Oct 31, 2018
Book review: All We Know of Heaven by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Kindle edition 2018.
This YA novel, by the author of numerous adult and YA novels, begins inside the mind of a girl in a coma after a car accident: “Once she understood that she was dead, her first thought was that heaven was overrated.” If that puzzle pulls you right in, you will enjoy this page-turner filled with twists, turns, and surprises. Mitchard’s skillful, seemingly effortless prose never gets in the way of the story, with its engaging characters and dramatic plots. She is known for writing heart-breakers, but she doesn’t shy away from humor.
page-turner image:pinterest.com
This is the story of Bridget and Maureen, best friends since kindergarten and cheerleading teammates. Their physical resemblance is so striking that they might be twins. Their relationship is complicated – at first Bridget is the star, and Maureen her shadow. “If you want to be my friend, you have to do what I tell you,” says five-year-old Bridget. Maureen does want to be her friend, and follows her lead into pranks and trouble. For eleven years, until the accident, they are inseparable. Though a bit of a bully and mean girl, Bridget is loyal and generous to her best friend.
image: pinterest.com
The accident scene, the emergency room where staff struggle to save both girls – we see them from multiple points of view, including the brilliantly imagined thoughts of the comatose girl. One girl dies, and one struggles through many months of recovery. When the situation takes a shocking turn, we see the impact of the resulting publicity on their families and friends, and indeed, the whole town. The plot keeps turning, bringing new surprises and dilemmas. In the end, Mitchard doesn’t resolve everything, wrapping it all up in a tidy, happy package, but she leaves us with some consolation, optimistic for the future of complex characters we have come to care about.
hopeful for the future image:asssa.es
Oct 26, 2018
Book review: Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History by Camille T. Dungy. Norton 2017.
Camille Dungy is a nature poet. She has published four books of poetry, and edited the anthology, Black Nature, Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. In her frequent travels she hungrily explores local landscape and history. These twelve meditative essays weave apparently unrelated histories into her thoughts on motherhood, race, and nature, creating connections and a clear pattern by the end.
weaving: bolga baskets from Ghana source:binoandfino.com
One essay is a love letter to her infant daughter Callie. Anyone who has had and loved a baby will recognize the nutty intensity of her adoration. Dungy was a well-published poet and a creative writing professor when she had her baby in her late thirties. She was stunned by the power of maternity. “I don’t know if I can define myself anymore, now that I’m your mother. You’ve consumed me.” Hers is an animal love. She wants to gobble Callie up, and has lost all sense of propriety and privacy.
source:oaklandpost.org
She watches as Callie topples over in her crib, almost hitting her head on the bars. “How can I name what I felt when I saw you not hurt? Not this time,” she writes, knowing she won’t be able to protect her child from all harm. “I don’t know if there is a name for this in any language, the hope and hurt and hunger I hold when I hold you.”
She examines the passenger list of the Brooklyn, the ship that carried Mormon settlers from New York to California, in a dangerous voyage around Cape Horn. She reads of the babies born and the babies who died on the voyage, and tries to imagine their mothers. “The story of the Brooklyn makes me breathless with sadness and a relief that almost borders on joy. I haven’t lost you yet. I haven’t lost you yet. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” And so she has been initiated into the desperate love of motherhood, the joy that is always shadowed by fear.
source: findagrave.com
She is in demand for poetry readings and workshops, and she is an enthusiastic traveler. Because she is nursing, she can’t leave the baby at home with her husband, so she and Callie fly all over the country. She is welcomed into the world of parents, a world she was previously unaware of, and finds that her hosts are eager to help her make arrangements. But strangers in airports are often more eager to hold, to touch, to play with the baby than to help her juggle the huge quantity of stuff that traveling with a baby entails nowadays.
source: themomedit.com
In places like Maine, where there are few black people, people stare. Though friendly, they are curious, and as always in the United States, her native land, she feels set apart. As the only black person at a writers’ retreat, the other writers expect her to speak for and represent all African Americans. At the same time, one woman says, “I don’t see you as a black woman,” which means, of course, that she doesn’t see her.
The group talks about Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, and the movie made from it. She hasn’t read it. “It’s hard to explain to a table full of white folks that sometimes I’m just not interested in spending time or money on films and books that focus on the melancholy of white experience.” I read books by minority authors, by disabled people, by LGBT writers, and seek out books from Asia, Africa, Latin America. But African-Americans don’t have to seek out exposure to the lives of white people; in schools and media they’re surrounded by it.
The Hours source:decider.com
“When you belong, you can overlook the totality of otherness, the way that being other pervades every aspect of a person’s life.” She writes of the freedom and expansive bliss of her time in Ghana, where she could disappear into the crowd.
street scene in Accra, Ghana source:wired.com
Dungy’s connection to landscape, her devoted attention to nature, is what makes home for her. She was raised in California, and says, “Once, I knew the silence and wind-cry of my California hills…When I lived in California, I was at home in the language of sky and mountaintop and sea.” When she moved to Iowa, for a long time she couldn’t write. “When a poem finally came, it was written in a different tongue.”
California hills source:imgur.com/gallery/2V7y4Bp
Iowa cornfield source:iowacore.gov
As a black woman she wonders, “How do I write about the land and my place in it without remembering, without these memories: the runaway with the hounds at her heels; the complaint of the poplar at the man-cry of its load; land a thing to work but not to own?” When she is menaced by a dog, she hears its owner say, ‘Sic her. Sic.’ But when the owner repeats the command, she realizes it is ‘Sit girl. Sit.’
source:greenacreskennel.com
“My poems are informed by displacement and oppression, but they are also informed by peace, by self-possession. When I was a child…the dogs we call bloodhounds…were nothing I knew to remember. When I was a girl-child in that kingdom of open space, and all the land I could see and name and touch was mine to love…When I was a child in the hills behind that street called Bluff View, there was no such thing as history. Sometimes my poems rest again in that quiet space, that comfort.”
source:ifsnj.org
Dungy is a poet, and it is a pleasure to read her prose. Her writing flows smoothly, attentive to rhythm and sound. Her thoughts are complex and subtle, though she says, “When writing about race, there can perhaps be precious little wholly fresh revelation. As with writing about motherhood. As with writing about the corruption of the body. As with writing about landscape. It has been the same story for as long as anyone can remember.” Perhaps there is nothing new under the sun, but the light falls on our world from many different angles. Every individual sees a little differently, and this writer gives us the gift of her vision.
Book review:
Oct 20, 2018
Good and Mad, the Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, by Rebecca Traister. Simon and Schuster. 2018.
Did you watch Dr. Blasey Ford testify about being sexually assaulted in high school? The moment I saw that long arc of mostly male faces sitting in judgment, I began crying and cursing, yelling “fuckers, bastards, assholes.” My rage astonished me. I saw the fear in her face, her rapid shallow breathing, and worse, her anxiety to please, to make sure she didn’t offend or inconvenience anyone. “Will that work for you?” she asked. “If that will be helpful…” she offered. And as her testimony dragged on, in a show trial with a foregone conclusion, I sat furious, and was relieved when her ordeal was over.
Rebecca Traister’s book on the political potential of women’s anger was written at white heat in four months, and released before the toxic farce of the Kavanaugh hearing. But as I read it after the hearing, it rang true.
Good and Mad focuses on women’s political fervor following the election of Donald Trump: the 2017 Women’s March, the #MeToo movement, and the explosive growth in women running for office, the great majority of them Democrats. It also gives us history. Traister analyzes the role of women’s anger in the long fight for suffrage, and the racist anger of white suffragists when black men won the franchise first. She discusses the Second Wave women’s movement of the 1960’s and 70’s, and black women’s anger as their leadership was ignored by both their allies and the media.
Traister, a feminist journalist, has thought long and hard about how white males, 31% of the US population, can rule the rest of us through deep individual alliances and divide and conquer tactics.
images:Min An at Pexels.com steemit.com
The alliances were personal.The suffragists were sisters, wives, mothers of the middle and upper class men who ruled and shaped their world. To turn against them took enormous courage, and many of these women paid a steep price for their rebellion. In the second wave of feminism, women in consciousness raising groups understood and began to reject the terms of their marriages, and many marriages did not survive.
image:acravan.blogspot.com
The alliances were also professional. During the second wave, newly-hatched feminists, mostly middle class, mostly white, began to succeed professionally in the world shaped by men. Grudgingly or whole-heartedly they accepted the ways of that world: job comes first, family a distant second; sexual harassment is just boys being boys.
In the early 70’s, as a single mother and newly-hatched lawyer, I was thrilled to be working at an excellent legal aid program. We were united in our zeal to help the poor and oppressed, and the two male directors were smart, supportive, even nurturing. But I spent my years there feeling guilty – inadequate as a mother, inadequate as a lawyer. When I cobbled together a proposal for part-time duties, the directors said “There’s no such thing as a part-time lawyer.” At an annual retreat, some of the men organized a wet T-shirt contest for the young secretaries. We women lawyers were outraged, but it didn’t matter.
we were young and fighting for justice in the 70’s
Despite the media focus on bra burning and glass ceilings, second wave feminism was not merely theater, nor only focused on professional white women. Many of us worked on issues of domestic violence, child care, sexual assault, welfare programs. click And middle-class white women did not invent feminist activism.
Black women have been a consistent revolutionary force in progressive movements. Over and over they take the lead, and then are shoved aside, by black men, by white women. Unlike the media and many white feminists, Traister recognizes their power, and turns to them for examples of courage, expressions of anger.
She quotes Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of Anger,” about black women responding to racism in the second wave of feminism: “[E]very woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions … which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy, serving progress and change.”
Audre Lorde image:spelman.edu
Traister tells of Shirley Chisolm in 1972 running for the Democratic presidential nomination, ignored by the media, betrayed by McGovern. In public she was cool, but behind closed doors she cried, according to Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who said she was ‘very sensitive, very hurt, and very angry.’
Shirley Chisholm image:rockfordha.org
Florynce Kennedy, the flamboyant black feminist lawyer, wasn’t cool in public. When television reporters ignored Chisolm, and tried to calm down Kennedy, she threatened, “The next son of a bitch that touches a woman is going to get kicked in the balls.” I remember Flo Kennedy, who died in 2000. I was thrilled by her speech to a gathering of women law students in 1973. That may be why, when my father and brother mocked me: “Look at the radical feminist cooking breakfast for her baby boy,” I answered angrily, “Somebody’s going to get kicked in the balls,” and they fled the kitchen.
image: amazon.com
Congresswoman Maxine Waters is famously angry, and doesn’t hesitate to call for Trump’s impeachment, a call which is quickly distorted by Trump’s supporters into a call for assassination. Not just Trump, not just Fox News, but even Democratic leaders have chastised her. When she encouraged people to harass Trump’s cabinet members wherever they run into them, Chuck Schumer said it was ‘un-American,’ and Nancy Pelosi called it ‘unacceptable.’
Maxine Waters image: huffingtonpost.com
Traister says white women rely on black women to express their anger for them. “In some ways, the cultural caricature of neck-snapping, side eye-casting black female censure becomes easily embraceable precisely because it is disconnected from…power, because its relationship to the threat of actual disruption of white male authority can be understood as inherently comical. Black women’s relative distance, from both white supremacy and patriarchal advantage, makes it easier…to applaud their toughness, precisely because it is so far removed from being a true threat to white male domination.”
This post-Trump uprising of women surely contains unconscious white racism and black rage. But Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter, says there never has been a movement that wasn’t messy with internal issues. “The question for us is, are we prepared to be the first movement in history that learns how to work through that anger? To not get rid of it, not suppress it, but learn how to get through it together…”
Alicia Garza image:theguardian.com
Traister: “The post-2016 movement offers a chance for many white women to be awakened to the many reasons they should be angry. But…the opportunity is not simply to be angry on their own behalf, but also at the injustices faced by other women…who experience those injustices in part thanks to the very mechanisms that protect and enrich those white women.”
We are at the beginning of a new wave of angry women. Traister is repeatedly asked, ‘Is it a movement, or a moment?’ and she answers: “…[M]ovements are made up of moments, strung out over months, years, decades. They become discernible as movements – are made to look smooth, contiguous, coherent – only after they have made a substantive difference.”
At the 2017 Women’s March, I wore my old buttons from the 1970’s. I have been to many marches; they are both tedious and inspiring, exhausting and invigorating. To me, Traister’s book brings encouragement, hope, and maybe even a little bit of activist energy. I believe in the generative power of our anger; there is a difference between fire that rages uncontrolled and fire you use as a tool. Do I want a world of yelling? No. But I believe first you holler. Then you strategize. Then you act.
Aug 9, 2018
Sandra Lambert has given us another book of connected stories click, this time stories from her own life. Feminist bookstore owner, successful writer, outdoorswoman, nature photographer, and activist for lesbian, disability and other political rights, Lambert is a woman with many more abilities than disabilities.
Polio in early childhood led to hospitals, surgeries, body casts. Lambert grew up using crutches and leg braces, and much later in life graduated to first a manual, then an electric wheelchair.
In a built world designed for those who can walk, Lambert is attentive to her own body in a way many people aren’t. She devises ingenious work-arounds to physical limitations, and she is attuned to all her senses. Set apart by her visible disabilities, she was often lonely in childhood and adolescence, but as an adult lesbian has a large and loving community of friends, with whom she shares nature adventures, travel, food, dogs and writing. Though she doesn’t dwell on it, she mentions in passing her lively romantic life, crowned by a happy marriage in her sixties.
marrying at Payne’s Prairie
Lambert doesn’t suffer well-meaning fools gladly. She puts readers on notice in the second chapter: no pity, no sanctimonious phrases, no offers of help unless she asks. At first in leg braces, later in a wheelchair, she will always encounter strangers who feel entitled to comment, who offer pity, praise, prayers. She’s learned to ignore them – “There’s a mute button in my head for these moments” – unless they touch her. In the laundromat a babbling Christian woman approaches from behind and hugs her, whispers “Jesus loves you.” Her wrath explodes. The mildest part of her response is her threat to call the cops.
image: Facebook.com/mango coin laundry
From earliest childhood, Lambert has found joy and solace in nature. Sitting on the wet ground in the woods among lilies of the valley, “the white pearls of flowers about to open would perch on my fingertips, and they seemed to have no weight…the confusions of where to sit on the school bus or why no one sat with me…lost any substance. The honey perfume of the disturbed plants rose around me.” She enjoys wind, rain, dawn and sunset, rolling over bumpy tracks through green woods to riverbanks strewn with alligators. Her writing is as sensuous as her life. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch, are all vividly there, and the words flow as smoothly as the rivers she loves. She relishes life.
image:visitgainesville.com
Kayaking, hiking in her chair – these bring Lambert into the wild. But she’s not close enough, and she seizes opportunities for direct contact with nature. As a child, “[w]ith braces and crutches left in a jumble…I’d crawl into snow-fed lakes with sudden, immense depths…These days I slip out of my wheelchair and into Florida waters. Spring-fed rivers, warm or cool depending on the season…Atlantic waves toss me until the seafloor scrapes against my skin.”
Briefly alone on the flooded Paynes Prairie she drops from her wheelchair, and towing her kayak, wallows in the wet sand among dry-land plants now wilted and rotting in the water. “And now I think about an alligator swimming and searching for dry land. …I lift onto my elbows and look around…[T]here are no alligators…I roll back into the new mud.”
one of many gator encounters
As she gets older she encounters new physical challenges, and increasing pain. Over and over she thinks through and solves the new problems. Here is an obstacle – here’s what she’ll do about it. When she makes plans, she accounts for the aftermath – a kayaking trip will be followed by days of exhaustion and pain, but is well worth it.
Lambert in her kayak.
Sometimes she realizes she can’t do anymore what she once loved, because of the expenditure of energy required. Then she’ll mourn the loss, and move on to other joys. But her writing is honest, and she acknowledges the times when she fears what the future will bring, the fear she calls her “personal image of the apocalypse,” that she has mockingly named, “the nursing home and bedsores panic.”
image:lazaruslaw.us
“…I can sense the deep sadness that will come, and I can’t yet see the other side of this, the part where something I couldn’t even have imagined comes into my life, where beyond fear and shame there is a grace of some sort. Is it even possible anymore? Do I keep trust that it will happen again, as it has always happened?”
Lambert shares her experience as an outsider, as a woman who must work harder than most of us to live a full life. But her memoir is much more than an account of coping with disability; it is the stories from that full life, stories of the happiness she has found or created. The writing is lyrical, and seasoned with humor, She doesn’t hesitate to laugh at herself. as when she discovers that the park ranger who seemed to be disturbed by her disability was in fact closely confronted by her naked butt in pants that had split down the middle.
image: fresnobee.com
What do I love about this book? The writing, the fierce wit, the remarkable woman who speaks from its pages. Disability activists remind the rest of us that we are only ‘temporarily abled.’ If we live long, we will keep encountering new limitations, and keep adjusting to them as best we can. If we are very smart, and very lucky, we may be able to hold on to joy and passion until close to the end, and face the challenges as creatively and intelligently as Lambert.
activist
nature photographer – night heron, spider lilies
unattributed pictures are from Sandra Lambert’s Facebook page, and used with permission
A Certain Loneliness is available now from University of Nebraska Press http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9781496207197/ and on Amazon.
The launch party for the book is September 14 at 6:30PM at the Matheson History Museum 513 East University Avenue Gainesville, Florida.
Jun 18, 2018
BOOK REVIEW: WINSTON WILLIAMS, FLORIDA’S FABULOUS WATERBIRDS
We’ve come to Delray in south Florida for Fathers’ Day with Joe’s dad Ollie and his wife Annette. Whenever we visit here, we go walking at Green Cay or Wakodahatchee Wetlands, water reclamation parks with miles of boardwalk over wetland and hammock – birds everywhere, and the occasional alligator.
GREEN CAY
I’ve known Annette and Ollie close to twenty-five years. Annette and I, both opinionated feminists, connected very quickly. In early days with Ollie there was the slight wariness of father meeting girlfriend, warm but not knowing whether it’s a passing fancy or a new member of the family. For the first few visits conversation was hesitant. Gradually, a relationship built over dinner and dominoes, our shared love for Joe, and these walks at the wetlands.
ANNETTE AND OLLIE
On one of our first walks Ollie and I fell behind, leaning on the railing, watching the birds. I saw an interesting one that I couldn’t identify. “Do you know what that is?” I asked. “It’s a bird,” he said. As soon as we returned to Gainesville I bought an Audobon Field Guide, inscribed it in front ‘To Ollie from Liz. It’s a bird’ and mailed it off.
NOT A BIRD.
Image: Asbruckman at commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3877883
Now, twenty-odd years later, Joe has found a much better gift for the indifferent bird-watcher, Florida’s Fabulous Waterbirds: Their Stories by Winston Williams.
He got it on the last day of the Friends of the Library Book Sale, when all the books are 10 cents. He usually comes home with a carton-full: a couple of novels, several art books, and lots of nature books, which overflow a bookcase in our bedroom Last time the box included this treasure, promptly claimed for his Dad.
A FEW OF JOE’S BOOKS
It’s a combination of mostly-exceptional photographs and idiosyncratic prose. The pictures and prose are equally interesting. The baby egret in the nest – yellow face, white punk feather headdress, eyes round and beak wide open with what looks like alarm – is worth the price of the book (even if you bought it new).
This is not a keyed bird-watchers’ guide, but a book driven by the author’s delight. The writing is filled with light-hearted humor that only occasionally falls flat, and fascinating tidbits of information. He devotes nine pages to the brown pelican, clearly his favorite water bird. But he also shows and tells about anhingas, cormorants, storks and flamingos, and has long sections on herons, egrets, and gulls.
Mother Nature has made herons and egrets unfairly confusing, with sex differences and seasonal or age changes. Williams describes the identifying markers, which usually involve beaks and legs, yellow or black. I wish I thought I would remember them.
Cattle egrets were not seen in the new world until the 1930’s – they flew across the Atlanic from Africa. They showed up in Florida in the 1950’s. What I always considered the weird, backward-bent knees of flamingos are actually their ankles.
image: american-bird.com
“The anhinga spears his prey with his pointed beak like an arrow shot from a bow. Sometimes the spear thrust is so powerful that the anhinga has to swim to shore and pry the fish off his beak by rubbing it against a rock…The size of the fish…ranges from small to unbelievable.”
The little green heron sometimes looks as if it has no neck at all, and sometimes stretches it out to “astonishing lengths. This stretching motion is probably used to help move a large fish through its digestive tract. It is the bird equivalent of taking Rolaids. It is known to animal behavior scientists as a ‘comfort movement.’ ”
Herring gulls and black-backed gulls both have a red spot on the bottom halves of their beaks. “This is believed to be a target that aids youngsters in the nest to peck at their parents when demanding food.”
Joe likes to repeat a line from Elmore Leonard. When a Florida farmer hears of a bird-watching tour he asks, “Watch ’em do what? [Would they] pay to watch me plow a field?” Myself, I love spying on birds and beasts. Ollie may be more akin to the farmer than to me, but I bet he’ll like the wit and pictures in this book, and he’ll certainly enjoy Father’s Day with his oldest son.
JOE AND HIS DAD, WITH DAUGHTER LEAH AND THE MAGNIFICENT ULA MAE
Jul 24, 2014
BOOK REVIEW: SANDRA GAIL LAMBERT, THE RIVER’S MEMORY
I have a bad habit of gobbling books, racing through them to see what happens next. (This is similar to the way I often eat.) But sometimes a really fine book will slow me down. It’s partly a matter of vivid, melodious writing, with every word the right one and no words to spare. It makes me want to savor the sentences. And if the characters move me, the stories are page-turners, and it’s filled with delicious details, why wouldn’t I want to linger at the table?
image:Twisted Road Publications
The River’s Memory, a novel by Sandra Gail Lambert, not only rewarded my careful reading, but made me want to read it twice. It tells the separate stories of six women and one little girl who lived along the Silver River in north central Florida. Lambert writes as though she were possessed by her seven characters. She lives in their worlds, sees their visions, and dreams their dreams. Each character becomes real, with her own distinctive voice. Because Lambert inhabits their lives, we do too, and care desperately about the fate of these women, all but one long gone.
photographs by Sandra Gail Lambert: Waccassassa and Wekiva Rivers(north Florida), Silver River – night heron and spider lilies
All the characters are intimately connected to the river, and to wild nature. They are solitary, sometimes lonely – though some have lovers, their lives are centered in nature, work, their creative vision, or simply survival. Their stories give us the history of Florida from prehistoric times into the 21st century: the extinction of species, indigenous trade before the European invasion, lynchings, the first world war and the flu epidemic, and the tacky tourism overlay which, for so many people, represents Florida. Artifacts from one story – a pot shard, a dugout canoe, a shred of scarf, a silver hip flask, appear in the stories that follow.
dugout canoe submerged in Lake Pithlochoco, Gainesville FL image:semtribe.com
In the 16th century a Native American potter finds her clay and her inspiration in the river. Surrounded by enemies and treachery, brought down by illness, she holds onto her creative vision – all that matters is the clay, the next pot. From one enemy she hears rumors of invaders from across the sea:“…Men furred like animals, too many to count, who rode on top of beasts….they say that the hair dangled off their faces like moss and some of their chests shone like the sun. Weapons bounced off of them.”
Tristan da Luna – early invader image:flickr.com
Just before the Civil War, a little girl on the Florida frontier has the woods and the river for her playground. “I poke the caterpillar. The yellow horns pop out of its back. From this close, I can see the slime. I touch them and wipe my finger on the hem of my over slip, and it stains, but maybe Mother won’t see. The horns flop and suck back under the skin. I poke it again, and the horns do it again. They look the same yellow as what ran out of the sore on Sister’s leg….Now I see all the other caterpillars… I pull at one and its feet suck onto the leaves. I pull harder, and it keeps eating even with the back half of its body in the air….”
“Mist is lace on top of the water. A little more day and it’ll disappear. Sister and I wave our hands into the white, and it spins into the sky like smoke. I lean beside Sister and we reach our hands until they touch the water and make circles in our reflections.”
Santa Fe River (north Florida) image:clubfla.org
It is 1918, the height of the War and the flu epidemic. We are at the Florida Industrial School for Girls, where inmates labor in the kitchen. With contagion spreading through the school, an orphan girl runs away, looking for her grandparents’ old home. She finds it abandoned and in ruins. She grieves and remembers, and her pain – aching head and bones, charred throat, itchy skin – seems to be one with her grief.
Florida Industrial School for Girls image: State Archives of Florida Florida memory
During the Depression, a woman born with no legs, who walks on her hands, finds her freedom rowing and swimming in the river at night, communing with the manatees. She eases her constant pain with rum. Her parents have done their best to give her privacy and independence, while keeping her at home. They have built her a downstairs suite with a separate entrance. “But I don’t need a room of my own. I need the rest of the world.”
image:manatee-world.com
Boys who spot her in the river surround and torment her like mosquitoes. “The line of them have unbuttoned their pants. They waggle small penises and laugh. I’m on my second generation of little boys. It seems that any of their parents who remember I’m a woman haven’t told them. No one’s yelling Mockie or Jew boy, so this particular batch doesn’t know about that either.”
image:mccullagh.org
The end of the 20th century, and an old woman in a hospital. As she lies dying, her pain eased and tongue loosened by ample doses of painkilling drugs, she tells her memories to a prim lady from the local Historical Society.
Her lover – a 65-year-old woman with “sparkles of red” in her silver hair,“my gal”- comes to take her home, but she demands to be taken to the river instead. There she lies among pillows in an abandoned canoe, while her lover poles them down the river.
“Arrowhead stalks stretch up my spine and bloom their white flowers into my breasts…. A turtle swims away from us, the flip of her turtle feet a tickle along my ribs, and an alligator splashes off the sunny bank…I see the alligator’s old relative, the crocodile, blinking its transparent eyelids and swimming in the ancient ocean that existed here above us all.”
image:Sandra Gail Lambert
The sour salesclerk in the Silver Springs souvenir shop has worked there for thirty years. She observes the tourists buying tchotckes with grim amusement. “My ex-mother-in-law collected owls. I guess she still does. I guess women have to collect something so their families will know what to buy them for gifts.”
image:etsy.com
She’s been doing the job for thirty years, and now has to deal with her first “younger-than-I-am boss.” When she is fired, she runs from the security guards and climbs the fence to the river, where she is caught in a fierce winter storm.
10,000 years ago, when giant sloths still loomed twenty feet above the native hunters, and saber tooth tigers were not quite extinct, a woman travels the coast to trade with the river people on behalf of her tribe. “These people who live so far from the sea, they pack together, and they stink – of the sticky pine in their fires, the sour bark drink they make, the rock dust that floats from their chert quarry…” Lambert fully imagines the life of these prehistoric people – their tense negotiations in trade, their intimate knowledge of the natural world, the children who remain unnamed until they have survived the hazards of early childhood.
image: slothsanctuary.com
cast of 14-inch sloth claw. image:naturalworld1.blogspot
This is a book of the body, of the senses. Sights, sounds, smells, touch lead through memory to revelation or understanding. It is a book of close description, but not the sort that makes your eyes glaze over, waiting for something to for godsake happen. Each story is filled with suspense, often with violence, threat, and tragedy. And the details are so telling – funny, poignant, or heartbreaking.
The River’s Memory is a feast. Don’t gobble it down; savor it.
Sandra Gail Lambert. image:Facebook
The River’s Memory is available from your local independent bookstore, or from any of the usual venues, in paperback and ebook.
