Tag: historical fiction

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The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, Kim Michele Richardson

“What I wanted most was to be okay as a Blue. I never understood why other people thought my color, any color, needed fixing.”

Kim Michele Richardson, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

It’s been a long time since I posted, and I’m sorry about that. I’m going to be honest and tell you that my grandmother passed away kind of unexpectedly so I had to go home for the funeral and to help my mom. It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks and I didn’t have a ton of time to read while I was gone. But I’m back now and I just finished a really great book called The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

Have you ever heard of the Blue Fugates of Kentucky? I’d heard of them in passing a few years ago but I knew almost nothing about them. Basically, Martin Fugate and his wife both had a recessive gene that caused a condition called methemoglobinemia. Their blood doesn’t carry oxygen efficiently to the body’s tissues. One of the effects of this is blue skin. Out of Martin Fugate’s seven children, four of them were blue. If a person develops this condition it can be dangerous, but apparently it’s not a big deal when it’s congenital. The Fugates generally lived long, healthy lives.

In The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, author Kim Michele Richardson’s Carter family is based off of the Fugates. The protagonist, Cussy Carter, is the last Blue in Troublesome Creek, Kentucky. She’s also a librarian with the Pack Horse Librarian Project, a project that really took place in the WPA under FDR’s New Deal. In an effort to get reading materials into the hands of people in the mountains of Kentucky, the Pack Horse Librarians would carry books and periodicals by horse, donkey, or mule. They would deliver directly to the people in their homes.

For Cussy, books are an escape from a hardscrabble life and the loneliness of being the last Blue. She traverses the mountains on her faithful mule, helping her patrons find joy in learning and comfort in her friendship. The relationships that she develops with the people on her book route were really sweet, and I enjoyed the care the author put into developing each of Cussy’s friendships.

This book was also interesting in that it brought to light the prejudice that the Blue people would have experienced. It’s true that it would be surprising to see someone with blue skin, but it didn’t occur to me that they might have been persecuted in the same way that a Black person would have been in a Jim Crow segregationist society. Cussy isn’t allowed to use a “Whites Only” bathroom and she’s not allowed to attend social functions in town with the white people because they see her as something other than themselves. Her family is even subject to miscegenation laws. The whole thing reinforced for me, again, just how ridiculous it is to classify people based on the color of their skin. In Cussy’s case, her blue skin was caused by a medical condition, but people saw her as sinful and less than them, even though a simple medication was able to make her “white.”

The one thing I didn’t love about this book was that Cussy was a bit of a Mary Sue. She was too kind, too charitable, too forgiving. On the one hand, I love reading about good people who do good things. There were so many uplifting moments in this book. But sometimes it felt a little unreal, because few people are as saintly as Cussy Carter, especially in the circumstances that she endured. I almost wanted her to have a bit more of an edge. A chip on her shoulder. Something that was less Pollyanna and would make her seem like a real girl.

Still, if you want a feel-good book with insight into a fascinating bit of history, this would be a good one to pick up.

Happy Reading!

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The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates

“The tree of our family was parted – branches here, roots there – parted for their lumber.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

Every once in a while, a writer comes along who can tell a good story in prose so exquisite that it makes you want to weep. It’s not purple prose. It’s not inflated and self-important. It’s just beautiful. Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of those authors. He has a true gift, and I’ve been privileged to read two of his books so far. I look forward to lots more.

The Water Dancer tells the story of Hiram Walker, the son of an enslaved woman and a plantation owner. He has what we’d probably call a photographic memory, but he can’t remember his mother. All he knows is that she was sold away when he was nine. Tied up with his lost memories is a mysterious power which saved him in the past, but which he struggles to understand and control. He will find that the bonds he forms, his love, his relationships, his memories, his past, all allow him to unlock the potential within himself.

What I loved about this book is how family-centered it is. Many of the historical novels I’ve read that deal with slavery focus on the cost of slavery to the individual. We read of cruel punishments, hard labor, rape, torture, and death. What I feel is missing in some of these novels, and what The Water Dancer illustrates so beautifully, is the cost of slavery to the enslaved family. The children ripped from parents. The parents torn from children. The spouses who never saw one another again. The people who spent the rest of their lives wondering where their brother or sister was, whether they were still alive.

What Ta-Nehisi Coates taught us in this book is that slavery didn’t just destroy individuals. It severed bonds. And even when the enslaved enjoyed times of relative peace, they knew that it couldn’t last. Every moment was poisoned by the thought that their children were not their own to keep. They could not protect them from the block, just as they couldn’t protect their husbands from the lash or their wives from the lusts of their enslavers. Coates paints the psychological pain of these atrocities in painstaking detail. Sometimes it’s difficult to read, but Coates demands that we do not look away.

The whole injunction of The Water Dancer is to remember. We, as individuals, as a nation, must remember. We must remember the people who were lost, the lives that were destroyed, the sins that were committed. I read an article recently that listed some of the major U.S. buildings that were built by the labor of enslaved people: Mount Vernon, Wall Street, the White House, the Capitol Building, the Smithsonian, Trinity Church, Harvard Law School. There are more. We live in a society that was literally built on the backs of people, men, women, and children, who had their lives and their families stolen from them. We forget this at our peril.

I’m not sure why I’ve been reading such heavy stuff lately, but it all seems important and it all seems incredibly urgent. I knew The Water Dancer couldn’t wait any longer. You’ve got to read this one. I know it’s hard, but we can’t look away. We’ve got to remember.

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The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead

“To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity.”

Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

A few years ago, I was driving through Marianna, Florida when we passed by a piece of property that felt wrong. That’s the only way I can describe it. It just felt wrong. I asked my husband what it was, and he shrugged. Neither of us are from Marianna. We didn’t know. I found out later that it was the Dozier School for Boys, the reform school that Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys is based on.

The Nickel Boys is not a happy book. It follows Elwood Curtis, a bright, idealistic Black boy from Tallahassee. Elwood is on track to go to college and make his grandma proud, but being in the wrong place at the wrong time lands him instead at the Nickel Academy. It’s supposed to be a place to mold troubled boys into productive young men. Instead, it’s a living hell in which the boys are ground down, twisted and bent in ways that they’ll never escape even long after they’ve left Nickel behind.

Elwood and his friend Turner are both fictional characters, but Colson Whitehead borrowed heavily from the experiences of men who had attended the real-life Dozier School. Knowing that gives this book a real/not real feeling. On the one hand, there was no Elwood Curtis, but on the other hand, there were hundreds of Elwood Curtises. Hundreds and thousands of boys, black and white, who were beaten, raped, humiliated, tortured, and even killed at the very institution that was supposed to help them find their way in life. All while the surrounding community looked the other way.

What struck me the most was the thought, “What are today’s Nickel Academies. Where are the Dozier Schools of my time? What modern atrocities do I turn a blind eye to?” We like to think about stuff like this—people being mistreated and beaten by government officials—as something that happened in the distant past. That that sort of thing happened in the ’40s during the Holocaust, or during the ’60s in the Jim Crow South, but not today. All of the pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. are in black and white, after all. But the hard truth is that these things weren’t all that long ago, and they’re still happening today. We need look no further than the U.S. border with Mexico to see examples of children being mistreated. We can walk the streets of any city in America and see examples of Black men and women being dehumanized by those who are supposed to serve and protect. These things still happen. I guess it’s up to us to decide whether we, like the fictional citizens of Eleanor, Florida (or the real citizens of Marianna), are going to look the other way.

The Nickel Boys is intense—lots of violence, lots of swearing—but its a story that needs to be told. I hope you’ll pick it up when you’ve got the mental space to deal with a really heavy topic. In the meantime, take a look at The Official White House Boys to learn more. This is the website put together by the real survivors of the Dozier School.

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The Blood of Flowers, Anita Amirrezvani

Just as when we step into a mosque and its high open dome leads our minds up, up, to greater things, so a great carpet seeks to do the same under the feet. Such a carpet directs us to the magnificence of the infinite, veiled, yet ever near, closer than the pulse of the jugular.

The Blood of Flowers, pg. 359

Are you familiar with the biblical story of Jacob and Esau? It’s found in the Old Testament book of Genesis, chapter 25, verses 29-34. There are twin brothers, Jacob and Esau. Esau was born before Jacob, so as the oldest son he will inherit his father’s right to the priesthood and he’ll be the patriarch of the family after their father dies. Esau is an outdoorsy type of guy, and he comes in from hunting one day to find that his brother Jacob has made a bunch of “pottage,” or soup. He’s been out all day and he’s hungry, so he tells Jacob to serve him some of the soup he made. Jacob tells him he’ll give him some soup only if Esau sells his birthright for it. Esau agrees. He gets some soup and Jacob gets the right to his father’s priesthood. Now, this does not seem like a good look for my guy Jacob. It’s super sneaky, after all. But really, Esau is the jerk here, because he sells his birthright for literally a bowl of beans, and then later he gets mad about it when Jacob claims the birthright. It was his own shortsightedness that causes himself to sell his most precious possession for nothing.

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani brought this story to mind. The protagonist is an unnamed teenage girl in 16th century Persia. Her loving parents have raised her to expect marriage to a man who will “pave [her] path with rose petals,” (11). But when her father dies unexpectedly, she and her mother are left destitute, and they leave their small village to seek refuge with her father’s half-brother is Isfahan. Her uncle is a renowned, well-to-do carpet designer. The girl is a fledgling carpet designer herself, and her uncle, recognizing her potential, takes her under his wing and instructs her on how to improve her designs and select just the right colors. Her aunt, however, sees her and her mother as a drain on the family’s resources.

When a wealthy man proposes marriage to the girl, they are ecstatic. That is, until they learn that he is proposing a sigheh. This was an interesting piece of Persian culture to learn about. A sigheh is a temporary marriage. In the girl’s case, she would be married to the man for three months, with an option to renew for another three months if he was pleased with her. Additionally, he would pay her family, as opposed to requiring a dowry from them. If this sounds like legalized prostitution…it kind of is. From my research, at that time a sigheh could be made for almost any length of time, even for just an hour. It was legal, but definitely not looked upon as a marriage of equal value and honor as a permanent marriage.

Her aunt encourages her to accept the proposal, but the girl is hesitant. To her mother, she says, “It feels as if he wants to buy me cheaply…You and my Baba raised me to expect better,” (123). But her mother insists that they need the money, and orders her to marry him. Like Esau, the girl’s family sells her for the equivalent of a mess of pottage.

Despite her marriage, the girl continues to create carpets and learn under her uncle’s tutelage. As her skills grow, so does her confidence, and eventually she realizes just how unjust her family has been to her. “…I have skills enough to join the royal workshop, if only I had been a boy. But rather than let me ply my craft and find a virtuous marriage, you sold me for next to nothing,” (278). She takes steps to reclaim her dignity, but in doing so she angers her aunt and uncle and finds herself struggling for survival.

I wanted to cheer as the girl began to value herself highly enough to take risks and take charge of her own life. This is a story of hope, of finding your voice, and of deciding what you really want out of life. This unnamed protagonist teaches us that we don’t have to accept other people’s assessment of our value. We need to know our own worth, and not allow fear to convince us to sell ourselves cheaply.

Happy Reading!