Black History Month

I’ve mentioned my abiding love for The Ramones before, and one of my birthday gifts was a new book by Joey’s brother, I Slept with Joey Ramone. I was looking forward to starting that, but then a friend posted something about February being Black History Month, and I thought “Yeah, I should do something for that.”

On the shelf next to my desk are several books that I think of as being on deck. They are books that I have bought and not gotten around to reading, and there are more than the ones on this shelf, but I hope that keeping these nearby reminds me to get to them. After I read one, I can bring something else out. Anyway, two of the books on deck were directly related to black history: Time on the Cross (Robert William Fogel and Stanley Engerman) and The Slave Community (John W. Blassingame).

Well, I decided to hold off on Joey, and read Time on the Cross instead, which was reasonable, and then I got really ambitious and decided to read both of those and Beloved (Toni Morrison) and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou).

Let me give you some background on how big of a procrastinator I am. My first encounter with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was in June of 1991. I had just started college, and I was trying to stay in town over the summer and earn some money. That did not work well at all, but one hot day I was hanging out at the library. I saw a copy, and started reading and got drawn in, but I did not check it out. I had so much to do, and everything was so uncertain, that I just decided that I would need to get back to it.

After I came back from my mission I got a job at Clear Connections, and I worked there for a little bit after graduation too. I can’t swear as to whether this happened in 1994 or 1996, but sometimes if I had a little extra money I would end up at B. Dalton, or the Book Vault, or the PSU bookstore, and blow it. Actually, it was probably before graduation, because one of my impulse purchases (Soul Stealers) ended up being a required text in my Chinese history class. Anyway, I bought Time on the Cross and The Slave Community at the PSU bookstore. Some professor had them in his assigned reading. I bet Sweetness and Power was for the same class, and maybe even How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, though I can’t be sure on that one.

Beloved was the most recent one to come up, and even that was probably 1998. I just remember I was working with Rose at Intel, and she was reading it and saying how good it was. Actually, I know we were talking about it when the movie came out, so that was 1998. Basically, I decided to undo over a decade’s worth of procrastination in a month.

The library provided the two books I didn’t own, and that was fine. They were both well-written, and gripping. I did not like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as much as I thought I would. I was frustrated with the people, who made bad choices. There are some horrible choices in Beloved, but I didn’t feel the same way about it.

Honestly, there are very horrible things in Beloved. It does not feel as harsh as it could, probably due to the poetic dreamlike writing, but still, there is some pretty horrible stuff. At the same time, I just felt more compassion than judgment. I guess all of the horrible choices came out of horrible situations, whereas maybe I felt that in the other book, they really should have known better. Maybe we shouldn’t even be able to quantify everything about the emotional response a book gives an individual. Regardless, I couldn’t stop reading either.

That was totally not the case for the other two. I started with Time on the Cross, and I stopped reading it to read Beloved, just to get a break. I have not finished The Slave Community yet. I will, but I may need to take more breaks. It’s not that there isn’t good information. Maybe I am just out of the academic mindset. I’m not sure “pedantic” is a fair word, but I’m kind of leaning towards that.

To be fair, they both have different problems. With Time on the Cross, they are using cliometrics to analyze the various aspects of slave life, and it was a new technique at the time, so it is very figure-heavy rather than being a narrative. Also, because they end up coming with many positive aspects of slave life, I felt a little disturbed reading it. Slavery is bad, and they are never trying to say that it is not a bad thing, but there’s a disconnect that can be a little off-putting. In the end, I did learn a lot about slave life, and about ways of studying history, and it was a good reminder about how data can be misinterpreted and twisted, so that constant re-examination is good. I’m glad I read it.

The Slave Community seems very poorly connected. A lot of information is thrown out, possibly to the point of overkill, and then sometimes the information is contradictory so I don’t feel like I am really getting anywhere, except that here and there I have picked up on some things that I didn’t know and that make sense. Also, I am not done with it yet, and Time on the Cross improved as I was reading it—so maybe in another thirty pages I will get into The Slave Community, and regret badmouthing it here. I will finish it.

I will say, though, that the reason that I think it might be the same professor who assigned both of these and Sweetness and Power is that Sweetness and Power (which covered the sugar trade and so related to slavery in South America and the Caribbean) was so pedantic that I gave up on it, and gave it away without ever reading it. That would have been a rough class.

In retrospect, I am really glad that I did this. I think understanding history is very important, and understanding viewpoints other than your own is very important. If we also had an Asian history month, and a Latin American history month, and so on, it would start feeling like a bit much (though we would learn a lot). I think there is something to be said for having black history month specifically, and I will probably gum up explaining it.

Asian Americans faced prejudice and hardships, but they came here on their own, and often they were settling in groups where they maintained some cultural identity. It is the same for Latin Americans. The Europeans who came here basically became what we think of as American history. Africans were brought here by force, integrated in some ways but separate in others, and that relationship has been a huge factor in shaping American history. We should be revisiting it over and over again. The only other history month that it might make sense to have annually would be Native American history month. Maybe I should campaign for that. (But really what I will always be hoping for is people reading more history and more literature and more science and more knowledge, all the time.)

I do regret a little bit that it was so much focused on one period. Beloved occurs partly after slavery, but there are a lot of flashbacks to slave times, and everything is an aftermath of slavery. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was the only one that was at all modern, covering time during the Depression and World War II. Maybe next year I can spend some time with Garvey or Abernathy or Bunche. At some point I know I will want to read Haley’s book on Malcolm X.

For now though, we have other library books to finish before the due date. Maria reserved Playing the Enemy after we saw Invictus and The Blind Side after we saw that, and when a book is tied to a movie there are a lot of holds, and it was just dumb luck that we got both at the same time, but there are many more holds so we will not be able to renew and we need to read them now. Then I need to read Born to Run, because a friend lent it to me, and then I can get to Joey. (And then I think I will just need to catch up on magazines for a while!)

If you would like to increase your own black history reading, I do have a few recommendations. First of all, it is a big commitment, but Alex Haley’s Roots is just phenomenal. Yes, it is fiction, but it is more than fiction too. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney, is a textbook, but it is a compelling and easy read (which is why it might not be from that one professor). From Slavery to Freedom, by John Hope Franklin, is the work on the subject, but it’s been so long since I read it that I can’t really remember it. I should probably re-read it at some point.

It’s not much of a list, but the faded memory is a problem. There was a great book on the Buffalo Soldiers that I read when I was doing my research paper on them, but I can’t remember the name. One the plus side, there was a collection of various papers and letters that I could not recall, and because of reading The Slave Community, I think it might have been Blassingame’s collection, so maybe I will be able to find it again. I just found this Spanish poem that has been haunting me since 1991 (Y yo me ire by Juan Ramon Jimenez), because someone finally posted it online. So someday, I am going to find those letters, and that other poem. But taking better notes back then would have been good too.