John Lewis & Real American Exceptionalism

Former President Barack Obama in his eulogy for John Lewis today called the late Congressman "exceptional" for "redeeming" our "faith in our founding ideals." If our journey towards achieving the "more perfect union" takes another 200 years, Obama said, then Lewis "will be a founding father" of that "fuller, fairer, better America."

Obama once was asked whether he "believed in American Exceptionalism."  His nuanced answer displeased a large swath of the country that thinks "American Exceptionalism" means "We're number one!"  What makes America truly exceptional was one of the ideas that emerged from the celebration of Lewis's life at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

Obama put the finish on that theme which had run throughout the service. Opening with remarks about Lewis's suffering violence during peaceful protests, Reverend Rafael Warnock had quoted scripture, "By his wounds we are healed," a phrase about "the suffering servant" in Isaiah, originally identified with the Jewish nation, later identified with Jesus by Christians.  Here, Reverend Warnock suggested that Lewis, with his cohort pushed forward the process of healing this nation by the pain they accepted in standing for truth against the pervasive sin of racism.  Reverend Lawson, a mentor to Lewis, quoted Martin Luther King Jr.'s promise that non-violent Black protesters, taking the pain and death inflicted by their enemies, would "transform" America "and the world."

Elevating a black man to the Mt. Rushmore version of history, these theologians turn the USA's story into one of redemption for the whole world.  In short: The Founding Fathers made the promises of freedom for a new nation, then built that nation on the backs of forced labor.  Four score and seven years later, Lincoln used those promises in the middle of a civil war to give America a "new birth of freedom," admitting in his second inaugural address that justice might require white people to pay back the years they made black people suffer. King's teacher Howard Thurman wrote in the 1940s that black people would play the role of Jesus in American society (read about Jesus and the Disinherited 12/2015). King developed that theme in sermons collected in Strength to Love.

In short, the agency of black people risking their lives to stand up for their dignity -- exemplified by John Lewis -- has been a force to make America grow into its promises.  What other nation has struggled so long and so openly with this dissonance between its ideals and its treatment of a minority?  This struggle, not the strength of our military or the influence of our economy, is what makes America exceptional, the best hope for the world.

Let's recognize the inadequacy of setting aside one month for Black history, as if the story isn't integral to all of our history. Black history is as much American history as any face on Mt. Rushmore - or Stone Mountain.

Other speakers at the funeral portrayed the man as courageous activist, delightful uncle, devoted husband and father, generous boss, and effective politician. Former President Bill Clinton told us what Lewis carried in that back pack in Selma (fruit, toothbrush, a study of American culture, and a memoir by Catholic monk Thomas Merton) because the young man expected to spend the night in jail. Former President George W. Bush repeated the story about Lewis's preaching to chickens, but added that Lewis refused to eat one that the family cooked, "His first non-violent protest." Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi got choked up telling how she visited him one last time and how, after he lay in state, a double rainbow appeared over the Capitol, though no rain had fallen.

Obama looked at the familiar story of Lewis's beating at the bridge in Selma from the unusual perspective of the troopers:  "They thought they had won that day."  But the world had seen the ugly truth that "law and order" here meant degradation and violence, and the world changed. 

Obama told us a story new to me, that Lewis and a buddy named Bernard bought two bus tickets and sat in the front of an interstate bus to test the Court's desegregation order, weeks before the freedom rides organized with protective entourages. "Imagine the courage!" Obama said. "He was all of 20 years old, and he pushed those 20 years to the center of the table" in a gamble for the benefit of others. 

Exceptional man, offering his life to make America exceptional.

[Photos: Lewis, in a very bad spot, has a little smile for the mug shot in Jackson, MS for riding a bus and using a white-only men's room. Top: the Selma march with the backpack.]

"Lightning Men" Dark but not Bleak

With the second book of the Darktown series by Thomas Mullen, Atlanta's first black policemen are caught at the intersection of gang war, police corruption, and a real estate dilemma: what is a fair-minded white homeowner to do when nice black families move onto his street and his dream home's value instantly plummets?

The book's title Lightning Men refers to American fascists who adopted Hitler's lightning insignia in the 1930s. After the war, they're back to intimidate communists, foreigners, and any blacks who dare to buy homes in white neighborhoods. 

 
Mullen writes in third person, but focuses different chapters through different characters. Black officers Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith hold the center of the story, along with their reluctant white ally Officer Dennis "Rake" Rakestraw. But Mullen gives us other characters' points of view: Julie, fiancee to Lucius; Sgt. McGinnis, the ramrod straight white officer fighting on behalf of the black men in his charge; Rake's wife Cassie; and two other characters who steal the show.

First, we meet the young black man Jeremiah as he walks out of prison, hoping to start a new life in Atlanta. He wants to go straight, but, without support, he's soon back in the drug trade that killed his older brother. He's also stymied in his effort to re-connect with his young son and the boy's mother Julie -- because she's engaged to Officer Boggs. When Boggs and Jeremiah meet face-to-face in a diner, Mullen heightens the tension by alternating their points of view. Jeremiah finds a weakness in Lucius. He keeps his thoughts to himself as Lucius talks: "I know what you fear. You fear sin. You are surrounded by it, and you have invited it into your family, so let's see how you like realizing that"(325). 

 
Then, there's Dale, who thinks he can earn respect by donning a ridiculous pointy white hood of the Ku Klux Klan, but he can't even see through the eye holes. When he gets in too deep, which is immediately, he runs for help to his brother-in-law on the force, Officer Rakestraw. Rake compromises himself to help. 

 
As Mullen plays Jeremiah off of Lucius, and Dale off of Rake, he also matches volatile Officer Tommy Smith with his brother-in-law Malcolm, whose secret Tommy feels bound to protect. 

 
Besides chapters where characters vie for dominance with intense, witty dialogue, Mullen writes some that stand out for action and suspense. There's an epic fist fight between Officer Dewey Edwards, the strongest, smallest cop on the force, and Thunder Malloy, biggest baddest drug dealer in town. There's a vigil past midnight by Tommy and his brother-in-law in a darkened house as they watch two, then four, then two or three dozen white neighbors gathering across the street: What will the white people do to keep their neighborhood from "transitioning?" For emotion, and dread, and sympathy, there's a scene in Atlanta's old train terminal where a black family from up north refuses to sit in the fouled "colored" waiting room; Rake tries to respect the family's dignity while an angry white mob forms around him. 

 
Set seventy years ago, the issues in Lightning Men are as up-to-date as our President's recent tweet to housewives about how "they" want to move in next door and destroy the suburbs with sinking property value. In one scene, the fictional Reverend Boggs sits at a table with the real Reverend William Borders (his grandson my classmate in the 1970s) to make a deal with white developers to re-draw the red lines that kept generations of black families from building wealth. The eponymous fascists peddle their version of today's "white genocide" narrative propagated by the young men in Virginia who chanted "Jews will not replace us." 

 
The novel is dark, but not bleak. I've already ordered the latest book in the series.
See my response to the first book, Darktown (06/2020)
.

Monumental Lies

As a white guy, I've never thought about these two monuments. Left in the photo is Edward Ball's 1876 work in Lincoln Park, Washington, the one whose replica in Boston has been removed in this season of increased sensitivity to systemic racism. On the right is James Earle Fraser's 1939 work, removed from New York's Natural History Museum.

If asked, I'd have said these were quaint products of their time, a bit over-the-top. What I've been missing is what makes the monuments so harmful. I've heard accusations that removing a monument is trying to erase history, but monuments can also cover up history.

Two Racial Lies in Two Monuments

While both monuments purport to celebrate freedom and friendship for the races in America, both perpetuate lies that white people in the Americas have told themselves since the time of Columbus:

Lie #1: Black people are built strong, their bodies suitable to hard labor in hot climates; and
Lie #2: Black people are like children, dependent on whites to survive the complexities of white society

All slave owners had to believe these lies to feel good about themselves. The Spanish Queen accepted these lies as good reasons to initiate the African slave trade to her Spanish colonies in the 1500s; confederate states' articles of secession echoed the same "fact" that only black people could do necessary labor in hot summer months. To justify chattel slavery of Christian brothers and sisters, contrary to St. Paul's admonition, English colonial legislatures simply described blacks as less than full human beings. 

In both of these statues we see both lies. The men of color sport physiques that are, well, chiseled. Yet they appear like wide-eyed children; the white men, fully-clothed and elevated, are the grown-ups in control. White people see these and feel good about the way history turned out, how our white leaders were so generous to people who could not have helped themselves.

But the man depicted at Lincoln's feet freed himself. The model Archer "Aleck" Alexander, who defiantly agitated for freedom years before the Civil War, aided Union troops during operations, and escaped himself [see photo]. (See reporting by DeNeen L. Brown in the Washington Post.). Black people funded the monument, but were not consulted on its execution. At the time of its unveiling, Frederick Douglass deplored that the black man is depicted "nude [and] couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal" (Letter published in the National Republican four days after Douglass delivered a sober assessment of Lincoln at the statue's dedication, 1876. See the article about tracking down the letter at Atlas Obscura.com.)

The Roosevelt monument's creator James Earle Fraser called the men of color "guides" for Roosevelt in his work (Andrea Kay Scott, New Yorker, 1 July 2020). But equally buff Teddy, high up on the horse, is the one looking ahead, gesturing onward, while the native American and the black man cleave to him with wide-eyed timorous looks. They carry Roosevelt's firearms. While they wear next-to-nothing, Teddy is resplendant in the uniform of his paramilitary group "the Rough Riders" that he organized to win Cuba from the Spanish in the 1898 war. Fraser intended to show Roosevelt's "friendliness to all races" (Scott) . But the composition of the statue embodies "The White Man's Burden," a poem that Rudyard Kipling actually wrote for young President Roosevelt to help urge Americans to get involved in the 1898 war. Kipling's poem urges young white men to go out into the world to "serve" people of color. For Kipling, non-whites are "half devil and half child," incapable of taking care of themselves through their "Sloth and Folly." (See the whole poem at the Kipling Society

I've heard discussions on NPR with black men and women who told how the Emancipation monument was like a punch in the stomach. On Here and Now two men told identical stories from childhood of being bewildered to see a man "who looked like me" naked and in such a submissive pose. Removing an image that gives such offense may be what our President would belittle as "political correctness," but I bet his mother might have called that "common courtesy."

More than hard feelings, these monumental lies motivate violence. A childlike man with the strength of a beast is someone to be feared, someone likely to steal or sponge off of welfare, someone to be controlled by police or prison guards. (See my blog post about law enforcement and racial fear 07/2016, and "The Privilege is Mine," an account of many ways that whiteness has been my super-power 12/2017)

The lies show up in the videos that have brought Americans into the streets these past several weeks. Three white men with a truck and a gun respond to an unarmed jogger as if he's threatening them. A white woman in Central Park, incensed to have a black man be the grown-up who points out to her the leash law, fakes terror in a 911 call, confident that authorities will believe her performance. Four cops team up to strangle the breath out of a man already handcuffed.

The lie about being "like children" has pervaded public policy for a century. Even during this pandemic, unemployment benefits and eviction moratoria have been limited for the express reason that the people who receive handouts won't return to the workforce without a push. At the inception of unemployment benefits, jobs identified with people of color were excluded from benefits.We add work requirements and restrict health benefits, on the theory that "they" will rely on government and vote Democratic if we don't prod "them" to work.  Reflecting that assumption, the editors of National Review routinely called the Federal government "the Plantation" when I gave up my decades-long subscription.

Confederate Monuments Do Erase History Confederate monuments are easy targets. Caroline Randall Williams writes in the New York Times June 28 that her body is a confederate monument. A black woman, descendant of Confederate leaders, Randall Williams calls her light complexion "the color of rape." To those who would "deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred," she writes,

I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

Confederate monuments do intentionally erase history, every one a repudiation of the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War. When Federal troops gave up on enforcing blacks' civil rights after 1875, whites repressed blacks with new laws, systematic discrimination, and pervasive intimidation. Those statues said to blacks and whites alike, "Forget about Reconstruction and civil rights; the good ol' days of white supremacy are back." Placed in town squares and on courthouse steps, they were always intended to be stone walls to blacks. Whether they be torn down, or surrounded by context, let them no longer stand unopposed.

Exception for Founding Fathers? Before I read an essay on George Washington by Michele L. Norris, I thought monuments to the founders deserved more credit than those honoring Confederates. One group created the union; the other group would destroy the union rather than give up slavery.

But Norris makes us uncomfortably aware how Washington, champion of independence, kept 300 human beings in abject dependence on him. First, Norris draws our attention to names of some who lived and served most closely to George and Martha: Austin, Moll, Giles, Ona Judge, Paris, Hercules, Joe, Richmond, Christopher Sheels, and William Lee. Did loving parents name these people at birth, or did enslavers tag them? Either way, looking at the names, you've got to sense individual character and personal potential that slavery cutailed.

I've been to Mt. Vernon and toured the spaces where its black population lived and worked. I've read lengthy biographies. But Norris's point is well-taken, that slavery was not just incidental to Washington and his peers, but essential. Their eloquent spokesman Patrick Henry riled up his fellow Virginians for war by casting the British as enslavers: "Give me liberty, or give me death!" They knew that life enslaved wasn't worth living, yet suppressed that knowledge every single day of their lives. I remember reading a note from Henry to a friend, about the irony of his most famous line. Henry wrote that he would free his slaves, if only it weren't so "inconvenient" to do so.

While Washington projected himself as benevolent lord to these people, we can see the shadow of the lies he told himself. When those serving him in Philadelphia came close to earning their freedom under a Pennsylvania law, George and Martha went to extraordinary lengths to swap them for others back at Mt. Vernon. Wanting to believe that their laborers prospered under their care, George and Martha reacted with relentless fury to recapture one who got away, Martha's personal servant Ona Judge. Yes, Washington saved up to free and provide property for those he enslaved, but not those jointly owned by his wife, and not until his death. The creepiest detail in Norris's article is a photograph of Washington's false teeth: Not wood, as schoolchildren are told, but human teeth extracted from nine people of his own plantation. A note in his ledger shows how he got them cheap off his own people, paying them a fraction of what the dentist usually paid to get teeth. The payment must have eased Washington's conscience more than it compensated their pain.

Should statues of Washington come down? The Washington Archives webpage about Washington's teeth acknowledges the probable truth of Norris's story, while reminding us how Washington to set the course for civilian, elected, law-abiding government in the new United States. The hope of this nation and of the world abides in those values: I want Washington's best side to be known. But I'd also like to know more about Austin, Moll, Giles, Ona Judge.... 

[I reached a different conclusion in an essay "Disarming Confederate Memorials" (08/2017). It begins with the anecdote of a mother, rancorously divorced, who chose to display mementos of her married life rather than deny her son reminders of his own past.]
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"The Ladies Who Lunch" 50 Years Later

YouTube suggested I might like a video from 1970 of actress Elaine Stritch singing "The Ladies Who Lunch." The song was from a musical that had just opened on Broadway, Company, book by George Furth, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, who composed the song for her character "Joanne."

YouTube was right. It's a good excuse to reflect on this song, that performer, and how the song holds up 50 years later. (See Elaine Stritch's TV studio performance from 1970.)

Before I'd ever heard of Stephen Sondheim or Company, comedian Carol Burnett shocked America by staging this bitter song in the middle of her beloved, folksy, charming TV variety show.  At age 11, I knew she was singing about my mother and my Aunt Blanche, and it wasn't funny at all. For years after, I'd find others impacted by Burnett's serious turn.

Sondheim writes in his memoir Finishing the Hat that "the character of Joanne was not only written for Elaine Stritch, it was based on her" with her "acerbic delivery of self-assessment" (193).

Until I saw this video artifact from 1970, I thought I knew everything about the song. I've heard and seen dozens of performances of the song, and I've accompanied myself singing it a few dozen more. The music has the mid-60s basso-nova feel, with dark coloration in the harmony, and a fun detail in the melody: whenever Joanne repeats the phrase, "I'll drink to that," the notes slide downward with notes out of the key, in a musical expression of inebriation. The lyric is a toast to different kinds of women that Joanne observes - the ladies who lunch, the ones who stay smart, the ones who play wife. In each verse, Sondheim hides an inner rhyme "to give the lines a tautness." I've italicized the syllables that rhyme to show what he means:

Here's to the girls who play wife --
Aren't they too much?
Keeping house but clutching a copy of Life
just to keep in touch.

He explains, "The 'clutch' is hidden, there's no musical pause there, no way of pointing it up, but it's there to help make the line terse, the way the character is" (quoted in Craig Zadan's book Sondheim and Co. 2nd Edition 1986, p.232).

So I cried to see Stritch, some 15 years younger than I am now, perform the lines in ways that bring tenderness out of this "acerbic" and "taut" song. It was a surprise, though I've seen another video of Stritch from around the same time.  It's in the Pennebaker documentary of the original cast's recording. Stritch fails in multiple takes. Everyone else had gone home hours before, and she's there screaming the song at the microphone, looking harried, insecure, ashamed.

This is different. "I'd like to propose a toast," she says, while an off-screen pianist plays the first chords rubato. Stritch is wearing her own signature outfit - a man's dress shirt, leggings. There's that late-60s eye-liner, but no other noticeable makeup; no accessories, no prop tumbler. Hands folded on her lap, she sings, "Here's to the ladies who lunch" the way I'm used to hearing it, as a clarion call. But then she sings softly, "Everybody laugh."

Already, she's laid out her attitude. These women are ridiculous, but she feels for them. They're "planning a brunch" she sings, scowling as if to say, "really?", then clasps her hands to sing softly, "on their own behalf."

This was taped at New York's Channel 13, a low-budget production, without any fancy camera work. The camera moves in on her sarcastic question, "Does anyone still wear a hat?" Her anger picks up as she rips through the girls who stay smart, giving us sarcastic jazz hands for "a matinee," and an-oh-so-serious scowl as her forefingers touch her thumbs -- we're being intellectual, now -- for "a Pinter play," and then an extravagant gesture for "a piece of Mahler's." (Sondheim reveals that Stritch didn't get the reference. She thought a piece of Mahler's would be some kind of pastry. In the full orchestration, Jonathan Tunick quotes a riff from Mahler's 4th after this line.)

She mocks the "ones who follow the rules, and meet themselves at the schools" before mocking her own kind, "the ones who just watch," who take "another chance to disapprove... another reason not to move," screaming "I - I - I - I'll" drink to that.

In the final verse, Stritch conveys strongly what's implied in the lyrics. Mock them she might, but she's with them, too. The camera moves in close on her eyes as she begins the last verse, when the internal rhymes punch up what these women all face together:

So here's to the girls on the go
Everybody tries.
Look into their eyes and you'll see what they know:
Everybody dies!

We've already had several "Everybody" lines: this is the ultimate. Sondheim tops it with a scary grand finale. Joanne commands an ovation, "Everybody rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise!" Stritch is uninhibited here, unafraid to sound hoarse, angry, and hurting.

Fifty years later, the song doesn't sound dated. I know these women. Stars keep wringing meaning from it -- Meryl Streep, Audra MacDonald, and Christine Baranski did a Zoom cocktail hour version for Sondheim's 90th birthday. If Mr. Sondheim is reading this, I suppose an update should include a toast to the ladies with jobs.

For now, as for the past 50 years, here's to "The Ladies Who Lunch."

[See my Sondheim Page for much more about the man, his shows, craft, and colleagues. I write about what I learned from interviews with Elaine Stritch and a folk singer, her contemporary Jean Redpath, at Diverse Divas and the Art of Showbiz]

Traveling with Joni Mitchell's "Blue": Lots of Laughs

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
traveling, traveling, traveling
Looking for something, what can it be? - Joni Mitchell, "All I Want"

Early on the lonely road of this pandemic, I picked up Joni Mitchell's Blue. It came highly recommended by a younger teacher, Justin Loudermilk, and by not one but two different NPR polls that put Blue as best album by a female artist. With that downer title, the eerie cover, and the obscure title song, I was a little apprehensive. But with this album, Mitchell has made a great traveling companion for me, out on my bike or lying awake at 2 a.m. The surprise is, she's funny.

[My appreciation for Joni Mitchell came decades late. Read about my discovery of her in my blogpost Just Songs: Discovering Joni Mitchell 40 Years Later. I respond to a group biography of Joni, Carole King, and Carly Simon in Carole, Joni, and Carly in Context]

The laughs begin with "All I Want." You expect the title phrase to go with some little thing, as, "All I want is" a poached egg, or maybe world peace. Instead, this song turns into a torrent of rhymed desires, some life-long and some immediate, some about herself, some about her companion: "I want to be strong, I want to laugh along," "to get up and jive... to wreck my stockings in some juke box dive," "to knit you a sweater...to make you feel better" and a rhyme that makes me laugh, "I want to shampoo you, I want to renew you...." She's pushing so hard, she could wear a guy down. She admits, with wise self-awareness, that sometimes "I hate you some, I love you some / Oh I love you when I forget about me." For her song about traveling, Mitchell drives the music with an ostinato on the hammer dulcimer, punctuated with off-beat chords.

Then Mitchell tosses wisdom and self-awareness out the window for a romantic fantasy, "My Old Man." Alluding to dance numbers in MGM musicals, she describes him as a "singer in the park, a walker in the rain, a dancer in the dark." When he comes home, she's there waiting for him to "take [her] in his arms" and "tell [all her] charms." It would be like a 60s sitcom marriage, except they "don't need no piece of paper from the city hall" to keep them together. And it's rated R: He's her "fireworks at night." (Thanks to my friend Susan for the insight that this song is fantasy. We've enjoyed the album together many times since the pandemic started.)

In other songs she see-saws between wanting to get away, and wanting to get back.

One fare-thee-well song, "Carey," with its companion piece "California," pulls us into the middle of a short-term relationship that seems to have been stormy, but a joy. The singer, restless on the Greek island Matalla, tells Carey that she has to leave, because

It's really not my home.
My fingernails are filthy, I got beach tar on my feet
And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne.

So she invites Carey out for a bottle of wine. "We'll laugh and toast to nothing and smash our empty glasses down." She does propose a toast anyway, to "this bright red devil who keeps me in this tourist town." In "California," she's so excited to be coming home from abroad that she'd "even kiss a Sunset pig" [note to non-boomers: that's 60s slang for L.A.P.D. - another of Susan's glosses], but she remembers fondly a "redneck" she met in Greece

who did the goat dance (prim little pause here) very well
he gave me back my smile
(sudden edge to the voice) but he kept my camera to sell

The "red, red rogue" was a good cook, too, she says, and she would have stayed on except for (rhapsodic swoop into her higher register) "California." A few years ago, NPR aired an interview with the eponymous Carey, who remembers working in a cafe in Greece when the famous Joni Mitchell, on retreat from her fame, presented him a tray she'd stacked with empties that he had failed to pick up from her friends' table. He dumped the tray at her feet. Start of a great friendship. It's fun to hear the details, but Mitchell's lyrics and the sheer joy of her playing and singing imply all that backstory. She sings, "You're a mean old daddy, but I like you," she pauses, "fine." So do we.

Even the down songs raise a rueful smile. In "This Flight Tonight," while the singer's back to traveling and wishing she weren't, she parodies pop music she hears on her headphones. Mitchell plays a mournful variation on "Jingle Bells" for "River," a song of regret at Christmas time: "I wish I had a river I could skate away on / I made my baby cry." The irony runs thick in "The Last Time I Saw Richard," who lectured the singer on romanticism, then "got married to a figure skater, ...bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator," and "drinks alone most nights."

There's another romantic comedy moment in "A Case of You." The man is over-the-top, saying he's "constant as the northern star." She shoots him down: "Constantly in the darkness? Where's that at? If you want me, I'll be in the bar." But then she's obsessing over him. Doodling on a coaster, she sketches his face, twice, inside a map of Canada. Cue a bit of her national anthem, "O Canada."

One song is more sweet than bitter, "Little Green." The singer seems to be instructing person or persons unknown who will be naming the child. "Call her green, and the winter cannot fade her," she sings. When "he," the father, moved to California, she wrote him about the child, "her eyes are blue"; he sent back a poem. There are a lot of epithets for a self-absorbed jerk like that, but she politely observes, "He's a non-conformer." The rest of the song is about hopes for this "child of a child" after the singer signs her away "in the family name." She feels "sad and sorry, but not ashamed" to provide the baby girl a "happy ending," with "icicles and birthday clothes and sometimes" -- she adds for mother and daughter, both -- "there'll be sorrow."

I knew when I started my journey with this album that I'd have to get over my distaste for the title song. I'd complained to my friend Justin how the melody meandered, how the lyrics were obscure, how Mitchell's voice, sustaining high notes, has wobbles so wide you could drive a big yellow taxi through them. He just smiled and said, "Give it time. I think you'll like it."

He's right.

To get it, I first had to discern the unusual form. It's ABBA. No hook. She varies every iteration of the word "Blue," something that bothered me, but now I appreciate how she never settles for mere repetition.

She seems to be calling someone "Blue" as a name, but maybe it's just a description. The lyric isn't so obscure when you appreciate the interlocking images of ocean, tattoo, song, pin/needle. In the first A section, she sings, "Songs are like tattoos." How? "Ink on a pin, an empty space to fill in." With "ink on a pin," the tattoo needle has "an empty space to fill in" on the skin; the songwriter fills in empty space on a page. The singer challenges the other person, "Crown and anchor me, or let me sail away," a call for commitment in a relationship, suggested by a common tattoo image [note to non-Boomers: anchor tattoos were common in the 20th century, at least]. She promises that "there is a song for you."

The "empty space to fill in" touches off the faster-moving B section(s) about spiritual emptiness of people in her time. Still playing with the ocean theme, she sings, "There's so many sinking now" as they try to get "through these waves." They use "Acid, booze and ass / Needles, guns and grass" -- "needles" and such, like the pin, may fill in the empty space. She doesn't seem so sure: "Lots of laughs, (pause) lots of laughs."

In the concluding A section, she comes back to the ideas of song and ocean, offering a shell as "your song from me," explaining, "Inside you'll hear a sigh, a foggy lullaby." I hear it as good-bye.

I found on the internet some bits that give me more to smile about. First, she said in reflection on Blue

"I came to another turning point — the terrible opportunity that people are given in their lives. The day that they discover to the tips of their toes that they're a------s. And you have to work on from there." "Why Joni Mitchell's Blue is the Greatest Relationship Album Ever" The Atlantic, February 2013

She told another interviewer that she was "miscast" when she wrote and sang "Both Sides Now" at a very young age. Hearing her song performed by Mabel Mercer gave her fresh insight on just how good -- and precocious -- the song is. (Mercer's recording of the song as a dramatic art song impressed me, too, around 40 years ago.) Mitchell approached Mercer, grand dame of New York nightclub singers, and told her what a revelation it was to hear her song performed by someone so mature. Mercer, at 70, took umbrage. Mitchell, telling this story at 70, laughed. (CBC, The National, June 11, 2013).

Then, there's the observation about that scary - looking cover. The last laugh is on me: It's a parody of Otis Redding's album Otis Blue.

Thanks to Jason

Thanks to Jason, I've kept a regimen of bike riding since 1992.  Jason was in 8th grade when he repaired my bicycle and got me hooked on riding.  For the past several years. he has made the long drive from Mississippi to the Atlanta area to ride with me during my birthday week, for which, again, I owe thanks.

[Photo:  Jason and me, at Marietta's cafe Douceur de France.]

This year, we rode the Silver Comet Trail west to Rockmart, where Jon Stewart's film Irresistible was filmed in 2019. We did 52 miles - midway between Jason's age and mine. [Photo: On site in Rockmart.]

Cycling America Virtually: NY, PA, OH, IL, MN

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[Updated 03/16/2023] Three months into the pandemic of 2020, I realized that my bike rides since Y2K added up to 25,000 miles, the circumference of the earth (see Around the World on a Bike).

So I set a new goal: to ride the distances between places I've known, lived, or loved. Starting virtually at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in New York City, I transferred miles from my local rides to a map of the US, making selfies at each meaningful stop all the way to LA. I'd left out a lot of places important to me, so I started a new tour, from LA to San Francisco, then east to my home in Georgia.  

Having just retired, I continued my rides.  I went up the coast to Maine, I crossed into Canada and the wider world. As of March 16, 2023, I'm close to 14,000 miles into my second virtual bike trip around the world, more than halfway. In 2022 alone, riding on trails around Atlanta, I cycled 4868 miles, average speed 15.4. Use the arrows at the top and bottom of each page to track the entire tour with pictures at each stop and appreciations for what each place has meant in my life's journey. What follows are pieces I wrote when my tour began in 2020:

I first visited New York City in 1974 with Atlanta's Northside School of Performing Arts to see lots of Broadway shows, but not A Little Night Music, alas. Thanks to Northside's pianist Paul Ford, that show by Stephen Sondheim would shape the rest of my life.  No kidding --  see my Sondheim page. My last trip there, made with my friend Suzanne, was to see Night Music starring Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2010. In this photo, I'm at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. My helmet is off to him!

To Pittsburgh PA was another 320 miles, site of my earliest memories. Dad worked in Pittsburgh's triangle. I remember riding the red funicular car down the steep hill towards the three-river area, ca. 1964. I was among the first little kids ever to enjoy Mister Rogers when he was still a local TV personality.  I write about it at "Mister Rogers was my Neighbor." (06/2018)

To Cincinnati OH was another 258, a ride I finished on July 4th. Every summer of my childhood, I visited my grandmother there. Aunt Blanche and Uncle Jack welcomed me and my siblings to their home, and took us to see fireworks. The photo is taken in Covington, the Kentucky side of the Ohio river, where my grandparents Dewey and Harriet Smoot lived as newlyweds 100 years ago.  The round building is the hotel that my uncle Jack built, with the revolving restaurant.  (Read more about Aunt Blanche (09/2009) and more about childhood memories of how wonderful Cincy was for me (09/2015 and 03/2023).

To Chicago is another 253 miles.  I lived in Chicago from 1966-1969, where I learned to read, write, and ride a bike.  My friends Gordon Walton, Neal Brailov, and I would ride a couple miles to Tracy Herzog's neighborhood to coast down the only hill in town.  A Google search for Neal shows him to be director at the Art Institute of Chicago, where I made a pilgrimage in 2004 to see the iconic painting by French artist Georges Seurat, central character in Sondheim's musical Sunday in the Park with George. (Read how that painting is so important to my life: "Sunday, Art, and Forever" 06/2015). I was in town to see Sondheim's Bounce (later revised to Road Show),   It's fitting that I complete this leg of my journey on July 14, Bastille Day, midpoint for the Tour de France bike race in years without a pandemic.  Here's a picture of me re-visiting Seurat's painting of Le Grand Jatte, an islet park in Paris.

On my 61st birthday, July 15th, I rode 61 miles on the Silver Comet Trail outside of Atlanta, a distance that would take me to Wonder Lake, IL, en route to Minneapolis, my next virtual destination. Here's Wonder Lake, with me at the end of 61 miles.  I took a nap afterwards.

On July 25, my bike and I completed 355 more miles, enough to take me to Chanhassen, a suburb of Minneapolis, where I stayed two weeks in 2005 monitoring my Aunt Harriet's health and enjoying her company.  (My article about Aunt Harriet's 4th of July celebration with me is one of my favorites 07/04/2018) Taking me on a bike tour of Chanhassen, my cousin Ken Bloch showed me Paisley Park, where Prince then lived.   For this virtual tour, I wore a shirt that alludes to Prince's music for Tim Burton's original BATMAN movie, and I pause with my Gatorade to toast this man whose music I sometimes play when I ride.  He never fails to get me moving and smiling: "Ain't gonna let the elevator bring us down / Oh, no, let's go / Crazy!"

|| The Tour continues →

Biking Atlanta's Freedom Trail on July 4th

For years I've made it my July 4th tradition to ride the Freedom Trail bike path from the birth neighborhood of Martin Luther King, Jr. to Stone Mountain, a lovely park with a giant Confederate monument, where the modern Ku Klux Klan was born.  Five years ago, I was riding at the park when a caravan of trucks roared by full of white people toting guns and waving Confederate flags en route to a demonstration against a memorial to King planned for the mountain top. 

So I smiled to see a mirror image today.  Black men and women, in black militia garb milled about Stone Mountain village toting automatic rifles.  My first thought was the irony that the supporters of Georgia's gun-carry law probably didn't foresee that gun rights would be exercised this particular way.

When I blithely rode through their perimeter to get back on the trail, the young man with the rifle who stopped me was very polite and waved me on. (The photo comes from someone's Twitter feed uploaded a few minutes after I passed by this spot.  The police escorted the group on a march through the park.)

In Candler Park, I was again diverted, this time by a crowd gathered to hear a string quartet play "Amazing Grace."

On NPR during my drive home, I heard two wonderful programs on American themes.  Sound Opinions covered Bill Withers's live album from 1972, making me realize the warmth and distinction of that voice, those songs, and that personality.  Nine-year Navy veteran (engineering, non-combat), blue collar worker, great singer-songwriter, he quit show business in 1985 to raise children.  He comes across as real smart, real fun, and just real.  Very American story, too. 

Then The Hidden Brain explored the topic of Thomas Jefferson's internal contradictions over slavery, exactly the subject for an essay that I've been drafting all week.  They had as much trouble reaching a conclusion as I've had. 

As the day winds down, I've just taken Brandy for a walk in the local cemetery.   She had a rough night last night with pre-4th fireworks; tonight should be an ordeal.

Now it's about time to remember Aunt Harriet and one special July 4th.  (See blogpost of 07/04/2018).

The brats, the sauerkraut, and the corn cobs are ready.  Soon, it'll be time to mix the martinis. 

Update:  After my Aunt Harriet tribute dinner, I listened to Bill Withers's Live at Carnegie Hall album on the back porch while Brandy huddled under the roll-top desk to escape sounds of fireworks exploding for blocks around.

His voice and words have been a part of my life since sixth grade, but until now, I've never thought twice about the man behind the recordings.  He seems at ease talking to a rain-soaked audience, singing and talking about his buddies in the band, and telling stories about his grandmother before singing his ode to her, "Grandma's Hands."  He tells the story of a Vietnam vet who's lost his right arm as intro to a strong song, "I Can't Write Left Handed," lines all dictation - tell my lawyer... tell my mother... It's hard to take!  The familiar songs are so acute.  Then at the end he sings vignettes about Harlem, Monday night, too hot, Wednesday night, too cold, Saturday night staying up 'til church Sunday morning.  For minutes at the end, he involves the audience in riffing on that song, giving these sophisticated New Yorkers some instruction in how to sing it right.

[Photo: Withers at Carnegie Hall, 1972, Village Voice, Bob Gruen]

"Darktown": Good Cops, Bad Cops, and Race in Atlanta, 1948

Darktown, a crime novel by Thomas Mullen, takes off from a real event. In 1948, Atlanta hired its first eight black cops to police "Darktown," the derisive name for black neighborhoods. Black cops were not permitted to drive or arrest a white person. For their own protection -- as a quarter of Atlanta's cops belonged to the KKK -- they could not wear their uniforms to and from work, could not patrol without a partner, and could not enter the police station. Their HQ was the basement of the YMCA.

[Photo collage: Atlanta 1948, Darktown, and the real-life cops who inspired the novel.]

In the novel, Officer Lucius Boggs is one of the eight. A college-educated son of a preacher, he still lives with his parents on Auburn Avenue, the actual neighborhood of Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr., "a private world" of wealth, culture, and fine homes cultivated after a white rampage through Atlanta's black neighborhoods in 1904 to be "a protective bubble keeping them safe from the rest of the city, the South, America" (216). To his uncle, Boggs claims to have built up antibodies to racism around him. His uncle grips him by the shoulders and pleads, "Bleed those antibodies from your veins!" Boggs opens his heart to be more vulnerable, and more angry, during the course of this story.

His partner Tommy Smith comes from darker places but has a lighter touch. When we first meet him, he's limping from "acrobatics," i.e., his jump from a third-story window to escape his girl friend's boyfriend (2). Boggs shrinks back when Tommy uses his fists and baton to shut down a petty criminal. In one of Mullen's great scenes, full of atmosphere, tension, and humor, Smith lays a loaded gun on a barroom table within reach of his adversary, daring the crook to shoot him while a blues band plays on. In this scene, we learn that Smith has direct experience of lynchings, which are just family lore for Boggs (155).

Both men are motivated to clean up their neighborhood. In the first chapters of the novel, they investigate gambling and liquor violations. They've set their sights on Mama Dove's brothel. But Boggs is feeling the pull to do something more. In his father's church during the funeral of a black man gunned down by white officers, neighbors confront Boggs: "I thought you were supposed to stop this!" (86)

Stepping out of his protective bubble, Boggs investigates with his partner the death of a young black woman. In the first incident of the novel, ticketing a drunk white man for driving into a light pole, they see her in the passenger seat in a light yellow dress, her face bruised. Days after, they find her corpse in a dump, recognizable only by the dress. When the driver turns out to have been an ex-cop whose name has been expunged from their report, the two cops look for justice off-hours. Their investigation takes them south of Auburn Avenue to Mama Dove's brothel, into the forbidden police station, way out to a farm terrorized by a sheriff and his posse, and the white neighborhood of a Senator.

They find an ally in Officer Dennis Rakestraw, who runs a parallel investigation of his own. Grandson of a German immigrant, he served with American troops at Dachau Concentration Camp, where he gave tours to townspeople who protested they never knew what was going on there (72). Sensitive to pervasive racism, he grows sick of the casual brutality and corruption of his partner Lionel Dunlow. With the discovery of something going on between Dunlow and the ex-cop who crashed the car, Rake goes into partnership with Boggs and Smith. The excitement builds from there.

The writer Thomas Mullen creates sympathetic characters. The more we learn about the victim, Lilly Ellsworth, the more we appreciate her courage and faithfulness to her family back on the farm. The Ellsworth father maintains his dignity facing unrestrained racist cops; the teenage brother is crushed by the weight of responsibility and sadness, and his stoic mother rebuffs the cops with suppressed rage (ca. 285). Mama Dove handles the cops with ruthless sarcasm (186). Even deplorable Dunlow, drunkenly spilling his story to Rake in a baking hot toolshed, reveals a side to his story that makes him understandable, though not forgivable (Ch. 31). We glimpse this other side early on, following a raid on the family of a black jailbreaker, where Rake, afraid for his life, has splashed scalding grits into the sister's face: Dunlow hugs his shaken partner (33). Dunlow feels some kind of sympathy for Rake, though we don't yet understand why.

Atlanta radio host Lois Reitzes opined during an interview with Mullen that Atlanta's weather is another character in the novel (City Lights, WABE FM). Mullen, who lives here, agreed. He conjures the morning light, relentless heat, sweat, the sounds and atmosphere of steamy nights.

Since May, it seems that we white people have felt like the heroes of noir detective fiction, described by Lucius's Uncle Percy as "good men who discover their environments are far darker than they realized" (216). Disturbed by videos of whites confident that the law will stand by them when they claim to have felt threatened by an unarmed black man - Ahmad Arberry, Chris Cook, and George Floyd -- we are coming to perceive the dark truth behind the glib phrases we've come a long way, post-racial America, and a few bad apples.

Those sayings have been our antibodies, enabling us to deny what black people still experience everywhere they go. For white readers, entering into the vividly realized world of Darktown may help to bleed those antibodies from our veins.

Related links
• I respond to the second book in Mullen's Darktown series, Lightning Men.
  
• See my Crime Fiction page for a curated guide to other fiction in the genre.
• My reflection on the movies Chinatown and LA Confidential (07/2016) specifically focuses on "noir" crime fiction. It ends with links to other reflections that explore the noir approach to storytelling, including the series by wonderful Walter Mosley about Easy Rawlins, a black man pursuing justice in LA after the Second World War.
• In an interview with NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates, Mullen tells her that he'd already started the novel in 2014 when the police killing of Michael Brown made headlines. When Bates asks if a white author Thomas Mullen can write a fair account of the black experience, he tells how the manuscript was sent around without his name or any mention of his previous historical novels, so that the story was accepted on its own merits. Hear the interview with Mullen and his publisher, 9/23/2016
• The image of Atlanta, ca. 1948, is from a blogger's review of the hardback edition at Jolene Grace Books

"Ashes": Seeds of America Trilogy Concludes

In the conclusion to Laurie Halse Anderson's The Seeds for America Trilogy, the narrator Isabel at last can attempt to rescue younger sister Ruth from enslavement years after Madame Lockton split the siblings. At the same time, General Washington and his French allies are closing in on the British Army at Yorktown. Isabel resents that her old friend Curzon seems more interested in that action than in helping her. As the title Ashes and the first chapter's epigraph suggest, this will be a novel of "blood and ashes." We see an odious slave overseer, stomach-churning disease, and gruesome carnage.

Yet the overarching question of the novel gives it the energy and delight of a romantic comedy: Will Isabel and Curzon ever realize that they love each other?

My friend Susan started reading this third book while I was still enjoying Forge, which is narrated by the young man Curzon (see "Friendship and Fire," 06/2020). I expressed my hope that Curzon's affable narrative voice might continue in the final book, or at least alternate chapters with Isabel's more intense voice. Susan made an interesting comment: "The narrator has to be Isabel, because she has more to learn."

I agree. When Curzon wants to re-enlist with the Continental Army, Isabel tries to dissuade him:

"I am my own army," I said. "My feet and legs, my hands, arms, and back, those are my soldiers. My general lives up here" -- I tapped my forehead -- "watching for the enemy and commanding the field of battle.... Neither redcoats nor rebels fight for me. I see no reason to support them." (126)

Curzon asks, "What do you fight for, then?" She answers that she wants only to get away from fighting. But, weeks later, she comes to understand an essential difference in their approaches to life:

He favored the larger stage, the grand scale at which folks sought to improve the world. I had chosen to focus on the smaller stage, concentrating myself only with my sister's circumstances.... I realized that Curzon did not care more for his army than me, or even feel that there was a choice to be made. His heart was so large, it could love multitudes. And it did. (242)

Isabel learns from Curzon. She speaks to both the larger and smaller "stage" when, following victory, Virginians re-enslave blacks in the camp and in the ranks. When Curzon expresses bitterness, she pours seeds into Curzon's hand, the ones from her late mother's garden that Isabel and Curzon have preserved through all their years together. A garden has to begin with something, she explains. As the seeds sprout and bloom, you can tend and shape the garden. Echoing the very first words of the series, a quote from Thomas Paine, Isabel says, "Seems to me this is the seed time for America" (271).

We know that one of the seeds is oppression of dark skinned Americans. But we're still free to make of the garden what we will.

There's so much else I want to remember from this book. There's a boy named Aberdeen who's "sweet" on Ruth; a donkey that Ruth names "Thomas Boon" in a scene both light-hearted and heart-warming; the re-appearance of Curzon's old friend Ebenezer; an emotional reconciliation (174); and, of course, the answer to that question, Will they ever realize they love each other?

Laurie Halse Anderson. Ashes. Conclusion to The Seeds for America Trilogy. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2016.

Before You Say Something You'll Regret...: Crucial Conversations

"Take a deep breath, Mr. Smoot. You're about to say something you'll regret."

I whipped around from the 7th grade girl who had made me so mad to face the boy who spoke those words behind my back. He was smiling, but very red in the face.

He continued, "Count to ten."

I did. Then I apologized to the class, laughed at my foolish reaction, thanked him, and did my best to meet the girl's needs. She only wanted to do well, and my instruction had not told her how.

That's my own contribution to the trove of similar anecdotes that show effective ways to handle conversation when it goes "crucial." These anecdotes often made me tear up, because nothing gets to me like forgiveness and reconciliation. There's the one about the wife who wants to feel appreciated more than desired (98); the wife who finds a nearby no-tell motel charged on her husband's account (149); and the mother whose daughter screams, "I finally get a boyfriend and you want to take him away from me" (170)

The authors slice these anecdotes up, filling the in-betweens with observations of what's going wrong, and what can make it go right. So each chapter is a kind of story, with a heartwarming denoument.

The basics are all present in my own anecdote. Look at yourself and others to see if a conversation has gone wrong. Apologize. Make it safe, expressing that you don't want the other to feel badly, and you do share a common goal (and if you don't agree on a specific goal, make the goal more general). Find out,Why would a rational, decent human being do what they're doing? I've always known, true authority is based on mutual respect.

Here are a few gems from the book:

• Sarcasm is a form of silence (75)
• Respect is like air: You don't notice it, but when it's gone, it's all people think about (79-80)
• When a conversation turns crucial, "step out of the content" to examine why there's "silence" or "violence," sure signs that someone doesn't feel safe (92 and before)

Some of the book's lessons are good for teaching my students about persuasive rhetoric. There's a list of ways to win an argument by hurting everyone and shutting down true dialogue:

• Stack the deck with our supporting facts
• Exaggerate
• Use inflammatory terms
• Appeal to authority
• Attack the opponent
• Make hasty generalizations
• Attack a straw man

I'd add "What about?" as in, "Oh? What about that time when...." It occurs to me as I type this up that I hear NPR interviewers sidestepping this kind of rhetoric every time they interview partisans on the news.

One of the many stories contributed by readers concerns using the principles in this book to compose a speech for an international audience filled with defensive delegates (222). For teaching persuasive writing, these are understandable notions: make the other side feel "safe" and mirror the other side's stories.

The authors' use of the word "story" is helpful. It's better for teaching writing than the dry word "thesis." Facts don't have power to make us emotional, but the stories we make from them do. If you're feeling strongly, then examine your story. Often, there's more than one story to explain the facts (115).

Also, vocabulary matters. "Angry" doesn't give you enough information; "surprised" and "embarrassed" give you some things you can address (114).

Some of the strongest stories and lessons follow the index. In an afterword, the authors tell what they've learned in a decade of teaching this book. These are strong:

• It's not only when it matters most that we do our worst. The author blew up at a minor $3 charge (224).
• Ready to launch a tirade at his 15 year old son, the father took a moment to examine the boy's story. When his own body visibly relaxed, the boy transformed, "no longer a monster -- he was a vulnerable, beautiful, precious boy" (226).
• You can't make someone else have dialogue with you. But weeks of the father's approaching the withdrawn, sarcastic daughter, "softened" her to the point that she felt safe to tell him her story (230).

One author tells us that some readers who thank him for the way the book has helped in their lives also admit that they've not done much more than skim the book. He says that's okay. We all have good ideas of what best behavior looks like, and just the reminder that a conversation has turned crucial is enough (228).

When that happens, take a deep breath. Count to ten. And start over.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. Second Edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 2012.

"Forge": Friendship and Fire

Ten minutes into Laurie Halse Anderson's YA novel Forge, I'd laughed out loud four times, gasped and cried. Those reactions mix in about that same proportion throughout the novel, along with "awwws" and some outrage. Comparing this to Chains, its predecessor in Anderson's trilogy Seeds of America, I find the same skillful manipulation of her story to fit with events of the War for Independence, with more playfulness and a whole lot more fart jokes.

[Image:   Laurie Halse Anderson. Forge. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2010.]

The jokes are a guy thing, natural to Anderson's narrator Curzon. In Chains, the intense story of Isabel, a girl enslaved, Curzon was comic relief, with his ridiculous floppy red hat, an earring, military garb too big, and a mouth on him. Even at the end of that story, sick and starving in a military prison, he's making jokes. Now he's "almost 16," meaning 11 months short of his birthday, enrolled in the Continental Army, longing to reunite with Isabel.

Friendship leavens Curzon's suffering from the elements, privations, and hostility from a few of the other teenaged boys in his company. Foremost among his allies is Ebenezer "Eben" Woodruff, the young soldier that Curzon saves early in the novel. Eben's gratitude is as boundless as his chatter, expressed often with arm-numbing punches to Curzon's shoulder.

A gulf opens between the two friends in a passage that anticipates how the "seeds of America" in 1777 will grow through Civil War to Civil Rights to those today who pit "law and order" against "systemic racism." When Eben argues that runaway slaves break the law, Curzon counters, "Bad laws deserve to be broken," just as the King's decrees are being rebuffed by the colonies. Eben asserts that "running away from their rightful master is not the same as America wanting to be free of England." Curzon falls silent a moment.

I almost told him then; told him that I and my parents and my grandparents had all been born into bondage, that my great-grandparents had been kidnapped from their homes and forced into slavery while his great-grandparents decided which crops to plant and what to name their new cow. (66)

If they'd had the phrase "white privilege," Eben still wouldn't understand. When Eben counters that bondage is "God's will," Curzon walks away: "You're not my friend." The ugly and painful chapters that follow make the friendship, when it returns, all the more deep and sweet.

To fit the arc of Curzon's story to a day-by-day account of events in 1777-1778, Anderson paces her chapters to make the personal coincide with the historical so that jaw-dropping surprises don't feel random. Instead, for example, we think, "It makes sense they would be there!" Anderson shows off in a playful way, meting out highpoints to fall on significant dates. There's peace-making and good will on Christmas, very bad luck on Friday the 13th, something having to do with the heart -- no spoilers, here -- on February 14th, and, for May 1st, more than one reason to think that our narrator has Maypoles on his mind. The way Anderson plays with her material to hit these marks adds another pleasure to the novel.

Anderson plays with the title, too. When my seventh graders read Chains, there's always a bubbling up of energy as the kids realize how many ways the title appears in the text, relating to story and themes. That game continues, as Chains are made at a Forge. Much of the novel takes place at Valley Forge. Curzon, who once worked for a blacksmith, makes himself a black "Smith" when he enlists with an alias. The hardships of military life are a "forge," says a fellow soldier, to be "a test of our mettle" (121). Lead antagonist James Bellingham has forged a metal collar for his slave. By training during the spring, ragtag soldiers are "forged" into an army. Then, forged notes are part of Curzon's escape plans.

Of course, there are no forges, no chains, without fire, and a singular passage about fire and chains confirms the strength of the fire that burns in Curzon.  He tells of hearing a story from Benny, the runt of the company whom Curzon admires for courage. It's little Benny who shames a bully to tears for shirking (140).  Curzon bites his tongue to keep from laughing when Benny, trying to fit in with the big boys, cusses "like a granny," Oh, foul, poxy Devil! (95).  Curzon, who cannot read, listens intently when Benny tells stories to his mates. 
The story of the Titan Prometheus, chained to a rock for sharing fire with the needy, comes to Curzon's mind at a moment of intense hopelessness.  Bellingham has outmaneuvered him: since Curzon is inured to pain, Bellingham threatens to punish Isabel for any misstep by Curzon.  Moments later, Curzon stares into a fireplace and recalls the story, though not the name, of a "fellow ... chained to a rock where an eagle ate out his liver, which grew back every night, and so on through eternity."  Curzon reflects,

When Benny finished his story... I did not know what I would have done if somebody shackled me to a mountain and sent an eagle to eat my insides, day after day after day.

Now I knew.  I would fight the eagle and the chains and that mountain as long as I had breath. (199)

This inner fire is important to Laurie Halse Anderson's trilogy.  In education forums and in public discussion of novels and movies, people this year have questioned whether white authors should be writing about the experiences of people of color.  Anderson, a white woman, gives us in her epigraphs samples from primary sources to show us how close she comes to real lives and real voices of the time, black and white.  She has given her black, male, teenage protagonist an appealing voice and strong agency in his own salvation; there is no White Savior, here.

Anderson's other works include memoirs of her own experience with abuse.  When she writes about Curzon's despair and anger under someone else's absolute power over his body, she writes with authority.   In Chains, both Isabel and her nemesis Madam Lockton suffer arbitrary decrees and physical beatings.  In Forge, it's different. As Isabel fills Curzon in on a particularly violent slave trader, she stops talking.  Curzon is mystified:

I was overcome by an unsettling sensation, as if some giant had picked up the whole of the earth and tilted it.  She'd been hurt, scarred on the inside of her spirit, and I did not know how to help her.  (189)

Curzon lacks our culture's generic phrase sexual abuse for what Isabel experienced.  But Curzon knows it when he sees Isabel forced to lather Bellingham's face while the odious man soaks in a tub. Giving orders, the man casually pets Isabel.  Curzon barely contains himself, thinking

Take your hand off her, you foul whoreson.
"Of course, sir," I said.   (207)

Though victimized, Isabel is no victim.  When she and Curzon make risky plans, Curzon says, "We should wait... for our luck to turn" (270).  He observes, with admiration, that others, female and male, would have "blubbered" and "backed out":

Not Isabel. The reverse side of her pigheaded stubbornness was unshakable courage that was worthy of a general.
"If our luck does not turn for the good on its own," she said, "we'll make it turn." (270)

For the finale, Anderson whips up action, humor, surprises, poetic justice, and a perfect conversion of her major themes, forge, freedom, and guys. As the story ends, Curzon is once again laughing, "walking out of Valley Forge the way I walked into it, with friends."

[See my response to Ashes, concluding book of the trilogy, 06/2020]

Around the World on a Bike

Tomorrow, I start going the other direction. This is something Dad did, running 25,000 miles over a period of years. Happy to continue the tradition.

PS - I've decided to do something different. I'm logging my miles on a virtual tour of the USA, stopping to take virtual selfies at places I've lived or loved. See my page Cycling America, Virtually.

Mary Karr's "Sinners Welcome": Discomfort and Joy

A hand at your back gently pushes you out into your life: the image appears in poems that open and close Mary Karr's collection Sinners Welcome (New York: Harper Perennials, 2006). In between, the poems help us to feel both the stifling power of the boxes that encase us and the joy of escape.

Not having read Karr's trend-setting memoirs, I pieced together from different poems the narrative of a mother who grows up with her son. He's a nearly-mythical being, angel or god-baby, born in a hurricane, appearing "in a flash...a tiny blaze" as trees fell and power lines "snapped and hissed like cobras" ("A Blessing from My Sixteen Years' Son" 62). From a tiny "pearl" he grew to be a "muscled obelisk" now "pawing" through the refrigerator for a snack. She remembers his Mother's Day gift, an aquarium full of crickets singing "as if I were the sun / Which I was, I guess, to him, / and him to me" ("Pluck" 29-30). In his room after he's gone to college, she reflects,

If you've never been a kid, and choose to raise one, know
he'll wind up raising you. From whatever small drop
of care you start out with, he'll have to grow an ocean
and you a boat on which to sail from yourself
forever, else you'll both drown. ("Son's Room" 54)

In this poem, she calls her alcoholism a "sarcophagus" that "boxed" her in before his baby cries "ripped through the swaths of ether I hid in." Nearly twenty years pass in a line as "he grinned up and eventually down / to me from his towering height" and his breathing, his life, freed her from her "ribcage," her self.

A series of poems surtitled "Descending Theology" expresses the abstract doctrine of the Trinity in terms physical enough to make us squirm. The surtitle references the Nicene Creed, the Lord "came down from heaven."  In other places she refers to God's incarnation by that word's literal meaning "enfleshment," as when the crucified Christ, separated from his body, "ached for two hands made of meat / he could reach to the end of" (61). Her version of the familiar Christmas story is not for the squeamish:

But in the muted womb-world with its glutinous liquid
the child knew nothing
of its own fire....
He came out a sticky grub, flailing
the load of his own limbs...
("Descending Theology: The Nativity" 9)

The Trinity pervades her retelling of the Crucifixion. She spares no gruesome detail as she describes the nails, the sagging rib cage, the suffocation, wondering "if some less / than loving watcher / watches us." Then "under massed thunderheads" the man on the cross feels his soul "leak away, then surge" as "wind / sucks him into the light stream" and "he's snatched back, held close" (52). In Karr's imagination, the Resurrection is wholly physical, the word "Spirit" translated literally as "breath": "In the corpse's core," she writes, "the stone fist of his heart / began to bang on the stiff chest's door / and breath spilled back into that battered shape." She rounds out the Trinity with the assurance to us, "Now it's your limbs he longs to flow into... as warm water / shatters at birth...."

Being freed from an enclosed space (tomb, womb, room, rib cage) to draw in air is often part of the experience in this collection. She writes in "Overdue Pardon for Mother with Knife" that she now will "glorify the force that stayed" her mother's hand from using the knife on five-year-old Mary (59), and that an "aperture" opened in her heart "(not a dagger slot)" moving the child to "guzzle down breath like sweet spirits // as if a pillow just slid off my face" (60). A sullen juvenile delinquent whom the poet once tutored seemed a hopeless cause, though there's a hint of connection and regret when she writes to him "you ignored -- when I saw you wave at lunch -- my flinch," and she hopes that, in prison, "some organism drew your care," even if it was just a cockroach, or "some inmate / in a wheelchair whose steak you had to cut / since he lacked hands" so that the "stone" could "roll back" from the "tomb hole" in his heart (12). I stopped breathing as her lines drew me into the experience of a man falling through ice and being whipped by the current downstream, "numb lips pressed to the river's spine, to suck slid inches of air" ("The Ice Fisherman" 50).

These motifs mix with gratitude in her evocation of a live performance of Mozart's Piano concerto in "A Major" (16). She plays freely with language, as when she puns on a "corps" of players "in funeral dress" lining up around the piano that's like a "sarcophagus" as it contains, like an Egyptian tomb, "flocks of birds, banks of cirrus clouds, Egyptian forest groves." The "dread-locked," "lion-headed" soloist "strides" to the piano (Awadagin Pratt - I recognized him before I saw the dedication) - the orchestra's bows tilt "like the tiny masts of lifted sails," and the "piano's notes unknot / some inner ropes in me." When there's a "wave," we're thinking of nautical metaphors, but it's the "broad wave of the maestro's wand" that sets off the musical journey, "the notes skittering us along like surf." At the end of the concert, crying, she reflects "I never haven't breathed so long." In this poem, as in others, she has associated regimentation and order with cages and death, but this time she puns, "I've seen a death with order, meant but no way mean." The pianist has "sprung our sternums wide / and freed us from our numbered seats."

Other poems tell of the challenges and consolations of writing. "I came awake in kindergarten," she writes, "caged" in a desk "under the letter K," reflecting now that "in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid," its names and vows, and how, when she comes to "the valley of the shadow of blank," she can lean on her "spinal K," i.e., letters, "a strong bone in the crypt of flesh I am" (3). A harsh word in grad school from a celebrated teacher opened her "un-mascara'ed eye" to see the challenge of an "intricate" world "impossible // to transcribe on the small bare page" (15).  Recreating childhood observations of her family at home on an ordinary day, she tells how her-ten-year old self grabbed paper to write it down ("Still Memory" 65).

In this collection, gratitude is the emotion that comes across most, for an interested student who "knows what I know, or used to know" ("Winter Term's End" 34); for teachers and colleagues;  and for a once-fierce cat who, leaning into her for comfort at the end, leads her to pray, "Lord, before my own death,/let me learn from this animal's deep release into my arms" (47). There are poems of regret and some that made me cringe. Even with those, as she observes in her essay, "There's always joy in seeing how others see, even when it entails a stab of pain" (89).

In an afterword "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," Karr writes that learning to pray "thank you" was her entry into faith and out of addiction. Long before she believed in God, she'd felt the "awe" of poetry, how a poet far away in time and space could connect to her life. Now she aims to express joy in her work, though she admits "I still tend to be a gloomy and serotonin-challenged bitch" (90).

I like to think that those hands pushing gently at the open and close of the book are a sly suggestion of hands pressed together, framing the poetry as prayer.

Firebombing and Force: What's "Strong?"

Both sides - the demonstrators who told WABE "we tried non-violence and it didn't work [so] burn [Atlanta] down!" and the President who threatened looters with "thousands and thousands" of armed soldiers and "vicious attack dogs" -- are deluding themselves that one great show of strength will end the problem once and for all.

To impose discipline once and for all, I did the worst things I've ever done -- hitting the dog, losing my temper at a student. Even when you get the satisfaction of feeling your power over others, their fear of you builds a reservoir of rage and resentment. Whatever you hoped for -- a loving pet, students eager to learn from you, a community of mutual trust and respect -- you've doomed it. Next time, the demonstrations of power on both sides will be even more destructive.

Our President called governors "weak" and threatened to override them with "strength." He said, "You're dominating or ... you're a jerk." In response, commentator George F. Will called the President a "weak person’s idea of a strong person, [a] chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities" (June 1).

If our President were to open the Bible he brandished the other night, he might see numerous times when his kind of "strength" failed God Himself, when awesome force failed to make His people do right once and for all. God tried expulsion from Eden, a world-wide flood, fire from heaven, and opening the earth to swallow the rebels. Psalm 78 alone gives 72 verses' worth of God's forceful actions that didn't have lasting effect. It works the other way, too: when emperors exerted force to make the Jews bow down to them once and for all, the Jews refuse, dance in the furnace, sleep beside lions, and light the menorah.

Jesus lived under oppression from his birth to his death. The massacre of babies at his birth was to protect Herod's claim to the throne; the crucifixion was to stop the Jesus movement once and for all. Theologian Howard Thurman, mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., outlines how other Jews resisted Roman oppression. Some, such as Herod and the much-reviled tax collectors, cooperated with the Romans; the Pharisees enforced Jewish identity and separation from the Romans; the Zealots advocated violent insurrection. Among the apostles of Jesus were some from each group. Thurman shows how each of their ways came with an intolerable cost, from loss of self-respect to violent retribution.

Jesus offered another kind of strength: radical respect for the other, love on a societal scale. Jesus stood up, told the truth to the religious and political authorities, but did not shun Nicodemus the Pharisee nor the Roman centurion whose daughter was ill. At the start of his ministry, Jesus refused Satan's temptation to bring about the kingdom of God by power. Jesus exalted the poor and weak and welcomed outcasts and foreigners. Asked would he forgive anyone as many as seven times, he replied, "Seventy times seven." When Peter defended him, Jesus commanded Peter to put the sword away. Hanging from the cross, he was mocked for having power to save others but not himself.

In our present context, what would Jesus' kind of strength look like? Our creator "became flesh and dwelt among us," says John's Gospel. I imagined what would happen if police officers facing a crowd were to take off their armor, put down their weapons, and join the demonstration. To my surprise, I learned that's what happened in Flint, Michigan and other places around the country. [See collage]

So, once again, the second time in just a couple of weeks, a camera has broadcast the killing of an unarmed black man by white men confident the state will back any white man who claims to have felt threatened by a black man. Once again, while politicians express dismay at the most recent killing, some (such as the President's spokesman Jake Tapper) deny that this kind of event happens routinely.  Once again, both sides face off.

Once and for all, can we agree that there's a better way?

Blogposts of related interest:
• Racism is about fear before it's about hate (07/2016)
• Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited: Real Prophecy. (12/2015)
• A year before George Will called the President a "weak person's idea of a strong person," I wrote how this president is a 13-year-old boy's idea of a great leader: America's First Teen President and Other Adolescent Power Fantasies (07/2019).