “There is a reason O.J. [Simpson] got off,” she said. “There is a reason when you are wealthy you are more likely to get off, even if you’ve committed a horrific crime.” O’Connor added, “You cannot have justice in an underfunded system, such as we have, with overburdened public defenders, judges watching the clock moving cases along and prosecutors acting on a formula too often.”
Mansfield Frazier, Cleveland vintner and community activist, asked, “How can the courts escape the clutches of the bail bond industry? They have a strong lobby.”
McGee Brown retorted, “Their power isn’t as great as they think it is. I don’t make decisions based on what the bail bondsmen want . . . It’s really about the judges pushing back.”
The panelists spoke of the importance of judicial education, adequate funding and efforts to combat voter apathy in electing judges. “Judges have tremendous power and I don’t think the voter recognizes it,” said Lakewood Municipal Court Judge Patrick Carroll.
Adrine underscored Carroll’s point: “Politics is the art of who lives, who dies and who pays.”
“Courting Justice” will become a yearlong initiative involving Ideastream, the City Club of Cleveland, the Cleveland Foundation and the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association. The next convening will be January 19 at the bar association. Interested people can call 216-870-1203 for more information.
“It is our hope that we can get to the root of this challenge,” said Ronn Richard, president of the Cleveland Foundation. “We can reflect on the procedures and policies that can so deeply derail the lives of the disenfranchised.”
And then change them.
“Call soul food what it is: the edible scripture of the Black aesthetic, the culinary answer to jazz, memory food of a people.”
That’s a tweet from Michael Twitty, a culinary historian from Maryland, who sees Cleveland as “the deep north.” To stay warm, he kept on his light grey jacket as he addressed the audience at the Cleveland Natural History Museum gathered for his December talk, “A Place at the Table.”
He begins with a question: “What if the enslaved could tell their story through food?” The story of American history, he argues, lies within the story of the foods people in bondage ate and the meals they cooked for others. It grieves him that so many hadn’t been properly acknowledged or recorded.
Via his food blog, AfroCulinaria.com, Twitty seeks culinary reconciliation. He has poured years into researching the origins of Southern cuisine and the agricultural connections between West Africa, the Caribbean and North America. His tweets at @KosherSoul are just as rich.
A childhood trip to Colonial Williamsburg sparked young Michael’s interest. The splendor of the kitchen in the Governor’s Palace fascinated the 7-year-old foodie. “My father was a Vietnam vet and all he wanted to see was guns and the cannons going off,” he said. “I had him in the kitchen for an hour and a half, staring at this beautiful pheasant. . . I actually flirted with the pheasant.”
It’s fitting then that the Twitty family – both living and ancestral — features prominently in his work. He started The Cooking Gene, a crowdfunded culinary tour of the South, five years ago, as he traced his family tree through two centuries. Along with a host of scholars and chefs, he visited the lands they worked and in some cases, sought to meet the descendants of the people who owned them.
Twitty’s first book, of the same name, will arrive in 2017. A few prospective publishes worried that Twitty’s identities – a black, gay, Jewish man – would be too much for readers. “This country is the only place I’m possible,” he retorted. “How dare you deny me the one thing America can give me – my uniqueness. My possibility.”
When Twitty hosts cooking demonstrations on former plantations and historical sites, he dons the full 18th century attire of those in captivity. He uses tools that would have been readily available to that population – cast iron skillets feature heavily – and recipes that would have been intimately familiar to the enslaved people on the plantation. Think okra and rabbit soup or mashed black eye pea fritters.
From the lectern in Cleveland, Twitty was careful with his language. He mentioned “enslaved people,” not slaves. “Slaveholders,” not master. They were “freedom seekers,” not runaway slaves. “Better yet, patriots,” he insisted. “Not slave rebels—patriots. They only wanted what America promised.”
In his work as a culinary historian, he has mastered the art of preserving culinary history, deftly maneuvering his way around a reluctant elder to slowly ease down their guard as he tries to capture their recipes. His first tip? Present yourself as a helper, not a pest. “Don’t be lazy; do some work. Wash the dishes, sweep the floor,” Twitty advises. Only then can you sidle up with questions about ingredients. Another tip? “Keep some measuring spoons in your pocket.” All the better to measure what the elders tend to eyeball.
He also brings dearly won kitchen wisdom to our political moment: “With these incidents of hate that we see, we have a choice. And that choice is to feed people. Feed them knowledge. Feed them love.”
A visibly emotional John Lewis took to the podium at the 2016 National Book Awards to accept this year’s prize for MARCH: Book Three, the last installation of the graphic novel series on the civil rights movement.
Flanked by collaborators Andrew Aydin, his co-writer, and illustrator Nate Powell, Lewis shared the significance of the moment with the crowd. His brief acceptance speech, which brought tears to both Aydin and Powell, is worth a listen.
by Charles Ellenbogen
Eddie has just escaped from the farm; Eddie also has no hands.
Those are among the first two things we learn in James Hannaham’s outstanding, tense and underappreciated novel, Delicious Foods (underappreciated despite winning the 2015 PEN/Faulker Award). Having established that frame, Hannaham recounts the events that led to that point using the voices of three narrators: Eddie, his mother Darlene and Scotty. I am going to avoid explaining who Scotty is.
It suffices to say that Hannaham takes a risk here that in other hands might have come across as a gimmick; here, it works. Darlene, having lost her husband Nat to a brutal act of racist violence (an act for which Darlene blames herself), spirals downward and severs the relationship with her son.
Darlene’s obsession with the loss of her husband and her role in it is not the only kind of enslavement in this story. She becomes, by all accounts, a pretty unsuccessful prostitute and falls under the spell of a self-help book. This allows her to be seduced by representatives from Delicious Foods, who promise her excellent accommodations and wages in exchange for her work on their farm. We are not fooled; Darlene, without telling Eddie, is. As soon as she arrives, she finds herself in another kind of slavery, one akin to the logistics of sharecropping. She doesn’t know where she’s been taken. That’s part of how the company controls her. Her accommodations are far from luxurious and her wages are abysmal. In fact, by the time she wakes up the next morning, she already owes the company money. And she can’t make the phone call to her son to tell him where she is.
And Eddie wants to know. Despite all of her frustrations with her, Eddie loves his mother. Hannaham explains in this elegant passage:
He remembered eating a certain brand of chocolate sandwich cookie that matched her complexion, not the deep brown of stained wood but lighter and ruddier, like cedar-bark chips. She had grace, and painted her finger and toenails a respectable shade of plum. A night sky of faint dots spread across her face. . . He remembered sitting in her lap and tracing these constellations. . .
After wandering among the people of the night, Eddie finds the same representatives from Delicious Foods and is reunited with his mother. The problem becomes that he, too, cannot leave the farm. And his mother doesn’t always want to.
In addition to taking us back to both the slavery and sharecropping eras, Hannaham’s descriptions of life on the farm resonates with the conditions that farmworkers face today. Some of the farmworkers dream about the plates and mouths where the food they pick will end up. How often, Hannaham seems to be asking, do we really acknowledge the labor that brings us our food? Where have you gone, Cesar Chavez?
Darlene gets increasingly drawn into life of the farm. Eddie, despite finding himself favored by the farm’s owner and therefore a prime candidate for an overseer position, becomes increasingly desperate to escape. And while his desperation does lead to his escape, it also explains – in a prolonged scene that is both horrible and true – why, when we first meet him, he is driving with no hands.
In what I first thought was a mistake, the story does not end there. Both Darlene and Eddie have to continue living and find a way back to each other. Like the readers, they are haunted by their experiences with Delicious Foods. Like the readers, they know their lives will never be the same. Life will not suddenly be easy. Hannaham – who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. and teaches at Pratt Institute – does not let them, or us, off of the hook.
Delicious Foods, like Emma Donoghue’s Room, demonstrates the incredible power of the love between a parent and child while they are both ensnared in very dismal circumstances. But in the end, there is hope. Hannaham writes of Eddie: “He had to survive. He had to live. He was free.”
Hannaham – who earned his MFA at the University of Texas at Austin – has written a new kind of Southern Gothic. Flannery O’Connor would be proud. Thanks to Hannaham’s understated prose, the power of the novel sneaks up on you. And it does not go away.
Charles Ellenbogen teaches English at John F. Kennedy – Eagle Academy in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.
What if Martin Luther King Jr woke up and asked, “What happened since I’ve been gone?” The answer is the premise of “Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise” – the latest documentary series from Henry Louis Gates Jr.
The two-parter premieres on PBS November 15 at 8 p.m., with Gates serving as host, executive producer and writer. There is also a companion book, “And Still I Rise,” published in 2015.
In the 50 years since King was assassinated, progress in Black America has been complex. African Americans have dominated sports, music and pop culture over the past few decades, but struggled since 1965 in the economic and political realms. “Black America Since MLK” explores this multi-faceted coin, examining mass incarceration, child poverty and police brutality alongside the election of the nation’s first black president.
“I want white America and black America to listen to black people talking to each other about what their lives mean and what these events signify,” said Gates, who chairs the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards jury. “I want Americans to realize we’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.”
This series promises new faces will emerge as eyewitnesses to history.
“We’re all familiar with the leadership — especially the male leadership, so I wanted to tell the story of Ella Baker,” Gates told Salon. “But I was also finding foot soldiers, who didn’t make the evening news but were sitting in those churches, clapping their hands, but had never been interviewed before. So we spent a lot of time on the ground, just talking to people. ‘Hey, were you there? Do you want to be in the series?’… We wanted to widen the lens.”
Viewers can tune in November 15 and 22. Watch the official trailer below:
Each time poet and Akron native Rita Dove speaks in Northeast Ohio, she begins with an acknowledgement of home. Her trip to Cleveland this past September was particularly rich in the significance of place.
“It’s been like one huge family reunion,” she said, smiling wide at the audience assembled at the Maltz Performing Arts Center on the Case Western Reserve University campus.
More than 600 people sat entranced for “An Evening With Rita Dove and Friends,” a celebration of the Anisfield-Wolf juror’s three decades of literary prominence. One of them was Harvard Sociologist Orlando Patterson, who said the following evening, “Last night I witnessed the extraordinary cultural presence of black America in our cultural life as I sat with the largest and most integrated audience I have ever seen, listening in rapt attention and near reverence to Rita Dove reading her glorious American poems.”
The evening of verse commemorated the 30th anniversary of “Thomas & Beaulah,” Dove’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, and this year’s publication of her “Collected Poems.” At 64, Dove has said the new anthology felt like “a tombstone,” but that she has come to appreciate having her best poems in one volume.
Dave Lucas, co-founder of Brews + Prose, emceed the evening, cautioning against viewing the evening as a respective. “I think I can speak for all of us when I say, thank you Rita, but we are greedy for much much more.”
Poet Toi Derricotte, who won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for “The Black Notebooks” in 1998, made the trek from Pittsburgh to introduce her friend, sampling and relishing her verse. As the capper, Lucas presented his mentor with a paper bouquet of flowers, carefully constructed from a copy of “Thomas and Beulah.”
“It must have been so difficult to destroy a book, I hope,” Dove remarked as she admired the token, “but it’s so beautiful.”
Philosopher David Livingstone Smith gave a lively preview of “Making Monsters: The Uncanny Powers of Dehumanization,” his forthcoming book, for an avid circle of listeners gathered at the Inamori Center for Ethics and Excellence in Cleveland.
The new work examines two cases of spectacle lynching – public events for which railroads put on extra excursion cars, tens of thousands assembled and crowds fought for human relics and nightmarish photos to commemorate the torture and killing of young black men.
Smith, 63, is keen to know “what is going on under the hood here, in these acts pursued by sane, ordinary people…the same sort of folk you’d meet at an average PTA meeting.”
The scholar, a professor at the University of New England, blends an examination of biology, philosophy, language and psychology. He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2012 for “Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others.” Quite cheerfully, he called attention to critiques of this landmark book, ideas which have helped refine his current thinking. Smith defines dehumanization as “conceiving of others – whole groups – as subhuman creatures.”
One critique came from philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, another Anisfield-Wolf winner, who suggested that the lethal violence perpetrators direct at others is actually an acknowledgement of their target’s very humanity. Such fury is only directed against someone capable of agency — that is moral reasoning.
“Virtually every genocide that I know anything about has been a racialized genocide,” Smith has said. “The notion of race gets us into a lot of trouble.” He told his Cleveland audience that “racializing a group of people is halfway to dehumanization.”
A warm, casually dressed man who is rigorous about definitions, Smith was frequently wry and very comfortable telling questioners when he didn’t know. He participated in a thought-provoking panel on combating dehumanization with Shannon E. French, a military ethics expert who directs the Inamori Center at Case Western Reserve University, and Dalindyebo Shabalala, a specialist in environmental law and the intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples. He is a visiting professor at the Case law school.
“The death penalty in the United States is fundamentally racialized – its roots are in slavery and violent law enforcement,” Shabalala said. “It comes from a story we tell about those getting the death penalty, one that is centered on the black male threat.”
French, whose book “The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present” was updated and reissued this fall, argued that Tamir Rice would not have died if Cleveland police had adhered to military standards. Fear for one’s own life is no justification for opening fire among soldiers, she said, particularly in an instance when the boy had no gun. “We need a warrior’s code in the police department,” she said.
Shabalala was skeptical that a code of honor could be restored to modern warfare, but French argued that some U.S. generals had insisted on respecting Iraqi culture and people when American forces invaded, and that an alertness to the code among chaplains and others has prevented some atrocities.
When pressed on how to combat dehumanization, Smith called for improved education on our delusions about race. He stressed that we must face “the full extent of our national crimes. I think that would free us in a lot of ways.”
The gritty documentary “Romeo is Bleeding” took home the top audience choice prize at this year’s Cleveland International Film Festival. Now the festival is hosting an encore screening of the award-winning film at the Breen Center for the Arts on Cleveland’s West Side.
The film follows 22-year-old poet and educator Donté Clark as he worked with youth in Richmond, California to mount an adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” in the hopes of starting a dialogue about the gang-related violence in the community. Clark is a founding member and artistic director of the RAW Talent Creative Arts Program, which offers workshops in visual arts, theater and music production.
But it’s the spoken word component that provides the backbone for the documentary, as viewers watch the students tell a Shakespearean tale using their own life experiences. Since its release in 2015, “Romeo” has picked up more than 20 awards on the festival circuit.
“Romeo Is Bleeding” is Jason Zeldes’ directorial debut. He is best known for editing the Academy Award-winning documentary, “Twenty Feet from Stardom.”
“Richmond is a community facing difficult problems but doing so with real fortitude,” Zeldes said in a 2015 interview. “Furthermore, Richmond is not my city. I am an outsider and the last thing I wanted to do was impose my perspective where it doesn’t belong. So early on I committed to the idea that the story would be told from Donté’s perspective, and adhere to his life’s experience in Richmond.”
Prior to the screening, light hors d’oeuvres and beverages will be available and afterward, audience members will have the opportunity to digest the film during a Q&A with some of the cast and crew.
Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole outside the Columbia, S.C. statehouse to remove the Confederate flag on June 27, 2015.
Bree Newsome — the activist who brought down the Confederate flag flying outside the Columbia, S.C. capitol building in 2015 — shared a few harrowing details of that June day with a Cleveland audience rapt at attention.
“A supervisor came over and directed the two officers at the bottom to tase me,” she recounted for a hushed crowd of more than 150 at John Carroll University. “Now, being attached to a metal pole, that could have electrocuted me. At that point, James (Tyson, a white ally) grabbed the pole and said, ‘If you electrocute her, you’ll have to electrocute me too.’ And then they backed away.”
Newson took her bold action amid a renewed debate about the legitimacy of flying the Confederate flag. Just ten days before her climb to the top of that 30-foot flagpole, Dylann Roof murdered nine people studying the Bible at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Roof decorated his website with symbols of white supremacy and photos of himself with the Confederate flag.
Dozens of South Carolina activists met and decided the flag – aloft on statehouse grounds since 1961 – had to go. Newsome, 30 at the time, volunteered to climb the pole, and Tyson volunteered to accompany her. The two knew they risked arrest, if not serious bodily harm. The night before the climb, Newsome said she “prayed more fervently than ever before.”
“You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence,” Newsome bellowed from the top of the pole. “I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.” In video of the removal, Newsome is dressed in all black, thick locs cascading down her back as she looks skyward during her arrest, reciting Psalm 23.
At several points throughout her talk, Newsome paused to link modern events — like the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 — to those in the history books — like the murder of Emmett Till in 1955: “It’s important that we understand the largest historical context that informs everything that’s happening right now.”
Unlike many African-Americans, Newsome had a firm grasp on her family lineage. Her fourth great grandfather stood his ground as a slave and refused to be sold without his wife and newborn; she shared with the crowd a faded but surprisingly well-preserved photo of her third great-grandmother, who “prayed daily for her children to see freedom.” Her father, Clarence G. Newsome, is president of National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. It is this heritage, she said, that rings through her voice in the fight for racial justice.
Today Newsome works to build a more sustainable, less reactive movement. Part of that includes using the Ella Baker model for social change, in which activists are embedded in the community they serve. “I don’t really believe in the charismatic leader model,” Newsome said. “It has to be about empowering people around us and people taking ownership of their community.”
The audience of mostly students stayed engaged through the hour-long talk, which Newsome called “Tearing Hatred from the Sky.”
Asked to weigh in on the state of the American dream, Newsome suggested there is still room for optimism. “Turmoil isn’t something we have to fear. Turmoil is an indication that the ground is ripe for sowing the seeds of social change…I embrace this as a time of transformation and promise.”
Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout” took home the Man Booker Prize for 2016, making him the first U.S. author to win the British award. The satirical novel, whose plot kicks off from an absurd trial that puts resegregation and slavery before the Supreme Court, was a unanimous choice for the judges. Historian Amanda Foreman, jury chair of the prize, called Beatty’s work “a novel for our times.”
“The Sellout is one of those very rare books: which is able to take satire, which is a very difficult subject and not always done well, and plunges it into the heart of contemporary American society with a savage wit of the kind I haven’t seen since Swift or Twain,” Foreman said. “It manages to eviscerate every social taboo and politically correct nuance, every sacred cow. While making us laugh, it also makes us wince. It is both funny and painful at the same time.”
This marks the second major award for “The Sellout,” as it collected the National Book Critics Circle prize in March. Below, the review from our own Karen R. Long, a member of the NBCC jury:
Try reading the first paragraph of The Sellout aloud. Better still, in public. It begins “This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything” and it ends describing our narrator handcuffed and sitting on “a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks.”
As the poet Kevin Young points out in The New York Times, this bit “takes the beginning of Ellison’s Invisible Man’(‘I am an invisible man. No, not some spook . . .’) and spoofs it beyond belief.” Indeed, the satire of Paul Beatty corkscrews its reader into one stunning contortion after another, until it feels as if every social construct is splayed and strangled, caught like a codfish in the reader’s own horrified throat.
“Horrifying” is one of my margin notes. So is “outrageous,” “incendiary” and “tour de force.” The vehicle delivering this is the dazzling voice of the narrator, raised in a neglected “agrarian ghetto” on the outskirts of Los Angeles where he grows prize watermelon and omnipotent marijuana. (After he passes a blunt to a group of surfers, “shaggy, aboriginal, blond-haired white boys, damn near as dark as you,” one says: “Incredible bud, dude. Where’d you get this shit?” Answer: “I know some Dutch coffee shop owners.”)
In this way Beatty serves cake and eats it: confirming and blowing up an expectation in the same sentence, pretty much sentence by sentence. The protagonist’s father treats his son as a life-long demented experiment; he is known as “The Sellout!” during roll call of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, where our narrator scarfs down a “batch of Oreo cookies.”
California plays the bass line in this painful music; here is one passage I marked tour de force: “If places like Sedona, Arizona, have energy vortexes, mystical holy lands were visitors experience rejuvenation and spiritual awakenings, Los Angeles must have racism vortexes. Spots where visitors experience deep feelings of melancholy and ethnic worthlessness. Places like the breakdown lane on the Foothill Freeway, where Rodney King’s life, and in a sense America and its haughty notions of fair play, began their downward spirals. Racial vortices like the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where misbegotten trucker Reginald Denny caught a cinder block, a forty-ounce, and fucking centuries of frustration in the face. Chavez Ravine, where a generations-old Mexican American neighborhood was torn down, its residents forcibly removed, beaten, and left uncompensated to make room for a baseball stadium with ample parking and the Dodger Dog. Seventh Street, between Mesa and Centre, is the vortex where in 1942 a long line of buses idled as Japanese-Americans began the first step toward mass incarceration.”
Taking a page from Dave Chappelle, our narrator decides the solution lies in racially segregating the local middle school and reinstituting slavery on his own spread. The weird and terrible thing: it goes well. The novelist Mat Johnson praised The Sellout, telling the New York Times: “Hordes on Twitter spend all day arguing and denouncing each other over perceived identity slights, racial or otherwise. Beatty’s work is a beautiful reminder that sometimes you can say more by laughing at yourself than by screaming at everyone else.”
Maybe so. But if a joke is “the truth that’s gone out and got drunk,” this brilliant novel makes a case for Carrie Nation, looking for an ax to sober the place up.
The editors of the New York Times Style magazine invited four woman to write letters of appreciation to Michelle Obama for the October 23, 2016 issue. The first – and arguably the most powerful – letter came from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her second novel, “Half of a Yellow Sun” in 2007. The following year she won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and her third novel, “Americanah,” was named one of the ten best books of 2013. Adichie’s TED talks, “We Should All be Feminist” and “The Danger of a Single Story,” have attracted more than 14 million viewers. She splits her time between Nigeria, where she was born, and the United States.
Her letter to Michelle Obama already has the feel of a classic:
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She had rhythm, a flow and swerve, hands slicing air, body weight moving from foot to foot, a beautiful rhythm. In anything else but a black American body, it would have been contrived. The three-quarter sleeves of her teal dress announced its appropriateness, as did her matching brooch. But the cut of the dress scorned any “future first lady” stuffiness; it hung easy on her, as effortless as her animation. And a brooch, Old World style accessory, yes, but hers was big and ebulliently shaped and perched center on her chest. Michelle Obama was speaking. It was the 2008 Democratic National Convention. My anxiety rose and swirled, watching and willing her to be as close to perfection as possible, not for me, because I was already a believer, but for the swaths of America that would rather she stumbled.
She first appeared in the public consciousness, all common sense and mordant humor, at ease in her skin. She had the air of a woman who could balance a checkbook, and who knew a good deal when she saw it, and who would tell off whomever needed telling off. She was tall and sure and stylish. She was reluctant to be first lady, and did not hide her reluctance beneath platitudes. She seemed not so much unique as true. She sharpened her husband’s then-hazy form, made him solid, more than just a dream.
But she had to flatten herself to better fit the mold of first lady. At the law firm where they met before love felled them, she had been her husband’s mentor; they seemed to be truly friends, partners, equals in a modern marriage in a new American century. Yet voters and observers, wide strips of America, wanted her to conform and defer, to cleanse her tongue of wit and barb. When she spoke of his bad morning-breath, a quirky and humanizing detail, she was accused of emasculating him.
Because she said what she thought, and because she smiled only when she felt like smiling, and not constantly and vacuously, America’s cheapest caricature was cast on her: the Angry Black Woman. Women, in general, are not permitted anger — but from black American women, there is an added expectation of interminable gratitude, the closer to groveling the better, as though their citizenship is a phenomenon that they cannot take for granted.
“I love this country,” she said to applause. She needed to say it — her salve to the hostility of people who claimed she was unpatriotic because she had dared to suggest that, as an adult, she had not always been proud of her country.
Of course she loved her country. The story of her life as she told it was wholesomely American, drenched in nostalgia: a father who worked shifts and a mother who stayed home, an almost mythic account of self-reliance, of moderation, of working-class contentment. But she is also a descendant of slaves, those full human beings considered human fractions by the American state. And ambivalence should be her birthright. For me, a foreign-raised person who likes America, one of its greatest curiosities is this: that those who have the most reason for dissent are those least allowed dissent.
Michelle Obama was speaking. I felt protective of her because she was speaking to an America often too quick to read a black woman’s confidence as arrogance, her straightforwardness as entitlement.
She was informal, colloquial, her sentences bookended by the word “see,” a conversational fillip that also strangely felt like a mark of authenticity. She seemed genuine. She was genuine. All over America, black women were still, their eyes watching a form of God, because she represented their image writ large in the world.
Her speech was vibrant, a success. But there was, in her eyes and beneath her delivery and in her few small stumbles, a glimpse of something somber. A tight, dark ball of apprehension. As though she feared eight years of holding her breath, of living her life with a stone in her gut.
Eight years later, her blue dress was simpler but not as eager to be appropriate; its sheen, and her edgy hoop earrings, made clear that she was no longer auditioning.
Her daughters were grown. She had shielded them and celebrated them, and they appeared in public always picture perfect, as though their careful grooming was a kind of reproach. She had called herself mom-in-chief, and cloaked in that nonthreatening title, had done what she cared about.
She embraced veterans and military families, and became their listening advocate. She threw open the White House doors to people on the margins of America. She was working class, and she was Princeton, and so she could speak of opportunity as a tangible thing. Her program Reach Higher pushed high schoolers to go further, to want more. She jumped rope with children on the White House grounds as part of her initiative to combat childhood obesity. She grew a vegetable garden and campaigned for healthier food in schools. She reached across borders and cast her light on the education of girls all over the world. She danced on television shows. She hugged more people than any first lady ever has, and she made “first lady” mean a person warmly accessible, a person both normal and inspirational and a person many degrees of cool.
She had become an American style icon. Her dresses and workouts. Her carriage and curves. Toned arms and long slender fingers. Even her favored kitten heels, for women who cannot fathom wearing shoes in the halfway house between flats and high heels, have earned a certain respect because of her. No public figure better embodies that mantra of full female selfhood: Wear what you like.
It was the 2016 Democratic Convention. Michelle Obama was speaking. She said “black boy” and “slaves,” words she would not have said eight years ago because eight years ago any concrete gesturing to blackness would have had real consequences.
She was relaxed, emotional, sentimental. Her uncertainties laid to rest. Her rhythm was subtler, because she no longer needed it as her armor, because she had conquered.
The insults, those barefaced and those adorned as jokes, the acidic scrutiny, the manufactured scandals, the base questioning of legitimacy, the tone of disrespect, so ubiquitous, so casual. She had faced them and sometimes she hurt and sometimes she blinked but throughout she remained herself. Michelle Obama was speaking. I realized then that she hadn’t been waiting to exhale these past eight years. She had been letting that breath out, in small movements, careful because she had to be, but exhaling still.
“It was very important to me that ‘American Dream’ be in the subtitle of this book,” Shetterly declared. “And the most important scene for me in the movie was the first one, where a little black girl in big glasses — like me — is standing at the blackboard factoring quadratic equations.”
The Evening Road 
by Matthew Hashiguchi, documentary filmmaker 
Philosopher 
