A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White Jr.

8069878A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White Jr.

For years I’ve wanted to read a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and I recently finally got around to it.  There are so many that have been written, it’s difficult to choose which one to read.  I ended up going with Ronald White’s biography, mainly because it was rated well, and it was the most recently written one I came across.  Having now read it, I wonder if I would have appreciated a different one more.

That is not to say this is not well-written and informative; it is.  However, what I had been hoping for was something that demystified that man, Abraham Lincoln.  And while this biography does that to an extent, it is far more an exploration and recounting of the Civil War than an analysis of Lincoln himself.  That said, it is an exhaustively researched volume, and I did come away having learned more about the Civil War than I ever knew before.

Some interesting things to note about Lincoln: according to this biography, at the outset of the Civil War – and indeed, of his political career –  he was not determined to abolish slavery.  While he was not in favor of slavery from a personal, moral perspective, his goal was only to stop the spread of slavery into territory beyond which it already existed.  He was fine with leaving slavery alone where it already existed, and at the outset of the Civil War, his focus was on keeping the Union together.  His views on slavery seem to have evolved over time (with the aid of pressure from anti-slavery factions in the North), and endeavoring to completeley abolish slavery came after a long process of rumination on Lincoln’s part.  Even when he first began to propose the abolishment of slavery, he made clear that he did not believe that Blacks were the social equals of Whites, and he proposed “emancipation and colonization,” meaning, arranging for freed slaves to be relocated to Haiti and Nigeria.

Perhaps his views on the social equality of Blacks also evolved, however, as indicated by his (final) encounter with Frederick Douglass at the White House for Lincoln’s second inaugural reception, where Lincoln warmly received Douglass, saying, “Here comes my friend Douglass …. there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.”  It is impossible, however, to know how far this would translate, practically speaking, had Lincoln not soon thereafter been assasinated.  Would he have championed Black suffrage?  Equal pay for Blacks?  Blacks holding political office?  Interracial relations and marriages?  It’s impossible to know this, but given the widely-held views of that time period, it’s unlikely that Lincoln would have been enthusiatic to that extend, no matter how progressive he was for the times.

It’s worth knowing, too, that the lines that divided the North and the South did not dilineate sentiments about racial equality to the extent I think we would like to believe.  Most Northerners at that time were deeply prejudice, and although many were against the institution of slavery, they still viewed black people as an inferior race, and wanted little or nothing to do with them.

I also found it interesting to learn of Lincoln’s supposed spiritual oddyssey.  As a young man, and even by the time he first assumes the office of the President, he seemed to be verging on agnostic.  Over the course of his presidency, however, he apparently underwent some kind of spiritual transformation and became almost pious in his views on god and providence.

In any case, White’s biography of Lincoln does offer a lot of fascinating information about Lincoln’s life, as well as the Civil War, and the generals and other important figures of the time.  A bit on the dry side, and with a little too much comparative analysis with the bible for my taste, it’s nonetheless an informative volume.  I’m not sure, however, that I feel that I understand Lincoln the man much better than I did before reading this book.  But maybe Lincoln will always remain somewhat of an enigma, and understanding the workings of his mind is an impossiblity.

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Gone_with_the_Wind_coverGone With the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

So many thoughts … where to start?

I just read this epic Civil War novel for the third time in my life.  The first time I read it, I was a mere teenager.  My mother would park herself on the sofa every year when the movie was on TV and cry her way through it (if my memory serves me), and by the time I was a teen, I had seen the movie numerous times because of this.  Being an avid reader, of course I read the book when I arrived at a certain age.  In truth, though, I don’t have any memories of how the book made me feel all those years ago – I only remember that I liked it very much.

The second time I read it was almost ten years ago when it was chosen for my book club.  Apparently I never wrote about it – I’ve searched – but I did give it five stars on Goodreads.  I had hoped that I had written about it so that I could go back and compare and contrast my feelings about it then with my feelings about it now, but alas, no such luck.  I do clearly remember loving it, appreciating all the details about the Civil War it contains, feeling a strong admiration for the character of Scarlett O’Hara (my goodness, that character – or at least her name – was the inspiration for my youngest child’s name!), feeling deeply invested in the story and the people who populated it, and wanting to go back to page one and read it all over again as soon as I finished it (I didn’t do that, though; it took almost ten years before I would reread it).

And now I am well into middle age and have read it for the third time.

Over the last few years, as I’ve become more aware of and invested in social justice issues, I’ve come across articles that mention Gone With the Wind as a monument to racism.  The first time I came across an article like this, my knee-jerk internal response was defensiveness.  How could one of my favorite novels be racist?  I’m not racist!  I understand how wrong racism is!  It’s just a fictional story about a time and a place that no longer exists.  That’s just the way things were back then.

You get the idea.  The usual white-person thought process in the face of uncomfortable truths about racism and prejudice.

So, when I picked it up (actually, I listened to the audio book; for the record, the reader did an excellent job) this last time, I knew that I would see it through a different lens than I did a decade ago.  Here are my main thoughts:

First and foremost, GWTW absolutely does romanticize slavery.  It portrays the owning of human beings as property as a mutually beneficial institution, in which slave owners took good care of their “darkies” much like pets or small children.  They fed them generously, nursed them in sickness, and generally appreciated their service like anyone today might appreciate the service of a paid, voluntary service provider.  If an occasional “lick” was meted out, it was for the negro’s own good – but violence against slaves was exceedingly rare.  And the slaves not only accepted their lot of being owned by other human beings, they were happy about it!  They did not pine for freedom.  They gladly accepted that they were put on this earth solely to serve their white folks.  Any stories coming from the Yankees about whipping slaves or sending bloodhounds after runaway slaves or any mistreatment of negroes was propaganda.  So, when the slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, it was a cruelty not only to the genteel Southerners, but the slaves themselves, who never wanted freedom in the first place, and couldn’t cope with it once they had it.

Well, that’s all propaganda if I ever heard it.  I did a lot of eye rolling, jaw-dropping, and cringing through all of that.  I felt ashamed that I had ever read this book before and not seen this, not given it much thought at all.

Speaking of Yankees, they are the bad guys in this story.  Yankees are horrible, murderous, unscrupulous blights.  Even after the war, the Yankees remain The Enemy.  And I’m sure there is actually a lot of truth in this.  As I read, I kept wondering when the South began to see the North as fellow Americans again.

Also, the Ku Klux Klan features prominently in this novel, and it’s portrayed as a necessary organization in the face of Reconstruction in order to preserve the Southern way of life.  Members of the KKK are upstanding, respectable, honorable noble men – they are the good guys.

I know, right?

Two characters in the story, Ellen O’Hara (Scarlett’s mother) and Melanie Hamilton-Wilks (Scarlett’s sister-in-law, and the wife of the man Scarlett pines for) are portrayed as near saints.  “Truly Great Ladies” they are called – meaning selfless, humble, kind, compassionate, gentle, forgiving, and utterly virtuous. However, they are both utterly devoted to “The Cause”: preserving the Southern way of life with its class hierarchy (of which they are at the top), and the institution of slavery.  Gentle, self-effacing Melanie frets that she doesn’t want her child going to school with “pickaninnies.”  So, really, how virtuous and saintly can someone be who has a bone-deep belief that owning other human beings and depriving them of liberty is the way things are supposed to be?

Now let us turn to Scarlett O’Hara.  What I mostly remembered from having read the book before (and seeing the movie countless times) is that I admired her mainly for her bucking a lot of the conventions women of her time were expected to uphold.  She spoke her mind at a time when women were expected to shut up and let the men do the talking – and thinking.  She was resilient, a fighter – she single-handedly pulled her family out of poverty after the war.  She went out in public while pregnant – a shocking and appalling thing to do at that time.  She owned a business – and a man’s business at that (a mill and lumber yard) – and ran it, and was good at it, at a time when women were expected to stay home and darn socks.  This admiration still holds.  In those ways, I do still feel that she is a heroine of a kind.

However, Scarlett O’Hara is a bitch.  She is jealous and petty and spiteful and 69234d55c356d4ae6f7ffbee80a7b9faself-absorbed and conceited, and often just plain mean.  She steps on people and doesn’t care who she hurts in order to get what she wants.  By the end of the novel, which spans twelve years, she has burned nearly every bridge she ever had.  She’s not actually a very likable person.  I’m left wondering how Margaret Mitchell wanted her readers to feel about Scarlett.  Did she intentionally create a character we aren’t supposed to like – was Scarlett meant to serve as a cautionary figure?  Or was Scarlett meant to be an admirable heroine?  Are we supposed to root for her or disdain her? Perhaps both.

As far as the love story – gah.  Scarlett spends the entire twelve years of the novel believing herself in love with Ashley Wilks, who is somebody else’s husband, as well as a pitiful, helpless, inept daydreamer of a man who leads Scarlett on by occasionally making proclamations of love for her in private, and on one occasion shoving his tongue down her throat (which she welcomed).  In reality, he really just longs to fuck Scarlett, but he’s too honorable to actually cheat on his wife.  Finally, at the end of the novel, Scarlett realizes that she never really loved Ashley (and she realizes that he only wanted into her bloomers), that she actually has loved Rhett for years without realizing it.

Rhett Butler is the bad-boy that women are believed to like so much.  He doesn’t give a crap about convention, he makes piles of money by unscrupulous means, and of course he’s tall, dark, and handsome.  And he’s in love with Scarlett from the first time he sets eyes upon her sixteen-year-old self when he is in his thirties (more on the prevalent lechery in the novel below).  Eventually, Rhett becomes Scarlett’s third husband, but he marries her knowing she’s in love with Ashley, but then ends up filled with resentment towards her for being in (fake) love with Ashley.  The relationship between Rhett and Scarlett is very fucked up once they get married.  They can never, ever, ever be vulnerable with each other.  Rhett plays very hard at not letting Scarlett know he actually loves her – and then resents her for not realizing that he loves her.  They communicate mostly with barbs and sarcasm.  Violence erupts between them occasionally.  All in all, it’s a very unhealthy coupling.  Funny that it’s often touted as “The Greatest Love Story Of All Time.”  They end up destroying each other because they can never be real with each other until it’s too late.

So, back to the lechery.  It’s plentiful in this story.  Scarlett’s mother Ellen was only fifteen when she married Gerald O’Hara, who was in his forties.  Scarlett is sixteen when the novel opens, and Rhett is thirty-three and falls in love with her.  Sue Ellen, Scarlett’s younger sister, is engaged to a middle-aged man (whom Scarlett woos away from her sister and marries for his money, but I digress).  It’s pretty gross and disturbing when you get right down to it.  Also, the incest thing.  Ashley and Melanie are first cousins and married.  Ellen, Scarlett’s mother, was in love with her own cousin, Phillipe, before she married Gerald.  I guess that sort of thing was accepted and common back in the day – but so was slavery.

All this being said, I confess I still enjoyed the book.  A lot.  From a purely literary standpoint, it’s a masterpiece – the writing is stellar, the characters and scenes come alive, it’s full of historical detail, and in all its nearly 1,000 pages, the story never drags.  I feel guilty about liking it because it’s so problematic in so many ways.  I also realize that I enjoy it specifically because I can only read it through the lens of a white person; I can’t imagine appreciating anything about it as a black person.  Racism persists, and the fact that white people have written stories glorifying such a heinous, miserable institution as slavery and portraying people of color as barely human, and the fact that white people (like myself) still enjoy these stories nonetheless is evidence of that.

 

12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

twelve-years-a-slave-book-cover-0112 Years a Slave

by Solomon Northup

I was not aware of this book until it was mentioned in a section about slavery in a book I’m reading with my kids about U.S. History.  I knew there had been an Academy Award winning  movie by the same name a couple of years ago, which I have not seen, but I wasn’t aware that the movie was based on a slaves narrative about the years he spent in bondage.  I’m not sure what compelled me to read this, except that as an American, and especially as a white American, I do feel a deep sense of responsibility to try to know and understand the brutal reality of slavery in America, and how that ugly past continues to influence and shape the present.

Solomon Northup was born a free black man in the early part of the nineteenth century.  His parents were a freed slave and a black woman who was born free.  Solomon, a carpenter and talented violinist, married Anne, a free black woman, and together they had three children and went about living as hardworking, respectable citizens in Saratoga Springs, New York.  One day, Solomon was approached by two white men and offered temporary work as a fiddler for a circus in Washington D.C.  Believing it would be a short trip, he didn’t bother sending word to his wife, who was away working as a cook in a hotel.  Once in Washington D.C. – the capital of the country that lauded freedom and liberty, which did not escape Solomon – he was drugged, shackled, and sold into slavery, his papers evidencing his status as a free man, stolen.  When he insisted he was a free man, he was beaten almost to death for his efforts.

Sold into the deep south, Solomon Northup spent twelve years as a slave, under three different masters, one benevolent (as much as a person who believes in the institution of slavery can be benevolent), and the other two brutal.  For twelve years, he existed under the mental and physical torture of slavery, always pining for a way back to his wife, children, and his freedom.

That he was eventually rescued is a miracle, as many, many free blacks were kidnapped and sold into slavery, and very, very few of them ever saw freedom again.

This is another raw look at the heinous things human beings are capable of inflicting on other human beings, and the twisted beliefs that make those acts possible.  A must read.

To Be a Slave by Julius Lester

51C1asDyjoL To Be a Slave

by Julius Lester

I was led to this book as I searched for a book to possibly read with my daughters, whom I homeschool, as part of our exploration of U.S. History.  I’ve been reading A Young People’s History of the United States by Howard Zimmerman with them (an excellent book), and detouring to other books when we want to delve more deeply into certain aspects of the history we’re reading about.  Slavery in America is one of those aspects.  I want to somehow convey to my kids the depth of horror of slavery, and to really try to imagine what it must have been like to be owned as a piece of property, like a table or a dog or an iPad, by another human being, to have no rights, and to spend one’s entire life doing the bidding of another person or people.  It’s hard even for me to imagine, obviously, being a white woman.

In any case, my query online for books for youth regarding slavery led me to Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave, which was originally published in 1968.  It opens thus:

“It was the late forties.  I was not yet ten years old.  One day there came in the mail a letter addressed to my father in which a company promised – in big and bold letters – to research the Lester family tree and send us a copy of our family coat of arms.  I was excited, but when I saw my father fold the letter as if to discard it, I asked anxiously, ‘Don’t you want to know our family history?’

“He laughed dryly.  ‘I don’t need to pay anybody to tell me about where we came from.  Our family tree ends in a bill of sale.  Lester is the name of the family that owned us.'”

I was chilled by this stark, but obvious information.  I had never thought about it before – but of course nearly every black American’s family tree would end in a bill of sale.

Many years later, Lester began delving into black history, and he came upon a book by B.A. Botkin called Lay My Burden Down, which was a compilation of interviews with the last living former slaves undertaken by the Federal Writer’s Project of the Depression.  The book angered Lester, who says, “The slaves depicted there were too reminiscent of the stereotyped blacks of the movies of the forties and fifties – happy, laughing, filled with love for while people.”  Believing that the interviews with former slaves were cherry-picked in order to produce a record of slavery that (white) people could feel good about, Lester went to the Library of Congress and spend weeks pouring through all of the interviews undertaken by the Federal Writer’s Project himself, gleaning from them exactly what he had gone there to find: true, emotional, harrowing, courageous, horrifying, heart wrenching firsthand accounts of slavery from those who were slaves themselves and lived to tell about it.  To Be a Slave is Lester’s compilation of those interviews, along with his notes.

I’ve read numerous books about slavery, both fiction and non-fiction, and this book has touched a deeper never probably than any other I’ve read, mainly for its raw and unvarnished truthfulness.  It’s actually aimed at young people – probably no younger than middle school, but something adults would benefit from reading, too.  This should be required reading; highly recommend.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

61OX2ZRLqYL._SL500_AA300_PIaudible,BottomRight,13,73_AA300_ Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Signature Performance by Elijah Wood
by Mark Twain

I attempted reading Huckleberry Finn probably fifteen years ago, and what I remember is that I had so much trouble stumbling over the dialect that I abandoned it.  I’ve wanted to pick it up again for years, but never did until recently when I received an Audible newsletter announcing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn read by Elijah Wood.  “That’s the ticket,” I thought.  “If I listen to someone else read it, I won’t have any trouble with the dialect.”  Plus, we were headed out on a family road trip, so it seemed like the perfect driving companion.

I wasn’t disappointed.  I am vastly underqualified to offer any analysis or critique of a classic great work such as this, so I’ll just say that I loved it.  If you haven’t ever read it yourself (and I know it’s required reading for many a high school student; my own son will be reading it for his high school senior English class this year.  I was required to read Tom Sawyer in school, but not Huckleberry Finn), it tells the story, as narrated by Huck Finn himself, of his adventures escaping his abusive, drunken, no good “Pap” and hooking up with a runaway slave by the name of Jim.  Full of danger, high adventure, and colorful characters, it’s a story for the ages.

Elijah Wood does a fabulous job performing the story.  His reading of it is fluid and seamless, and he does the backwoods, southern dialect beautifully.  I discovered after I finished it that he had actually played Huck Finn in a Disney production of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1993, and I wonder if this allowed him an intimacy with the story that he might otherwise not have had.

I really loved this story and am sorry I waited so long to read it.

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

the-invention-of-wings-sue-monk-kidd_t580 The Invention of Wings: A Novel
by Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd, author of the widely read The Secret Life of Bees, explains in an afterword to The Invention of Wings that she knew she wanted to write a novel about sisters, but who those sisters would be and what the setting would be in which they would exist was a mystery to her until she attended an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum about women who have made important contributions to history and stumbled upon the names of Sarah and Angelina Grimke.  She had never heard of them before, although they haled from her own hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.  After reading about the two women at the exhibition, however, Kidd was intrigued and began to dig deeper.  And so The Invention of Wings was born.

I had never heard of the Grimke sisters, either, but apparently they were at one time two of the most well-known – and notorious – women in the United States.  Born into a large, wealthy plantation family in the early nineteenth century, the Grimkes were raised when slavery epitomized the Southern way of life.  Both sisters, having witnessed firsthand the cruelties of slavery, abhorred the institution and eventually became pariahs in their community as they became more and more vocal as abolitionists.  As adults, they left Charleston and traveled the states speaking out against slavery and for equal rights, not only among races, but gender as well.  Sarah and Angelina Grimke thus became two of the most famous abolitionists and feminists of their time.

In The Invention of Wings, Kidd creates a fictional account of the Grimke sisters’ lives, as well as the lives of a cast of supporting characters, based on historical fact.  The story is narrated alternately by Sarah Grimke and a slave by the name of Hetty, aka “Handful,” who was presented to Sarah as a handmaid on her eleventh birthday.  While Sarah Grimke apparently really was given a young slave girl named Hetty as a gift for her eleventh birthday, historical records indicate that Hetty died in childhood.  Kidd’s novel is an imagining of what might have been had Hetty lived.  The novel spans several decades – from Sarah’s eleventh birthday through middle age.

I loved this book.  I actually listened to it on audio, so it took me a while to get through it, but it was such a treat to listen to this epic, sweeping story play out.  The characters and scenes are so vivid.  While it’s certainly not the first novel I’ve read that addresses slavery, it doesn’t feel redundant or stale by any means.  The horrors of people owning other human beings like property, and literally valuing them at a fraction of “whole humans” and treating them accordingly . . . it’s a heavy weight on the conscience of America.

A must read.