Books

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!

On Free Speech and Book Selling

The current political divide in our country has resurfaced the issue of free speech and book access.  I have been following this recent controversy surrounding Powell’s Books‘ decision to carry Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, a new book by Andy Ngo.  The conservative journalist has made a name for himself after the 2019 Proud Boy march, as well as this year’s Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon.  His new book focuses on his reporting of Antifa.

The bookstore’s decision to carry the book has caused a major uproar in Portland, with angry protesters in front of the store.  The store decided to no longer carry the book in the physical store, but sell it on their website.

“In the interest of fostering thoughtful dialogue and illuminating American discourse as it stands — as opposed to how we wish it looked — we allow both righteous and deplorable books to share our virtual and physical shelves,” the bookstore said in a statement.

I agree. Bookstores are supposed to be defenders of free speech, even speech they don’t agree with.  It is antithetical for bookstores to censor books. Just because the store sells a particular book, it doesn’t mean that it endorses the book, nor is anyone forcing customers to buy the book!

I once worked in a bookstore, and we sold many books I didn’t personally agree with or had any interest in reading myself.  Also, it is not good for business, and not in the way you would initially think.  Book censorship becomes a slippery slope into a rabbit hole you can’t come back from.  If you come out against one book, then you would have to also ban other similar books.  Then when you don’t ban the other similar books, you are accused of hypocrisy.  Powell Books also sells Mein Kampf on its website, and I don’t see protesters trying to ban it.  I bet these protesters would be singing a different tune if this was a conservative-leaning bookstore censoring a liberal book!

Free speech is not a liberal or conservative issue; it’s a democracy issue.  There are more people on the democratic side than the other side.

In addition, this also affects customer psychology.  Most customers expect to browse a physical or online store and explore different books and ideas of their choosing,  But once you become the bookstore known for censoring books, it changes how customers view your store.  They might think the store is making judgments about their reading choices, and that might turn them off from shopping with the store.  I have a friend who stopped shopping at a particular bookstore because a store cashier continuously gave her ugly looks whenever she asked about libertarian-leaning books.  She now buys all her books from Amazon.  Ultimately, independent bookstores are only hanging by a thread financially, and need every customer they can get.

Honestly, Ngo’s book probably wouldn’t have been gotten all the attention it has received if it wasn’t for the protesters.  Without the protests, the book probably would have sold meagers copies and faded into obscurity.  If I was the bookstore owner, I probably would have buried the book in the book stacks instead of a floor display, sold it online, and did special orders if customers came in requesting it.

It’s a democracy issue.

Book Review Island People

This was one of those ebooks I purchased a long while ago, but it had been sitting on my TBR list for the longest time.  Then the pandemic happened, and I needed a book to help me escape from the health and racial tragedies happening in real-time, but also where I can engross myself in learning something new.

I pleasantly found both of these qualities in Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Island People: The Caribbean and the World.  Most books about this region of the world usually focus on the fun aspects for the tourist-minded – the beaches, the sun, the food, etc.  However, Island People goes beyond the tropical hype and focuses on little-known historical and cultural anecdotes.  One main point throughout the book the author makes a point of is that globalization began in earnest in the Caribbean, which was at one point was the center of all global economic growth.  Whether it’s reggae music in Jamaica, the meaning of “cubanidad” in Havana, or colorism on the Dominican Republic/Haitian border, the region was also heavily influenced by cultural and racial integration by way of colonialism and slavery.

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