The Heritage Month Project: "The Underground Railroad" By Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Underground Railroad, and while I don't know what other books were being considered for those awards that year, I have to say I have no problem with The Underground Railroad taking the top spots. It is a great read, both character- and plot-driven and very substantial. You finish this book, and you feel, Now, that was a book. 

The Underground Railroad is the story of an American slave, Cora, living in the early nineteenth century south. The time is significant, I think, because we know the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) is long in her future, assuming she's even still alive when it comes. The beginning of her tale is heart-breakingly grim, about life on the plantation. But it's a kind of heartbreak most of us have heard about before. It's not until she enters the underground railroad that something unique happens.

What happens is that The Underground Railroad turns into alternative history. 

The historical underground railroad was an informal network of people who helped American slaves escape into free states, where they might end up being captured and returned to the south, or into Canada, where slavery had been against the law since 1834, when Great Britain outlawed it in its empire. The railroad metaphor for the system was enhanced by the use of the terms "conductors" for guides, "depots" or "stations" for buildings where slaves could be hidden, and "stationmasters" for the people who owned the homes or otherwise were responsible for a building, accepting and hiding slaves there.

Whitehead's alternative underground railroad involves a real railroad that is truly under the ground. When Cora gets onboard, she begins a journey story in which she makes stops that provide her with respite but only for a while. 

Her first stop is in South Carolina where we immediately understand that we're not in the historical south anymore, because one of the first things Cora sees is what is called a skyscraper. Life is a lot better for Blacks in South Carolina, which has what might be called an enlightened attitude. But there's something not quite right here, in a very futuristic scifi kind of way. Sure enough, South Carolina has a little eugenics thing going on. Before this can become an issue she has to deal with, Cora finds out she is being hunted by someone who makes his living catching and returning escaped slaves to their owners. 

She boards the railroad again.

A second stop has a Holocaust feel and another a utopian commune vibe. The ending reminded me of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, which makes sense. The Handmaid's Tale is a story of a woman caught in a nightmarish future, and The Underground Railroad is a story of a woman caught in a nightmarish past.

I'm not totally comfortable saying I enjoyed a book dealing with a historical issue that is so painful. But the alternative history aspect helps to give distance. Black experience makes some great source material for genre writing. 

Other Alternative History Dealing with Black Experience

I loved Dread Nation by Justina Ireland. It's a zombie story and there were no zombies in the nineteenth century, so while the young Black women in this book are trained as zombie hunters as sort of cannon fodder to protect young white women with money, I can be assured this never happened. Right? As I pointed out in my original post, zombie stories supposedly are never just about zombies, and Dread Nation isn't. It definitely deals with race and politics.

Dread Nation has a sequel! Deathless Divide. Oh, I often recall one of the zombie hordes attacking a town in a scene in this book. Do not know why. Again, this isn't so much about zombies. It's about race and gender. 

More Genre Writing From Black Authors

• Science Fiction and Fantasy 
• Mysteries and Thrillers  I've read My Sister the Serial Killer
• Historical Fiction Several things here look good. So many books. So little time.
• Essays and Memoirs I've read a couple of these and am presently reading The Cooking Gene.

The Heritage Month Project: "Pearl's Secret, A Black Man's Search For His White Family" by Neil Henry

Pearl's Secret by Neil Henry is an older book, published in 2001. It's been on my To Be Read Shelf for a number of years. I probably bought it because of the genealogy and history aspect. I didn't know much about it beyond that.

By the time I finally started reading Pearl's Secret, I thought it was going to be a Finding Your Roots thing. That worried me since I stopped watching that show, because I find it so formulaic. ("Your ancestors suffered horribly. How does that make you feel?") Then I thought the book was going to be a memoir of Henry's experience hunting for his white family members, maybe some nerdy stuff about hunting high and low. You do get a little of that. Genealogical research was much more of a chore before the Internet, even if today sites like Ancestry.com are only as accurate as the strangers who are doing the posting there.

But what the book really is is a family history as it relates to race, first through the Black side and then the white side of Henry's family, once he connects with them. I personally think family histories relate to the greater histories families lived through, and Henry's story supports that.

Henry describes his childhood in Seattle as the youngest son of a surgeon and a librarian as being Leave it to Beaverish. It was an idyllic suburban life interrupted by episodes of racism. He's invited by a couple of little white girls in his neighborhood to come over and play only to be chased down the street by their grandfather when he goes to the door. Not at all surprised he remembered that years later. In his family there is talk of the value of having light skin and good hair while at the same time feeling great respect for their Black history and culture. Believe me, no one was talking about French Canadian achievements and listening to French Canadian music when I was growing up. My mother's side of the family didn't know they had any kind of achievements or music, which I suppose can easily happen when your name is Adams.  

Henry's own story of being adrift while attending Princeton and working for Ben Bradlee at The Washington Post tended to drag for me, because I've read about guys going to private schools and having good jobs in journalism before. His grandparents are nice people, but he doesn't talk that much about them. The relatives who are the stars of his family show are his parents, who experienced life under Jim Crow and survived and overcame it. Their stories are riveting, shocking. Seriously, I am shocked by how little I, who have taken a history course or two and read a few history books, have known about the Jim Crow era until recently. I kept talking about these people at the dinner table while I was reading about them. 

Netflix! Where are you? I would watch this mini-series.  

I don't want to say too much about the Beaumonts, Henry's white family, because there's sort of a creative nonfiction thing going on here, with a narrative climax that I don't want to give away. Though I will just say, "boll weevil." Yes, I had heard the name, just as I had heard "Jim Crow." I had no idea the significance, though.

Regarding Peal's secret, itself--That's a bit of a surprise, too. It's not that she was a Black woman hiding her white background or a Black woman passing as white, because she was neither of those things. Her secret is something else. 

Pearl's Secret is a great example of how reading about people you are less familiar with opens up opportunities to see something different, to add to your personal knowledge base. My feelings about this book reminded me of reading Don't Hold Me Back, a picture book memoir written and illustrated by the late artist, Winfred Rembert. Rembert was a few years older than me, but not a lot, and I actually met him. In his book, he writes about growing up in the south at the end of the Jim Crow era. I found it disturbing that someone nearly my contemporary had to pick cotton as a child and saw the bodies of lynched Black men hanging from trees. Now I realize that growing up poorish in rural Vermont when I did, without weekly news magazines or a daily paper coming into the house, was probably a great protector for little Gail in terms of what was going on in the rest of the world.

James Marriott, a columnist with The Times (London), wrote a few days ago that "Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable."  It's also inconceivable if we never knew it happened.

 

Friday Done List February 13

 What's happened these last two weeks?

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor    

• I made three submissions.
• I received one rejection.
• I had three pieces published. (One of these had been submitted before this period.)
• Had just about decided to try Substack but immediately decided not to. The thinking behind that may become a blog post.
• I worked on two humor pieces, one of which had been rejected a couple of times.
• Readership has plummeted on Medium, which is encouraging me to work harder on submitting elsewhere.
• Last weekend's Weekend Writer post has made me think I need to do a study of short story writing. I've done this in the past, but my success rate with publishing short stories suggests I need to do more. Just in case the whole world isn't wrong, and I'm right. 

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Have done five blog posts.
• Promoted the three pieces published on Medium.
• Continue to work on building community on BlueSky and Medium.
• Have been reading for Black History Month and published blog post on first book read. 
• Promoted my Black History reading post.

Goal 3. Submit Book Length Work to Agents and Editors

• Received rejection on last submission

The Heritage Month Project: "Colored Television" by Danzy Senna

My very first read for my Heritage Month Project, and Black History Month, was a good one, Colored Television by Danzy Senna. This novel was a Good Morning America Book Club Pick (there's some good stuff at that link) so it has had plenty of attention. I, however, didn't hear of it until I saw it on a list of humorous novels. As is often the case for me, while I liked the book very much, I had mixed feelings about how funny it was.

Jane, our biracial main character, is going through a desperate period. She teaches writing at a so-so college where she is at a crucial point. She has been on leave for a year where she is supposed to be finishing...and selling...her novel about mulattoes that she has been working on for ten years. If she can't sell it, she won't get tenure and will be stuck with the heavy workload that the untenured have to shoulder there. Additionally, her funny (yeah, he is funny) artist husband is talented, but his work doesn't sell. The family is constantly moving from one less than desirable living situation to another. One of their two children appears to be in the early stages of being diagnosed with a neurodivergent issue. (Seriously, that can take what seems like forever.) Jane's hopes for a black bohemian bourgeois life for herself and her family are all pinned on that book. That desire is intensified after having housesat for a year in her wealthy TV writer friend's home and experiencing the good life. 

I may not have found this book particularly funny because this white/failed middle grade writer/homemaker identified a lot with its mixed race/failed literary writer/academic. I mean a lot. I, too, am a woman writer who can no longer sell a book and is flailing around with other kinds of writing and has a little boy like Flinn in my family.  I found myself shouting to Jane in my head. "Come on, Jane! You wrote and published one book. You know another book isn't going to fix everything." "Jane! Jane! Don't drink all Brett's expensive wine!"

Jane leaves novel writing after it becomes clear her second book is dead before it even gets in the water. She finds it a relief. I have left novel writing, too, and Jane is right. It is a relief. Except all the little writing projects I come up with for myself can be overwhelming. And, wouldn't you know it, Jane comes up with smaller writing projects that are overwhelming her. Her's involve pitching a comedy show about mulattoes to a Hollywood wheeler and dealer named Hampton Ford.

Now Hampton Ford is also desperate. He complains that the ideas Jane pitches him aren’t mulatto enough, that they’re about random things and the characters she's talking about don’t have to be mulatto. They could be anybody.  I wonder, is that why this book grabs me and evidently a lot of other readers? Is this a book about a mixed-race woman living a desperate life, writing a book about mulattoes, pitching ideas about mulattoes, but she could be anybody?

She could be so any of us?

The Story Behind the Story Times 3

After what seemed to me like quite a bit of rejection the past couple of months, including two last Friday, I had three pieces published in three different Medium publications this past week. 

Kitchen Culture?

The story behind The Big Advantages of Small-Batch Baking was published in Tastyble on the fifth. This is one of my essays about eating/cooking. I have to come up with a name for this category, because as I've probably said before, I'm not interested in traditional food writing. Food writers need to know something. I'm interested in what I think of as nonprestige food. And I'm interested in life around eating. I just thought of "kitchen culture," right this minute. Perhaps I'll use those words somehow. 

Anyway, the backstory to this story is pretty much there in the story. The only interesting bit is that the weekend before it was accepted, I found myself with some extra time, because we were expecting snow the day I was supposed to visit with some relatives and help with the little people there. I spent this time making three small-batch recipes while my husband made one, so I could take pictures for this submission. One of my recipes didn't get into the pictures, because it was not photo ready when it came out of the oven. But that's how the photos in the article came about.

Interesting point: Tastyble has editors who do edit. Many publications on Medium don't. Editors can be helpful. The Tastyble editor I worked with made an excellent point about my original title. It was arty, but told nothing.

The snow didn't develop, I could have gone to my family's house instead of baking and taking pictures for work, but probably wouldn't have because it ended up that two people therre were sick. I worked instead of doing the mother thing. 

Bookish Stuff

I have published a few book-related things in various places on Medium. Last week I revised last Tuesday's blog post about using heritage months as temporal landmarks for planning reading. I'm interested in reworking blog material for publication elsewhere, though Medium would allow me to publish my blog posts there just as they are. 

Nonetheless, I did a big revision and expansion and published This Year I Am Using Heritage Months to Plan My Reading in Books Are Our Superpower. The piece was accepted for Medium's boosted program, which means it will get more promotion.

Reworking material for publication in different venues is a traditional free-lance writer thing, and I'm interested in doing more of it. 

I worked on this intently last Friday and Saturday when I was supposed to be getting ready to go to that same family member's house and then going there. However, they had more sickness there and cancelled. I worked on that photo I used for the illustration in addition to revising and revising and revising instead of bursting into that sick house and making everyone well, which, of course, I could have done with my magic. Working mother guilt lasts for generations.

A Writer on Writing

Erdal Erdal on Pexels

Yesterday The Writing Cooperative, a very big Medium publication that had rejected something I submitted there a few years ago (I can't remember what it was about) published my piece A Hermit Crab
Walks into a Bar. This was something I wrote at least a year and a half ago, so we're talking about submitting something from the files.

I didn't abandon any sick children or refuse to go out into a storm to work on this one, so that's good.

It's gratifying to have had so much published in such a short period. However, Medium has been experiencing a crisis related to payments going down for those writers accustomed to making regular money there and readership going down for writers like me who think they're doing well if they make a few dollars per story. We will have to see whether this recent work (and child abandonment) broadens my readership, which is my major reason for publishing on this platform.

More to follow?

The Weekend Writer: Story and Short Stories

Two articles turned up recently on Medium regarding story, both of which started out good but then drifted off. They reminded me, though, that I think defining story is significant. And, it turns out, difficult.

In years past when I was trying to do it, I found confusing info. For instance, some people use plot and  story interchangeably. Plot is an element of story, so it cannot also be story.

My favorite definition of story comes from L. Rust Hills in his book Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. He says that in a story, something happens to somebody and the somebody is changed as a result. I like to think of it as "something happens to somebody and so what."   

Relating to short stories, which I am more interested in writing than I used to be, Edgar Allan Poe had some significant things to say. They are summarized in How to Write a Short Story According to Edgar Allan Poe at Dark Media. One incident, Gail. One central event.

Hmm. With that in mind, maybe one of my short stories is really a tiny novel. 

Some Annotated Reading February 6

Books

I recently read the follow-up to a YA book I liked very much a few years back. I am not mentioning any titles, because the second book was a major, major disappointment. It became what I call a "skimmer." I had to start skimming to finish the thing. It was YA, but there was no indication that the YA character was YA (his backstory was in the first book). There was a lot of what might be considered thought-provoking sort of spiritual stuff that didn't really work. Some point-of-view switches that didn't make sense. Some dragging that seemed like filler. Oh, my gosh. This was the second in what was supposed to be a trilogy. The third book seems to have been dropped. The author may have never had much of an on-line presence and now seems to have disappeared. I am always sorry to see this kind of situation. 

Short-form Writing

Did a Best-selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer's Story? by Katy Waldman in The New Yorker I am a great one for missing the point when I'm reading, especially nonfiction like this. The part of this that really struck me was the description of how the best-selling novelist worked with her editor on this particular project. It was intense, more so than I experienced when working with book editors. I read things like this, and I think that maybe I'm fine with not publishing another book. I don't know that I want to go through something like that. Thank goodness for that agent rejection I just got, yeah?

Transgender soldiers date back to the Civil War  by Petula Dvorak in The Washington Post. When I was a tween and teen reader, I loved reading about women who disguised themselves as soldiers so they could fight in the Civil War. I knew nothing about transgender issues. Didn't know they existed.

Why Simon & Schuster’s Flagship Imprint Won’t Require Blurbs Anymore by Sean Manning at Publishers Weekly. I hate book blurbs. As I've said here many times.

What Fruit We Bear by Megan Baxter in Sequestrum. This is so good it makes me feel, Yes, I must read short stories.

The Many Ways YA Books & The Community Isolates Teens at Vicky Who Reads: A YA Book Blog.  I don't know how I stumbled upon this five-year-old post, but I 100 percent agree.

How Midlife Became a Crisis by Matthew Redmon in Wise & Well. This is a wow. I will never think about middle age as that boring old cliche again.

Humor

Three-Year-Old Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs  by Angus Duffin in Slackjaw. Because I love Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

I’m Your Young Adult Child and I Have Twenty Acceptable Reasons for Not Putting My Stuff in the Dishwasher  by Stacey Curran in Frazzled.  I love teen voice lists. 

How I, A Stay-at-Home Mom, Actually Wind Down in the Evening When My Husband Comes Home by Alexis Tai in Frazzled. Notice the line about asking the father to babysit. It's not babysitting if it's your own freaking kid!

A Series of Announcements From the Robertson Elementary PTA Spring Gala Committee Encouraging You to Please Support the Students Despite the Ongoing Apocalypse by Saba Khonsari in Frazzled. As a general rule, I don't care for apocalyptic books and movies, but I love apocalyptic humor.

God Attempts To Write A Novel In Seven Days by Rachel Reys in Slackjaw. You probably don't have to be a writer to get this.  

Time Management Tuesday: Heritage Months as Temporal Landmarks for Reading

Heritage months (also sometimes called history months) are designated periods of time during which various ethnic groups, often ones that have traditionally been viewed as outsiders or other, are recognized. They are like temporal landmarks, calendar events that create opportunities. I love temporal landmarks.

Various organizations recognize and support different heritage months. Northwestern University does a good job of recognizing more than one group per month. 

Right now, the U.S. Department of State recognizes nine heritage months, which I am listing here, just for the record. 

• Black History Month
• Women's History Month
• Arab American Heritage Month
• Jewish American Heritage Month
• Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month
• Military Appreciation and National Veterans and Military Families Appreciation Months
• Caribbean-American Heritage Month
• Immigrant Heritage Month & World Refugee Day
• Hispanic Heritage Month 

My plan this year is to observe the months as the U.S. Department of State has listed them, because when I was planning this last fall, this was the most official looking list I found. I will stick with it to the extent that I can.

Now why would I want to plan a year of reading around heritage months?

So Many Books

Over the last 20 years or so, there have been surges of interest in just how many books are published each year in, let's say, the United States, since that's Original Content's home country. Here's one source that says 4 million books were published here in 2022. The same source says that 2.1 million books were self-published the year before, to try to give us an idea of what's going on with that. Quite honestly, though, I thought I saw a figure recently that said only 500,000 books are traditionally published in this country each year and another 1 and a half million are self-published, which would bring us to 2 million books, not 4.

Because 2 million books is so much more manageable a number than 4 million.

I am nitpicking in order to make the point that a lot of books are published each year. And then all those books are out there, and more books are published the next year and the next, plus there are all the books kicking around from years gone by.

So many books. I can't read them all. Neither can you.

So Hard to Find Numbers

Though there has been a great interest in increasing diversity in publishing since 2020, I can't find a lot of numbers to tell me what's happening with that. How many of those 2 or 4 million books are written by black writers or Asian writers or Arab American writers? If you scroll down here, you'll see that these people say that at whatever point this was published over 75 percent of writers in the U.S. were white, 7.6% were Hispanic, 5.9% Black, 4.9% Asian, and 0.4% American Indian/Alaska native. (These are their terms.)

The point I'm making now is that when a writing group is a small percentage of the whole writing group, they're going to produce a small percentage of the total number of books published. They can just physically only write so many books. Those books can easily get lost in the millions of books published. Even white readers who consider themselves color blind in their reading interests are not going to have a lot of books from nonwhite writers showing up in their personal book radar.

Where Heritage Months as Temporal Landmarks Come In

Writers can use temporal landmarks to help focus on particular things--using weekends for specific writing projects, assigning the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day for revision, using periods organized by groups, like National Poetry Month, to be their new draft time. This writer is going to use this year's heritage months as temporal landmarks to organize reading.

Why not just read these writers all year long? I do. But, like the people I described above, I only read what happens to pop up in front of me. Observing heritage months gives me an opportunity to do a little seeking out.

Additionally, as I said last year when I announced that I was going to do this, "when times are...strange, shall we say...publicizing the work of groups whose work didn't always get much attention in the past is something positive we can do. It doesn't involve name calling or ranting, which I've never seen doing anything for anybody."

Also, I love temporal landmarks. Focusing on one thing is just so freaking exciting. I am so up for this. I am actually reading two books now for Black History month. Sadly, I often peter out toward the end of a temporal landmark project, so I am worried the heritage months at the end of the year will be getting less attention from me. But I will just have to plan more carefully to avoid that, won't I?

My Real, and Very Shallow, Reason for Observing Heritage Months with My Reading

Lulu Blog has a lovely post on The Importance of Reading Black Literature. But it doesn't mention what I get from reading literature written by anyone from a group I don't belong to.

If you are a reader who has been around a while and has read a great deal...has read so much...a lot of what you read isn't what we might call new. There is a lot of sameness. There is a lot of old wine in a new flask kind of thing going on in books by your favorite writers or books in your favorite genres. Reading books by people in groups you're not as familiar with opens up opportunities to read about new characters and experiences. To read something different.

That's not a very virtuous reason for doing this. But maybe that's the best reason of all for reading the work of writers you're not familiar with. 

You should be hearing about my heritage month reading throughout the year.