About Talia Whyte

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Book Review: Caul Baby

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I don’t usually read fiction, but the virtual book galley room at Winter Institute last February provided me with a great opportunity to broaden my horizons by picking books I would normally not pick up.  While I am a nonfiction gal, I did get some interesting fiction books that I will review over the next few weeks.

The first book I read is Caul Baby, the fictional debut by writer Morgan Jerkins.  She is the editor of Zora, an online black women’s magazine.  She has previously written two nonfiction books from a black feminist perspective.

Caul Baby explores issues of black motherhood.  The book is set in Harlem with a pregnant Laila, who has had a history of miscarriages.  Out of fear that she might miscarry again, she turns to the Melancons, a family of women who sell their caul, a layer of skin that has magical power.  The family decides not to give her the healing skin because they only help white people. Laila loses her baby and has a mental breakdown.

Unbeknownst to anyone in her family, Laila’s 20-year-old niece, Amara, is pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl born in a caul.  Because she doesn’t want her family to know about her pregnancy and wants to continue with her college studies, Amara has her baby in secret at her godfather’s house. He secretly gives the caul-bearing infant to the Melancons. The book continues down a thrilling route of intrigue and secrets while looking at race and class in America.

I really liked the book.  It was really well-written, and the character development was superb.  I was able to visualize everything happening in the book. Maybe Jerkins is setting this book up to be made into a movie!  The book cover is also stunning.

Of course, after Googling real caul babies, I went down a rabbit hole of surreal images of newborns still in their amniotic sac.  En caul births, as they are called, are extremely rare where a newborn is born fully inside the sac, which looks like a thin and filmy membrane.  In many cultures, it is good luck to be born with the caul. The Melancons are part of a long caul-bearing tradition from West Africa by way of New Orleans that is both helpful and harmful in their Harlem community and to themselves.  Coincidentally, Josephine, one of the Melancon women, also has also had many miscarriages, doesn’t have the same good luck with the caul.

I also appreciated the focus on reproductive health and justice for Black women.  Systemic racism impacts access to quality healthcare, which puts Black women at higher risk for pregnancy complications.  According to the CDC, Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related problems than white women.  Black women also develop fibroids and endometriosis more often than white women, contributing greatly to pregnancy issues and other health issues.  Many might not go to a doctor to get properly diagnosed for these issues because of cost, access, thinking it is just a “bad period,” or not thinking health professionals will believe their pain.

Then Black women are criminalized when access to proper healthcare is denied.  A storyline later in Jerkins’ book is about Asali, a pregnant Black teen who delivers her baby inside a convenience store bathroom and leaves the dead baby in the trash.  Amara is now a 40-year-old prosecutor who is running for Manhattan district attorney.  To win the race, Amara charges Asali as an adult for murder while still secretly thinking about her own hypocrisy of giving up her baby.  If Asali had access to decent healthcare, Harlem wasn’t gentrifying, or if she was simply white, would she be in this situation?

Sometimes fiction can tell us many truths.

Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins. Published by Harper on April 6, 2021.  Buy it here.

Book Review: How The Word Is Passed

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Last February, I attended the annual Winter Institute virtually hosted by the American Booksellers Association.  I was there as a steering committee member for my local bookstore, Rozzie Bound.  I had never attended a whole conference conducted online before.  It was a wonderful experience, and I wish all conferences are done online, even after the pandemic.  One of the cool things about it was I was able to select advanced reader copies (ARC) of new books coming out in the next few months and have them delivered to me for free.  I will be reviewing some of those books here in the next few weeks.

One of the books I selected was Clint Smith’s book How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.  Smith is an activist and writer for The Atlantic.  He also used to be on the podcast Pod Save The People.   Whenever I listened to him on the podcast, I found him a brilliant and thoughtful person.  So when I saw his book was an available ARC, I immediately requested it because I know I would get a good history lesson.

And I wasn’t disappointed.  I loved the book!

How The Word Is Passed focuses on how America remembers slavery through physical landmarks.  The book attempts to answer many questions. Are we doing a good job at this remembrance? Are we telling the truth about these landmarks to ourselves? What do they say about America?  Smith goes beyond the debate around Confederate monuments and tries to answer these questions. He visited places dedicated to our collective memory on slavery like Monticello, Whitney Plantation, Blanford Cemetary, Juneteeth celebrations in Texas, and Senegal’s Gorée Island. The book is well researched and does a great job examining how America is reckoning with this history.

He also talks about history that is hidden in plain view, like Central Park.  I only found out a couple of years ago that a thriving black community used to live in the area we now know as the famous park called Seneca Village.  The rich, white New Yorkers wanted to have a park similar to those in Europe.  In what probably was the first gentrification act in New York, the Black folks were violently forced out of the village in the 1850s, and developers raised all the buildings to create the park we all know today.  I remember going on a three-hour walking tour of Central Park about five years ago, and the tour guide never mentioned any of this dark history.  The guide made it sound like the park was a vacant, unused parcel of land before Frederick Law Olmsted created the park.

The most disturbing part of the book is when the author visits Angola – a slave plantation turned into a prison that got its start with “convict leasing” – or slavery by another name.  Today Angola Prison also has a museum “celebrating” its storied history, minus any mention of slavery, a golf course, a guesthouse, and the Angola Rodeo.  Yes, a rodeo! According to the rodeo’s website, it includes activities like “Convict Poker, where four offenders play poker seated at a table with a loose bull, and the last sitting offender wins.”  The rodeo also includes “Prisoner Pinball,” where offenders stand in randomly placed hula-hoops with a loose bull and the last offender still in their hula-hoop wins.”  Think of Disney with cellblocks!

Several of the landmarks bring up issues of truthfulness and “storytelling,” whether it is the stained windows at Blanford Church, the Lost Cause messaging from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, or the actual number of enslaved people who came through the House of Slaves.  I wonder in the cases of Blanford and Gorée if the storytelling has more to do with tourism and the financial incentive.  Blanford Church is part of a memorial for Confederate soldiers buried in the adjacent Blandford Cemetary in Virginia. When Smith toured the church, all the guide wanted to talk about were the famous windows and not about the Confederacy’s role in wanting to keep slavery alive.  Many tourists today only go to slave plantations and other similar landmarks just to hear a “nice story.” Unfortunately, places like Blanford are catering to that “whitewashed” market. Oh, slavery wasn’t that bad.  Look at the lovely windows! It’s like going to Auschwitz and not wanting to hear about the Holocaust!

On the Gorée tour, Smith was told that millions of enslaved people came through the Door of No Return.  Not only is this number exaggerated allegedly, but there is even a question about how relevant Gorée is in transatlantic slave trade history.  Gorée Island is a significant tourist destination in Senegal and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Many people in Dakar financially benefit from the island’s high profile and tourist money, even if these exaggerations started by House of Slaves’ original curator Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye in 1962 persisted.  In my opinion, there is a financial incentive to keep the lie going.  Many historians still argue that the number of enslaved people coming through there isn’t as important as its place in the collective memory of what the House of Slaves represents.

Smith ends the book with more questions for the reader.  How do we fill these historical gaps when we don’t always know if the information we are being told is true, false, or “sincere fiction”?  I don’t think we will ever know, but we should work towards having more honest information.

How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America by Clint Smith.  Available June 1, 2021, from Little, Brown, and Company.  Buy the book here.

Reread Book Club: The Color of Water

Book: The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother
Author: James McBride
Times Read: 2

I picked up a copy of this book in a thrift store recently. I remember first reading it when I was in college. This is a memoir about the author’s white mother, Ruth McBride. For most of his life, she told him that she was a light-skinned black woman, when in fact, she was a white woman who was disowned by her Orthodox Jewish family when she married a Black man.

When James asked his mother about why she was different looking from her children, she would say only, “I’m light-skinned.”

When he asked if he was black or white, she said, “You’re a human being.”

And what about God?

“God is the color of water.”

McBride’s writing style was so engaging that I finished the book in a few days. One of the common themes I didn’t catch onto when I first read the book was Ruth’s constant need to always be moving and changing because of all the secrets and chaos her life became so embedded in. She was escaping Virginia for New York for Delaware and back to New York while raising 12 biracial children as a twice-widowed, Jewish-turned-Christian white woman in near poverty in a racist society, and it totally made sense to me. At the beginning of the book, we see Ruth riding a bike, and it symbolizes her need to just get away to deal with the stresses of her life.

All the constant movement and chaos growing up in this household was also stressful for the author, who said that he didn’t give him much of a chance to think about his own racial identity until later in life when he wrote this book.

But she was able to adapt to every situation. Water adapts in the same way as it is colorless in small amounts and it adapts the color it is reflected from light in larger quantities.

I am so glad I picked up this book again!

The History of Insurrections

Broadcaster Karen Hunter does this really great weekly YouTube show with Dr. Greg Carr, head of the Africana Studies Department at Howard University.  Every Saturday, they have a discussion about Black history.  In November they discussed the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, the violent overthrow of the North Carolina town’s biracial government by white supremacists, which is very reminiscent of the January 6 insurrection.

I was going to write a piece about this, but I think I will just place their discussion here for the full context instead.

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