Category: African-American (Page 1 of 3)

History, mystery, and the open road in Nic Stone’s ‘Clean Getaway’

by Andrew Hedglin

William “Scoob” Lamar, the protagonist of Nic Stone’s fantastic new middle grade adventure, Clean Getaway, has a lot of questions at the beginning of the book. He just doesn’t know it yet.

When his grandmother, his beloved “G’ma,” shows up in an RV at the beginning of his spring break, to jailbreak him from being grounded, he jumps at the chance. He writes a note to his dad, and leaves his phone at home so he can’t be called. Just the wide open road, and the person he adores and trusts most in the world.

It’s not until they leave Atlanta and cross into Alabama that things start to get a little…weird. Why has G’ma sold her house to buy this RV? Did she really just dine-and-dash? Are they really headed all the way to Mexico? And does Scoob’s dad even know where they are?

He’s not getting answers to these questions immediately, but he is learning a lot, that’s for sure. It turns out his G’ma, a white lady, and his G’pop, a black man who he never met and died in prison, tried to take this very road trip all the way back in the 1960s. Of course, they had some help from Green Book, the famous guide for black travelers in the dangerous days of segregation and Jim Crow. As an African-American himself (with a serious, conscientious father), Scoob already knows some things about his history–he’s read To Kill a Mockingbird, and visits MLK’s home and church every January)–but some of what he learns really opens his eyes to how things were (and what still is).

Nic Stone has written an outrageously fun adventure with real tension and emotion mixed in. What really stands as a highlight in how well Stone understand how kids and adults relate to each other, even (and especially) they care a lot about each other. G’ma is completely over-the-top, fun, emotional, and increasingly mysterious, torn between unburdening secrets and teaching and protecting Scoob. Scoob himself is smart and and has a certain down-to-earth cool (he has a girlfriend, Shenice, back home in Atlanta), but can sometimes be a little impulsive and mistake-prone, as well as vulnerable in his powerlessness to the whims of adults, as all kids sometimes feel.

I think this book has a wide audience because while its colorful text (along with evocative illustrations by Dawud Anyabwile) and well-plotted structure are easy enough for kids on the earlier end of middle grade to digest, its keen emotional intelligence and relatable themes keep it interesting for kids on the older end of the middle grade age range. I found it pretty enjoyable as an adult, to tell the truth. As a bonus, this road trip novel even winds its way through Jackson, Mississippi (to pay respects to the great Medgar Evers). Whoever chooses to pick up this great middle school tale, they should know that they’re in for a wild ride!

Nic Stone will be at Lemuria on Friday, January 10, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Clean Getaway, in conversation with Angie Thomas (author of The Hate U Give). Lemuria has selected Clean Getaway as a January 2020 selection for its Oz Books First Editions Club.

Author Q & A with Mildred D. Taylor

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 5)

Mildred Taylor wraps up her 10-book series that has followed the lives of the Logan family from slavery to the Civil rights movement with her final addition, All the Days Past, All the Days to Come. With familiar character Cassie Logan at the forefront as her own story evolves along the timeframe of civil rights events, she is supported by familiar family members who provide a constant link to generations past.

Born in Mississippi in 1943 and raised in Toledo, Ohio, Taylor developed a strong attachment to Mississippi as a child, thanks to frequent trips “home” to visit extended family members who were always eager to offer stories of their own childhoods.

She earned a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Toledo in 1965; and went on to write Song of the Trees, the first of the Logan family series, a decade later.

It would be Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, published in 1976, that would become her most recognizable work when it was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1977.

The collection has earned many other awards for Taylor throughout her lengthy career, including an NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, Buxtehuder Bulle Award, Coretta Scott King Award, Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction, Christopher Award, Jane Addams Book Award, American Library Association’s Best Book for Young Adults, the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and others.

What inspired you to become a writer, and to use this tool as a way to bring to life the real-life struggles of racism, for young people?

Mildred Taylor

From the time I was a child, I was fascinated by the stories my father told about the history of my family and the history of others in his Mississippi community. He was a master storyteller, using dialect of the many characters in a story and sometimes becoming an actor using great motions to tell the story. There were many of us in the family who heard the stories; I was simply the one tapped on the shoulder to write them down. My father passed before Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was published, but his words and those of others who told the history live on through all my books.

Your new book “All the Days Past, All the Days to Come” is to be the final chapter of the Logan family saga, begun with “Songs of the Trees” in 1975. Looking back to the beginning, did you ever expect that this collection of stories would become so enduring to readers for so many years?

Because I was so very much enthralled by the stories, by the history, it never surprised me that others would be as well. What surprised me was that I could tell the stories well enough so that people around the world would care about the history of my family, and about the lives of people in my family’s Mississippi community.

This final book (as its predecessors) recounts many true historical events along the time frame of each volume. Having lived through many of these events yourself, is it still difficult to look back on those times, and do you believe enough progress has been made today?

I could not get free of the stories and the obligations I had to myself and to the history of my family and the history of so many African Americans whose stories I wanted to tell. As one friend told me: “It is something you have to do. We’re of the last generations who knows–who remembers how it truly was–racism and degradation and what we had to go through to rid ourselves of all that. Younger generations think they know, but they have no idea of what it was truly like.”

Because of the historical timeline I am trying to follow, this final book is my greatest challenge yet. At a time when racism is again at the forefront, I believe it is important to look back at history, to look at how we have evolved since slavery began in our country, what has been sacrificed through a civil war, lynchings, racism, and segregation. Through a personal story told from the point of view of the Logan family of Mississippi, perhaps readers of all ages can grasp what life was like before the Civil Rights Movement and how that Movement helped change the nation, and to understand why we cannot allow racism to overshadow us again.

From slavery to the presidency, this is what the epilogue in All the Days Past, All the Days to Come symbolizes, and the bus is a symbol of that journey. That Cassie is on that bus–the bus, a negative symbol through much of her life–to President Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration is one of the greatest triumphs for Cassie, her generation, and all African Americans.

Much has changed and much has not. I believe everyone needs to know the history.

The series has granted you many awards since its beginning more than 40 years ago. Has this taken you surprise?

As I said previously, since I was enthralled by the stories, it did not surprise me that
others would be as well. What surprised me was that I could tell the stories well enough that people around the world would respond as I did.

Of course, it was wonderful to win the Coretta Scott King award for four of my books. When The Road to Memphis won the award, I was actually on the dais (platform) with Mrs. Rosa Parks and was able to talk with her. My greatest regret is when I was unable to attend the ceremony to accept the award for The Land and I missed the chance to receive the award from Mrs. King herself.

What would you like to say to young people of all races today about the hope for cooperation (despite the frequent division) in this country? Are you hopeful for the progress that has been made; or do you believe racial equality will ever become the norm in America?

There have always been racial divisions in the United States; however, through the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, hard-fought-for legislation, integrated education, and one-on-one communication among all people, Americans have a much better understanding of each other today than 50 years ago, 100 years ago, all the years past in the United States.

Through continued education, economic opportunities for all, the important one-on-one relationships, there is hope that in time we as Americans can be accepting of each other. At that point, perhaps racial equality will be the norm.

Signed first editions are available for pre-order at Lemuria’s online store. The book’s publication date is Tuesday, January 7.

Author Q & A with Phil Keith

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (December 1)

Author Phil Keith adds his sixth book to his collection as his collaboration with bestselling writer Tom Clavin unfolds the almost unbelievable story of bravery and valor of a little-known World War I hero in All Blood Runs Red: The Legendary Life of Eugene Bullard–Boxer, Pilot, Soldier, Spy.

Bullard was the first African American military pilot who flew in combat, and the only one to serve as a pilot in World War I. He would later become a jazz musician, a night club owner in Paris, and a spy during the French Resistance.

Among Keith’s previous volumes is Blackhorse Riders, winner of the 2012 award from USA Book News for Best Military Non-Fiction. He was also a finalist for the 2013 Colby Award, and earned a silver medal from the Military Writers Society of America that same year.

He holds a degree in history from Harvard University, and is a former Navy aviator. During three tours in Vietnam, he was awarded the Purple Heart, Air Medal, Presidential Unit Citation, and the Navy Commendation Medal, among other honors.

Your book states that Eugene Bullard led a “legendary life” as a boxer, pilot, highly decorated soldier, and a spy. Why has his story been so little known?

Phil Keith

Three reasons, primarily: Gene fought for France in World War I, and, of course, he was black. Not many in America, during World War I, were interested in hearing stories about courageous African Americans. The times were still too racially charged, and even the American Air Service had an official policy that banned blacks from serving.

Secondly, all during his World War I experiences, he was constantly badgered and put down by a particularly racist American living in Paris, Dr. Edmund Gros. This doctor was the founder of the famed American Ambulance Service and co-founder of what became the Lafayette Flying Corps. He was a virulent hater of blacks, and of Gene in particular, because Bullard had been so successful despite Gros’ best efforts to ground him. Gros constantly omitted his name from recognition of Americans helping in the war effort and eventually was successful in getting Gene bounced out of French aviation.

Thirdly, when Gene returned to America, he wrote his autobiography in the late 1950s. That was at a time when Franco-American relations were at a low ebb; and, the editors who reviewed his manuscript thought it was too fantastical to be true, especially for a barely educated black man.

How did you hear about Bullard, and how did you handle the research for this book, working with information that was not only hard to find, but often conflicting?

Doing research for a book on World War I, with a chapter on America’s famous aviators, I came across a footnote in some Eddie Rickenbacker material that mentioned Bullard. That was the first I had ever heard of him. I was fascinated and began to dig.

I found the only existing archive on Bullard at Columbus State University in his hometown of Columbus, Ga. I spent a week combing through their boxes. We also found bits and pieces of the Bullard story in other bios, particularly his famous contemporaries.

And, yes, there were conflicting stories, so we had to set up a rigorous process of “triangulation:” Nothing got in the book unless it could be confirmed by at least two other sources.

Despite the obstacles, why did you and your co-author Tom Clavin believe Bullard’s story needed to be told?

Bullard is clearly one of the most fascinating historical figures of the 20th century yet very few people know about him; so, from that standpoint alone, his story is important–fills in a missing piece. Perhaps even more importantly, Bullard’s story should be a role model for today’s African American young men and women. He is a true hero who can be looked up to and his examples of determination and persistence are crucial, we think, to the telling of the experiences of post-slavery blacks in America and Europe.

How did you two split up the writing of this book?

Tom is a dogged researcher, so he got the task of “story-hound,” except for the sojourn to Georgia. Much of the original sleuthing went to Tom. We also wrote to our individual strengths: I concentrated on the military aspects of Gene’s life, for example, and Tom, who has written several sports books, did the work on Gene’s boxing days. I did most of the rough draft manuscript, and Tom did the vast majority of the editing and smoothing. I had never done a collaboration before, but Tom has. I have to say it went very smoothly. It was so smooth, in fact, that our editor at Hanover Square Press immediately optioned our next book idea, which is in progress now. It will be a ripping good sea story about the Civil War’s most famous sea battle between the USS Kearsarge and the CSS Alabama.

Please share the story of how the title of this book was chosen.

“All Blood Runs Red” is the Anglicized version of the French “Tous Sange Que Coule C’est Rouge.” This was the motto Bullard had stenciled on the sides of his SPAD fighter plane, with the words surrounding a large red heart with a dagger stuck in it. For Bullard, he wanted to make the point that “we’re all in this (the war) together.” It did not matter the color of any man’s skin: when any soldier bled, all the blood was red. This was also the title of his never published autobiography (1960) and we wanted to use it in his honor.

Phil Keith will at Lemuria on Tuesday, December 3, at 5:00 p.m. to sign copies of and discuss All Blood Runs Red. Lemuria has selected All Blood Runs Red its December 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Sarah Broom’s award-winning memoir ‘The Yellow House’ demonstrates the powerful pull of home

By Emily Gatlin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (November 24)

Childhood homes are harbors of our rearing, keepers of our secrets and reflections of our parents. It’s our first understanding of what “home” actually means, and the way it always pulls us back.

Memories made there supersede the physical house itself. We don’t remember the stains on our bedroom carpet, but we know that our feet were warm when we rolled out of bed to get ready for school. The walls were filled with tokens of what we loved, be it a watercolor painting or old family portraits. We don’t remember what the upholstery looked like on the formal dining room chairs, just that on holidays, we gathered as a family and laughed along with stories of our shared history. Often, our parents upsized, downsized, separated, became snowbirds or passed on, but we can still drive by our homes and be filled with warmth and gratitude.

Sarah M. Broom’s memoir The Yellow House takes us on a journey of her life through her New Orleans East home, which was purchased by her mother Ivory Mae in 1961. As a young mother and widow, Ivory Mae invested her entire life savings at nineteen years old to purchase the shotgun house, in what was a promising up-and-coming area of New Orleans, and home to a major NASA plant during the height of the space boom.

Ivory Mae was optimistic about her investment and when she married her second husband Simon Broom, Sarah’s father, they forged their family together through constant home renovations and family additions—twelve children in all—until Simon died when Sarah was only six months old. Ivory Mae’s thirteenth child, the half-finished yellow house, was left in mild disrepair after Simon’s death, but it didn’t really matter. The family held together tightly, and sent each of the twelve children out into the world to find their own way.

Broom left the crumbling home and New Orleans after graduating from high school, but found herself continuously drawn back to the yellow house after career shifts and general twenty-something malaise until ultimately, it was destroyed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. She decided to come back to do what she could for her beloved city and other residents in her former neighborhood, becoming a frustrated speechwriter for embattled Mayor Ray Nagin, while getting to know a different side of New Orleans. She did not win many friends that go around.

Recently winning the the National Book Award for nonfiction, The Yellow House is a love letter to Broom’s family, while at the same time a reckoning of politics, race, and class in New Orleans as it deals with the disparity between New Orleans East, which was all but wiped off the map by Katrina, and the more luscious and populated tourist centers of the city.

Broom’s writing is masterful and unflinching, cuts deep to the bone, while being affable and full of love for her native city. She conjures the spirit of New Orleans in a way that only someone who came from its soil can, shining a light on its lesser-known, but always visible residents. They are the ones who fled to the Superdome, cut themselves out of their attics, and remained in New Orleans to try and reclaim their lives any way they could.

While heartbreaking at times, The Yellow House is a necessary read in the fact that it’s a unique firsthand, well-researched exploration of inequality, the American experience, place and identity, and a true definition of family. Broom proves once and for all that you really can go home again.

Emily Gatlin is the Digital Editor of WONDERLUST and the author of The Unknown Hendrix and 101 Greatest American Rock Songs and the Stories Behind Them. She lives in Oxford.

Lemuria selected The Yellow House as its September 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction. Signed first editions are available in our online store, and regular hardback editions are available in our physical store.

Cost of growing up gay, black in American South detailed in courageous memoir ‘How We Fight for Our Lives’

By Charlie R. Braxton. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (October 20)

For many decades, this country has held on to the mythos of the great American melting pot, the place where the world’s tired, poor huddled masses can come and be a part of the democratic fabric of the good old USA. Many people point to this melting pot mythology as proof of America’s exceptionalism, which gives our country the God-given right to transform the world in its red, white (with the emphasis on the word white) and blue image.

It is the global projection of this image, as imperfect as it may be in actuality, that has long been a part of the lore and lure of the United States of America. It is the mirage that entices thousands upon thousands of people to leave their troubled homelands and, sometimes, risk their lives to come to “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” where they are free to live their lives as they see fit, worship the God of their choice, and consume as much as their wallet will allow.

But no one tells them that there is a heavy cost to enter this land and dive into the alabaster cauldron that is America’s melting pot. And for those native or foreign-born children who aren’t white, male, Christian, and cisgender and wish to swim in the mainstream of America’s melting pot, the toll is extremely high. For members of the LGBT community it means suppressing a vital part of their selves so that thay can “get along” with the cisgender majority. This so-called staying in the closet can be damaging to their psyche or, in some cases fatal–as the escalating suicide rate among LGBT youth may indicate.

For those who doubt this damage happens, reading Saeed Jones’ riveting memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives will offer anecdotal proof.

In How We Fight for Our Lives, Saeed Jones, an award-winning African American poet, recounts with vivid details many of the trials and tribulations of growing up a black, gay male in the deep south and his struggle to create a safe space where he can be free to be himself and love whomever he chooses without fear or prejudice from anybody.

But for black non-cisgender men, who grow up in the South’s so-called Bible-Belt like Jones, finding a safe space can be difficult to create as Jones documents via a series of masterful tales about his struggle navigating the various reactions of his family and friends to his sexuality.

This difficulty is certainly not lost on Jones who writes, “As much as this book is my coming of age story as a gay Black man raised in the American South by a single mother, it is also my attempt to excavate the reason why I have come to think of life as a fight.”

For those of us who seek a deeper understanding of the dire need to continue to love and fight for all humanity, we should be grateful to Saeed Jones for having the courage to write How We Fight to for Our Lives.

Charlie R. Braxton is a poet, playwright and journalist whose latest book is entitled Embers Among the Ashes: Poems in a Haiku Manner (Jawara Press, 2018)

Saeed Jones will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, October 23, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss How We Fight for Our Lives.

Author Q & A with Sarah M. Broom

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 1)

In her debut book The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom presents a powerful memoir of the New Orleans she experienced as a child (growing up in a family of 12 children), and the house that swallowed up the dreams and finances of her resilient mother.

Broom earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 and won a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016. She was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011, and has been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony.

Her work has appeared in The New YorkerThe New York Times MagazineThe Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and others.

Today, Broom lives in Harlem.

Sarah M. Broom

The Yellow House is a richly detailed memoir of your life, sharing not just stories of your immediate family but those of at least two preceding generations. Why was it important to you to devote so much detail to previous generations to fully tell this story?

I wanted to provide context, a kind of grounding, to situate the story in a lineage. To begin at the moment of my birth would have been dishonest, and also would have ignored the people who compose me and make me who I am. I was setting up a matriarchal world, establishing the women who preceded me within the City of New Orleans. The story of my mother’s house felt, to me, indistinguishable from the story of my Grandmother Lolo and her many houses.

The neighborhood in which the Yellow House was built was part of New Orleans East, touted in the early 1960s as a “new frontier” and a “Model City” like nothing that had come before it. Describe the idea behind its expected growth, and why it would eventually fail.

New Orleans East was an enormous area of the city, east of the Industrial Canal, a navigation channel opened in 1923. Long before New Orleans East, Inc. arrived, there was a collection of communities within the east including Orangedale Subdivision, where my mother eventually bought the Yellow House. New Orleans East, Inc. began to build out the more easternmost parts of the area, which created a flurry of excitement and news stories. Eventually, the entire area of the city took on the corporate name. The East failed for many reasons–the oil bust, white flight which led to divestment, public policy and city planning choices, and inattention.

Your mother, Ivory Mae Soule Webb, was a 19-year-old widow when she bought the Yellow House in 1961, paying the $3,200 price with life insurance money after her first husband’s death. By 1964, when they moved in, she was remarried to Simon Broom, and they began married life with six children between them. Tell me about your mom’s pride in her home, and how important it was to her to keep everything looking nice, inside and out.

My mother loved to make a beautiful home. She was raised by women who took pride in all the places where she lived. For my mother, owning a house of her own was buying into the American dream. Through home ownership, I suspect she learned quite a bit about the frailty of the American dream, about the critical importance of the solidity of the “ground,” so to speak. (It was) understood through time that her investment might not build wealth for her as it might for someone else.

After several career moves and the devastation of Katrina, you eventually were drawn back to New Orleans. At the end, you state: “The house was the only thing that belonged to all of us.” Ultimately, what did (and does) the Yellow House mean to you and your family?

It is to this day a repository. Witness to our lives. The place our mother paid for, in which she built a world full of joy and surprise and sometimes sadness, but it belonged to her and it still is ours even as a memory.

Lemuria has selected The Yellow House its September 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Extending the Narrative: David Blight’s ‘Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Peace’

I’ve read and taught Frederick Douglass’ first autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, for years, so when I saw David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Peace, I was intrigued. Douglass’ Narrative covers just a sliver of his life, but it does so with intensity and purpose—namely, to help Americans in 1845 see and vicariously experience the horrors endured by enslaved people in America.

Blight’s biography, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History, offers a similar intensity, but pulls the camera back to offer a wider-angle view. We are greeted with the larger political and social contexts through which Douglass’ life flowed, yet Blight’s writing never looses its focus on Douglass’ own experiences. Showing these intersections between national history and Douglass’ personal history allows Blight to muse on how Douglass’ writing and activism affected the American abolitionist movements, and how the various gears of those movements affected Douglass personally.

The book does a fantastic job of both lionizing Douglass, with quoted, researched descriptions of his wildly popular speeches, and humanizing the man by showing us his personal struggles with family and dear friends. Especially heartbreaking is the deterioration of the friendship between Douglass and abolitionist stalwart William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison was the first major abolitionist figure to recognize Douglass’ genius. Garrison thrust Douglass to the forefront and encouraged him to use his story as a weapon against those who deemed slavery just. Both men valued each others’ opinions and held the other in high esteem. Yet ego and ambition (from both men, honestly) eroded their relationship into one of petty bitterness.

Blight’s biography does what all great biographies do: it gives insight into the character, showing complexities beyond the blurbs in history books. And while Blight’s tome is a thick one (760 pages of narration, with an additional 100 of end-notes) the detail with which he tells Douglass’ story doesn’t get bogged down in useless minutia. His writing is lively and thorough at the same time—a true rarity.

‘On the Come Up’ cements Angie Thomas’s powerful voice

By Andrew Hedglin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 14)

Angie Thomas created a cultural phenomenon from Jackson to Hollywood two years ago with her debut, The Hate U Give, a young-adult novel about the aftermath of a police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. However, the book contains so much more than that, from the coming-of-age tale of protagonist Starr Carter, to its beautiful, real depictions of life in a black community.

Thomas returns to the fictional Garden Heights community of The Hate U Give in her follow-up novel, On the Come Up. In this book, 16-year-old Bri Jackson overcomes other people’s expectations for her to find her voice and use her talent for hip-hop to communicate her place in the world. From the “ring battles” in a local boxing gym to the SoundCloud-inspired accounts of the internet, Bri always goes forth boldly to remind the world that “when you say brilliant that you’re also saying Bri.”

Part of those expectations are from people in her community expecting her to carry the mantle of her father, the underground hip-hop legend Lawless, who was tragically murdered when Bri was a child. Bri is proud of her father’s legacy, but she has her own unique experiences to share.

The other side of the expectations is weighted with racial anxiety. Bri attends an arts-based magnet school in the posh Midtown neighborhood, bused there every day with her friends Sonny, anxious about grades and his online crush on a neighborhood boy, and Malik, her other best friend, her secret crush, and a budding political activist.

When Bri is stopped by security guards while smuggling contraband snacks into school, an ugly incident takes place in which she is forcefully pinned to the ground by security guards with a history of racial profiling. The cell phone videos of the incident have the power to reveal the truth of what happened, but they also have the power to distort. The image imparted partially depends on what the viewer wants, or expects, to see in the first place.

So it is with the lyrics to the song that Bri records in response to the incident, called “On the Come Up.” Students use the song in a school protest that goes wrong. A local DJ baits Bri in a radio interview, because Bri, while talented and thoughtful, is often prone to emotional, hot-headed responses. Bri laces her song with plenty of irony and nuance, yet those meanings are sometimes hard to convey in a song that’s also catchy enough to become a viral hit.

Meanwhile, Bri has to make important decisions, including her choice of manager. Should she stick with her beloved Aunt Pooh, a gangsta with a heart of gold and amateur to the business? Or should she side with Supreme, her father’s old shark-like manager with opaque motivations?

Bri is vulnerable to being sorely tempted to temper her image to achieve success. Self-expression is fine for what it’s worth, but real financial pressures await at home when her single mother is laid off from her job as a church secretary in the aftermath of the riots from The Hate U Give.

Her mother Jay and her brother Trey tell her not to worry, that she shouldn’t make long-term decisions based on immediate financial circumstances, but Trey has already put grad school on hold, and Jay has a history of not always being there for them, including a long stretch of drug addiction after their father and her husband was murdered in front of her.

In addition to this mesmerizing world-building, Thomas carries her spirited first-person narration into this new tale. Thomas does a very fine job balancing the personal and the political. Her style and solid writing will appeal not just to young fans who see themselves represented, but to older fans as well who wish to peek into the world a young, vibrant world populated with strong, three-dimensional black characters.

Andrew Hedglin is a bookseller at Lemuria Books, a graduate of Belhaven University, and a lifelong Jackson resident.

Signed copies of Angie Thomas’s books are available at Lemuria and on its web store.

Haunting Mississippi images in Florence Mars’ ‘Mississippi Witness’

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 24)

Many recall Florence Mars from her groundbreaking book Witness in Philadelphia, her personal account of the upheaval that surrounded her native Philadelphia, Mississippi, in the wake of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964.

But perhaps little known until now with the publication of Mississippi Witness: The Photographs of Florence Mars, it’s revealed that Mars was a talented photographer, as well.

James T. Campbell, a Stanford University professor, writes in an excellent introduction to the photos that Mars only started photographing her surroundings after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing separate but equal schools. Mars writes that she recognized that the world in which she was living was soon to be a thing of the past and wanted to capture it on film.

The photos, curated by Elaine Owens, recently retired from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, were mostly taken from 1954 to 1964.

Mars was not a professional photographer, though she exhibits mastery of the form in her work. Rather, she was born into relative wealth in Neshoba County, her family owning thousands of acres of land, a livestock auction, and a mercantile business in the county seat.

Like Eudora Welty, a writer who also picked up a camera and chronicled the people, places and things around her during the Depression two decades before, she applied her own knowledge and interests to her work. And, like Welty, the photos were published in definitive form only years after they were taken.

As Campbell writes, the “similarities in their circumstances and sensibilities are obvious. Single white women, they lived at once inside and outside the confines of the conservative, racist, patriarchal society. Solitary by nature, both understood the yearning for connection. Acutely observant, both saw the wonder in ordinary life, the aching beauty that survived the ugliness.”

Many of the photos are simply haunting. While most are portraits without name, background or explanation, they are environmental in that the elements of the photos tell a great deal—perhaps more than simple words can tell.

For example, one shows a young black girl facing the camera in a cotton field where the stalks tower over her. At her feet, dragged behind, is a cavernous cotton sack filled to near bursting by the bolls she has picked, perhaps weighing as much as herself. The expression on her face is at once sad and defiant, resigned, proud and beaten. It is the face of a child living the life of a hardworking adult, too young to be careworn, too old to be that of a child.

In another, a young black woman is washing clothes in a galvanized tub, her hands gnarled by the work, her face a portrait in stoicism, scrubbing out dirt.

Others include:

  • White jurors taking a break in the Emmett Till trial, which Mars attended. Their casual, exasperated looks don’t exactly telegraph a fair hearing.
  • A white performer in grinning black face entertaining lounging white farmers in overalls at the stockyard at Philadelphia.
  • A young black woman washing naked white children on a porch at the Neshoba County Fair, 1955. In the notes section at the end of the book, the authors relate that Mars had penciled a caption on the back of the print: “Certain things are taken to be self-evident.”

Mars, Campbell writes, stopped taking photos after the civil rights workers were killed, as “the tense atmosphere made photography difficult.” In its stead, Mars confided “writing took over from the photography in the middle of my life.”

Her Witness in Philadelphia was published in 1977. She died in 2006.

Mars’ photographs are as she intended, an enduring testament to a time in Mississippi long gone. Printed on heavy stock in a large format, they are a rare treasure.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at the Clarion Ledger, is the author of seven books including his latest, Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them.

James T. Campbell and Elaine Owens will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, February 27, at 5:00 p.m. to sign copies of and discuss Mississippi Witness.

Author Q & A with Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger (February 17). Click here to read this interview on the Clarion-Ledger’s website

New Orleans native Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel is a darkly thought-provoking satire on race in America that is based on one African-American man’s plan to spare his teenage son from racial disparities he and his own father have endured–thanks to a new medical procedure that can change his biracial son’s skin white.

We Cast a Shadow has been called “a surrealistic satire about identity, race, and family relations” with a plot that, though many will find outrageous, will make readers pause and think.

An award-winning writer, Ruffin has earned an Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for Novel-in-Progress. His work has been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, and others.

He is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and is a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance.

In We Cast a Shadow, a well-intentioned and unnamed father of the future–a hardworking, goal-oriented black attorney–works to secure enough wealth to have his son Nigel undergo a “demelanization” procedure to change the teenager’s skin to white, thereby promising his child a brighter future. How did you develop this story idea, and why?

Maurice Carlos Ruffin

I thought about all the ways we’ve tried to push against racism in our history as a nation. We’ve protested, fought the Civil War, passed laws, and, yet, we still deal with the problem today.

The narrator wants to protect his son, and he wants to do it in a way that is foolproof and effective. He reckons that no one will bother his son if he’s white! Of course, we see celebrities alter themselves all the time to gain notoriety: skin tanning, liposuction, rhinoplasty, etc. I was thinking about what would happen once we can change virtually any part of our bodies. It’s not so far-fetched now that we can genetically modify babies in the womb!

It’s clear throughout the story that Nigel and his mother are against the idea of having the procedure done, but the father is adamant. In the end, three lives are changed forever–each of their destinies a thought-provoking surprise. What lessons can readers learn from this anonymous dad’s sobering tale?

One lesson is that racism affects us all. It doesn’t matter your race, gender, or age. None of us are really safe until all of us are. Another lesson is that none of us should be too arrogant about our beliefs. Both parents are sure their approach is right. But what if both are right and wrong at the same time? A bit of humility might go a long way to ultimately ending racism and the damage we do to ourselves and our families.

The word “shadow” is used frequently in the book, as a noun, verb or adjective. Tell me about the title of the book. Was it based on the novelist E.M. Forster’s quote from A Room with a View? “We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place . . . because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm . . . and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”

I wasn’t consciously aware of the Forster quote! I was thinking of Kanye West’s song “All of the Lights.” In the video for the song we see that he’s trying to protect his daughter from the dangers of their rough neighborhood. With my narrator, he wants his son to have every possible opportunity that any American child should have. He wants him to see “all of the lights.” I flipped that idea on its head to create the title. They are caught in the shadows.

A character in the book told the narrator that race was “just an idea,” and said, “We’ve got to ignore race to transcend it.” Can you explain what this means, and do you agree?

It’s an old idea. People often say they don’t see race, as if that’s a good thing. However, if you don’t see race, then you’ll never understand how policies related to housing, policing, health, education, economics, etc. more negatively affect black people and other people of color.

Racism is a sickness. Imagine how terrible it would be if your daughter had diabetes and you said, “I don’t see diabetes!” That child would not do well with you serving her waffles with syrup each morning. If there is a solution to America’s racism problem, it lies in turning off the systems that automatically disenfranchise people every day. But you can’t turn off the systems if you refuse to see them.

Do you see another novel in your future soon?

Absolutely. I’m writing it now. But don’t ask me what it’s about because I don’t know. I tend to throw everything into the pot until it smells right. So, I’ll keep working on it until it’s a dish I’d serve to people I care about.

I always rely on faith that the writing will work out. It usually does. It did with this novel!

Signed first edition copies copies of We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin are available at Lemuria’s online store.

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