Toni Morrison
This novel, based on grammar school experiences of the author and her friends and schoolmates, is set in 1941 in Lorain, Ohio, on Lake Erie. The narrator's parents take in Pecola, pregnant by her father. The story evolves over the preceding year, divided into its four seasons, with backstories of Pecola's parents and Soaphead Church leading to the story's present time and circumstances. These were still-segregated days before the 1960s Civil Rights movement, impressionable boyhood days of Martin Luther King and Malcolm Little, when Paul Robeson refused to perform for segregated audiences. Freedom Riders were infants then, if born yet at all, their leaders still in diapers or grammar school. Blacks weren't allowed in parks in those days or in white people's homes either unless they worked there. Could you tell your children public amenities are off limits to them because they're black and because these rules are enforced? Blacks were and are still treated like dogs and still live like dogs in some places. It's much worse in other countries. Blacks are scarce if found at all in other parts of the world besides Africa and the Caribbean.
The Bluest Eye is not so much about current events such as World War II. It's a glimpse into the world blacks lived in in years surrounding 1941 when the story takes place. Blacks accepted their world as they found it, living their lives accordingly without questioning how things were. Their parents were colored, they were Negro, their children were black and their grandchildren are African-American, but still black sometimes. Why would any woman put up with a dysfunctional man I'd set dogs on, thinking it's all there is available, even if she is told all her life that women must be submissive and that dark-skinned people are inferior.
These were days before the Black is Beautiful movement when nonwhites discovered their history, culture, roots and identity, before books and movies depicted them as heroes instead of just servants of whites. These were still days when uppity black men, and black women defending them or active in their own right, met flames at the end of a rope at slightest whim of white mobs seeking free entertainment in the midst of worldwide economic depression, before America entered World War II. People still alive heard first-hand stories from their grandparents of slavery and of Juneteenth jubilation at its end. Today's Jewish children are the last generation to hear about the Holocaust from living survivors.
John H Johnson recently moved to Chicago from Arkansas City, Arkansas, attended Du Sable High School and went on to work for Harry Pace at Supreme Insurance Agency. Johnson's Negro Digest was coming soon. To Black people in Lorain, Ohio, living lives of cheerfully quiet desperation, freezing like dogs in winter's wood- or coal-stove cold, Cincinnati was anther planet. Nobody ever mentioned Chicago or told them Chicago existed. Ebony and Jet were still a few years away, around the corner from here. Words such as smod, gumption and pocketbook were missing from this book I still recognize language, lives, people and names I grew up with and which still exist.
Tumbledown shacks where blacks lived on one end of town evolve lakeward through modern well-to-do homes where lighter-skinned blacks lived, evolving in turn to where whites lived in grander and grander lakefront homes, first to go in times of storm, flood and mudslide. Lake water lapped from lakefront beaches all the way across the lake to Canada on its other side. Across Pennsylvania's border Lorain saw steel mills' red glow and gray smoke filling distant air over poorer parts of town where the darkest blacks lived. The same black mothers who beat their daughters for the slightest offense discovered, real or imagined, were angels of kindness to spoiled, pampered racist daughters of white families they worked for, while black daughters took their beatings as an inevitable fact of life.
Pecola wished for blue eyes so she'd be as beautiful as white people she saw. Our own late neighborhood black friend Otis unlike other blacks we know had blue eyes. We saw not blue eyes, but a stand up friend now gone, socially accepted decent likeable character. Smoking and heavy drinking killed him. Nobody liked or would associate with or even speak to Pecola except Claudia, the book's narrator, and her older sister Frieda. Even Pecola's family ignored her. Pecola, Claudia and Frieda lived in a closed world with only each other for friends. Together they noticed and appreciated life's little things. Dandelions growing by the sidewalk, a whole fresh strawberry, a penny or two for candy, or ham hocks and other meager portions cooking on the stove. They also remembered the bad parts, the evil parts like racism and racist taunts white children learned from their elders.
A penny was worth something then. Nowadays it's sidewalk change. Collect enough pennies and you're got the price of a newspaper. Four newspapers equals the price of today's city bus ride one way. Rosemarys ordered to go home, the show's over, grow up into Rosemarys who can and will frame you and railroad you at the drop of a hat. Locked psychiatric facilities are filled with people they can't pin Murder 1 on, at least in the United States, like they did Mumia Abu-Jamal for his writing.
I still see racist incidents today, not all of them involving white people, but that's another poem, an ongoing poem. Meantime I report them to the nearest ethnic studies teacher. Although I find it difficult to blame the world's nonwhites, I still won't accept guilt trips for them or anyone else. Race, like Attention Deficit Disorder, is a cultural construct for Nazi pigs to push dope, which, like smoking, is a burden I refuse to carry even for people I DO care about. Emphasis on sexuality, religion, menstruation or other physical functions or on casual sex bores me. What else is new? However I find The Bluest Eye otherwise readable.
Sister Souljah
Mama said, Mama said
Sal Si Puede all over again
Summer, July 4, Christmas and other special days don't exist in this cold, dark world of high rise Brooklyn housing projects most of us only see from distant freeways. Cold year-round winter sets the stage in a world of designer clothes, fancy cars, hard drugs and hot "burners," where time is marked only by another shooting. Everyone in the projects, even those not using or selling drugs, has something they don't want Welfare authorities to know about.
Race is a cultural construct for Nazi pigs to push dope. Look at any white person's swimming pool brown. Yet people in the world of this novel internalize what the outside world calls them. The only white people venturing into this all-black ghetto are law enforcement frantically trying to keep drugs from spreading to their own communities, and BCW (Bureau of Child Welfare) workers leaving some of these kids for prisons to harvest later on.
Winter Santiaga, oldest of four daughters of a man who, as Winter and her mother find out years later really wanted a son, "popped out of her mother's coochie" during a January 1978 snowstorm and was named Winter. The family lived so large on such big money that when Santiaga paid cash for a Long Island mansion they just walked out of their old apartment as if going out to dinner.
School on Long Island is even more boring than school in Brooklyn. Precollege school even today is little more than babysitting and obedience especially for girls. Especially for nonwhite girls. Bored, Winter at first misses her old neighborhood and friends. School on Long Island is even more boring than school in Brooklyn. Brooklyn becomes darker and darker and more dangerous. Winter's parents tell her firmly to stay out of Brooklyn. Anxious for a night out and for news from the "way," she works around it, meeting friends in Manhattan instead.
Things slide downhill as Winter's mother takes a bullet intended for her husband. The Feds abate the family home, cars and money and sell everything they have at public auction for pennies on the dollar. Her father in jail for life and her sisters scattered by the BCW, she's on her own at 16. No matter how hard Winter tries to escape Brooklyn, circumstances always bring her back there to the old streets and family. Stash after stash is stolen or spent on expensive designer replacement clothes Winter needs to show her best side. Childhood friends devolve into razor and box cutter wielding, waiting enemies whose presence only the ghetto-bred could detect.
It's one of those stories you read just before it takes place. I saw the movie Back To The Future 10 days before the story happens. Awesome. There's a couple of cell phones in the story but no computers, Internet or e-mail. Nothing but the never-ending battle of the sexes. The men get the upper hand and get the women sent to prison for years for them. Ka-ching, folks, our tax dollars at work.
Winter's mother's convincing crackhead act and dress still fails to get her past heavily guarded gates to see her daughter. Winter's "boyfriend" Bullet snatches letters Winter's mother brought to her from her father right out of Winter's hands and angrily throws them into the fire. Money and clothes do come and go until at 18 Winter gets her own prison clothes and her old crew that got there the same way she did. Meanwhile others their age, far from and ignorant of project life, sport the collegiate look with voting rights and strong futures to match. This new generation of Black youth combines old words such as jet and crib (leave, residence) with new words such as whip, skips and burners (cars, sneakers, guns) used in such a way that any gangsta-wannabe, history and ethnic studies buff, linguist or casual reader can define from surrounding text. The word dipped is used in many different ways, from expensive as in family and personal possessions on down to crazy and addicted to crack.
Rap star Sister Souljah, born Lisa Williamson in New York's Bronx, figures prominently in this novel from Paragraph One but never does any rapping even at concerts let alone on the radio or in Midnight's tape collection. Online searches and record store inquiries turn up only her 1992 album 360o of Power and her backup work for rappers Public Enemy, Sean Combs, and others. Nowadays Souljah, more speaker than rapper, mostly spends her time directing Combs' Daddy's House Social Programs, a youth project established and largely funded by Combs.
In the novel, she's head of some program uptown which is supposed to help people who attend her manhood and womanhood classes. Empty promises and morals sermons abound everywhere but job training, health care, referrals and other social services are a forbidden subject. Souljah, visiting Riker Island's women's section, is angry at being diverted to speak to adult women with AIDS instead of to youth as she had asked to speak to. Afraid of touching these women and contracting AIDS herself, Souljah lands on her feet with a spiel these women jump up from or are rousted from their sickbeds and deathbeds to hear.
Sister Souljah should be admired because not every novelist would present themselves in the same light as Souljah does here. Souljah's readably presented message aimed at black youth, especially girls trapped in the life, shows instead of merely tells that drugs aren't the answer. Souljah in the novel imitates real life: the system's failure to provide practical solutions, nothing but irrelevant lectures on attitude. The message is loud and clear: Get out if you can. This ain't the life. He does the crime and she does the time. Revenge is a dish best served cold: she gets to write her story for others to read. This book, good as class reading, is a classic.
* A soda for the Poet!
Reginald Lockett
I didn't get to read Lockett's first book Good Times & No Bread.
Birds is about Lockett's boyhood in Oakland in the 1960s and 1970s. Party Crashers depicts his adult life as poet and teacher and the father of two daughters. Some of Birds' poems are repeated in Party Crashers. Lockett remembers his pool hall buddies drinking cheap wine while he still underage drank soda. Kool and the Gang share jukebox space with Little Richard, one-songed BB King, and whatever do-wop and blues sang that day.
At Herbert Hoover Junior High School, often mistaken for Juvenile Hall, Lockett's love of history, art and English still salvaged passing grades for his record. Lockett started writing poems at 14 when teachers tired of sending him to the principal's office plopped him with the school's other troublemakers in a creative writing class in the basement. The teacher, Miss Nettlebeck, wouldn't accept less than Lockett's best.
Lockett's poems are mostly event journals, written in short, staccato lines. Line breaks occur after only a few words and often in the middle of a sentence. Lockett's friends, schoolmates and teachers are all here, their stories told in plain English and a little street slan of the day, without arcane metaphors and complex poetry forms.
The Richardson family, which I never met but heard mentioned in class lecture, is here. Retired English teacher Anne Heffley, who taught me how to write blank verse and haiku that conforms, is here. I'm surprised that the late Charles Murry, teacher of African-American history and culture, isn't here, especially when the later of these two books is dated 2001 the year after Murry retired. I went to Murry's memorial, met his family and wrote the poem. Perhaps in his next book?
Jacqueline Woodson