The Talk

Graphic novel memoir 

     There are a lot of talks any parent has to have with their children.  Darrin Bell's The Talk is structured around the one white parents are spared: the one on survival strategies in a still too racist world.  A world where being stopped by the police can result in an on the spot death penalty and white people feel entitled to call the police for the most trivial reasons.  A world in which for too many people Black lives don't matter.

     When Bell (who is biracial) asked his white mother for a water gun she bought him a bright green one.  When he asked why she didn't get him a more realistic one she gave him an answer that he considered "the most paranoid nonsense I've ever heard."  When he took it outside to play it was confiscated by a cop.  Then a flashback conveys his mother's speech the essence of which is "The world is different for you and your brother.  White people won't see you or treat you the way they do little white boys."

     Bell is a father in 2020.  His very young son asks him "Who's George Floyd?"  He remembers how his father had avoided discussions about racial matters.

     "I see the man my boy will become.  I wanted to create a world for him where he'd never have to carry a four-hundred-year-old burden.  Maybe Dad sought to spare me from it.  My father didn't have that power, and neither do I.  My son's world is his to create.  All I can do is prepare him."

     In between the anchoring incidents readers discover Bell's life story replete with incidents of racism and his growing discovery of his power to fight back by sharing his insights through words and images.  It is that blend which he carries over into The Talk that makes it so much more powerful than a words only format ever could be.

On a purrrsonal note, Tuesday was a volunteering day.  I shelf read 📚 in the Orono Public Library's juvenile wing.  Then I walked down the hill and did mostly weeding in the community garden.  The weather was perfect: sunny and breezy.  There was a great jazz concert going on in the Library's outdoor amphitheater.  The blueberry bushes in the library's garden were thick with delicious fruit.  My friend Zoe brought in shortbread sandwich cookies with jam filling she made herself.  It was a perfect evening.  (Jules)

It was not as muggy.  (Tobago)

A great big shout out goes out to Zoe because those cookies were amazing.

Tobago and Jules Hathaway 

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Sent from my U.S.Cellular© Smartphone

The Dos and Donuts of Love

YA romance 

     In my battle against too much sugar in my diet, donuts 🍩 would be my downfall if there was a store like You Drive Me Glazy (featured in Adiba Jaigirdar's The Dos and Donuts of Love) within walking distance of my house 🏠 or UMaine.  

     Shireen is over the moon when she gets an email telling her that she's been accepted to be a contestant on the Junior Irish Baking Show, an on air competition where teens bake in a studio with new challenges each session and every week some are eliminated.  Practically all her life she's been working toward her goal of having a pastry shop.  This would be a real help.  And the publicity could help her parents' donut 🍩 shop, You Drive Me Glazy, recover from a very bad sales slump.

     But there are 🐍 in Paradise.  For one thing one of the other contestants is Chris, her former girlfriend.  They had had a recent acrimonious breakup that seriously impacted Shireen's self confidence.  Not only does she have to see Chris on a regular basis, but they're paired up for the first episode.

     For another thing it's a reality show where often the manufactured drama outweighs the purely culinary aspects.  After each show contestants are asked questions about each other designed to stir up a heroes and villains situation.  People in charge of the show do nothing to stop the viewer meanness expressed in comments.

     And one of the other contestants may be a saboteur.

     Ordinarily Shireen would have her best friend there to be supportive.  But Fatima is spending the summer ☀️ in Bangladesh with extended family.  Different time zones make phoning a challenge.  And when they get to talk Fatima seems distracted by being able to know her relatives for the first time in her life.

     If I were you I'd devour this sweet story along with a box of your favorite 🍩 s.

     Wonder why I am SO CRAVING a glazed lemon donut 🍩.

On a purrrsonal note, last weekend was Eugene's and my 34th anniversary.  We celebrated with a romantic weekend at camp.  On the way there and back we stopped at yard sales.  He kept paying for my stuff including a just my size perfect chair for my outside reading 📚.   I was also able to score 🙃 an amazing 🙀 🐈 😻 🐈‍⬛️ 😺 🐱 shirt.  I hope we will be lucky enough to celebrate 🍾 a lot more anniversaries.  (Jules)

Me too!!!  (Tobago)

A great big shout out goes out to Eugene.

Tobago and Jules Hathaway 

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Sent from my U.S.Cellular© Smartphone

Friday I'm In Love

YA romance

     Camryn Garrett fans, get ready to party.  After what feels like a too long wait the author of Full Disclosure and Off The Record has gifted us with Friday I'm In Love which totally lives up to its predecessors.

     "'But you said I could have one,' I say, folding my arms.  'Remember you said I could have a gigantic party when I turned sixteen because you never got to have one.'

     'When you were six,' Mom fires back.  'Things were different when you were six.'"

     As the narrative begins Mahalia's mother is driving her to her best friend's lavish Sweet Sixteen party.  It's a bittersweet moment.  At the same time she's celebrating Naomi's coming of age party she's mourning her inability to have one.

     "But it doesn't matter anymore.  It's too late for me to have a Sweet Sixteen and there's no such thing as a Sweet Seventeen.  The next-best big party to look forward to is, like, a wedding or funeral."

     The next week Mahalia and Naomi are at Naomi's house rewatching a movie where the character expresses frustration with gay people having to come out because otherwise they're assumed to be straight.  Mahalia says that people should be able to come out in any way they want to.  Personally she'd choose to come out in a big party, "Being the center of attention.  My sexuality being celebrated instead of shunted to the side where I can only talk about it with Naomi."

     That's when they come up with a coming out party idea.  But pulling it off isn't going to be easy or even guaranteed.

     While Naomi has two professional parents who can easily afford "two hundred dollars per hour and sixty-five dollars per plate" Mahalia's single mom struggles to make rent on their one bedroom apartment under ordinary circumstances.  And a double whammy crisis is about to strike.

     Mahalia's mother is the only family she can count on.  Her father is lost to a new wife and children.  Her mom is strongly fundamentalist Christian.  Will she be able to love a non hetero daughter?

     There is also a delightful but exasperating complication in Mahalia's personal life.  Siobhan is a gorgeous new student from Ireland.  Although Siobhan has a boyfriend she's sending signals that she may was to be willing to ditch him to become more than friends with Mahalia.

     Friday I'm In Love is a truly engaging narrative, especially for teens and adults who are encountering or have experienced roadblocks in pursuit of dreams.

     I never graduated high school.  Oh, yeah, I got a diploma but not the ceremony.  My last year in high school I went via the 20th century equivalent of zoom:  correspondence school.  Not by choice, I assure you.  Mom needed me to help my sister with her school work, be her TA and secretary, and do housework and cooking 🍳.   I very much missed a school social life, especially as ads for gifts for graduates popped up.  How I envied those who were able to experience this rite of passage.  When my diploma arrived in the mail I threw it in the trash.  It meant nothing to me.  When Harriet got to 🎓 it was torture, reminding me of what I missed out on.  When I graduated college I was one of the few people who had no family present.  But if all goes well (as in COVID not making a comeback) my grad school program will end with the graduation of my dreams with my family there and all the celebration and pomp and circumstance.

Jules Hathaway 

     

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Sent from my U.S.Cellular© Smartphone

Driving The Green Book

Adult nonfiction 

"That Black people have had to create mechanisms for survival is an indictment of America.  But it is also a testament to people of color that we have found ways to cope and survive and navigate this incredibly unfair and complex world.  The Green Book and a lot of other things like it were the tools that people used to navigate.

--Bryan Stevenson, lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative"

     Alvin Hall's Driving The Green Book is a logical reading follow up to A Fever In The Heartland.  Victor Green started his travel guidebook just a few years after the time period of the former book.  In those few years not much had changed in white attitudes and behaviors.

     Before you read the rest of the review, especially if you're white like me, I want you to think back on a trip you personally took by car.  What were your fears?  What precautions did you or your parents take?  Did you have to instruct your children or have your parents instruct you in survival behaviors?  How did the journey feel at a gut level?

     When I was a child in the 50s Dad used to take Harriet and me on long drives to amusement parks.  Although I didn't know it at the time, we were incredibly privileged.  We could stop at any gas station, restaurant, or other establishment and get prompt, courteous service.  Clean restrooms were always available.  If there had been a car breakdown my very unmechanical father would have had no trouble getting help.  There weren't places we had to avoid after darkness fell or at all.  

     Access to motor vehicles was a mixed blessing for Blacks in America.  On one hand it provided a way for them to avoid the degradation, humiliations, and outright perils of traveling by train or bus.  On the other hand it came with its own dangers.  In many places police and even non law enforcement whites could stop and harass or worse any Black for any reason including possession of a car.

     Victor Green decided to make traveling while Black a little less perilous.  His guidebooks, published yearly between 1936 and 1967 provided listings of safe motels, rooming houses, restaurants, gas stations, and other establishments.  For many Blacks, especially those traveling South they became survival guides.

     Hall utilized an unusual method of gathering materials for his book.  In addition to library research he took two extensive road trips, visiting places listed in the guidebooks and interviewing Blacks who had traveled during different eras.  Thanks to his living primary sources he is able to provide a rich narrative of the times in which Green created his publication and the need for it.

     While The Green Book was created as an affirmation of optimism with its editor envisioning a future of respect for all humanity in which it would no longer be needed, Hall and some of his interview subjects are a lot more guarded.  

     Jan Miles, author of The Post-Racial Negro Green Book, a collection of 21st century incidents grouped under categories such as police brutality, racial profiling, and white privilege, when asked if she could see a time when such documentation wouldn't be needed replied: "I don't see it.  I don't foresee an end to it now.  Maybe in someone else's lifetime.  If I had a child, probably not in that person's lifetime either."

     And Hall ends his book with this sobering prediction:  "If history is any judge, I doubt the current resurrection of information about the travel guide will result in its being included in textbooks approved by largely conservative white state and local education committees in the US.  Therefore, The Green Book's contribution to the lives of African Americans and the history of the United States will fade again, until a horrifying national racial event needs to be understood, needs context.  Then a new generation of Black, Brown, Asian, and white people will discover, for the first time again, along with incidents like the Red Summer of 1919 and the fate of Negro Wall Street in Tulsa in 1921, The Negro Motorist Green Book."

     So the two books I chose for my anniversary weekend reading have more in common than being rich and thought provoking portrayals of times in the recent past.  Both must serve as cautionary tales with huge implications for the present and future.

Jules Hathaway 

     

  

     

     

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