Tag: slavery

Black Experience, book-review, books, reading

Homegoing

k4books

In my first attempt of the year I head to my library’s website.  My first stop – my lists of saved titles to read.  Around the World – my list of books to read from every country – beckons me.  After reading many Top Ten lists of 2021, I choose Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I click the button to reserve my copy.  In one week, it is in my house. 

The story pulls me in immediately. First, we meet Effia, a girl in a village in Ghana.  Her father is “a big man” in the village.  Her mother beats her often.  The chief is set to marry her when she becomes a woman, but her mother tells her to keep that a secret.  Instead of earning an honored place in the village as a first wife, Effia is given into marriage with a British officer.  When she goes to Cape Coast Castle, she discovers there are people that look like her in the dungeon that will be sold as slaves.  She learns quickly that the British will become “mean” when questioned about this.

Next you meet Esi.  She is the daughter of “a big man” in a different village.  Her mother loves her and is always near her side.  It is in this story that you start to hear that people in the North are not human.  The Villagers have conducted raids across the country, being known as a strong tribe to be afraid of.  Prisoners are held in cages in the village center, with people walking by to spit on them because they are not people.  Esi’s mother is forced by her husband to pick a girl to be a house girl.  The mother protects her as best she can.  It is not until after the girl is whipped by the father for dropping two drops of water, at the urging of the rest of the family, that Esi learns that her mother had been a slave before.  As fate has it, it is Esi that ends up in the dungeon below where Effia is.  This is when we learn that these are half sisters, each traveling a very different path from the other. 

I am very uncomfortable reading this book, which is probably the point.  From the first, when I realize that the villagers participated and profited from enslaving their own kind, just from a different village, I am sick.  When I realize the animals that are found around those villages become what these people are called in derogatory terms, I am horrified – I knew of the slur, but this put the pieces together of where the slur came from.  The way groups of people dismiss others – making it easy to treat them badly by stripping them of any humanity – is way too familiar.  This is the tactics that the Nazis took in 1930s Germany against the Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and more.  These tactics are not just our history.

This history continues to haunt us.  The legacy of slavery remains in the systemic structures of our world, including education, economic support for the poor, and access to proper mental and physical health resources. We continue to be faced with the stark realities of continued prejudice: Floyd George’s murder, LGBQT+ being thrown off roofs, and women like Malala being shot.  Until we start looking at others as part of us, this will not change.  There continue to be people that need to be better at someone’s cost. They lead the way for others to feel better about themselves by putting others down. They strip the belief in the humanity from those they push down.  All those that participate in this, or that stand by and let it happen, ultimately lose their own humanity. We need to open oppressor’s eyes to this.  Unless we all understand we are in this together, there will be no end. 

This is my reaction from the first third of the book.  My soul is crying, and I can’t continue.  If the rest of the story continues as well written, I can only guess at the depth of feeling and thought it will provoke in its readers.  As for me, I am too saddened by the reality of what this represents, and gripped by the fear that we have not learned enough to keep it from happening again. 

Black Experience, book-review, books, reading

The book of lost friends

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This is a book with at least two stories, all that intersect around family, and history.  We start meeting Benedetta Silva, known as Benny as she starts her first job teaching at a poor rural school in Louisiana to help pay off her student debt.  Although she is white, she is living in poverty until her first paycheck arrives.  She is intimidated by the unruly teens that await her, fighting with each other, and never listening.  She tries everything to get them engaged, even buying treats for those that are hungry from her low salary. 

Next we meet Hannie and her slave family were being moved from Louisiana to Texas by a relative to keep them from being set free.  Out of sight of the owners, the relative starts to sell off the family in ones or twos the whole way there.  The last to be sold, Hannie finally gets the buyer to understand that she was stolen and sold away from her rightful owner.  Along the way, she had kept track of who was sold where, in the hopes to reunite with them in the future.

As we follow Hannie, who is returned to the original plantation alone but strikes out as a sharecropper with a few other slaves that had remained, we see that she is smart and resourceful.  Lavinia, the plantation owner’s pampered daughter, meets with Juneau Jane, the plantation owner’s mulatto daughter by his mistress.  Afraid that Lavinia’s arrival meant that the head of the Gossett plantation was dead, Hannie listens in to find out what is happening because there was only one year left on the lease before the sharecropping land was to be free and clear for her and those working it.  The three end up in an odyssey to find the father, to determine who was entitled to what property.  At one point the three end up in a church, where the walls were covered in posters of letters to friends, where people were looking to reconnect with those that had been sold away. 

Benny, who is renting out a home near the plantation because it was the cheapest she could find, needs help when the roof starts to leak. Through this challenge, Benny meets marvelous women that have kept the community together and give Benny hope for surviving.  Through the stories that Benny hears from Mrs T, she decides that this is the story that would resonate with her students, and asks her to come and tell it to the kids.  The kids are hooked and come up with a way to bring the stories to life.  While not approved by the school board, made up of rich white folks, the stories are coming from the Carnegie Library, a source of pride of the community at one time.  Facing a threatening police force, and the school board that sends their own kids to a private school instead, Benny is told to just let the kids get a vocational education as they were not better than that. 

Throughout the chapters flipping between the two, actual letters written and sent are included.  These had been published in the Southern Methodist newspaper and was shared via pulpits across the country.  The heartwrenching stories behind each of these hit home for me.  I did not know that these adverts had been created for people to finds each other in the late 1800 – early 1900s.  I did, however, understand these completely.  As a Jew, I am fully aware that after WWII, the same was happening in the displacement camps throughout Europe with people searching for any connections that may be left.  It is the guilt at being alive, combined by the fear of being alone, that makes these so sad.  While the longing is always there, sometimes it is easier not to ask the question for fear of the answer.

That also is true when it comes to a hard past.  In the Louisiana is the reality that slavery did happen.  Ancestors we part.  But in order to remain in power, the stories and intimidation continued.  It is this need to keep the power structure as it is, and the fear of what will happen if it is not, that keeps the true history of the plantation and those that lived on it.  Until you face the choices that you made, good or bad, and acknowledge them, you are doomed to spend your life covering up for them.