A New Day in the Delta: Inventing School Desegregation As You Go.
By David W. Beckwith.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 384 pages. Cloth $29.95.
The trouble with David Beckwith’s fascinating memoir about his year (1969–1970) spent teaching in Leland, Mississippi, as one of the first white teachers in a black high school is the ending—regrettably after an apparently successful transition to teaching, Beckwith left it behind and support for public schools in the Delta eroded precipitously as the region embarked upon school desegregation. While scholarly readers may view Beckwith’s work with uncertainty because it comes from his diary turned manuscript nearly 40 years later, he offers, at the very least, an instructive tale of one white man’s awakening to the liberal conscience via teaching across a racial divide in an ostensibly transformative time. Arguably, Beckwith offers more—including a window into the contemporary as a prologue to challenges facing educators today.
From the perspective of an educational historian, Beckwith’s account provides an invaluable daily record of school happenings in a black high school as Mississippi school districts embarked upon desegregation first by mixing teachers, a final act of desperation to stall progress in a longstanding history of massive resistance to racial equality in education. Beckwith, who earned bachelor’s degree in business administration and had neither teacher certification nor experience, became an unwitting participant in this diversion. When desperate for postgraduation employment and motivated to save money for graduate study, he signed on to teach English or history in a Leland public high school. Unbeknownst to him, he was soon assigned to teach history at Lincoln Attendance Center (the historically black high school).
The essence of Beckwith’s story involves the day-today of his experience and newfound collegiality with African American teachers and students in close proximity. As the distant and strange become familiar to each, both black and white, barriers melt away. A bittersweet story emerges, one sated with the semishocking tribulations of classroom management, student discipline, and school politics inherent to novice teaching in a high poverty area. Aside from oral histories, Beckwith’s enhanced journalistic account fills an important gap in the materials made available to educational researchers who often find so little about what was actually happening in schools from school board records and official documents. Some aspects, such as corporal punishment or that we called schools “attendance centers” may shock contemporary sensibilities but, suffice it say, Beckwith’s is a good but sobering read.
A New Day in the Delta appears upon the heels of a growing body of literature about the negative effects of school desegregation policy and its implementation. One genre of this literature explores teachers’ experiences of transition after Brown v. Board of Education and during desegregation. Advanced by Vanessa Siddle Walker and Adam Fairclough, among others, this work seeks to measure the real “costs” of Brown to the black community. Thinking in terms of the community leadership that black teachers and school principals brought to their communities through black schools, some of this work, but not all, expresses a tone of lament for the past. Albeit with a slightly different twist as Beckwith is white, his book shares a bit of this tone when through his overpowering examples from his interactions with black students he questions the ability of white teachers and desegregation to meet the cultural needs of black students.
Tapping into another genre, Beckwith’s account demonstrates the fallibility of educational policy and policy-making, in the spirit of scholarly studies advanced by John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield, for example. This work shows how segregated housing patterns, standardized testing, and a “color-blind” judiciary along with other forces has accelerated resegregation of American schools in many places across the country, a pattern signaling the abysmal failure of federal efforts to promote equality. Given the gravity of the host of consequences that arise from public policy, including those that are intended, unintended, and dysfunctional, Beckwith’s subtitle, "Inventing School Desegregation As You Go," highlights the vacuum of planning and leadership that often marks federal educational initiatives that play out quite dubiously on local levels—in this case, school desegregation.
That school desegregation in the Delta occurred ostensibly “on the fly” from Beckwith’s perspective comes as little surprise. In addition to an entrenched resistance to racial progress, paternalistic leadership models diminished the participation and voice of many school teachers and especially black teachers and black schools in policy implementation on the local level. Most certainly, Beckwith’s account demonstrates that he and his colleagues did have questions and strategies to offer up, but in the heat of the day-to-day they lacked any sort of mechanism for broad-based planning, consultation, or insider role in school or district governance at the time. Thus, Beckwith’s story shows how teachers in public schools became left behind, as work spaces inadequate for attracting and retaining young teachers who might otherwise want to have a say in how to establish and maintain good schools took shape.
Given the recurrent nature of inequality and segregation despite our nation’s presumptive “best” efforts, scholars are asking whether or not the South should “turn back” from desegregation. Even if he does not offer a regional remedy, Beckwith’s A New Day in the Delta does give pause to consider his capability for turning back time to provide us with such an expressive take on local history. To the extent that his “new” day strikes a familiar semblance with the often overwhelming challenges faced by novice teachers related to classroom management, student discipline, and facilitation of meaningful student learning experiences, we can learn important lessons about the nature of schools and teachers’ work. He sounded to me like a pretty good teacher . . . if only we could have kept him around.
Amy Wells
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Reading the South
The Missing.
By Tim Gautreaux.
By Tim Gautreaux.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. 378 pages. $24.95 cloth.
In The Missing, author Tim Gautreaux returns to the fictional landscape of early 20th-century Louisiana that he so successfully portrayed in his critically acclaimed 2003 novel, The Clearing. As he did in that earlier work, Gautreaux delivers a compelling piece of literature dealing with people struggling against the land, each other, and the irreversible advance of time.
The Missing’s jacket blurb suggests that the book is a kind of detective story set aboard a Mississippi riverboat. To a superficial degree, this promotional copy is true. The plot begins unfolding when a band of rustic malcontents abduct the precocious daughter of two excursion boat musicians in a New Orleans department store. Because the child has been lost under his watch, its central character, World War I veteran and store floorwalker Sam Simoneaux, makes it his personal quest to recover the little girl. He takes a job aboard the Ambassador, the aging showboat aboard which the missing child’s parents perform, and it is here where much of the novel’s storyline unfolds. As the vessel plies the water between New Orleans and Cairo, Simoneaux not only pieces together clues that lead him to the missing girl, but also to the men responsible for the wholesale murder that had left him orphaned as an infant.
It does not take long to discover, however, that the girl’s disappearance and the Simoneaux family killings are primarily a vehicle for discovering what is “missing” in the lives of the novel’s central characters. Underneath its suspenseful narrative, The Missing probes the moral and philosophical underpinnings of human loss, mutability, and emotional separation. Questions of the unknown and unknowable permeate the novel’s smallest details. The author’s description of Simoneaux’s thoughts on a daytime cruise full of Confederate veterans offers a sense of this aesthetic: “Most of the men were animated, wore their old uniforms or some version of those gray markings, but he wondered about the ones who’d stayed at home, who wanted nothing of the remembering, who’d gotten in the mail a two-cent postcard announcing the veterans’ excursion and thrown it in the stove and then maybe looked out the window, gladdened by the fact that people weren’t shooting each other down in the street.” Gautreaux frequently proves himself a master of what historians call “interpreting silences.”
New Orleans and the jazz-infused Mississippi riverboat culture of the 1920s provide the backdrop for The Missing, and the deft touch with which Gautreaux renders his historical portrait reveals a world of steam locomotion, muddy river water, and passengers eager for a few hours’ escape on the dance floor. Yet the boat and its crew supply only half of the narrative’s tension. Every drop of the gangplank sets in motion a confrontation between the rustic and urbane, rich and poor, good and evil. Unlike the protagonist’s piano playing, Gautreaux’s prose never strikes a false note, carefully avoiding the clichéd references that readers of Louisiana and jazz culture must so often endure. To wit, his portrayal of the showboat era’s twilight is so convincing because he never oversells his enormous knowledge of the subject matter. Instead, Gautreaux seamlessly transports the reader into a different time, to a world with deadly disease epidemics, without air conditioning, and where simple folk collide with the inevitable advance of modernity.
Works that engage themes of familial duty and love, guilt, human frailty, cowardice, and vengeance are seldom as witty, literate, and, above all, entertaining as Gautreaux’s new novel. The Missing manages to ask vital questions of Southern culture, particularly with regard to class tension, but consistently does so in a way that neither patronizes nor panders. Perhaps, then, Gautreaux’s greatest triumph has been to deliver profound moral commentary without beating anyone over the head in the process. Readers will likely find themselves on the last page recalling the author’s imagery of a bygone era and culture and contemplating his novel’s deeper message.
Justin Nystrom
Reading the South
Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War.
By Jacqueline Jones.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
528 pages. $30.00 cloth.
Jacqueline Jones’s 2008 Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War is a seamless account of life in late 19th-century Georgia, incorporating well-known events, snapshots of culture, analysis of politics and economics, and richly evocative descriptions of the landscape of the city and surrounding Lowcountry. Saving Savannah is a confrontation of a past most often remembered with an acute sense of injury by the city’s residents, who share a collective memory defined by the mythology of the Lost Cause and stories of suffering during Sherman’s occupation. These attitudes obscure the violent reality of slavery and its legacy of inequality. Jones presents a complicated view of the city, drawing the reader through bustling streets where a desire for order clashes with an uncontrollable environment, ambitious citizens, and the trauma of war.
Jones sets out to explore the “larger African-American freedom struggle that shaped the streets and households of Savannah and the rice and cotton fields of lowcountry Georgia,” skillfully situating this struggle within the context of the complex social structure of Savannah. Jones’s expansive and inclusive work provides a comprehensive analysis of Savannah that is not limited to African American residents, free or enslaved. Her focus on the struggle for equality allows for a revealing analysis of the power dynamics of a rapidly changing city. Her close reading of letters, diaries, and newspapers from the period is exhaustive, and the conclusions drawn from the materials are insightful. Jones presents incisive commentary on a wide range of subjects, including a fascinating discussion of the politics of performance and display of the frequent parades of the city, analysis of the conflict between white elites and laborers encamped at Fort Pulaski in the opening days of the war, and ideas about the social status of white overseers on remote rice plantations.
Jones examines a world that “defie[s] urban-rural, black-white, enslaved-free distinction” and by doing so provides an incisive analysis of urban slavery in which movement through space is constantly negotiated. For this reason, Jones’s attention to the landscape is particularly compelling. The city of Savannah is most often thought of as a place of awe-inspiring beauty, but Saving Savannah redirects our gaze, creating images of a city that foreground illness, slavery, and multiple wars in what has throughout its history been a highly contested space. Within Jones’s frame, she brings into focus ordered squares surrounded by dustfilled streets, fetid swamps, and bustling docks lining the riverfront. Her rendering of the landscape is visceral, and appropriate as the setting for an unstable and rapidly changing society. Jones’s attention to elements such as the prevalence of wooden homes and the humid and bacteria-laden marshes provides fascinating points of departure for larger discussions. What role do enslaved firefighters play in a city dominated by wooden structures and constantly threatened by fire? How can elite young Confederate soldiers function while stationed on sea islands, long conceived as uninhabitable by whites during the summer months?
A central question for Jones is what threatens the city—from what does it need to be saved? For the African American community, the demise of slavery signaled the redemption of the city, the saving of their right to self-assertion and protection of their families. For white leaders of the city, however, emancipation troubled the already shaky hierarchy dividing white and black, free and enslaved, and rich and poor. To save Savannah from the scourge of “freedom and equality” white elites acted “creatively and violently” to maintain white supremacy. As saviors, elites were forced to appeal to whites of the laboring class in a way that further disrupted the social hierarchy. This “larger project of white supremacy” had important implications for politics in the city, evident in Jones’s analysis of the evolution of the local and national Democratic parties.
The complex economy of Savannah, formed at the juncture of slavery and free enterprise, was one of the greatest challenges to ordered hierarchy. Jones provides a valuable examination of urban slavery in a city where some slaves were able to hire themselves and participate in an economy in which the “commercial spirit” blurred racial distinctions and those between the free and enslaved. Jones presents a particularly fascinating analysis of the role of enslaved fire companies, which were essential to protect the wooden city from the constant threat of fire. In addition to legitimate trade as skilled laborers, slaves and free blacks participated in a profitable underground economy that had the tacit or explicit sanction of white city leaders. This economy in combination with loosely segregated housing, Jones contends, attested to elites largely unsuccessful efforts to maintain a caste system.
The book is divided into three sections—antebellum, in bello, and postbellum. Saving Savannah begins on the docks of the Savannah River in 1851, as the enslaved mason Thomas Simms stows away on a ship bound for New York. Jones frames her work through the personalities of Savannahians such as Simms, who move through a richly described city where one is made to feel the heaviness of oppressive humidity and the rhythm of streets entwined around Oglethorpe’s famed squares. By telling the story of Simms, who is ultimately seized in Boston and returned to Savannah under the Fugitive Slave Act, Jones is able to connect Savannah to events of national importance.
Jones also follows the life of Charles C. Jones Jr., an attorney and son of a minister and slaveowner. Charles Jones served as mayor in the prewar years and as an officer in the Confederate army. In the Jones family, one sees the evolution from paternalistic slaveholding to the tensions underlying tenancy and sharecropping in the 1870s. Readers first encounter Susie Baker King as she walks to a clandestine school for black children run by free woman Mary Woodhouse in downtown Savannah, and follow her progression as a 14-year-old teacher in the independent black settlement on St. Simon’s Island in 1862. King worked as a teacher, laundress, and domestic servant and later moved to Boston. By following persons such as Simms, Jones, and King, Jones creates a narrative thread that brings to life the history of the Georgia Lowcountry and illuminates the challenges faced by each before, during, and after the war.
The postwar section of Saving Savannah follows the black struggle for self-determination as the lands of the barrier islands are at first claimed by recently freed slaves as part of Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15. Black families staked claims on land and began to reunite families long separated, actively engaging in politics and building schools, churches, and strengthening mutual aid societies. When these lands again come under the control of planters, freedmen and women were faced with the prospect of tenancy, tightening segregation, and the continual threat of violence. This book by Jones, winner of the Bancroft Prize for American History for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, appeals both to a general audience and a more scholarly one. Her cast of characters, such as Simms, the nurse and schoolteacher Susie Baker King, and lawyer Charles C. Jones Jr. privileges individual experience in a way that illuminates the lives of many and their place within the complex social structure of the city. Though her work is highly localized, Jones employs contemporary Savannah newspapers and personal correspondence to great effect as a screen through which to understand national and international events such as the insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the anniversary of Liberian independence. Jones is successful in providing a clear and approachable view into the complex political and social atmosphere of Savannah while also placing scholars in conversation with each other. The work of Maurie McInnis on the politics of taste and urban slavery, Peter Kolchin’s analysis of specific labor systems intrinsic to rice culture, Michael Gomez on the resilience of Islam in some coastal slave communities, and Richard Slotkin’s work on the regeneration of violence resonate through the work without being off-putting to a more casual reader.
Jones, at the conclusion of Saving Savannah, turns to the present-day landscape of the city, searching for the imprint of slavery and emancipation on streets more often wandered in search of beautiful homes and eccentric residents made known through John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The tourism industry has in many ways created a city that is all surface, and Jones notes that the city’s poverty and persistent crime are confronted by preservationists and business leaders as a problem of “aesthetics.” Such an attitude indicates a resistance to the exploration of deeper causes of historic inequality. The city is the victim of an exclusive and selective history that willfully obscures the lives of many persons who have walked on the famed squares. Saving Savannah is an antidote to these selective views and should serve as a guide for educational institutions in the city as they seek to understand the lives of all Savannahians.
Becca Walton-Evans
By Jacqueline Jones.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
528 pages. $30.00 cloth.
Jacqueline Jones’s 2008 Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War is a seamless account of life in late 19th-century Georgia, incorporating well-known events, snapshots of culture, analysis of politics and economics, and richly evocative descriptions of the landscape of the city and surrounding Lowcountry. Saving Savannah is a confrontation of a past most often remembered with an acute sense of injury by the city’s residents, who share a collective memory defined by the mythology of the Lost Cause and stories of suffering during Sherman’s occupation. These attitudes obscure the violent reality of slavery and its legacy of inequality. Jones presents a complicated view of the city, drawing the reader through bustling streets where a desire for order clashes with an uncontrollable environment, ambitious citizens, and the trauma of war.
Jones sets out to explore the “larger African-American freedom struggle that shaped the streets and households of Savannah and the rice and cotton fields of lowcountry Georgia,” skillfully situating this struggle within the context of the complex social structure of Savannah. Jones’s expansive and inclusive work provides a comprehensive analysis of Savannah that is not limited to African American residents, free or enslaved. Her focus on the struggle for equality allows for a revealing analysis of the power dynamics of a rapidly changing city. Her close reading of letters, diaries, and newspapers from the period is exhaustive, and the conclusions drawn from the materials are insightful. Jones presents incisive commentary on a wide range of subjects, including a fascinating discussion of the politics of performance and display of the frequent parades of the city, analysis of the conflict between white elites and laborers encamped at Fort Pulaski in the opening days of the war, and ideas about the social status of white overseers on remote rice plantations.
Jones examines a world that “defie[s] urban-rural, black-white, enslaved-free distinction” and by doing so provides an incisive analysis of urban slavery in which movement through space is constantly negotiated. For this reason, Jones’s attention to the landscape is particularly compelling. The city of Savannah is most often thought of as a place of awe-inspiring beauty, but Saving Savannah redirects our gaze, creating images of a city that foreground illness, slavery, and multiple wars in what has throughout its history been a highly contested space. Within Jones’s frame, she brings into focus ordered squares surrounded by dustfilled streets, fetid swamps, and bustling docks lining the riverfront. Her rendering of the landscape is visceral, and appropriate as the setting for an unstable and rapidly changing society. Jones’s attention to elements such as the prevalence of wooden homes and the humid and bacteria-laden marshes provides fascinating points of departure for larger discussions. What role do enslaved firefighters play in a city dominated by wooden structures and constantly threatened by fire? How can elite young Confederate soldiers function while stationed on sea islands, long conceived as uninhabitable by whites during the summer months?
A central question for Jones is what threatens the city—from what does it need to be saved? For the African American community, the demise of slavery signaled the redemption of the city, the saving of their right to self-assertion and protection of their families. For white leaders of the city, however, emancipation troubled the already shaky hierarchy dividing white and black, free and enslaved, and rich and poor. To save Savannah from the scourge of “freedom and equality” white elites acted “creatively and violently” to maintain white supremacy. As saviors, elites were forced to appeal to whites of the laboring class in a way that further disrupted the social hierarchy. This “larger project of white supremacy” had important implications for politics in the city, evident in Jones’s analysis of the evolution of the local and national Democratic parties.
The complex economy of Savannah, formed at the juncture of slavery and free enterprise, was one of the greatest challenges to ordered hierarchy. Jones provides a valuable examination of urban slavery in a city where some slaves were able to hire themselves and participate in an economy in which the “commercial spirit” blurred racial distinctions and those between the free and enslaved. Jones presents a particularly fascinating analysis of the role of enslaved fire companies, which were essential to protect the wooden city from the constant threat of fire. In addition to legitimate trade as skilled laborers, slaves and free blacks participated in a profitable underground economy that had the tacit or explicit sanction of white city leaders. This economy in combination with loosely segregated housing, Jones contends, attested to elites largely unsuccessful efforts to maintain a caste system.
The book is divided into three sections—antebellum, in bello, and postbellum. Saving Savannah begins on the docks of the Savannah River in 1851, as the enslaved mason Thomas Simms stows away on a ship bound for New York. Jones frames her work through the personalities of Savannahians such as Simms, who move through a richly described city where one is made to feel the heaviness of oppressive humidity and the rhythm of streets entwined around Oglethorpe’s famed squares. By telling the story of Simms, who is ultimately seized in Boston and returned to Savannah under the Fugitive Slave Act, Jones is able to connect Savannah to events of national importance.
Jones also follows the life of Charles C. Jones Jr., an attorney and son of a minister and slaveowner. Charles Jones served as mayor in the prewar years and as an officer in the Confederate army. In the Jones family, one sees the evolution from paternalistic slaveholding to the tensions underlying tenancy and sharecropping in the 1870s. Readers first encounter Susie Baker King as she walks to a clandestine school for black children run by free woman Mary Woodhouse in downtown Savannah, and follow her progression as a 14-year-old teacher in the independent black settlement on St. Simon’s Island in 1862. King worked as a teacher, laundress, and domestic servant and later moved to Boston. By following persons such as Simms, Jones, and King, Jones creates a narrative thread that brings to life the history of the Georgia Lowcountry and illuminates the challenges faced by each before, during, and after the war.
The postwar section of Saving Savannah follows the black struggle for self-determination as the lands of the barrier islands are at first claimed by recently freed slaves as part of Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15. Black families staked claims on land and began to reunite families long separated, actively engaging in politics and building schools, churches, and strengthening mutual aid societies. When these lands again come under the control of planters, freedmen and women were faced with the prospect of tenancy, tightening segregation, and the continual threat of violence. This book by Jones, winner of the Bancroft Prize for American History for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, appeals both to a general audience and a more scholarly one. Her cast of characters, such as Simms, the nurse and schoolteacher Susie Baker King, and lawyer Charles C. Jones Jr. privileges individual experience in a way that illuminates the lives of many and their place within the complex social structure of the city. Though her work is highly localized, Jones employs contemporary Savannah newspapers and personal correspondence to great effect as a screen through which to understand national and international events such as the insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the anniversary of Liberian independence. Jones is successful in providing a clear and approachable view into the complex political and social atmosphere of Savannah while also placing scholars in conversation with each other. The work of Maurie McInnis on the politics of taste and urban slavery, Peter Kolchin’s analysis of specific labor systems intrinsic to rice culture, Michael Gomez on the resilience of Islam in some coastal slave communities, and Richard Slotkin’s work on the regeneration of violence resonate through the work without being off-putting to a more casual reader.
Jones, at the conclusion of Saving Savannah, turns to the present-day landscape of the city, searching for the imprint of slavery and emancipation on streets more often wandered in search of beautiful homes and eccentric residents made known through John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The tourism industry has in many ways created a city that is all surface, and Jones notes that the city’s poverty and persistent crime are confronted by preservationists and business leaders as a problem of “aesthetics.” Such an attitude indicates a resistance to the exploration of deeper causes of historic inequality. The city is the victim of an exclusive and selective history that willfully obscures the lives of many persons who have walked on the famed squares. Saving Savannah is an antidote to these selective views and should serve as a guide for educational institutions in the city as they seek to understand the lives of all Savannahians.
Becca Walton-Evans
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Reading the South
Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching.
By Paula J. Giddings. New York: Amistad/ HarperCollins, 2008. 800 pages.
$35.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.
In 1990, when first-class postage cost a quarter, I knew one fact about the figure on the new Black Heritage stamp: Ida B. Wells was involved in the antilynching movement at the end of the 19th century. The stamp inspired a visit to the campus library, where I was startled to learn that Wells was born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, 25 miles north of the University of Mississippi. Ida B. Wells should be a household name, at least in every Mississippi house. Yet, few of my students can identify her, even now; and the audience was small at Square Books last year when Smith College professor Paula J. Giddings, on a national book tour, gave a gripping account of her subject.
At 800 pages, Giddings’s life of this great Mississippian provides a hefty remedy to the prevailing lack of knowledge. Recently released in paperback, Ida: A Sword among Lions won the American Library Association’s Black Caucus Award and was a 2008 National Book Critics
Circle finalist. The title echoes the Psalmist’s image of the tongue as a “sharp sword,” an apt metaphor for Wells’s skill on the speaker’s platform and in her exchanges with Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, W. E. B. DuBois, Susan B. Anthony, and other famous colleagues. At Square Books, the biographer also pointed out the pen-as-sword symbolism in the tiny Victorian engraving of a woman’s hand directing a feather quill beneath the word Ida on the dust jacket. Giddings explained that the teenaged Wells taught in a rural school near Holly Springs to support her orphaned siblings; but, after she moved to Memphis for a better teaching position, she “found herself in journalism” and became involved in “every progressive movement of her time.”
In fact, the biography’s scope is much more comprehensive than the subtitle "Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching" suggests. For decades, Wells wrote news columns and published pamphlets against this horrible form of racial injustice, exposing the barbaric treatment of victims from several Southern states. The 1892 lynchings of three Memphis men, including her good friend Thomas Moss, were sickeningly close to home. But Wells’s lifelong concerns also included women’s suffrage, early childhood education, unions, prisoners’ rights, political corruption, and other hotly debated issues. She was an investigative reporter before that phrase became commonplace, and Giddings traces her career in absorbing detail, citing scores of archival collections, from Holly Springs’ Rust College Library to the Library of Congress. Repeatedly, she quotes from period newspapers, including the Memphis Commercial, which described the controversial Wells as a “saddle-colored Sapphira,” a “notorious courtesan,” and “the wench.” In contrast, the Christian Recorder compared her to Joan of Arc.
Like Wells’s journalism, Ida: A Sword among Lions is thoroughly documented—dense with names, dates, and statistics. In relating the deaths of Wells’s parents in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, Giddings recreates the situation in Holly Springs, an elevated area known for its “healthy climate” and the reputed “healing properties” of its springs. After infected refugees arrived from other towns, the mayor was the “first local casualty,” and more than half of the 3,500 residents fled. Giddings categorizes the deaths of adults and children by race and sex. Although African Americans were as likely as whites to catch the disease, their survival rate was much higher because of their “greater immunity to tropicborn diseases.” Giddings combed Holly Springs death notices before concluding that the Wellses were apparently “the only black family to suffer multiple mortalities.”
The narrative of Wells’s life unfolds with great dramatic appeal, and Giddings ends most chapters on an anticipatory note that propels the reader onward. This technique is ideal for portraying Wells, a theater lover who “appalled” a suitor “when she told him that she was studying for a reading of Lady Macbeth—the murderous Scot who begged the gods to ‘unsex’ her sufficiently to do what she had to do.” Gender and sexuality are crucial considerations throughout Ida. Giddings describes Wells, a major supporter of women’s organizations, as a Victorian who courageously rejected any narrow “Victorian way of thinking.” Wells’s straightforward remarks on interracial sexual relationships offended blacks as well as whites; moreover, she was “one of the few women reformers who actually used the word rape, and had learned to do so without apology.” Allegations of rape were often the excuse for torturing, maiming, hanging, and burning African Americans, sometimes in public spectacles that drew women and even children. Giddings says that Wells was “careful not to claim that no black man was guilty of rape”; she nevertheless believed “that the South was using the charge against black men to hide its own deficiencies, particularly from the eyes of the suspicious and investor-laden North.”
Her newspaper office destroyed and her life threatened, Wells became a permanent exile to the North in the violent aftermath of the Memphis lynchings. In Chicago, she married Ferdinand Barnett, a lawyer, activist, and newspaper founder who—like Wells—“was capable of militant indignation and believed in self defense by any means necessary.” Motherhood (two sons and two daughters) barely slowed the pace of Wells-Barnett’s work, and much of Giddings’s Ida explores campaigns from the second half of her life. “I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches,” she wrote in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice. In 1930 she was the first African American woman to run for a seat in Illinois’s Third Senatorial District; Wells-Barnett lost but planned to “profit by lessons of the campaign,” her diary reports. When she died of uremic poisoning the next year, the Chicago Defender emphasized her forceful place in “Chicago public life” for almost four decades. The minister who addressed an overflow crowd at her funeral praised “her untiring but almost hopeless war against civic oppression”; and a soloist sang, “I’ve Done My Work.”
Joan Wylie Hall
By Paula J. Giddings. New York: Amistad/ HarperCollins, 2008. 800 pages.
$35.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.
In 1990, when first-class postage cost a quarter, I knew one fact about the figure on the new Black Heritage stamp: Ida B. Wells was involved in the antilynching movement at the end of the 19th century. The stamp inspired a visit to the campus library, where I was startled to learn that Wells was born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, 25 miles north of the University of Mississippi. Ida B. Wells should be a household name, at least in every Mississippi house. Yet, few of my students can identify her, even now; and the audience was small at Square Books last year when Smith College professor Paula J. Giddings, on a national book tour, gave a gripping account of her subject.
At 800 pages, Giddings’s life of this great Mississippian provides a hefty remedy to the prevailing lack of knowledge. Recently released in paperback, Ida: A Sword among Lions won the American Library Association’s Black Caucus Award and was a 2008 National Book Critics
Circle finalist. The title echoes the Psalmist’s image of the tongue as a “sharp sword,” an apt metaphor for Wells’s skill on the speaker’s platform and in her exchanges with Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, W. E. B. DuBois, Susan B. Anthony, and other famous colleagues. At Square Books, the biographer also pointed out the pen-as-sword symbolism in the tiny Victorian engraving of a woman’s hand directing a feather quill beneath the word Ida on the dust jacket. Giddings explained that the teenaged Wells taught in a rural school near Holly Springs to support her orphaned siblings; but, after she moved to Memphis for a better teaching position, she “found herself in journalism” and became involved in “every progressive movement of her time.”
In fact, the biography’s scope is much more comprehensive than the subtitle "Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching" suggests. For decades, Wells wrote news columns and published pamphlets against this horrible form of racial injustice, exposing the barbaric treatment of victims from several Southern states. The 1892 lynchings of three Memphis men, including her good friend Thomas Moss, were sickeningly close to home. But Wells’s lifelong concerns also included women’s suffrage, early childhood education, unions, prisoners’ rights, political corruption, and other hotly debated issues. She was an investigative reporter before that phrase became commonplace, and Giddings traces her career in absorbing detail, citing scores of archival collections, from Holly Springs’ Rust College Library to the Library of Congress. Repeatedly, she quotes from period newspapers, including the Memphis Commercial, which described the controversial Wells as a “saddle-colored Sapphira,” a “notorious courtesan,” and “the wench.” In contrast, the Christian Recorder compared her to Joan of Arc.
Like Wells’s journalism, Ida: A Sword among Lions is thoroughly documented—dense with names, dates, and statistics. In relating the deaths of Wells’s parents in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, Giddings recreates the situation in Holly Springs, an elevated area known for its “healthy climate” and the reputed “healing properties” of its springs. After infected refugees arrived from other towns, the mayor was the “first local casualty,” and more than half of the 3,500 residents fled. Giddings categorizes the deaths of adults and children by race and sex. Although African Americans were as likely as whites to catch the disease, their survival rate was much higher because of their “greater immunity to tropicborn diseases.” Giddings combed Holly Springs death notices before concluding that the Wellses were apparently “the only black family to suffer multiple mortalities.”
The narrative of Wells’s life unfolds with great dramatic appeal, and Giddings ends most chapters on an anticipatory note that propels the reader onward. This technique is ideal for portraying Wells, a theater lover who “appalled” a suitor “when she told him that she was studying for a reading of Lady Macbeth—the murderous Scot who begged the gods to ‘unsex’ her sufficiently to do what she had to do.” Gender and sexuality are crucial considerations throughout Ida. Giddings describes Wells, a major supporter of women’s organizations, as a Victorian who courageously rejected any narrow “Victorian way of thinking.” Wells’s straightforward remarks on interracial sexual relationships offended blacks as well as whites; moreover, she was “one of the few women reformers who actually used the word rape, and had learned to do so without apology.” Allegations of rape were often the excuse for torturing, maiming, hanging, and burning African Americans, sometimes in public spectacles that drew women and even children. Giddings says that Wells was “careful not to claim that no black man was guilty of rape”; she nevertheless believed “that the South was using the charge against black men to hide its own deficiencies, particularly from the eyes of the suspicious and investor-laden North.”
Her newspaper office destroyed and her life threatened, Wells became a permanent exile to the North in the violent aftermath of the Memphis lynchings. In Chicago, she married Ferdinand Barnett, a lawyer, activist, and newspaper founder who—like Wells—“was capable of militant indignation and believed in self defense by any means necessary.” Motherhood (two sons and two daughters) barely slowed the pace of Wells-Barnett’s work, and much of Giddings’s Ida explores campaigns from the second half of her life. “I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches,” she wrote in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice. In 1930 she was the first African American woman to run for a seat in Illinois’s Third Senatorial District; Wells-Barnett lost but planned to “profit by lessons of the campaign,” her diary reports. When she died of uremic poisoning the next year, the Chicago Defender emphasized her forceful place in “Chicago public life” for almost four decades. The minister who addressed an overflow crowd at her funeral praised “her untiring but almost hopeless war against civic oppression”; and a soloist sang, “I’ve Done My Work.”
Joan Wylie Hall
Friday, June 12, 2009
Reading the South
Toni Morrison. What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction.
Edited by Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
215 pages. $30.00 cloth.
Carolyn Denard gets her title for this splendid collection of 29 essays, reviews, and addresses from a luminous parable at the heart of Morrison’s Nobel Prize lecture of 1993. The children of a village approach a wise woman with a question that may be a riddle, a trap, or an urgent plea: tell us whether the bird we hold in our hands is living or dead. The woman, old and blind, is skeptical of the children’s motives and replies cautiously, testily. Whereupon the children, surprisingly, upbraid her for the poverty of her response, insisting on the wisdom that is their due: “‘tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. . . . Tell us
what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.’” For Denard, the wise woman is Morrison herself, and the occasional writings gathered here are what move at the margins of her celebrated fiction, what “informs, orders, and gives intellectual energy to her life commitments and to her role as a writer.”
These essays, however, are far from marginal. They are central, vital, and the publication of this book gives them a new visibility and coherence as major elements of the Morrison oeuvre. They are brimming with insights into African American history, literature, and culture, the work of fellow writers and artists, national politics, and the vocation and business of writing. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” adds an important new motif, “the presence of an ancestor,” to the inventory of conceptual tools for mapping the “distinctive elements of African-American writing.” “[T]hese ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective.” The absence of such figures is “frightening,” “threatening,” “caus[ing] huge destruction and disarray in the work itself.” With these words Morrison not only limns the significance of such characters from her own work as Pilate in Song of Solomon or Baby Suggs in Beloved; she also reminds a national culture quick to fetishize youth, freedom, and newness that “[w]hen you kill the ancestor you kill yourself,” that “nice things don’t always happen to the totally self-reliant if there is no conscious historical connection.” A beautiful autobiographical tribute to two such ancestors, Morrison’s maternal grandparents, can be found in the essay that opens What Moves at the Margin, “A Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say), Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say),” first published in the bicentennial year of 1976. There Morrison channels her ancestors to comment on the “racial vertigo,” the justified skepticism and optimism, of the black community at the advent of the nation’s third century.
To the ancestor, I would suggest, we might add the stranger as another defining figure in Morrison’s writing, as discussed in “The Fisherwoman,” her weirdly affecting introduction to a collection of photographs by Robert Bergman. There she recounts the lasting impression left by a woman she met only once, a visitor who comes to fish from a neighbor’s seawall and never returns—a figure whose very existence Morrison comes to question. Reflecting on her response to this encounter—wistful, betrayed—Morrison comes “[t]o understand that I was longing for and missing some aspect of myself, and that there are no strangers. There are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from,” for “it is the randomness of the encounter with our already known—although unacknowledged—selves that summon a ripple of alarm.” In the stranger as well as the ancestor, then, Morrison finds “access to me,” an “entrance into my own interior life.”
“The Site of Memory” explores the role of the literary image as the principal means of access to “the unwritten interior life of the people” in Morrison’s creative process: “the image comes first and tells me what the ‘memory’ is about,” as beautifully illustrated by an episode in the composition of Beloved. Morrison’s brilliant reflections in Playing in the Dark on the “Africanist presence” that underlies and organizes “classic” (that is, white) American literature find a complement here in “On the Backs of Blacks,” which notes a similar phenomenon, a marginal-yet-inexorable “presence,” in the histories of American immigrant groups. The “most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture” for such groups, she writes, is “negative appraisals of the native-born black population. . . . It doesn’t matter anymore what shade the newcomer’s skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open”—a claim supported by subsequent works of historical scholarship such as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White and Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks. “Rediscovering Black History” recounts the making of The Black Book, perhaps the most significant accomplishment of Morrison’s editorial career at Random House—a work that supplied germinal images, episodes, and epiphanies for Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. An anthology, picture-book, scrapbook, and historical artifact in its own right—all in one—The Black Book was an attempt to document “life as lived—not as imagined—by the people: the anonymous men and women who speak in conventional histories only through their leaders,” an effort “to hold on to the useful past without blocking off the possibilities of the future. To create something that might last, that would bear witness to the quality and variety of black life before it became the topic of every Ph.D. dissertation.” Like the book itself, the essay succeeds memorably.
I could go on. There are the incisive and sometimes deeply moving appreciations of other writers: Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, James Baldwin, Albert Murray, and especially the Guinean novelist Camara Laye, whose 1954 novel The Radiance of the King is the subject of a brilliant critical essay demonstrating Morrison’s bona fides as a commentator on postcolonial literature. There is the New Yorker essay that hails Bill Clinton as “our first black President” while proceeding to a lacerating deconstruction of the media circus and Capitol Hill feeding frenzy that was the Summer of Monica Lewinsky: “This is Slaughter-gate. A sustained, bloody, arrogant coup d’état. The Presidency is being stolen from us. And the people know it.” There is the witty and provocative 1971 report from the trenches of second-wave feminism, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” a wry but unfazed account of the ironies attending the peculiar position of black women at the intersection (or was it in the crosshairs?) of the civil rights and women’s movements: “In a way black women have known something of the freedom white women are now beginning to crave. But oddly, freedom is only sweet when it is won. When it is forced, it is called responsibility. The black woman’s needs shrank to the level of her responsibility; her man’s expanded in proportion to the obstacles that prevented him from assuming his. White women, on the other hand, have had too little responsibility, white men too much. It’s a wonder the sexes of either race even speak to each other.”
And of course, there is the Nobel Prize address, whose stubborn, hard-won faith in the efficacy of language is grounded in a communal context that may give it even greater resonance than Faulkner’s famous words on the “puny inexhaustible voice” of the mid-century liberal individual talking back against the “ding-dong of doom.”
Denard deserves credit for organizing these writings in a straightforward three-part scheme—with sections on “Family and History,” “Writers and Writing,” and “Politics and Society”—and for her lucid introduction to the volume. But the real star is Morrison, who seems incapable of an uninteresting thought or a pedestrian sentence. The hazard that a book like this confronts its reviewer with is the temptation simply to let those sentences speak for themselves. Like these words on writing and language: “If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams—which is to say yes, the work must be political.”
“When you first start writing—and I think it’s true for a lot of beginning writers—you’re scared to death that if you don’t get that sentence right that minute it’s never going to show up again. And it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter—another one will, and it’ll probably be better. And I don’t mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it—and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better. I don’t have the hysteria that used to accompany some of those dazzling passages that I thought the world was just dying for me to remember.”
“The resources available to us for benign access to each other, for vaulting the mere blue air that separates us, are few but powerful: language, image, and experience, which may involve both, one, or neither of the first two. Language (saying, listening, reading) can encourage, even mandate, surrender, the breach of distances among us, whether they are continental or on the same pillow. . . . Provoking language or eclipsing it, an image can determine not only what we know and feel, but also what we believe is worth knowing and feeling.”
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Magnificent.
Jay Watson
Edited by Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
215 pages. $30.00 cloth.
Carolyn Denard gets her title for this splendid collection of 29 essays, reviews, and addresses from a luminous parable at the heart of Morrison’s Nobel Prize lecture of 1993. The children of a village approach a wise woman with a question that may be a riddle, a trap, or an urgent plea: tell us whether the bird we hold in our hands is living or dead. The woman, old and blind, is skeptical of the children’s motives and replies cautiously, testily. Whereupon the children, surprisingly, upbraid her for the poverty of her response, insisting on the wisdom that is their due: “‘tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. . . . Tell us
what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.’” For Denard, the wise woman is Morrison herself, and the occasional writings gathered here are what move at the margins of her celebrated fiction, what “informs, orders, and gives intellectual energy to her life commitments and to her role as a writer.”
These essays, however, are far from marginal. They are central, vital, and the publication of this book gives them a new visibility and coherence as major elements of the Morrison oeuvre. They are brimming with insights into African American history, literature, and culture, the work of fellow writers and artists, national politics, and the vocation and business of writing. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” adds an important new motif, “the presence of an ancestor,” to the inventory of conceptual tools for mapping the “distinctive elements of African-American writing.” “[T]hese ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective.” The absence of such figures is “frightening,” “threatening,” “caus[ing] huge destruction and disarray in the work itself.” With these words Morrison not only limns the significance of such characters from her own work as Pilate in Song of Solomon or Baby Suggs in Beloved; she also reminds a national culture quick to fetishize youth, freedom, and newness that “[w]hen you kill the ancestor you kill yourself,” that “nice things don’t always happen to the totally self-reliant if there is no conscious historical connection.” A beautiful autobiographical tribute to two such ancestors, Morrison’s maternal grandparents, can be found in the essay that opens What Moves at the Margin, “A Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say), Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say),” first published in the bicentennial year of 1976. There Morrison channels her ancestors to comment on the “racial vertigo,” the justified skepticism and optimism, of the black community at the advent of the nation’s third century.
To the ancestor, I would suggest, we might add the stranger as another defining figure in Morrison’s writing, as discussed in “The Fisherwoman,” her weirdly affecting introduction to a collection of photographs by Robert Bergman. There she recounts the lasting impression left by a woman she met only once, a visitor who comes to fish from a neighbor’s seawall and never returns—a figure whose very existence Morrison comes to question. Reflecting on her response to this encounter—wistful, betrayed—Morrison comes “[t]o understand that I was longing for and missing some aspect of myself, and that there are no strangers. There are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from,” for “it is the randomness of the encounter with our already known—although unacknowledged—selves that summon a ripple of alarm.” In the stranger as well as the ancestor, then, Morrison finds “access to me,” an “entrance into my own interior life.”
“The Site of Memory” explores the role of the literary image as the principal means of access to “the unwritten interior life of the people” in Morrison’s creative process: “the image comes first and tells me what the ‘memory’ is about,” as beautifully illustrated by an episode in the composition of Beloved. Morrison’s brilliant reflections in Playing in the Dark on the “Africanist presence” that underlies and organizes “classic” (that is, white) American literature find a complement here in “On the Backs of Blacks,” which notes a similar phenomenon, a marginal-yet-inexorable “presence,” in the histories of American immigrant groups. The “most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture” for such groups, she writes, is “negative appraisals of the native-born black population. . . . It doesn’t matter anymore what shade the newcomer’s skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open”—a claim supported by subsequent works of historical scholarship such as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White and Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks. “Rediscovering Black History” recounts the making of The Black Book, perhaps the most significant accomplishment of Morrison’s editorial career at Random House—a work that supplied germinal images, episodes, and epiphanies for Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. An anthology, picture-book, scrapbook, and historical artifact in its own right—all in one—The Black Book was an attempt to document “life as lived—not as imagined—by the people: the anonymous men and women who speak in conventional histories only through their leaders,” an effort “to hold on to the useful past without blocking off the possibilities of the future. To create something that might last, that would bear witness to the quality and variety of black life before it became the topic of every Ph.D. dissertation.” Like the book itself, the essay succeeds memorably.
I could go on. There are the incisive and sometimes deeply moving appreciations of other writers: Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, James Baldwin, Albert Murray, and especially the Guinean novelist Camara Laye, whose 1954 novel The Radiance of the King is the subject of a brilliant critical essay demonstrating Morrison’s bona fides as a commentator on postcolonial literature. There is the New Yorker essay that hails Bill Clinton as “our first black President” while proceeding to a lacerating deconstruction of the media circus and Capitol Hill feeding frenzy that was the Summer of Monica Lewinsky: “This is Slaughter-gate. A sustained, bloody, arrogant coup d’état. The Presidency is being stolen from us. And the people know it.” There is the witty and provocative 1971 report from the trenches of second-wave feminism, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” a wry but unfazed account of the ironies attending the peculiar position of black women at the intersection (or was it in the crosshairs?) of the civil rights and women’s movements: “In a way black women have known something of the freedom white women are now beginning to crave. But oddly, freedom is only sweet when it is won. When it is forced, it is called responsibility. The black woman’s needs shrank to the level of her responsibility; her man’s expanded in proportion to the obstacles that prevented him from assuming his. White women, on the other hand, have had too little responsibility, white men too much. It’s a wonder the sexes of either race even speak to each other.”
And of course, there is the Nobel Prize address, whose stubborn, hard-won faith in the efficacy of language is grounded in a communal context that may give it even greater resonance than Faulkner’s famous words on the “puny inexhaustible voice” of the mid-century liberal individual talking back against the “ding-dong of doom.”
Denard deserves credit for organizing these writings in a straightforward three-part scheme—with sections on “Family and History,” “Writers and Writing,” and “Politics and Society”—and for her lucid introduction to the volume. But the real star is Morrison, who seems incapable of an uninteresting thought or a pedestrian sentence. The hazard that a book like this confronts its reviewer with is the temptation simply to let those sentences speak for themselves. Like these words on writing and language: “If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams—which is to say yes, the work must be political.”
“When you first start writing—and I think it’s true for a lot of beginning writers—you’re scared to death that if you don’t get that sentence right that minute it’s never going to show up again. And it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter—another one will, and it’ll probably be better. And I don’t mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it—and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better. I don’t have the hysteria that used to accompany some of those dazzling passages that I thought the world was just dying for me to remember.”
“The resources available to us for benign access to each other, for vaulting the mere blue air that separates us, are few but powerful: language, image, and experience, which may involve both, one, or neither of the first two. Language (saying, listening, reading) can encourage, even mandate, surrender, the breach of distances among us, whether they are continental or on the same pillow. . . . Provoking language or eclipsing it, an image can determine not only what we know and feel, but also what we believe is worth knowing and feeling.”
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Magnificent.
Jay Watson
Book Review
Wildflowers of the Coastal Plain: A Field Guide.
By Ray Neyland. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2009. 352 pages, 535 color photographs,
65 line drawings, 1 map. $34.95 cloth.
As a kindergartener, I developed a real skill at gently tugging the stamen from a honeysuckle flower and letting the pinhead droplet of nectar fall on my tongue. Nowadays my fingers are too big to do it. Or I tug too hard, breaking the flower in half. In truth, I haven’t exactly tried to “eat” a honeysuckle flower in many years, but I have had a chance to sample a cold scoop of honeysuckle sorbet from Crook’s Corner in Carrboro, North Carolina. Thanks to Ray Neyland’s field guide, Wildflowers of the Coastal Plain, I now know that the Japanese honeysuckle from the playground fence is native to Asia and has a fancy Latin name: Lonicera japonica.
When I got older, and needed money for important things like Skittles and Dr Pepper, I organized a plant sale in our front yard on Second Street in Gulfport. I rifled through my mother’s supply of Tupperware, punched holes in the bottoms of a few canisters with a nail, and potted half a dozen or so purple hairy spiderwort (an herb!) and lazy daisy (grazed by deer and cattle!), and sold them to the neighbors. How many white shirts did I ruin with all that juicy spiderwort? I just couldn’t resist picking a fistful for the jar on the kitchen table. They seemed to pop up, overnight, and just as amazingly, multiply by the dozen before lunchtime.
Now I’m all grown up, and just last weekend I sat with my six-month-old daughter, Lucy, in a clump of white clover (Trifolium repens) in the front yard and searched for the lucky four-leaf varieties. Though we didn’t find any, we did tie long chains from the flowers. Lucy grabbed handfuls of clover and tried to eat them while I thought about how it would only be a few years until I could show her how to get the nectar from honeysuckle.
Maybe it sounds silly, but Mr. Neyland’s book, while an excellent guide full of vivid color photographs and descriptions and glossaries, took me back. Now I know a bit more about those old flowers from my childhood, but more important, I will be able to show them, and many more, to Lucy with hope that she loves them as much as I do.
Sally Cassady Lyon
By Ray Neyland. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2009. 352 pages, 535 color photographs,
65 line drawings, 1 map. $34.95 cloth.
As a kindergartener, I developed a real skill at gently tugging the stamen from a honeysuckle flower and letting the pinhead droplet of nectar fall on my tongue. Nowadays my fingers are too big to do it. Or I tug too hard, breaking the flower in half. In truth, I haven’t exactly tried to “eat” a honeysuckle flower in many years, but I have had a chance to sample a cold scoop of honeysuckle sorbet from Crook’s Corner in Carrboro, North Carolina. Thanks to Ray Neyland’s field guide, Wildflowers of the Coastal Plain, I now know that the Japanese honeysuckle from the playground fence is native to Asia and has a fancy Latin name: Lonicera japonica.
When I got older, and needed money for important things like Skittles and Dr Pepper, I organized a plant sale in our front yard on Second Street in Gulfport. I rifled through my mother’s supply of Tupperware, punched holes in the bottoms of a few canisters with a nail, and potted half a dozen or so purple hairy spiderwort (an herb!) and lazy daisy (grazed by deer and cattle!), and sold them to the neighbors. How many white shirts did I ruin with all that juicy spiderwort? I just couldn’t resist picking a fistful for the jar on the kitchen table. They seemed to pop up, overnight, and just as amazingly, multiply by the dozen before lunchtime.
Now I’m all grown up, and just last weekend I sat with my six-month-old daughter, Lucy, in a clump of white clover (Trifolium repens) in the front yard and searched for the lucky four-leaf varieties. Though we didn’t find any, we did tie long chains from the flowers. Lucy grabbed handfuls of clover and tried to eat them while I thought about how it would only be a few years until I could show her how to get the nectar from honeysuckle.
Maybe it sounds silly, but Mr. Neyland’s book, while an excellent guide full of vivid color photographs and descriptions and glossaries, took me back. Now I know a bit more about those old flowers from my childhood, but more important, I will be able to show them, and many more, to Lucy with hope that she loves them as much as I do.
Sally Cassady Lyon
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