Month: August 2020

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The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, Tom Reiss

Out of the deepest betrayal Alexandre Dumas would weave imagined worlds that resurrected his father’s dreams and the fantastical age of glory, honor, idealism, and emancipation he championed.

“You see, Father,” he writes in his memoir, as if for himself, “I haven’t forgotten any of the memories that you told me to keep. From the time I could think, your memory has lived in me like a sacred lamp, illuminating everything and everyone you ever touched, even though death has taken it away.” (Reiss, 2012, 323)

Go out and get a copy of this book. Immediately. It was a beyond captivating read. I’m going to go pretty in depth in my discussion of this book, but I promise that I’m just gliding over the surface. It will still be well-worth the read, even after going through this review.

I’ve read several books by the novelist known as Alexandre Dumas père (as opposed to his son, Alexandre Dumas fils, also a novelist and playwright). But I’d known very little about the first Alexandre Dumas, father of Dumas père, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, known (thankfully) simply as Alex Dumas in adulthood. The book The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss brought General Dumas’ vibrant life into complete technicolor.

This is a story of courage. Of bravery and betrayal. Of a France that, for about a decade, was a place where “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” applied to everyone, regardless of skin color. And it’s the story of how one man, Napoleon, set race relations in France back decades. It’s also the story of how France has all but forgotten one of its most glorious sons. 


Alexandre Dumas by Olivier Pichat – Musée Alexandre Dumas, Villers-Cotterëts

Alex Dumas was born on Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), the son of a ne’er do well marquis and his slave concubine. His father eventually sold Alex’s mother and his other siblings because, I don’t know, I guess he was just completely devoid of natural affection. Alex must have been his favorite though, because he pawned him instead of selling him outright, and redeemed him as soon as he could. He brought 14-year-old Alex back with him to France and made him a count. Alex lived the life of a Parisian dandy for a while, but he eventually joined the French army, leaving behind his fancy pants name and title and taking his mother’s last name, Dumas, as his own. He believed strongly in the ideals of the French Revolution, and he would hold fast to those principles throughout his life. He negotiated the shifting sands of Revolutionary France without getting guillotined and fought brilliantly in the military. He rose quickly through the ranks to become a General. Napoleon nicknamed him “the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol” because Alex had managed to single-handedly hold a bridge against an enemy squadron until reinforcements arrived.

However, spoiler alert (except not really because everyone knows this), Napoleon was a major jerk. At one point, Napoleon and Josephine were supposed to be the godparents to Alex’s firstborn son, but by the time little Alexandre Dumas was born, Napoleon and Alex were on the outs. Basically, Napoleon grew to dislike Alex Dumas because Alex truly believed in the principles of the Revolution and wouldn’t get behind Napoleon’s increasingly blatant attempts to seize power. Alex also insulted one of Napoleon’s friends, and apparently the little man knew how to hold a grudge. Napoleon had a big hand in ruining the Alex’s health, his life, and plunging his family into poverty.

As a lifelong fan of his son’s work, it was fascinating to see how the experiences of Alex Dumas are reflected in his son’s novels. Tom Reiss pays particular attention to the similarities between Alex Dumas and The Count of Monte Cristo‘s Edmond Dantès. Dantès and Dumas were both cast into prison for years without a trial. Both were essentially forgotten by those who could have, and should have, helped them in their plight. In fact, it seems that the image of his father, alone and forgotten by his countrymen, seems to have impacted Alexandre Dumas deeply.

To remember a person is the most important thing in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. The worst sin anyone can commit is to forget. The villains of The Count of Monte Cristo do not murder the hero, Edmond Dantès – they have him thrown into a dungeon where he is forgotten by the world. The heroes of Dumas never forget anything or anyone: Dantès has a perfect memory for the details of every field of human knowledge, for the history of the world and for everyone he has encountered in his life. When he confronts them one by one, he finds that the assassins of his identity have forgotten the very fact that he existed, and thus the fact of their crime. (3)

Tom Reiss also delves into the effect of Revolutionary France on People of Color. I was surprised to discover the French had a proud tradition of not having slaves in France itself, even though they depended on a particularly brutal form of slavery to keep their plantations in the Caribbean running. Things got messy when Frenchmen returned to France from the Caribbean with their slaves in tow. Should the slaves be freed once they set foot on French soil, or did the property rights of the Caribbean extend to France? Apparently there was a wave of lawsuits in which slaves brought to France sued for their freedom – and won.

There was certainly still racism. Reiss relates one episode in which young Alex Dumas, upon escorting a woman to the theater, was insulted and humiliated by a white man because of his race. However, Dumas’ race was much less of a hindrance in France than it would have been in America at the time. It didn’t stop Dumas from marrying his sweetheart Marie-Louise, the daughter of an innkeeper in Villers-Cotterêts. I had expected her parents to be against the match, but they were thrilled. Her father always proudly referred to Dumas as “the General,” and he enjoyed a warm relationship with his in-laws throughout his life. Neither did Dumas’ race keep him from a meteoric rise through the military. He was the commander-in-chief of several armies throughout his life, led numerous successful campaigns (sometimes against extraordinary odds), and had the respect and loyalty of his soldiers and fellow officers.

The fact that a Black man could rise so high in the 1790’s was astounding to me. Until reading this book, I’d never given much thought to race relations in other countries. I knew that the United States wasn’t the only country stained by the sin of slavery, but other than some general knowledge about William Wilberforce and the movement to end the slave trade in Great Britain, I was pretty ignorant. I’d certainly had no idea that Black and mixed-race people in France enjoyed, for a time, rights that they wouldn’t see in the U.S. for almost another two hundred years. I suppose I assumed that People of Color received the same treatment abroad as they had in the U.S.

This is absolutely not to absolve France from the horrors inflicted upon Black slaves in Saint-Domingue and their other Caribbean colonies. The conditions of slavery on Caribbean sugar plantations remain some of the most barbarous acts of cruelty man has ever inflicted on man. However, before reading this book I was less critical of American slave owners than I should have been.

When I reflected on the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson as he penned the words, “all men are created equal,” I think I gave him a bit of a pass because I believed that he was simply a product of his time and that most people in the Western world treated slavery as a matter-of-course. I considered Jefferson, Washington, and other slave-owning Founding Fathers to be “products of their time.” Well, it turns out that people in their time were well-aware that slavery was an abomination, and that the choice to continue the system was a simple matter of putting money over morals. Not only that, but while even free Blacks in America were being trampled on and degraded, a Black man in France could become the commander-in-chief of an army.

But then why did France not remain on that trajectory? Because Napoleon is the worst. That’s why. When he took over, he knew that France couldn’t remain competitive economically if it didn’t have the income generated by slavery in the Caribbean colonies, so he rolled back a ton of the progress that had been made in Saint-Domingue during the Revolution, and he severely restricted the rights of People of Color in France. When General Alex Dumas was released from prison in Italy, he returned home to a country that had largely forgotten him and which, in just a few short years, had decided that he was less than. He had to practically beg his best friend to be the godfather to his son, Alexandre, and even then his friend couldn’t actually be bothered to show up for the ceremony itself. General Dumas was not awarded the Legion of Honor, even though all of his fellow generals got the award. Nor did he receive his military pension, back pay for his time in a foreign prison, or a new commission in the army. France, it seemed, had no further use for the general. He died a broken, impoverished man in 1806.

In the early 1900’s, a statue was finally erected to honor General Dumas. It stood next to the statues of his son and grandson. But even then it remained covered for months because French bureaucrats couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to inaugurate it. The Nazis eventually destroyed it.

By Unknown author – Late 19th-century picture of a statue of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas that was destroyed by the Germans during the occupation of Paris, Public Domain

Several years ago, France did make an attempt to honor General Dumas. Here’s the result:

Photo by Shanker Pur

While I think we could agree it’s a powerful statue in its own right, I don’t think anyone looking at it would immediately associate it with Dumas. Said Tom Reiss:

In the race politics of twenty-first century France, the statue of General Dumas had morphed into a symbolic monument to all the victims of French colonial slavery, in the form of these mega-shackles. A military marching band played the “Marseillaise” in Alex Dumas’s honor, followed by an Afro-Caribbean drumming group, then by the mayor and the activist, who both made impassioned speeches. Then everyone went home.

There is still no monument in France commemorating the life of General Alexandre Dumas. (330)

Happy Reading!

Reference List

Reiss, T. (2012). The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (1st ed.). New York, NY: Crown.

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The Beautiful, Renée Ahdieh

“Didn’t you know, darlin’?” he drawled. “All the best saints are sinners.”

Renée Ahdieh, The Beautiful

Having absolutely loved this book, I was surprised, even shocked, at the numerous bad reviews on Goodreads. I’m honestly baffled, and I’m here in defense of The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh.

The Beautiful is what Twilight might have been if it had been written by a competent author, if Bella had a personality, and if Edward wasn’t an abusive creep. I unapologetically loathe Twilight, and it’s colored my feelings about the whole vampire genre. So when I picked up The Beautiful, I didn’t have high hopes. Mostly I just wanted something a little different, and I thought I’d give it a try. I definitely didn’t expect to love it the way I did. I devoured it.

Renée Ahdieh had me with this sentence from the first chapter –

“Night had seeped through the water, like a dark stain across organza.”

I remember thinking what a vivid description that was. I could see the lowering of the sun, the shadows spreading across the water. What’s more, we find out later that Celine, our protagonist, previously worked for one of the best dressmakers in Paris. That beautiful description of a stained organza is the kind of thing that would make sense to someone familiar with fabrics. Right away, we’re getting insight into the way Celine thinks.

Description is one of this novel’s strong points. The author paints a world with her words, and I found myself vividly imagining the New Orleans of Ahdieh’s fantasy. From the smell of beignets from a boulangerie to the trembling bougainvillea on a shuttered terrace, the author really brought New Orleans to life for me.

Additionally, I found the characters to be multi-layered, interesting, and likable. The trouble with YA novels is that the young women are often one-dimensional, thinking only about and existing only for their romantic partner. (I’m looking at you, Bella Swan, you bland, miserable waif.) In Celine Rousseau, we have a protagonist who, sure, has a love story, but also has her own stuff going on outside of her relationship. In this novel, we see Celine come to appreciate her mixed heritage, something she’d been taught to be ashamed of and to hide. We sit with her as she ponders sin, guilt, remorse, and absolution. We join her in coming to terms with the events that led to her fleeing Paris for New Orleans. On top of that, Celine has a skill set as a dressmaker that is valued and marketable. She sometimes accepts help from others, but she certainly doesn’t need anyone to make her way for her. She’s portrayed as competent, intelligent, and level-headed, even in the face of challenging circumstances, and she exercises a tremendous amount of agency.

Similarly, Bastien is a solid character in his own right, separate from his relationship with Celine. And he gets bonus points for not being a misogynist. One of the first things that draws Celine to him is the fact that he treats her as an equal. During their first meeting. he swears in front of her, and she ponders the fact that her father had always told her that curse words weren’t meant for female ears. But here’s a young man who curses in her presence, just as he would if she were a man. She’s appalled, but she also appreciates the fact that he doesn’t treat her with kid gloves. Throughout the novel, Bastien recognizes Celine’s strength and competence. He fights with her, he threatens her, but he never condescends to her or orders her around.

This is, in my opinion, what makes their relationship work. Because the author gives Celine and Bastien stories separate from one another, I am able to see why they like each other. Sometimes YA authors write about the protagonists as though they’re The Lover from Shakespeare’s The Seven Ages of a Man. (“And then the lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow.”) We read about their feelings of love, usually ad nauseam, but we’re left completely clueless about what they actually like about one another, aside from their mutual physical attraction. Ahdieh doesn’t make that mistake with Celine and Bastien. They spend enough time together that we’re able to see clearly why they’re drawn to one another.

There are a pair of scenes that stick out to me as demonstrating this pretty well. Don’t worry, there’s nothing super important in these scenes, so no real spoilers here. In the beginning, Celine is sitting with her friends Pippa and Annabelle at a booth selling items they’ve made. One of the girls laments the fact that they’ve worked the whole day and haven’t sold much. Celine jokes that maybe they should try making their money at night. It’s a bawdy joke, and innocent Annabelle doesn’t get it, but it shows us that Celine has kind of a raunchy sense of humor. In a later scene, Celine meets Bastien, and they’re bantering. She poses the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” and Bastien remarks that the rooster must have come first. Celine is simultaneously surprised and delighted by the off-color joke, and gives a genuine laugh. These two scenes set us up to see Celine and Bastien as a pair. They’re both a little rough around the edges, with the same sense of irreverent humor. Ahdieh does this several times throughout the book, and it lends a lot of credibility to the relationship.

The world-building itself left a little to be desired. I feel like Ahdieh will need to explain a lot in the sequel, The Damned. There were definitely things that needed elaboration. Things that I still have questions about. But overall, I was satisfied with the answers I got, and I’m confident that more will be explained in The Damned.

I enjoyed the ending simply because it surprised me. Throughout the novel, there is a string of murders, with Celine as the thread that apparently links the victims together. She spends the whole novel trying to lure the murderer out of the shadows so she can confront him, and I spent the novel pretty confident I knew who the murderer was. It seemed obvious, but I was completely wrong. I love being caught off guard. The ending tied up most of the loose ends, but it left me with several more questions that I’m dying to have answered.

I also really appreciated the diversity of Ahdieh’s characters. New Orleans, as a southern port city, was a multi-ethnic and multi-racial place in the late 1800’s. But the author also doesn’t portray New Orleans as some sort of colorblind, post-racial utopia. There are several tense, racially charged scenes, specifically one in which some local boys are reluctant to do business with Bastien because he keeps company with people of various races. He lets them know, in no uncertain terms, that their racist sentiments are unwelcome, especially as he, himself, is of mixed heritage. Similarly, Arjun confronts several British characters with their ingrained imperialist attitudes, challenges their claims that they don’t benefit from a racial hierarchy, and chafes at the restrictions placed on him because he is Indian. I was glad that Ahdieh didn’t shy away from addressing the very real issue of race relations, even though it wasn’t the focus of her story.

There was just so much meat here, along with a truly fun story. I’m annoyed that my library doesn’t have The Damned yet, but considering it was just published at the beginning of July, I suppose I’ll have to cut them some slack. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it as soon as I can.

Happy Reading!

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As Hermione Says, “When in Doubt, Go to the Library.”

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

Almost a decade ago, Forbes featured a question from Quora entitled “Will Public Libraries Become Extinct?” Two writers contributed, and each insisted that libraries would be obsolete in five to fifteen years. One of the contributors, Marc Bodnick, hypothesized that people wouldn’t completely stop going to the library, but the rise of e-books and e-readers would drastically reduce library patronage to the point that libraries would not longer be economically viable. Another contributor, Erica Friedman, argued that libraries would not be obsolete in reality, but that they’d be defunded because people would perceive them as being obsolete. She noted that libraries are much more than simple book lenders, and they’re often at the forefront of technology, but the general public isn’t aware of the myriad of services they provide. Said Friedman:

“If you don’t use your library, you’ll never know those things. And you’ll tell yourself that libraries are exactly the way they were when you were six, then feel slightly bad when you vote them off the town budget.

Libraries will die, because they were killed by people who never used them.”1

Eight years after their predictions, libraries are still going strong. I, for one, don’t see that changing any time soon.

I do, however, think that Erica Friedman had a point. As a whole, we see libraries much the same as we did as children. We envision rows of books, maybe some tables, and an uptight librarian who shushes hyperactive children. But book lending is just part of what libraries have to offer us, and the stern librarian has likely been replaced with someone much friendlier.

As a frequent library patron, I thought I knew what my local branch had to offer. But, in preparation for this post and for the sake of thoroughness, I checked out their website. I was blown away. Here are just a few of the services they provide:

  1. Access to a genealogy research database
  2. Test prep (Driver’s test, ACT, SAT GRE, GMAT)
  3. Job search and career services
  4. Homeschooling resources for children and parents
  5. Story time for small children (This is been put on hold due to COVID-19.)
  6. A calendar for children listen local events and activities
  7. Resources for starting a small business, from business plan handbooks to demographic data
  8. Library outreach to local senior residential centers, bringing book carts to the elderly since they can’t make it to library themselves
  9. Free tutoring in math, reading, writing, test prep, and English language skills
  10. A seed library! (I love this one. Every spring, they have packets of seeds for patrons to take and plant in their home gardens.)

If I listed everything my local library has going on, you’d be here all day. The point is that libraries are more than just repositories for books. They’re the information hubs of the community as well as gathering places. Since e-readers allow you to access books without leaving your home, they’re convenient but isolating. As Benjamin P. Hardy, a contributor at Huffpost, said, “Technology gives people a platform but not a place.“2 Libraries give people both.

Additionally, libraries add community value because they provide a place for people to go without the expectation that money will be spent. The number of such places is dwindling drastically. Even the majority of museums and national parks charge at least an admission fee, but you need exactly zero dollars to be a library patron. You can sit in your local library all day long reading books, working on your laptop, or sitting with your child during story time, and you won’t have to spend one red cent. They’re also entirely neutral. There’s nothing political, religious, racial, or dogmatic about a library, and as such everyone can feel welcome.

Though libraries may seem to be a relic of the past, it’s actually the young who are keeping them alive. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2016, 53% of Millenials had visited a library or bookmobile in person over the last year, compared to just 45% of Gen X and 43% of Baby Boomers. Young people are also more likely to use library websites and apps.3 Personally, I use my library’s app at least weekly. It’s a convenient way to manage my account, renew books, and place holds on materials.

I’m thrilled that the dire predictions about libraries’ inevitable doom have, so far, been proven false, and I’m proud to be part of a generation leading the charge to resurrect the library. If you haven’t stopped by your local branch lately, why don’t you? Even with COVID-19 restrictions, libraries across the country continue to safely provide their services. Visit your library’s website or drop in one day, and I promise you’ll be delighted by what you can find there. If you’re already an avid library-goer, I’d encourage you to look for ways to support and advocate for libraries in your community. Consider donating your unwanted books to the library instead of a thrift shop. Pay attention to local politics and candidates’ positions on libraries. There are a myriad of ways to help, even if all you can do is vote. If libraries can be “killed by people who never [use] them,”4 then the responsibility to keep them alive falls upon those of us who do.

Happy reading!

End Notes:

1. Marc Bodnick and Erica Friedman, “Will Public Libraries Become Extinct?” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, October 2, 2012. https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/10/02/will-public libraries-become-extinct/.

2. Benjamin P. Hardy, “The Extinction of Libraries: Why the Predictions Aren’t Coming True.” HuffPost. HuffPost, December 22, 2017. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-extinction-of-libraries-why-the-predictions-arent_b_5a3d3acde4b06cd2bd03da4a.

3. A. W. Geiger, “Public Library Use in U.S. Highest among Millennials.” Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center, July 27, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/21/millennials-are-the-most-likely-generation-of-americans-to-use-public-libraries/.

4. Bodnick and Friedman, “Will Public Libraries Become Extinct?”

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There There, Tommy Orange

This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff. Then someone from up on the yacht says, “It’s too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings.” And then someone else on board says something like, “But your father gave you this yacht, and these are his servants who brought the hors d’oeuvres.” At which point that person gets tossed overboard by a group of hired thugs who’d been hired by the father who owned the yacht, hired for the express purpose of removing any and all agitators on the yacht to keep them from making unnecessary waves, or even referencing the father or the yacht itself. Meanwhile, the man thrown overboard begs for his life, and the people on the small inflatable rafts can’t get to him soon enough, or they don’t even try, and the yacht’s speed and weight cause an undertow. Then in whispers, while the agitator gets sucked under the yacht, private agreements are made, precautions are measured out, and everyone quietly agrees to keep on quietly agreeing to the implied rule of law and to not think about what just happened. Soon, the father, who put these things in place, is only spoken of in the form of lore, stories told to children at night, under the stars, at which point there are suddenly several fathers, noble, wise forefathers. And the boat sails on unfettered.

Tommy Orange, There There

We’ll start today with that heavy quote because There There by Tommy Orange is a heavy book. It’s brilliant. It’s eye-opening. But it’s heavy.

There There was put on my reading list as part of a mass addition of Authors of Color. With everything that has been going on recently, I’ve become aware that I have too long allowed myself to be one of the people on the above-mentioned yacht, mostly unaware of the struggles of the people in the water and my own position of privilege aboard the ship. As I’ve opened myself up to the message of Black Lives Matter and other similar movements, I have come to see some of the ways in which I’m part of the problem. One thing that stood out to me, as a reader, is the fact that I have read an embarrassingly small amount of literature written by People of Color. I counted. Of the over 500 books I have listed as Read on Goodreads, just over 30 of the authors were People of Color.

So, a few weeks ago, I did some googling and found lists of must-read books by Black authors, Latinx authors, Arab authors, East Asian authors, and Indigenous authors. If you haven’t done this exercise, I’d encourage it. It was enlightening to see the mountains of rich literature that I’d been previously unaware of. There There was one of my finds.

This book centers around one event – the Big Oakland Powwow. In little vignettes, we’re introduced to a huge cast of characters who are all tied to the powwow in some way. There’s Tony Loneman, a twenty-one year old drug dealer of Cheyenne heritage living with fetal alcohol syndrome. Dene Oxendene is an aspiring documentary maker who is trying to capture stories of Native people. There’s Edwin Black, a biracial man who never knew his father, is battling an internet addiction, and is pushed by his mother into an internship helping with the powwow. There are Opal and Jacquie, two middle-aged sisters dealing with the fallout of their childhood involvement in the Native American occupation of Alcatraz in the 1970s. The character list is extensive. Those are just a few. The way that Tommy Orange is able to weave the strands of all of these lives together, to get them all to that powwow, is masterful.

He really succeeds in giving each character a different voice. In fact, when I first read a portion narrated by Tony Loneman, I was a little put off by the excessive swearing. It seemed like every other word was a curse, and I started to get annoyed. “Does this author not know any other words?” I wondered. As I continued reading, I realized that the character didn’t know any other words. Tony Loneman, a drug dealer, raised by his grandmother, someone whose IQ measured extremely low due to fetal alcohol syndrome – he cursed a lot. When the author shifted to another character’s point of view, the vocabulary changed. It added authenticity to the voice of each character.

The book starts with a prologue, and there’s an interlude as well. These sections are filled with short essays on issues in the Native community at large and in the community specific to Oakland. These were some of my favorite bits of writing. It’s the kind of prose must take tremendous effort to write, but Tommy Orange made it seem effortless.

Orange addressed several themes in There There: suicide in Native people, addiction, the search for identity, gun violence, privilege, and what it means to be Native.

On suicide:

“Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better that leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we’ve made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths…or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up.”

On identity:

“…Anything you hear from me about your heritage does not make you more or less Indian. More or less a real Indian. Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen. You, me. Every part of our people that made it is precious. You’re Indian because you’re Indian because you’re Indian.”

There’s so much more there, and it was the first time I’ve ever heard a Native American story told by an actual Native American. For so long, these people have had their story told by other people, by history books written by white scholars, by elementary school students playacting the First Thanksgiving, by Hollywood movies in which the powers that be cast Johnny Depp (of all people) to play Tonto in The Lone Ranger. It was moving, in itself, to hear a Native American story told by someone whose story it is to tell.

Okay, there are going to be spoilers from here on. If I’ve convinced you, go read There There, and then come back.

The culminating event, the Big Oakland Powwow, is marred by tragedy when Octavio, Tony, Charles, and Calvin all try to rob the powwow. In the interlude, Tommy Orange lets us know that that’s where this is going, so we watch it happen like a car crash you see coming but can’t prevent. Orange shifted through the points of view as Dene, Bill, Orvil, Tony, and others got shot, so it was like watching each one of them fall. You’d think that after one death scene it would be like beating a dead horse, but Orange managed to make each death impactful.

I think it was also poignant that most of the deaths were accidental. Octavio, Tony, Charles, and Calvin weren’t intending to kill the people at the powwow. They just wanted the money. They got into a fight among themselves and the passersby were caught in the crossfire. This seemed to me to be a symbol for the deaths of Native Americans as a whole. In some cases, the U.S. government absolutely committed active, unapologetic genocide against Native Americans. But there were other times when it seems like the lives of Native Americans were collateral damage, caught in the storm of bullets simply because they were in the way.

This quote, in particular, broke me:

“Something about it will make sense. The bullets have been coming from miles. Years. Their sound will break the water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.”

I’ll leave it there.