Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

ZZ Packer
Riverhead Books
Reviewed by Nancy
4 out of 5 stars

Overview

Already an award-winning writer, ZZ Packer now shares with us her debut, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decides where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream.

With penetrating insight that belies her youth—she was only nineteen years old when Seventeen magazine printed her first published story—ZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking performance—fresh, versatile, and captivating. It introduces us to an arresting and unforgettable new voice.

My Review

“We had all been taught that adulthood was full of sorrow and pain, taxes and bills, dreaded work and dealings with whites, sickness and death.”

This collection of stories is brimming with energy, hardship, sadness, humor, and compassion. The characters’ voices and life experiences are so authentic that I was able to forget about my own life and problems for a few days. I loved how these stories explored race and class in a provocative way and through an African-American lens. Z.Z. Packer captures that feeling of being an outsider so perfectly, that I couldn’t help thinking about my friend, Karen.

Karen moved from Alabama to Boston in the 80’s. Tired of the increase in crime and rising rents, she and her family eventually settled in a small New Hampshire town. As much as she loved the clean air and open spaces, and despite the kindness of friends and neighbors, being one of a few African-American families in town always made them feel like outsiders.

Karen and I worked at the same company and knew each other for four years. We used to have lunch together and go out for drinks after work. She wanted to attend the company Christmas party, but did not want to bring her husband, who succumbed to alcoholism after a long period of unemployment. So I offered to go with her. In my experience, company parties are stiff and boring, but it ended up being an OK time even though I would have much rather been at a dance club. After a couple of drinks, I noticed Karen seemed withdrawn. When I asked her what was wrong, she just shrugged her shoulders. A few more questions later, I learned she felt uncomfortable at the party and wanted to leave. Learning the reason for her discomfort took a lot more effort and left us both feeling frustrated. Karen admitted she was uncomfortable being the only black person at the party. People were warm and sociable and I didn’t feel she was being mistreated at all, so I couldn’t understand why she felt the way she did. Rather than explain it further, Karen asked me to attend the Black Social, a company-sponsored event for black professionals, with her the following evening. Just like the Christmas party, people were friendly, shook hands, asked about my job, and made me feel welcome. There was no reason for me to be uncomfortable, and I wasn’t. I just had this little nagging sensation of not belonging, of being different, of standing out in a crowd. Being in Karen’s shoes for one night taught me a valuable lesson.

Karen died of liver cancer in 1992, but I always think of her when I’m the only white person having breakfast at Subway.

Blanche on the Lam

Blanche on the Lam
Barbara Neely
1992 Penguin Books

reviewed by carol

3/5 stars

Remember how I said I grew up on Christie? It took college to really open my eyes to the insight that I had read very few books by authors who were not white. It became a personal project to increase the diversity of my reading (while still hanging in my favorite genres of mystery, sci-fi and fantasy). I was scanning through my college’s small bookstore, looking for my books for the semester when I saw the Penguin paperback edition of Blanche, no doubt on the list for some literature class. I quickly grabbed it and settled down for a read. Blanche on the Lam held my attention, but even more than that, it shares and affirms an experience seldom portrayed in literature. 

Blanche is an African-American domestic worker, recently moved to North Carolina after unsettling events in NYC. She’s barely making ends meet, living with her opinionated mother and taking care of her deceased sister’s two children. When called into court for a bounced check, nerves and claustrophobia get the best of her and she makes a run for it before she can be taken into jail for a multiple-month sentence. Needing someplace to stay, she decides to show up at a temporary agency job she had already refused, claiming to be her replacement. It turns out a couple, their elderly aunt and disabled cousin will be traveling to their country retreat for a week, giving the normal servants a week off. As she tries to mitigate the idiosyncrasies of her new employers and come up with a strategy to deal with being a fugitive, she realizes her employers are acting extremely strange, even for white people. When an elderly black gardener shares his own concerns with Blanche, she starts to fear for her safety.


Once I got past my struggle with the idea that Blanche would become a fugitive over a check-cashing case, I enjoyed the plot. It begins more like literary fiction, with Blanche primarily focused on solving her current problem, as well as developing a strategy for caring for herself and the children. Tempted to go AWOL from her life, the story is about her as much as the mystery. In fact, while she notes the oddness in her employer’s household, she isn’t really drawn into their troubles until the black gardener is found dead.  Unlike many amateur sleuths, Blanche is a reluctant investigator, adding a more realistic angle to the story. 

“Blanche had learned long ago that signs of pleasant stupidity in household help made some employers feel more comfortable, as though their wallets, their car keys, and their ideas about themselves were all safe. Putting on a dumb act was something many black people considered unacceptable, but she sometimes found it a useful place to hide.”

Characterization is interesting, and clearly a strong point of the mystery. Blanche is a practical, straight-forward person that has realized that sometimes the best way to get along is to keep her mouth shut, but she’s only able to do that for so long. Despite her own relative poverty, Blanche has had a wealth of experiences providing insight into human nature. Neely stated in an interview that she started the Blanche story as a way to deal with writer’s block on another project and was surprised by the enthusiastic reception Blanche received. As a lifelong activist, she was interested in presenting “political fiction” as she wrote from the perspective of the underrepresented, that of a “poor black woman (a nice interview with Ms. here). 

There’s aspects that do make this feel like a first book. Although the plotting and characterization are quite good, the tone can be a bit didactic, with Blanche doing a great deal of ‘telling’ through her inner voice. While insightful, it could have been less heavy-handed, done through memories or experiences. During my second read, I found myself far less tolerant of it; not that I minded the message, but that it could have been so much meaningfully relayed through action. Otherwise, the writing style is sophisticated, with nice variety. Blanche’s observations give a nice sense of the opulent homes and the Carolina setting.


A number of the reviews I’ve seen mentioned that they found this book through criticism of The Help, and I’d definitely encourage reading about Blanche over the moviefied version. I recommend the series it if you are a mystery fan interested in broadening your reading experience. Won Agatha, Macavity and Anthony Awards for best first novel 1992.


cross posted at my blog at https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2014/12/22/blanche-on-the-lam-by-barbara-neely/

Black Girl in Paris

Shay Youngblood
Riverhead Trade
Reviewed by Nancy
3 out of 5 stars

Overview

Shay Youngblood's debut novel, Soul Kiss, received accolades from reviewers and writers alike. The Washington Post hailed it as "intelligent and erotic ... immensely engrossing and satisfying," while The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called it "exquisite." Tina McElroy Ansa described it as "extraordinary ... lyrical, intimate, funny, unsettling, enthralling." Now, in her second novel, Youngblood explores the endeavor of a creative coming-of-age, and infuses her story with the same mesmerizing, lush language and impressionistic style that won her so many fans the first time around.

Black Girl in Paris wends its way around the mythology of Paris as a city that has called out to African-American artists. Like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Josephine Baker before her, Youngblood's heroine leaves her home, in the American South, nurturing a dream of finding artistic emancipation in the City of Light. She experiments freely, inhabiting different incarnations--artist's model, poet's helper, au pair, teacher, thief, and lover--to keep body and soul together, to stay afloat, heal the wounds of her broken heart, discover her sexual self, and, finally, to wrestle her dreams of becoming a writer into reality.

Youngblood's lyricism, as effortless as an inspired improvisation, and her respect for the tradition she depicts create a natural tension between old and new, reverence and innovation, and tell a story at once timeless and immediate.

My Review

I love Paris, its grandeur, its palaces, museums, monuments, breathtaking views, restaurants, cafes, its rich culture and history. It is a dynamic, international and happening place.

It’s been about 5 years since I’ve been there last, so I was really looking forward to taking a literary trip to Paris.

Eden, a 26-year-old Black woman from Alabama and an aspiring writer, journeys to Paris with just $200 in her pocket to follow in the footsteps of her literary heroes – James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes.

This could have been a fascinating story, but I found the descriptions of Paris vague, the main character too naïve for her age, and far too much of the story focused on her menial jobs. I wanted a little glimpse of the past, some insight into her heroes who were just names dropped on the pages. I also wanted to know more about France’s troubles – the racism, the struggles of the poor and working class, the problems of immigrants.

I wanted a more serious story and less whimsy. I could have done without the recipes and the silly musings about art and love. There were interesting secondary characters I would have liked to know more about – Eden’s androgynous boyfriend, Ving, and his friend Olu-Christophe, a Haitian living in Paris without papers, and Luce, Eden’s friend/lover who taught her how to take what she needed in order to survive.

The story was pleasant enough reading, but lacked passion and spirit, making my literary trip to Paris rather disappointing.

Fear and Confusion

Fear Itself by Walter Mosley
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm not a black man. Walter Mosley is, so I assume he's writing from experience and knows what he's talking about. As such, it's nice to read crime drama/detective stories with well-round portraits of black men and women, men and women that the reader can believe in.

Having said that, I didn't know what the hell was going on for half the time in Fear Itself. Now, part of that was intentional. Mosley held the old wool over my eyes for a while on purpose. On the other hand, there were times when the action and dialogue got somewhat muddied up, and I don't think that was intentional. This was not the strongest narrative story the author's ever composed, that's for sure.

It does have its strong points though. The Southern California setting description is enjoyable for someone like myself who's spent some time there. The eccentrics that pop up are delightful distractions.

Here's a point which I'm not sure falls under strong or weak point: the main character. The diminutive and mild-mannered Paris Minton, a bookshop owner, is no hero. In fact, at times he's a coward. However, when the chips are down, the man stands up. The anti-hero is all the rage in literature these days, but the Paris character doesn't feel like a bandwagoner. He seems like the genuine article underdog. He feels realistic. He doesn't always do the right thing. He wants to do the right thing, but he's generally more concerned for himself. I'm kind of disgusted by him at times. All that may have even lessened my overall enjoyment of the book, but by god, I respect Mosley for that!

If you haven't figured it out by now, I like Walter Mosley. From what I've read, his books may not go down amongst the great literary works of our time. They should, however, be considered as valuable in their own right.



View all my reviews

Zero Fade

Chris L. Terry
Curbside Splendor Publishing

Reviewed by Nancy
4 out of 5 stars

Summary

Zero Fade chronicles eight days in the life of inner-city Richmond, Virginia, teen Kevin Phifer as he deals with wack haircuts, bullies, last year's fly gear, his uncle Paul coming out as gay, and being grounded.

My Review

If it wasn’t for Karen's review, I’d probably never come across this book, and that would be a terrible shame.

The cover was embarrassingly bright, the characters on the front are green and the one in back is yellow. I loved the book’s compact size, the bright white pages and the comfortable text size. It aroused some curiosity on the bus, probably because I’m in my 50’s and there’s a prominent Teen Urban Fiction label on the spine, or maybe because I had a silly smile on my face reading about 13-year-old Kevin’s “mushy tushy.” Yeah, it’s a kids’ book, but adults can enjoy it too.

I liked how this story shows just 8 days of Kevin’s life. It is not all mundane, though. He’s a very typical teenage boy at that awkward age where your body and emotions are in turmoil. His dad left when he was a baby, his sister is distant, and his mom is smart in lots of ways. It’s just too bad she can’t give her son a decent haircut.

I also liked how the story takes place in urban Richmond, Virginia, and features black characters that are richly drawn, vibrant and real. Their skin color is not the focus of the story, yet this is very much a story about the black experience. It deals with the complexity of relationships, identity, sexuality, and growing up without being preachy.

Kevin’s sharp observations brought me back to my own childhood growing up in the Bronx. Though we didn’t share all the same experiences, there were enough similarities that made it very easy for me to relate and empathize with his character. He wasn’t always likable (what 13-year-old is), but he is genuine.

"Our school’s old. When you first walk in, there are class photos from the ‘50s to now. The school was segregated before Martin Luther King, so the pictures from the ‘50s and ‘60s are all white people wearing funny-shaped glasses and sitting on corncobs. By the ‘70s, there are a few black people in the pictures with big ‘fros and beaded necklaces like pictures of Mama in high school. They’re bits of pepper in a salt spill. But it’s reversed by 1980, and the pictures look like Oreo cookies—mainly black, with a little white in the middle."

Kevin deals with bullying, competing with his best friend to get a girl, and his discomfort with all things gay. His dapper gay uncle, Paul, certainly is not making that easier for him. At least Kevin now has a great haircut.

As thoughtful and entertaining as this story was, I’m glad it’s over. Like many kids, Kevin was really hard to take at times.

Coffee Will Make You Black

April Sinclair
Harper Perennial
Reviewed by Nancy
5 out of 5 stars

Summary

Set on Chicago's Southside in the mid-to-late 60s, Coffee Will Make You Black is the moving and entertaining tale of Jean "Stevie" Stevenson, a young black woman growing up through the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The novel opens at a time when, for black families, seeing a black person on television was an event; when expressions like "I don't want nothing black but a Cadillac" and "Coffee will make you black" were handed down from one generation to the next without comment. Stevie is a bookworm, yet she longs to fit in with the cool crowd. Fighting her mother every step of the way, she begins to experiment with talkin' trash, "kicking butt, " and boys. With the assassination of Dr. King she gains a new political awareness, which makes her decide to wear her hair in a 'fro instead of straightened, to refuse to use skin bleach, and to confront the prejudice she observes in blacks as well as whites. April Sinclair writes frankly about a young black woman's sexuality, and about the confusion Stevie faces when she realizes she's more attracted to the school nurse - who is white - than her teenage boyfriend. As readers follow Stevie's at times harrowing, at times hilarious story, they will learn what it was like to be black before black was beautiful.


My Review

I couldn’t resist the title. When I was little, my mom used to give me my own mug with a little bit of Café Bustelo and a lot of sugar. It made me feel pretty grown up that I was drinking coffee with my parents. My grandmother would look at me disapprovingly and say, “coffee will make you black.” Well, obviously it wasn’t working, so I would hand my empty mug back to my mom and ask for a refill. Then she would tell me that too much coffee is no good for you. But if it makes me black, how can that be a bad thing?

I was tired of being white. Most of the white kids in my neighborhood were Jewish and came from far wealthier families than my own. The Puerto Rican kids all spoke Spanish and were various shades of brown. Though my dad was born in Puerto Rico, he had a very pale complexion. My mom, on the other hand, has that rich brown shade I so desired. Looking more like my dad than my mom made it difficult for me to fit in. My closest friend was Jewish, but I enjoyed hanging out with the black girls. They were the best at Double Dutch jump rope and tried to teach klutzy me, but all I ever got to be was a turner. My friend Penny sometimes asked me to braid her hair. Oh, what fun! It was so unexpectedly fine and easy to style. Some days, she would wear it loose with a plastic headband. Other days she would come to school in cornrows with colorful beads on the ends. Penny stuck up for me when a couple of girls harassed me on the school bus. I loved her colorful clothes and no-nonsense attitude. Whenever I was with her, no one would mess with me. One day I wanted to bring her home. My mom said it was OK, since my dad was working and wouldn’t be home until evening. While Penny was visiting, my dad shows up unexpectedly and spouts racial invective, causing poor Penny to run out of the apartment in tears. That was the end of our friendship. She eventually moved out of the neighborhood and so did I.

After Penny, I developed a crush on Joanne Chesimard when I saw her on TV passionately speaking about revolution. She was beautiful, eloquent, and wanted to change the world. I wanted to be just like her when I grew up and refused to believe she had anything to do with bank robberies and killing police officers.

Life is a series of disappointments, but black is beautiful.

All big cities have similarities. Even though Jean Stevenson “Stevie” grew up in Chicago, many of her experiences triggered sweet and painful childhood memories of growing up in the Bronx. This is not only a story about the problems of growing up and gaining independence. There is a lot here about family relationships, friendships, race relations, the feminist movement, standards of beauty, discovering one’s sexuality, and the turmoil of life in the 1960’s.

Stevie sometimes hangs out with the wrong crowd. She defies her mother’s attempts to make her “white” by resisting hair straighteners and skin lighteners. Stevie just wants to be herself and embraces her life with passion.

This was a funny, moving and heartwarming story about growing up. I’m looking forward to Stevie’s college years in the sequel, Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice.

Also posted at Goodreads

A Rough Cut Gem

Ruby
by Cynthia Bond
Published by Hogarth
Available on April 29, 2014

Reviewed by Amanda
4 Out of 5 Stars

I received an advanced reader's copy from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The small town of Liberty, Texas, offers its residents anything but liberty. People find themselves bound by secrets, both theirs and those of others. It's a place where God's word is in everyone's mouth, but it's the devil who rules their hearts--and he roams the woods at night. With hypocritical righteousness and dark intentions, the town turns as a whole on Ruby Bell. The beautiful and spirited Ruby is a modern day Eve whose beauty lures in both men and women, while putting her own soul in peril. When Ruby attempts to escape the darkness of Liberty, it's not long before her past draws her back into the town's clutches.

After her return to Liberty from New York City, Ruby's confrontation with the past draws her into madness. She becomes a wild thing, existing on the fringes of society, used by men to satisfy their lust and shunned by the women. Ephram Jennings, a quiet, patient man who still sees Ruby's hidden value, sets about saving her soul with the gift of an Angel Food cake and, in this simple gesture, takes on the prejudices of an entire town. Through Ephram's patient ministrations, we learn of the personal demons that haunt Ruby and of the tangled web of lies and violence that ultimately connect everyone in Liberty. While the narrative can seem somewhat disjointed and sudden revelations about characters can at first seem incongruous with what we already know of them, the reader can be assured that these seemingly disparate threads will ultimately be drawn together into a coherent portrait of a community destroying itself from the inside out.

Using poetic language and brutal, unrelenting scenes of physical and sexual violence, Ruby makes the intra-racial racism within an early 20th century black community tangible and reveals the dangers that come with spiritually cannibalizing one of its own. There are certainly overtones of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison here, but Cynthia Bond is never guilty of cheap imitation and tells a story that is uniquely her own. Particularly inventive is the use of a supernatural element to explain how the desire for or claiming of "white power" within the black community transfers hate and prejudice to those who were once its targets.

This is not an easy book to read and those with a low tolerance for rape, pedophilia, and graphic sexual scenes need not apply. While I sometimes found the frequency of these scenes a bit over the top ("Please, just give me one, ONE character who had a healthy, wholesome childhood," I mentally begged), it's made bearable as the novel ends with the possibility of hope and redemption.

Intuititing Elevators

The Intuitionist

Colson Whitehead

Reviewed by Carol

Recommended for: Someone who wants a gumbo of mystery, lit, pulp, and African-American experience.

★   ★   ★  1/2

 

I came to Colson Whitehead by way of zombies.

Colson Whitehead, writer of award-nominated books, including National Book Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and New York Times Notable Book of the Year; contributer to the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Harper’s; and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Yes, that Colson Whitehead. Zombies.

I’d like to pause for a moment and just admire the mind-twist for those that deride zombie books.
The writing in Zone One (my review) was astonishing enough that I resolved to seek out more of his work. The message was bleak enough that I wasn’t in a hurry about it. Though I picked up John Henry Days some time ago for a song, it was finding The Intuitionist that brought me back to him–I find a little mystery hard to resist. Except it wasn’t, not really. Allegory and all that. Post-modern literature something-something. Except better, because it’s not self-consciously ironic or a parody. It’s sincere.

On the surface, it’s a pulpy noir fiction, set in a roughly parallel world to ours, ugly racism warts and all, in an unnamed New York, during perhaps the 1940s. It’s about a woman who works as an elevator inspector, a member of the prominent and politically powerful Department of Elevator Inspectors. The elevator doctrine has undergone a schismatic shift in the past decade, after Mr. James Fulton developed the theory of Intuition, the discipline of inspecting an elevator by analyzing one’s experience of it. Lila Mae is the first colored woman in the department, only the second colored person in the local chapter, and a disciple of Intuitionism. When a brand new elevator crashes (thankfully, without passengers), it seems she and the Intuitionists are being set up to take the fall and enable an easy political win for the Empiricists. Lila, unsure how to defend herself, takes a role in solving the issue after the head of the Intuitionists approaches her with a tempting lure–designs for Fulton’s mythical black box seems to be in play but missing, a Holy Grail of elevator design that will revolutionize the city.




In one sense it works. The surface plot is interesting–there are, after all, secret societies, company cars, a muck-raking newspaperman, gangsters and potential lovers. The story holds, Lila Mae is sufficiently developed beyond allegory, the city is full of rich detail, the puzzle of the elevator guild interesting and the possible blueprint alluring. Weaving through it is Lila’s acknowledgement of the experience of being an African-American woman, her history, and her gradual awakening in the city. In another sense, it feels very constructed, very designed, meant to educate and explore, and not quite so much to feel.

The Intuitionist is Whitehead’s first published work. I was a little disappointed to not see the same level of prose that I loved in Zone One. Bleak as it was, the imagery in Zone was mesmerizing and intricate. In contrast, this is a book not necessarily of language, but of ideas. Elevators have, in essence, transformed the city, allowing it to reach new heights. A new elevator–the fabled black box–would do the same. Intuitionists are transforming the field, and people of color are transforming themselves. It’s fascinating and complex, and much like an elevator–gears, weights, counterweights, artistry, and while the purpose is clear, the mechanism of the parallels are not so obvious that the reader feels overpowered.


Unfortunately, it also, much like the elevator, misses the feel factor. I enjoyed it as a read, I was intellectually engaged, but it reminded me a bit of high school English class, without the note-passing (we didn’t have texting in those days). Perhaps it’s because Lila Mae is somewhat disenfranchised from herself–as she goes through her life one step removed, I found I remained somewhat removed as well. Still, it was interesting, and pleasantly complex. I don’t regret the time spent, and feel rather pleased about exercising those mental muscles. It definitely piques my interest in the rest of the Whitehead cannon.

Three and a half stars, rounding up because this author can write.

The Blighted Lives of Heroes

WHO FEARS DEATH
Nnedi Okorafor
DAW Books
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An award-winning literary author presents her first foray into supernatural fantasy with a novel of post- apocalyptic Africa. 

In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke. But when the only surviving member of a slain Okeke village is brutally raped, she manages to escape, wandering farther into the desert. She gives birth to a baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand and instinctively knows that her daughter is different. She names her daughter Onyesonwu, which means "Who Fears Death?" in an ancient African tongue.

Reared under the tutelage of a mysterious and traditional shaman, Onyesonwu discovers her magical destiny-to end the genocide of her people. The journey to fulfill her destiny will force her to grapple with nature, tradition, history, true love, the spiritual mysteries of her culture-and eventually death itself.


My Review: Who fears Death? I suppose most living things fear death. Onyesonwu, our title character, is the product of a genesis no one should have to carry with them: She is a child of rape, a product of brutality that should have made her mother hate her. Instead, her mother names her “who fears death” and never from that moment on, despite the both of them being outcast and made into The Other, never fears anything again.

I had a very hard time with this book, wanting to Pearl Rule it on average three times per reading session. I did in fact abandon it when a major major major anti-man hot button issue occurred near the end. But this is what earns the book four stars from me: I could not not read the rest. I had to know why what happened, happened.

Am I happy I read it? Not really. It was harrowing for me. I don't like man-bad-woman-good books. There are two unforgivable things in my moral universe: Abusing animals and rape. I'm no fan of supernatural/magjicqkal stuff (Onye's a shapeshifter). What on the surface of the earth persuaded me to read this thing?! I mean, it's even praised by Luis Alberto Urrea forevermore! I shoulda stood home, as the saying goes.

But Dr. Okorafor is a sorceress. She cast a spell on me. She reached out from inside this book and she made sure my brain needed to know this, and needed it so much I'd overcome my prejudices and make it part of my mental furniture.

I will step on her foot if I ever meet the Doctor in person.

She set the book in a post-nuclear-holocaust Africa! I love postapocalyptic fiction! How am I gonna resist that? And she made explicit a disdain for the rotten, evil-souled uses of religion in oppressing and abusing people of all types. I think I purred. I know I smiled.

It's also a joy and a pleasure to me to see women, and women of color, and women of immigrant parentage, enter the lists of American English-language speculative fiction. It makes me feel that this world has a shot at survival after all. Writers are not ignored because of their bodily plumbing or skin color or weird names. (Sorry, but I'm still an old white man, and this lady's name is really seriously weird to me.) This is the world I grew up wanting to live in, and now I get to...for a while anyway...and that, more than any other factor, made me stick with the book long past my usual stop.

Should you read it? Should you turn page after page of non-European-named characters, landscapes bursting with heat and searing miseries of spirit, heroes whose lives are blighted by origins beyond their control?

Yep.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Easy Does It

 

Devil  in a Blue Dress

Walter Mosley

Originally published 1990,

Republished 2002 by Washington Square Press

Price: Free at the public library

 

Reviewer: Carol

Rating: Four out of five easy stars

Recommended for: fans of detective noir

If you don't immediately start humming the song when you see this title, play it while you read. It is a classic:
http://youtu.be/KVbr37_yPeY

Easy Rawlins is just trying to get by. Laid off from his job building jets, he needs to make payment on his mortgage or face the loss of his house.

Drowning his woes at a tiny bar above a meatpacking warehouse, his friend and bar owner Joppy hooks him up with DeWitt Albright. Easy can't help but notice that Joppy, an ex-heavyweight fighter, is nervous, a sure tip-off there's something wrong. But Dewitt's a businessman with a simple job for Easy-- he offers him a hundred dollars to find a white girl known to hang out in the African-American community. In 1948, that's more than a couple mortgage payments to tide Easy over while he looks for his next job.
"'And just exactly what kind of business is it he does? I mean, is he a shirt salesman or what?'
'They gotta sayin' for his line'a work, Ease.'
'What's that?'
'Whatever the market can bear.' He smiled, looking like a hungry bear himself. 'Whatever the market can bear.'

Dewitt shows Easy a picture of the missing girl. Originally black and white, it's been touched up in color. "After staring at her a full minute I decided that she'd be worth looking for if you could get her to smile at you that way."

Everybody's seen her but no one wants to say where she is unless they get a piece of the action. Unfortunately, the devil has a blue dress, no doubt, and she seeds a trail of destruction in her wake. Part of the reason she breathes scandal is that her relationships transcend race, taboo at the time. Part of the reason is that the crowd she runs with includes pimps and underworld businessmen.

Soon the bodies start piling up, and the cops haul Easy in. But Easy fought in World War II, and if there is one thing he can't tolerate, it is disrespect. He decides to take control of the situation instead of letting himself be played.

"Somewhere along the way I had developed the feeling that I wasn't going to outlive the adventure I was having. There was no way out but to run, and I couldn't run, so I decided to milk all those white people for all the money they'd let go of."

His detective work takes him around various hangouts in L.A, including Ricardo's, a rough bar that you don't go into without an inside man. "Joppy had taken me to Ricardo's a few times after we locked up his bar. It was a serious kind of place peopled with jaundice-eyed bad men who smoked and drank heavily while they waited for a crime they could commit." Unsuccessful, he heads for a cut at the local barbershop, sure source of news and a neutral zone in the black community.



Devil in a Blue Dress won Moseley the Shamus award for first PI mystery, and it is easy (ha-ha) to see why. Succinct but encompassing descriptions that create a feel for L.A., the mood of post-WWII America, and an even better sense of what it felt like to be poor and black with the deck stacked against you. The experience of race weaves in and out of the storyline without being dominating or self-pitying, and has all the more impact for being so dispassionate. It affects Easy's life in so very many ways that it is an indirect commentary on race relations in the late 40s. The dialect has the flavor of Easy's southern heritage, contrasting with the more crisp language in his head. It makes for a nice reading balance, as it can be a reading challenge when dialect used for an entire book. This was an enjoyable, fast moving story that put Mosley on my authors-to-watch list.

Four easy stars.

And, of course, there's the movie.






Also published at Goodreads and http://clsiewert.wordpress.com

Coming of Age in Mississippi

Anne Moody
Dell Publishing
Reviewed by: Nancy
4 out of 5 stars

Plot Summary

Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till’s lynching. Before then, she had "known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was…the fear of being killed just because I was black." In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life.

An all-A student whose dream of going to college is realized when she wins a basketball scholarship, she finally dares to join the NAACP in her junior year. Through the NAACP and later through CORE and SNCC she has first-hand experience of the demonstrations and sit-ins that were the mainstay of the civil rights movement, and the arrests and jailings, the shotguns, fire hoses, police dogs, billy clubs and deadly force that were used to destroy it.

A deeply personal story but also a portrait of a turning point in our nation’s destiny, this autobiography lets us see history in the making, through the eyes of one of the footsoldiers in the civil rights movement.

My Review

I recently read Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and while I enjoyed this story tremendously, I wanted to read something that was less uplifting, more realistic, and told from the perspective of an African-American.  Anne Moody’s powerful memoir was the perfect choice. 

This is a well-told and fascinating story about the author's life growing up in rural Mississippi, and her fight against racism.   Her story is chronologically told, from the author's youth in rural Mississippi, her education, family relationships, poverty, racism, violence and finally, her involvement with the Civil Rights Movement. 

The last section of the book devoted to Moody’s activism was riveting and deeply disturbing.  She participated in the heavily publicized Woolworth sit-in, which was known for its violence, and was deeply shaken by the deaths of four black girls in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. 

 

1963 Woolworth Sit-in, Jackson, Mississippi

Once a religious child, she questioned her faith in God. 

“Now talk to me, God.  Come on down and talk to me.  You know, I used to go to Sunday school, church, and B.T.U. every Sunday.  We were taught how merciful and forgiving you are.  Mama used to tell us that you would forgive us twenty-seven times a day and I believed in you.  I bet you those girls in Sunday school were being taught the same as I was when I was their age.  Is that teaching wrong?  Are you going to forgive their killers?  You not gonna answer me, God, hmm?  Well if you don’t want to talk, then listen to me.   As long as I live, I’ll never be beaten by a white man again.  Not like in Woolworth’s.  Not anymore.  That’s out.  You know something else, God?  Nonviolence is out.  I have a good idea Martin Luther King is talking to you too.  If he is, tell him that nonviolence has served its purpose.  Tell him that for me, God, and for a lot of other Negroes who must be thinking it today.  If you don’t believe that, then I know you must be white, too.  And if I ever find out you are white, then I’m through with you.  And if I find out you are black, I’ll try my best to kill you when I get to heaven.”

Moody provided details about intimidation, beatings, shootings, and other acts of violence enacted by the Ku Klux Klan against African Americans and their white supporters and about the institutionalized racism that kept many black families mired in poverty.  I just wish that Moody had spent more time with the story of her activism and the efforts and sacrifices of Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and others,  rather than mundane details about childhood.  

I am thankful to Anne Moody and all the other young people who sacrificed their jobs, safety, and lives to make a stand against injustice and change the course of our history and for their stories that keep them alive in our minds and hearts.  

Also posted at Goodreads