When Bad Things Happen to Good People

I recently finished reading Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. It's the story of a slave girl (Isabel) during the British occupation of New York City in the Revolutionary War. While I learned something about that historical event, the main thing I'm taking away from this book is an increased appreciation for the injustice of slavery.

The story indirectly described the suffering the rebels experienced during the occupation (I say indirectly because Isabel's owners were British sympathizers and therefore were given preference when it came to getting food. They are even able to have some elaborate parties.). Isabel also ends up taking food scraps to the American prisoners of war, and the description of the conditions in the prison is almost uncomfortably vivid. It's not the first time I've read about those kinds of conditions (The Heretic's Daughter and Forged in the Fire, for example, had pretty vivid prison scenes). What makes it different this time is that the main characters in Chains are slaves, and that adds a whole new dimension to their suffering.

Isabel and her younger sister Ruth are sold early in the book to a selfish, cruel woman and her husband, who take the sisters to New York City. Throughout the book, Isabel is trying to find a way to get away from Madaam. On top of all the work Isabel is expected to do, Madaam hits Isabel with a riding crop, constantly insults her, separates her from her sister, and even has her branded with an "I" for "insolence." That's all bad enough, but what really brought the injustice home to me was that Madaam wouldn't even allow Isabel her identity. Shortly after arriving in New York, Madaam renames Isabel "Sal," even though that's not who Isabel wanted to be. I don't know why that bothered me more than the branding. (spoiler) Actually, I decided as soon as she was branded that the "I" should stand for "Isabel" instead of "insolence"; it took Isabel nearly to the end of the book to come to that conclusion herself.

The fact that all this cruelty is set against the struggle for the patriots to free themselves from British "oppression" is ironic. At least a couple of times, Isabel appeals to people who are engaged in this struggle for freedom and they refuse to help her; freedom is not for the slaves. There's also a sad reality in the way Curzon (Isabel's friend) is treated in the prison. He was captured fighting for the rebels and taken as a prisoner of war along with all the free white men. However, even though he was actively fighting for their cause, the other prisoners still place Curzon in a lower position. They steal his blanket and they take the lion's share of the food - even when Isabel has brought it for him.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, which means there will probably be a lot of discussions about slavery. Sometimes I think it's easy to intellectualize what slavery was about. Chains takes slavery out of the intellectual realm and makes the reader see and feel what it must have been like to be owned, body and soul, by another person and how hard it would be to escape that situation.

Let's add Laurie Halse Anderson to that list of people I want to study to be a better writer....

At Long Last, I Finished!

In my previous post, I was whining about how long it was taking me to read The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land by Conevery Bolton Valencius. Instead of quitting, I decided to persevere, and I finally finished it today at lunch.

So what did I get from the book for my efforts? Here's a partial list of key points I want to remember:

People in the 19th century had a worldview that lumped their physical bodies and their environments together as governed by the same basic processes. For example, a body had "humors" that flowed through it, and land had "air" that flowed above and even from it. A particular body might have bilous humors, and a particular section of land might have miasma. Too much of either was likely to produce illness. To be healthy, bodies and land had to be in "balance."

White American settlers spoke of the land they were moving to as being "new," with no consideration that other cultures had lived on that land for perhaps centuries, and that the land had current inhabitants. The only settlement that mattered was that of white Americans. Very ethnocentric.

White people of the 19th century held to the scientific "truth" that certain types of people belonged in certain types of land. That theory was used to explain why white people who moved to the Mississippi Valley or the South suffered and so often died from "ague," while black slaves seemed immune to the disease or to suffer only a mild case. Whites, said the theory, belonged in cooler climates (like northern Europe); blacks belonged in hot, sunny, tropical areas (like Africa). The theory was used to justify the institution of slavery - white people simply were not suited for the difficult labor and exposure to the sun and humidity that it took to work a plantation. Blacks, on the other hand, were perfectly suited for such conditions. Very (conveniently) racist.

New settlers to an area had to go through a period of "seasoning" before they were fully acclimated to their new home. This seasoning usually consisted of recurring periods of fever and shaking (most likely malaria). If a person made it through the seasoning, he/she was proud of the fact and wore their newly sallow complexion as sort of a badge that he/she was not a novice anymore. Yet there was also a degree of ambivalence about having one's skin darkened by the sun or by disease; many people took that as a sign of the "degradation" of the white race (to become more like the black race).

Bleeding was a commonly used remedy for all sorts of illness, as was lancing (for boils or "risings"). These remedies were seen as allowing the bad matter in the body (whether too much blood, bad humors, or pus) to escape and to bring the body back into balance. Valencius draws the parallel to the cultivation of the land. As with bleeding, she says, plows cut into the surface of the land, releasing miasmas. Although it was a painful, wrenching process - for both the land and the person doing the cultivation - it was necessary to bring the land into a condition of being useful and "healthful" and productive.

There were a lot of sources of miasmas - standing or stagnant water, rotting trees or other vegetation, cold winds, low-lying land, freshly-plowed dirt. "Miasma" was sort of a catch-all term for any conditions people had a hunch were unhealthful but didn't have the scientific knowledge to describe.

"Medical geography" was big. People would do detailed observations of the land, its weather, its vegetation, its people, and/or the patterns of health and illness over a period of time. These observations were frequently published by reputable journals in the Eastern cities, giving backcountry doctors and wannabe scientists a chance to connect with the academic world.

As I was reading on section that talked about the stereotypes of the ways in which the Southern climate influenced Southern character, I thought I saw maybe another seed of the Civil War beginning to grow. Medical students from the South and the Mississippi Valley were consistently treated as ignorant and lazy by their Northern counterparts and teachers in the "elite" medical schools along the East Coast. As a result, Southerners began to argue that Northern medicine and its practitioners simply couldn't understand the diseases and environmental conditions in the South; that gave the Southerners a chance to feel superior about something. It reminded me of the way nationalism often begins - "We are different, and you just don't understand us. We have to do for ourselves to have it done right."

There were more interesting bits (including some pretty wild planting practices meant to ensure the fertility of the land!). I have two main disappointments. First, Valencius doesn't mention the interaction of white settlers and Indians all that much. She is much more interested in the contradictions between how free white settlers and black slaves viewed the "health of the country." Secondly, I felt she focused almost exclusively on those contradictions in the second half of the book. Not everyone in early Missouri and Arkansas was a slave owner; it would have been interesting to see more about how the people who were doing their own cultivation viewed their relationship with the land.

Anyway, I'm done now. The chapter on race motivated me to read Richard Peck's The River Between Us next (young adult - won't take long); then it's on to a book I promised to read earlier this summer - more historical fiction about the Civil War, A Difference of Opinion by Nancy Dane.

Entry for February 28, 2007 - In Which She Reflects on Race Relations

I cut it close, but I did manage to finish my book for this month -- here on the last day.

I knew there were kid/young adult books written by African American authors that have had good reviews, so I thought I would read one this month. I selected Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. It's a Newberry Award winner, so I expected it to be exceptionally good. However, I was disappointed, especially at first-- in fact, I considered just dropping the book and moving on to something like Bud, Not Buddy. The book moves very slowly in the beginning -- VERY slowly. Taylor likes to use description -- the "slow the story down to a crawl" type of description, and the characters don't really seem to ring true to me. The "good" characters are totally good, and the "bad" characters are totally bad with no redeeming qualities. It seemed like a sort of cardboard morality story.

(Note: This entry is going to contain spoilers, because I can't say what I want to without revealing important plot action.)

The narrator of the story is 9-year-old Cassie Logan, who lives with her 3 brothers, her parents, and her grandmother in the Mississippi delta in 1933. The story goes through most of a year with the Logan family, who are different than the other black families in the area because the Logans own their land instead of sharecropping for the wealthy descendants of the pre-Civil War plantation owners. The family has managed to keep the land for about 50 years, though the father has to go to Louisiana to work on the railroad to get money to pay for the mortgage and taxes.

The story describes the persecution the blacks in the area suffer, starting with an incident (which the Logan children only hear about) in which three men are burned alive for supposedly making advances to a white woman. The children have to bear up under the indignity of having school books that are discards from the white schools and the taunts of the white children on the school bus that passes them every day. Over the course of the story, the persecution escalates after Cassie's parents organize a boycott of the local storekeeper, who was responsible for the burning incident. Cassie's mother loses her job as a teacher, and her father is attacked on his way home from getting supplies from a store in Vicksburg. Cassie herself is the subject of harassment when she accidentally bumps into a white girl and is forced to apologize and to refer to the girl as "Miss" Lillian Jean. But all the tension between the blacks and the whites in the area comes to a crisis point when TJ Avery, one of Cassie's oldest brother's friends, gets involved in a robbery gone bad with two white boys, who put all the blame on him. Cassie and her brothers observe the "night men" come and haul the entire Avery family out of their house, and only a fire that threatens one of the plantations keeps the vigilantes from lynching TJ.

The climax of the book must be why it was a Newberry winner, because all those things I complained about above are no longer true at that point. The scene is vivid, to the point that it is painful to read it and to know that scenes like that really happened to people. But as painful as it is to look, we can't afford to look away. It's part of the truth of the American South of the early 20th century, and recognizing and remembering the brutality of race relations at that time is important. The ending of the book was especially poignant -- "What had happened to TJ in the night I did not understand, but I knew it would not pass. And I cried for those things which had happened in the night and would not pass."

But that brings me to the thing that bothered me about this book. The message seems to be that things between blacks and whites won't get any better. Of course, we see the brutality and the harsh use of power by the whites in the story. But the blacks also do things that keep the relationship negative. Cassie's older brother Stacy engineers revenge on the busload of white kids who have splashed him and his siblings with mud earlier in the day. Cassie herself masquerades for a month in "Uncle Tom" style so she can get a chance to get back at "Miss" Lillian Jean. And it doesn't matter to her that Lillian Jean doesn't understand why Cassie turns on her -- Cassie is satisfied with the revenge.

The saddest part, to me, is the relationship between the Logans and a poor, "white trash" boy named Jeremy. Jeremy keeps reaching out in an effort to be friends with the Logan kids. He walks part of the way to school with them every day. At Christmas, he brings Stacy a present. He comes over to their house in the summer just to talk and he invites them to come see the bedroom he built for himself up in a tree. But they rebuff all his attempts at friendship. As Mr. Logan explained it after Jeremy brought the Christmas gift, "Far as I'm concerned, friendship between white and black don't mean that much 'cause it usually ain't on a equal basis. Right now you and Jeremy might get along fine, but in a few years he'll think of himself as a man but you'll probably still be a boy to him. And if he feels that way, he'll turn on you in a minute . . . . white folks mean trouble. You see blacks hanging 'round with whites, they're headed for trouble. Maybe one day whites and blacks can be real friends . . . . the trouble is, down here in Mississippi, it costs too much to find out."

I have to take a little side trip here for a minute. The other day, I was talking to a friend about this book (before I'd finished it and when these thoughts were first coming together in my head). He said he's reading a book about the Crow and Sioux Indians and the way they dealt with the occupation of whites and being forced onto the reservation. He said the book says the leader of the Crow had a dream about a chickadee, which he took as a sign that the Crow should be like the bird -- smart and adaptable and able to learn from those around them. So they began to raise cattle rather than hunt buffalo, and they prospered as ranchers. The Sioux, on the other hand, followed Sitting Bull's vision of the ghost dance, which reinforced their past identity as great warriors of the plains -- and we know what the ultimate outcome was there. My friend said the book said the Sioux had a "thin" identity that limited their world and their options to the point that there couldn't have been a different outcome.

I think the view of race relationships in Roll of Thunder is a similar "thin" identity. Just about everyone in the book -- black and white -- has a view of others that is based only on skin color. It doesn't matter that Jeremy acts more like a friend than TJ does (he's always trying to use Stacy to get the answers to tests for school, he cheats Stacy out of a good wool coat, he gets Mrs. Logan fired from her teaching job); when it comes down to it, the Logans stick with TJ because he's black and they reject Jeremy because he's white. If we identify the "other" as the enemy based on outside appearance rather than trying to get past that appearance to find out who the person is, of course racism and prejudice "w[ill] not pass."

Maybe I'm naive. Maybe it's easy for me to say that because I'm white, and I've never had to face a lynch mob or be dragged out of my house in the middle of the night. But it seems to me there's a element of risk in any relationship. Anyone -- white or black -- can turn on you. But if we allow ourselves to have relationships only with those people who are "safe" because they belong in the same category we do, or if we treat others who are different as if only that "skin" is the reality, the world becomes a small, tight straitjacket. The only way we can achieve Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream world -- a world of "thick" relationships with possibilities -- is by opening ourselves up to the risk of getting to know the person behind the skin.