Good morning, readers and book lovers, and welcome to our last open forum! I’ll enlarge on this point later. However, for now, the topic of today’s open forum is as follows: Which book introduced you to the viewpoint of other races?
It’s a bit difficult for me to pin this particular change down to a book: in my own case, there were several factors that introduced me to the viewpoint of other races. As a teenager I lived through the Little Rock school integration crisis of 1957, described in this diary; also during those years I read a novel called Mittee and encountered a photoessay in one of those old book-sized magazines, either Reader’s Digest or Coronet, can’t remember which, now; and finally, I was gobsmacked, as the British say, by a newspaper article I read when writing a diary about a book called The First Emancipator. Please follow me below the fold for more.
Daphne Rooke's Mittee was a best seller in its day (1951) and no wonder: the mixture of obsession, lust, murder, and race prejudice experienced by a love triangle consisting of a white man, a white woman, and a “coloured” woman, set against the background of the Boer War is a fascinating read. The white man is a Boer named Paul, who is obsessed with beautiful but vain Mittee, a young woman he’s known since childhood; the coloured woman is Selena, brought up with Mittee and so close that occasionally, when no one is around, Mittee addresses her as “Sister.”
Race prejudice seems like a bowl of unsorted soft fruit: just when you think you’ve got rid of all the worms, there’s always one more. Read this passage from Mittee, in which Selena describes breakfast at the Coesters’ house, where she and Mittee were staying:
When the prayers were over, Jansie and I took our plates from the kitchen table. Mrs. Coester always gave us the same food as her family ate because we were not Kaffirs and this was more than you got in some of the other houses where they made no difference between black and coloured.
The nonwhite in Boer South Africa were never for a minute allowed to forget the inferior status assigned them by their white overlords. At one point in the novel the man Jansie, a brutal farmhand obsessed with Selina, comes to court her, bearing a candle in his hand “Like a white man,” he says. But Selina is having none of it.
I shut him out of my room, leaning against the door until I heard him go away. It was a big room where a bywoner had once lived and there was a window opposite the bed. Good enough for a white person, said Mittee, when she showed it to me. You’re lucky to have such a good nonnie, Selina. She had put in some old linoleum and curtains; a chest of drawers and a bed. Selina was a lucky girl.
Only when I finished the book did the full import of the opening sentence dawn on me:
We are happy in our hut on the mountaintop for here we call no man Baas and Fanie hunts with his rifle like a white man.
Only when away from Boer society, living on their own, did this husband and wife of color feel free.
That photoessay published--oh, dear, at least 40 years ago--is unrecoverable now. It showed photos of subjects that everyone finds pleasant: fresh summer flowers, fields covered with new snow, birds in flight against an evening sky. The penultimate page showed a photo of a crescent moon floating high in a night sky. If memory serves me correctly, the caption at the bottom of that page read, "Night coming tenderly..." and the final page showed the sweet, innocent face of a black child aged about six, with her hair done up in ribbons, gazing upward, and a caption below that read, "...black like me." Both the photoessay and Langston Hughes' poem made a powerful impression on me, one I've never forgotten.
Daily Kos Front Pager Denise Oliver Velez has done more to educate me (and others) about black history than any of those who taught me American history in school. What they taught me was the white male Eurocentric view of history, completely omitting any mention of the contributions made by black people. Or by Native Americans, or any other ethnic minority, come to that. Denise’s diaries on Daily Kos convey the voices and viewpoints of people of color, a perspective all too sadly lacking in the dying traditional media.
This past week Front-Pager Susan Grigsby wrote a review of the book everyone’s talking about: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Edward Baptist, the book’s author, states that the old “plantations” of the South should be called slave labor camps, because that’s what they were.
Above the fold is a photo showing a view of the Oatlands Slave Labor Camp in nearby Leesburg, Virginia. You can’t see Goose Creek because it’s hidden by trees, but you can glimpse the faraway Blue Ridge Mountains. I have loved Oatlands because the pale yellow mansion, set in the green Virginia countryside, soothed my soul when I looked at it; but now I realize that I was looking at the place from my little Caucasian suburban housewife point of view, never thinking of the backs bent in labor to build that place in the heat of a Virginia summer, nor of the fear of the lash that would descend on those aching backs should their weary hands falter in the work.
So that’s my account of a book that showed me the viewpoint of people of color. What’s YOUR story? Did a book about the viewpoint of others strike you like lightning, or was it a gradual process, like the wearing of water on stone? Tell us about it!
P. S. People, I am now completely out of ideas for open forums. A few delightful readers of this forum have contributed diaries recently, but not nearly enough to keep this series going. I can’t keep doing it all by myself; for one thing, I have no more ideas and for another, my day job involves holding a 12-pound-baby nonstop. Exhausting. Here’s a poll if you feel like taking it, but otherwise—We who are about to depart salute you! Hail and farewell.