Nov 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW: SUSAN NUSSBAUM, GOOD KINGS, BAD KINGS
My writer friend Sandra, a voracious reader, introduces me to many books I might not otherwise see. Some of them take me into a world I have never thought about.
Good Kings, Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum is a novel set in the Illinois Learning and Life Skills Center, a nursing home for severely disabled children. It is a novel with a purpose, to let disabled characters speak for themselves.
Nussbaum believes such institutions “need to be done away with, once and for all” click. But unlike so many writers with a cause, who hit you over the head with a righteous bludgeon, Nussbaum never seems to be preaching. She creates a fully realized world and gripping plots, and though she writes from the point of view of seven different characters, she mostly makes it work. I wasn’t far into the book before I recognized their vivid individual voices, and no longer needed to flip back through the pages to see who was who.
Three of the speaking characters are teenaged residents of the Center, three are employees, and one is an employee of the health care corporation which owns it. Her job is to recruit new residents, and investigate Center operations to find cost cutting opportunities.
The teenagers don’t define themselves by their disabilities, though the world may do so. They are typical teenagers – falling in love, mischief-making, yearning to be understood. They resent authority and scorn the adult world.
A FAMILIAR TEEN LOOK. IMAGE OF LINDSAY LEE USED WITH HER PERMISSION click
Listen to Yessenia, the fiercest and funniest of the gang. She is a bad-ass 15-year-old who has just been released from juvenile detention. Her aunt who was raising her is dead, so she is placed at the Center, and attends Herbert Hoover High School.
I went there on account of I am physically challenged, and they send the people which have challenges to Hoover. They send peope with physical challenges, but also retarded challenges, people been in accidents like brain accidents, or they’re blind or what have you. I do not know why they send us all to the same place but that’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it looks like it will always be because I am in tenth grade and I been in cripple this or cripple that my whole sweet, succulent Puerto Rican life.
PUERTO RICAN DAY PARADE. IMAGE:LATINO.FOXNEWS.COM
Moving into the center is a shock for Yessenia.
They got the most stupidest rules in here that I ever heard of…You’re not allowed outside the damn building alone without passing another one of their bullshit tests. By ‘outside the building’ they don’t mean plain old outside either. They mean outside like ‘stay on the grass in front of the door.’ They think you’re too stupid to even walk out the door on your own. I was raised in the city. I grew up in the Puerto Rican ghetto. I think I know how to walk outside a damn door…you’re not allowed alone on a bus – a regular bus that I been taking by myself since I was a child – without a houseparent. This is almost worse than Juvie. At least at Juvie you were suppose to be punished.
ACCESSIBLE CITY BUS. IMAGE:FCGOV.COM
Joanne, a disabled woman, is a data entry clerk at the center, who is connected to the Center for Disability Justice. She befriends some of the residents, and hopes to get them the subsidies the law provides so they can live independently when they reach 22. Yessenia learns about disability activists from her, and when a boy dies after being scalded in the shower, Yessenia takes action. She chains herself to a tree with a sign “They kill and abuse children here.”
IMAGE: MIUSA.ORG click
DISABILITY PROTEST IN CHICAGO. IMAGE: NGA.ADAPT.ORG click
In response to the death and Yessenia’s protest, the board of directors hold a damage-control meeting. Michelle, the recruiter, takes notes.
[The lawyer wants to] take the emphasis off the small number of children who die [and emphasize] the very large number of children who live…I write down, “Most children stay alive here.”
Cost-cutting means most employees wear several hats. Ricky, the Center’s bus driver, also has to restrain the children or take them to the time-out room when they misbehave. He and Joanne become lovers, and he tells her
All I do all day is punish these children…When we’re in the bus – when me and the kids are in the bus everything’s cool. We got our own little kingdom, you know? But more and more all they want me to do is lock them up or hold them down and I hate it. I hate it.
And Joanne says to me, ‘ Maybe you need to think about getting out.’
I’m like, ‘ Yeah, but then I think they’ll get some other gorilla instead of me and at least if I’m doing the job it’s one less psycho messing with them, you know?’
‘Raping them,’ she says.
Neither one of us talks for a while after she says that.”
We hear from the child who is being repeatedly raped by one of the aides. We hear from Teddy, the man who is in love with her, He is almost 22, and looking forward to independent living.
I’m starting to save my allowance up. It’s part of my plan for running away. I saved last month’s allowance for a week…but then Louie stole it. I know it was Louie cause he’s a asshole and I had it the night he worked and next morning it was gone. I had it under my seat cushion and he was the one who plugged my wheelchair into the charger after I was in bed. It don’t do no good to complain. They just say ‘I didn’t do it…’ and you can’t prove it they did.
When I’m on the loose I’m gonna get a place to live and an aide. I’m gonna go to bed as late as I want. I’ll eat dinner when I want. I’ll have beer. I’ll take the bus wherever I feel like it….
The day I turn twenty-two they want to ship me off to a old people’s home. They’re going to stick me with the grandmas and the grandpas….So that’s why I got to run.
HIS MODEST AMBITION
We all begin life needing twenty-four hour assistance. Those of us who are lucky gradually become more and more able to do for ourselves. And then if we live long enough we may again need assistance.
Only the richest of us can afford a personal care attendant twenty-four hours a day, and society as a whole is not willing to subsidize such private care. So we establish institutions, where we can achieve economies of scale, and then we try to avoid looking inside to see how those economies, and the additional economies of the profit motive, play out.
A RESIDENTIAL FACILITY
We only value personal care-giving if it is provided free, by loving family members, usually women. Because care-giving is valued in sentiment rather than dollars and cents, we pay abysmally low wages to those who give care, and profit-driven corporations cut costs by reducing staff to dangerous levels. The alternative, of funding well-paid assistance in individuals’ own homes or small group homes, seems too costly for us to bear.
I have quoted extensively from the book, because I really hope you will read it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want to throw things. Nussbaum opens the doors of a dreadful place. She shows us lives and circumstances that most people have never seen. But though the book is horrifying, it is not depressing, because the characters are so impressive, and because things look pretty hopeful for some of them at the end. I feel lucky to have heard from them.
Jun 7, 2013
ANNE TYLER, THE BEGINNER’S GOODBYE
I have long been a fan of Anne Tyler. She is a master of character, writing with intelligence, compassion and humor about ordinary lives. She says
My reason for writing is to live other lives, and I do that by burrowing deeper and deeper, quarter inch by quarter inch, into the center of those lives.
Her characters are quirky, but everyone, if sufficiently known, is quirky. No one is boring. This is not to say that some people don’t bore us, especially if they won’t shut up, but if we could hear their thoughts, know their histories and habits, their joys and sorrows, we would find them unique and fascinating.
Though Tyler takes us deep inside her characters, the experience is not claustrophobic, because she achieves a perfect balance between action and response. (I’m currently reading a writer who writes one sentence of dialog or action followed by a paragraph of the character thinking about it. I’m choking.)
Many of Tyler’s books deal with marriage and family, the ties of time and affection that can bind people together despite conflicting expectations and desires, and radically different world views. She writes about the daily, often mundane incidents of ordinary lives – walking a dog, preparing a meal.
image:petadvisor4U.blogspot.com
The incidents are peculiar, yet feel entirely realistic. In Accidental Tourist, Macon washes his clothes each night by stirring them around in the bathtub while he takes a shower. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the darkest Tyler book and probably my favorite, Pearl, in a rage at her daughter’s messy room, drags all the clothes out of the closet and dumps the dresser drawers out on the floor. One of the funniest scenes I have ever read is at the beginning of Breathing Lessons, another favorite, when Maggie and Ira, her husband of twenty-eight years, are driving to a distant funeral and talking at cross-purposes – she wants to focus on their son’s relationship with his ex-wife, while he wants to understand how Maggie smashed up their car just as she exited a body shop.
image:junkacarorlando.com
Anne Tyler is an accessible literary writer. Her writing never intrudes, or distracts us from the characters and story. There is no self-indulgence here, no ‘Look at me, I’m writing’ pyrotechnics, just a smooth flow of language that carries us deeper and deeper into the characters’ lives. Still, because I write, I tend to notice and analyze a felicitous phrase, and from many years back I remember her description of a woman washing dishes as she watches her children out the kitchen window, “her careless ease with dishes, ceaseless care with children.’ I marvel at that – I’m sure that rhetoric has a name for such word play.
image:corbisimages.com
For years I devoured each of Anne Tyler’s novels when it appeared, and then for a while I lost track of her. I recently found her again, and read The Beginner’s Goodbye.
Aaron Woolcott’s wife Dorothy was killed when a tree fell on their house and crushed her. Now, according to Aaron, she has come back. The novel is about healing from a loved one’s death. That description could fit a self-help book, but here there are no platitudes, no encouraging advice. It is a vivid, comical tale of loss and recovery.
Aaron begins his story with, “The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how people reacted.” Immediately I accepted his point of view, though for most of us the strangest thing would be not the reaction but the return.
She was unique among women, Dorothy. She was one of a kind. Lord, she left a hole behind. I felt as if I’d been erased, as if I’d been ripped in two. Then I looked down the street and saw her standing on the sidewalk.
image:exploreuk.uky.edu
Dorothy keeps reappearing – at the farmers’ market, in the street, outside their house. He is eager to see and talk with her, and looks for her everywhere. Aaron believes both that she is ‘real’ and that it is all in his head.
I had first tried to do without her – to.’get over’ my loss, ‘find closure,’ ‘move on,’ all those ridiculous phrases people use when they’re urging you to endure the unendurable. But eventually she had faced the fact that we simply missed each other too much. She had given in and returned. That’s what I liked to believe.
Aaron’s account of their life together is filled with his love and grief, his memories, his regrets. He argues with her each time she reappears, and concludes that although he loved her, their marriage was unhappy, or at least difficult.
He reviews their clumsy courtship, when he was eager as a puppy and she was unaware they were courting, and goes on to explain the many ways they were at odds with each other. He loved her for her lack of feminine charm – her frumpiness, her failure to nurture him – but also resented it. He was blind to her hesitant attempts to take care of him, to make herself more attractive. When they married she diffidently offered to wear a white dress -“I could do that. I wouldn’t mind.” and went on to describe it in detail, including a bouquet. And he responded “We’re neither of us the type for that, thank heaven.”
image:alakewedding.com
Other people – his colleagues at the vanity press where he is an editor, his neighbor, his sister – try to offer comfort and companionship, but he fends them off, much the same way he fended Dorothy off. Eventually he does ‘find closure, get over it, and move on,’ though he says
It’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are muffled, sort of. Then, every now and then, I lift a corner of the blanket, just to check, and -whoa! Like a knife!
Lately I’ve been preoccupied with loss, dreading not my own death, but the death of people I love. This is probably a function of my age. You needn’t be 65, or morbidly obsessed, however, to enjoy The Beginner’s Goodbye. If you like fascinating, maddening characters, and you enjoy laughing out loud when you read, do try Anne Tyler.
I’m a big Anne Tyler fan
May 18, 2012
BOOK REVIEW: ELINORE PRUITT STEWART, LETTERS OF A WOMAN HOMESTEADER
I love to read about pioneer women, about their struggles and hardships, their courage and strength. They worked so hard, found joy in tiny simple things, and came together in celebration and sorrow.
I know that the pioneers made their lives by destroying the world of the Native Americans. This sentence would logically be followed by a “but…,” and an excuse, but I have no exculpatory statement to make about the brutal imperialism of the westward movement. I only have my belief that we must take history as we find it, and my awareness that my own comfortable life is built on the oppression of others, at home and around the world, and so I won’t cast the first stone.
Elinore Pruitt Stewart was a homesteader in Wyoming when she wrote these letters to her friend Mrs. Coney. She had been working in Denver as a laundress, furnace tender and housekeeper to support herself and her 4-year-old daughter Jerrine. She hated the city, and wanted her own homestead, so she placed an ad seeking employment on a ranch, with the idea she would learn about ranching life as she established her claim. A Scottish homesteader, Clyde Stewart, hired her as a housekeeper for his small cattle ranch.
CLYDE STEWART’S HOMESTEAD, FROM WYOMINGTALESANDTRAILS.COM
Elinor was an adventurous young woman. She says, “I wanted to just knock about foot-loose and free to see life as a gypsy sees it. I had planned to see the Cliff Dwellers’ home; to live right there until I caught the spirit of the surroundings enough to live over their lives in imagination anyway. I had planned to see the old missions and to go to Alaska; to hunt in Canada. I even dreamed of Honolulu …I aimed to see all the world I could, but…first I wanted to try homesteading.” As it turned out, homesteading was all the adventure she had, and all the adventure she needed.
Clyde Stewart is a comical character in her letters. “Mr. Stewart is absolutely no trouble, for as soon as he has his meals he retires to his room and plays on his bagpipe…It is ‘The Campbells are Coming,’ without variations,…from seven till eleven at night. Sometimes I wish they would make haste and get here.” Six weeks after her arrival, she married him. She kept it a secret from Mrs. Coney for a year, ashamed that she married so quickly. “But although I married in haste, I have no cause to repent. That is very fortunate because I have never had one bit of leisure to repent in.”
RON LEISHMAN CARTOON AT CLIPARTOF.COM
Even after marriage she was resolutely independent. She had filed her first claim, on the land adjoining Mr. Stewart’s, soon after she arrived in Wyoming, and planned to file for another 160 acres in the desert as soon as she had enough cash: $40 to file and $160 after five years. “I should not have married if Clyde had not promised I should meet all my land difficulties unaided. I wanted the fun and the experience.”
ELINOR PRUITT STEWART ON HAY MOWER, FROM EPSRANCH.COM
In her first summer in Wyoming, Elinore mowed hay for over two months. She also milked the cows every day, did all the cooking for the ranchhands, and put up sixty pints of jellies made from wild fruits.
When the ranchhands departed for the roundup and there was a lull in the work, she went camping in the mountains with a saddle horse and pack horse, Jerrine riding behind her. On their second morning they woke to find new snow weighing down the tree branches that sheltered them. It was still snowing hard, and she says, “I began to think how many kinds of idiot I was. Here I was thirty or forty miles from home, in the mountains where no one goes in the winter…”
But as they rode through the snowstorm they came across the little farm of Zebulon Pike Parker, an 80-year-old sheep farmer who was too tender-hearted to sell any of his thirty sheep. They spent the night with him, breakfasting on coffee, venison steak, hoe cakes and honey, and then he accompanied them on the two-day journey home. Zebulon and Elinore became the best of friends, and later she reunited him with his southern family – he was illiterate so he had not been able to stay in touch.
ILLUSTRATION BY N.C.WYETH from LETTERS OF A WOMAN HOMESTEADER
Elinore made friends of all ages and types. When the ranch hands were out on the range and there was no one to cook for, she was free to go off on adventures. With Mrs. Louderer, a lonely German widow, she prepared a Christmas feast for the shepherds in a dozen distant camps. Because cattle men and sheep men were enemies, she didn’t mention her Christmas plans to Clyde, but after cooking for several days to keep her household supplied, she set off to Mrs. Louderer’s ranch.
“I never worked harder in my life or had such a pleasant time… We roasted six geese, boiled three small hams and three hens. We had besides several meat loaves and links of sausage. We had twelve large loaves of the best rye bread; a small tub of doughnuts, twelve coffee-cakes…and also a quantity of little cakes with seeds, nuts and fruits in them, – so pretty to look at and so good to taste…I had [brought] thirteen pounds of butter and six pint jars of jelly, so we melted the jelly and poured it into twelve glasses.” They drove across the country in their four-horse sled – “Tam O’Shanter and Paul Revere were snails compared to us” – delivering twelve boxes of Christmas feasts to the delighted shepherds.
SHEPHERD, FROM KNOWLEDGECENTER.UNR.EDU
Elinore was quick to help a a stranger in need, who then became a friend. She organized a huge birthday celebration for an ancient woman who was raising her granddaughter. The feasting went on all day and the guests left the next morning. At the end of a long letter telling the story, she mentions that she has been very busy, arranging the funeral for “a dear little child [who] has joined the angels.”
A year and a half later she confessed to Mrs. Coney that it was her own son who had died. “For a long time my heart was crushed. He was such a sweet, beautiful boy. I wanted him so much. He died of erisypelas. I held him in my arms till the last agony was over. Then I dressed the beautiful body for the grave….Little Jamie was the first little Stewart. God has given me two more precious little sons. The old sorrow is not so keen now. I can bear to tell you about it, but I never could before.”
Elinor’s life was filled with love, adventure, humor, friendship, and incredibly hard work. She relished life even when she was engulfed by sorrow. “When you think of me, you must think of me as one who is truly happy.” She lists her blessings: “my home among the blue mountains, my healthy, well-formed children, my clean, honest husband, my kind, gentle milk cows, my garden [with] loads and loads of flowers…chickens, turkeys and pigs which are my own special care. I have some slow old gentle horses and an old wagon. I can load up the kiddies and go where I please any time. I have the best, kindest neighbors and I have my dear absent friends. Do you wonder I am so happy? When I think of it all, I wonder how I can crowd all my joy into one short life.”
ELINOR PRUITT STEWART, FROM NEW FRONTIERS, UNKNEWS.COM
Note: Elinor made ample use of poetic license in her letters. According to information on wyomingtalesandtrails.com, Stewart left her first husband after a year of marriage. He was still alive when she married Clyde. Though she presents herself as a southerner, she actually grew up in Oklahoma. And Clyde was born in Pennsylvania, rather than being an immigrant from Scotland. She lost the right to file a claim when she married, so her claim had to be made in the name of her mother-in-law, who was a head of household.
click
Mar 2, 2012
For your amusement and edification, here is a compilation of anecdotes, quotations, and a bit of poetry in honor of Women’s History Month. At the end of this post I’ve included links to buy the books I used.
Mehitabel Haskell, speaking at the Worcester Convention, October 15, 1851:
“…This meeting, as I understand it, was called to discuss Woman’s Rights. Well, I do not pretend to know exactly what woman’s rights are; but I do know that I have groaned for forty years, yea, for fifty years, under a sense of woman’s wrongs. I know that even when a girl, I groaned under the idea that I could not receive as much instruction as my brothers could. I wanted to be what I felt I was capable of becoming, but opportunity was denied me. I rejoice in the progress that has been made. I rejoice that so many women are here; it denotes that they are waking up to some sense of their situation…” (Tanner, Leslie B.,ed. Voices from Women’s Liberation, p.63. Signet. New York.1970)
VICTORIAN SCHOOLGIRLS SCHOOLGIRLS IN AFGHANISTAN
Sojourner Truth, speaking at the Broadway Tabernacle, September 6, 1853:
“…Now, women do not ask half of a kingdom, but their rights, and they don’t get them. When she comes to demand them, don’t you hear how sons hiss their mothers like snakes, because they ask for their rights; and can they ask for anything less? … But we’ll have our rights; see if we don’t; and you can’t stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as you like, but it is coming. Women don’t get half as much rights as they ought to; we want more, and we will have it…”
(Tanner, p. 73)
PHOTOBUCKET.COM by WOMAN-HEART
Reverend Olympia Brown was the first woman ordained by the Universalist Church. In 1867 Lucy Stone asked her to go to Kansas to work for suffrage there: a referendum was coming up on a constitutional amendement granting suffrage to Blacks and women. She tells us about that summer and fall:
“Kansas was just then emerging from the great struggle for freedom which culminated in the civil war. Many of her men had been killed… The crops that season had been destroyed by grass hoppers. Many of the pioneers were suffering from malaria and other diseases incident to the settlement of a new country. There were few public conveyances, either by rail or stage or livery. The outlook was not encouraging. [The party had made the speaking engagements without any knowledge of the country, and they were often fifty miles apart]…. In many places there were no roads, only a trail across the prairie and sometimes not even that. Under such circumstances, to lose our way became almost a daily experience… But on we went, and the most remarkable thing about the campaign was that notwithstanding all these difficulties, the speaker did not, during the whole four months, miss one appointment.” [The amendment was rejected.] (Stratton, Joanna L. Pioneer Women:Voices from the Kansas Frontier, p. 261. Simon and Shuster, NY. 198l.)
KONZA PRAIRIE TRAIL, KANSAS RAKING AND BURNING GRASSHOPPERS
Mississippi Winter IV, by Alice Walker:
My father and mother both
used to warn me
that “a whistling woman and a crowing
hen would surely come to
no good end.” And perhaps I should
have listened to them.
But even at the time I knew
that though my end probably might
not
be good
I must whistle
like a woman undaunted
until I reached it.
(Walker, Alice, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, p. 22. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. New York. 1984.)
At the founding meeting of The National Colored Labor Union in 1869, the needs of working women were ignored, and the women challenged the group. A delegate from Newport, Rhode Island, spoke:
“…Are we to be left out? we who have suffered all the evils of which you justly complain? Are our daughters to be denied the privilege of honestly earning a livelihood by being excluded from the milliner, dressmaker, tailor, or dry good store, in fact every calling that an intelligent, respectable industrious female may strive to obtain, and this merely because her skin is dusky? These privileges are all denied colored females of Newport. However well they may be fitted for other positions, they are compelled to accept the meanest drudgeries or starve… Therefore the colored women of Newport would ask that you remember us in your deliberations so that when you mount the chariot of equality, in industrial and mechanical pursuits, we may at least be permitted to cling to the wheels.” (Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter, p.69. Bantam Books. Toronto. 1984.)
NATIONAL COLORED LABOR UNION CONVENTION
Ida B.Wells, a Black journalist from Memphis, is best-known as leader of a campaign against lynching. “It was 1884, and Ida B. Wells took her seat in the “Ladies Coach” of a train bound for Memphis from Woodstock, Tennessee. But by that year, customs in the South were changing. A conductor demanded that Wells leave the first class section for the smoking car. When she refused, the conductor attempted to force her from her seat – a mistake, he quickly realized when he felt a vicelike bite on the back of his hand. He called more conductors to his aid, and to the standing cheers of the White passengers on the train, the three men dragged [her] out of the car.”
Wells sued the railroad. She won, and the railroad appealed. They offered her more money than the court had awarded her if she would just not contest the appeal. She refused. The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the award. (Giddings, p. 22)
IDA B. WELLS
Here is an anonymous pioneer on the Kansas frontier, speaking about the marriage vows:
I already had ideas of my own about the husband being the head of the family. I had taken the precaution to sound him on ‘obey’ in the marriage pact and found he did not approve of the term. Approval or no approval, that word ‘obey’ would have to be left out. I had served my time of tutelage to my parents as all children are supposed to. I was a woman now and capable of being the other half of the head of the family. His word and my word would have equal strength.” (Stratton, p. 58)
“Ella May Wiggins was born in 1889 in Appalachia. At sixteen, she married a logger. A few years later, he was crippled in an accident, leaving her the sole provider for a family of nine children, four of whom died of whooping cough. She moved the family to cotton mill country and worked for ten years as a spinner. She joined the National Textile Workers Union, engaged in ferocious struggle with the company bosses and used her own songs for organizing. In 1929, at the bloodiest moment in the union struggle, she was shot and killed on her way to a union meeting at the mill in Gastonia, North Carolina.” (Bernikow, Louise, ed. The World Split Open, p. 309. Vintage Books. New York. 1974)
Revolutionary Dreams by Nikki Giovanni:
i used to dream militant
dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i’d be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural
dreams of being a natural
woman doing what a woman
does when she’s natural
i would have a revolution
(Giovanni, Nikki, Re:Creation,, p.20. Broadside Press. Detroit.1970)
Septima Poinsette Clark was born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, and died in 1987. She was an unsung hero of the civil rights movement, who established citizenship schools throughout the South, recruiting hundreds of teachers who taught thousands of others to read, to register to vote, and to stand up for their rights. She said,
“I think that the work the women did during the time of civil rights is what really carried the movement along. The women carried forth the ideas. I think the civil rights movement would never have taken off if some women hadn’t started to speak up.
Women need to grab the men by the collar and do more. That’s the way I feel. We need women who will get these men by the collar and work with them. We still have a hard time getting them to see what it means to vote.” (Lanker, Brian. I Dream a World, p. 164. Stewart, Tabori, and Chang. New York, 1989.)
SEPTIMA POINSETTE CLARK. IMAGE BY BRIAN LANKER
Johnnie Tillmon, born 1926 in Arkansas, is the founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization. She says:
“I got this idea of organizing women on welfare who lived in the project. We stopped a lot of harassment. There used to be a time when they would look in your dirty clothes hamper for men’s clothes. They used to come to your house at midnight and they used to pump the kids, “Where’s your daddy?”
If your kids look clean or your house looks clean, then you must be doing something fraudulent, because they understand that you really shouldn’t be able to do what you do with the money you get. So when you trade a man for the man, you still got somebody telling you how to live your life.
There’s six white women to every black one on AFDC in this country. But nobody ever talks about that. I met a group of white women from Kentucky who said, ‘You cannot leave us out of this organization. We’re having the same problem with our welfare department that you have as a black woman.’ So that’s why the organization was made up out of everybody.
I believe in rhetoric to a certain extent. But you can only rhetoricize so long and then you have to deal with fact. Now, I can do as much rhetoricizing as the next person. But sometimes I had to start a mess to get to the facts.” (Lanker, p.92)
JOHNNIE TILLMON. IMAGE FROM BLACK KOS at DAILYKOS.COM
This is from comments by Audre Lorde, the poet, at a conference in 1979:
“As women, we have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” (Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider, p. 112. The Crossing Press. Freedom, CA. 1984)
THE MASTER’S HOUSE. IMAGE BY RIYANNICOLE at PHOTOBUCKET.COM
Remember? by Alice Walker:
Remember me?
I am the girl
with the dark skin
whose shoes are thin
I am the girl
with rotted teeth
I am the dark
rotten-toothed girl
with the wounded eye
and the melted ear.
I am the girl
holding their babies
cooking their meals
sweeping their yards
washing their clothes
Dark and rotting
and wounded, wounded.
I would give
to the human race
only hope.
I am the woman
with the blessed
dark skin
I am the woman
with teeth repaired
I am the woman
with the healing eye
the ear that hears.
I am the woman: Dark,
repaired, healed
Listening to you.
I would give
to the human race
only hope.
I am the woman
offering two flowers
whose roots
are twin
Justice and Hope.
Let us begin.
(Walker, p.1)
Buying the books:
Tanner, Stratton, Giddings, Giovanni, and Lanker are available from the Independent Online Booksellers Association. click
For Walker and Lorde try the Independent Booksellers Association website click. They will hook you up with a bookstore near you, which can order it if it’s not in stock.
Powell’s Books has all but Bernikow and Giovanni. click
Amazon has lots of dealers selling the Bernikow. click
Sep 30, 2011
My favorite place on the Web is Poetry Daily. Every day it gives me a new poem, from one of hundreds of literary journals and books. When I find a poem I like, I put it in a fat, three-ring binder, my own anthology. click
Louis Untermeyer’s A Treasury of Great Poems, English and American, introduced me to poetry in ninth grade. All the scattered bits that remain in my memory come from that year and that book. “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind…” “I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart…” “Love at the lips was touch as sweet as I could bear…” I loved that book, but I left all my books (and my first husband) behind when I was twenty-three.
LEFT BEHIND
I found the Treasury again at our library’s semi-annual used book sale. I paid two dollars and was reunited with hundreds of old friends. click
At 94 my father astonished a dinner party by reciting Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, all fifty lines. He glowed with pride, and deserved to. Doris, my sister-in-law, once recited the preamble to Intimations of Immortality. She seemed to do it for the sheer pleasure of hearing the words. My sister followed with Jabberwocky.
I have always wished I had a big collection of poetry in my head. It would entertain me when I have to wait in line, or when I am imprisoned in a small cell for my courageous political actions, or, perhaps more likely, in a hospital bed for one or another ailment of age.
When I retired I decided to memorize poetry. I started with Elinor Wylie, “Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones, there’s something in this richness that I hate.” I struggled to remember the poet’s exact words, as she no doubt struggled to choose them, though some, I hope, came as a gift. Over and over I repeated the whole sonnet, until it seemed to be firmly planted. An hour later it was gone.
In my computer I have a file of the ten poems I managed to memorize. I wish I had such a file in my brain. Each poem I added drove out the previous one.
download my ten poems
Years ago, I paid my two foster children to memorize short poems. I believe I paid them a quarter. The first poem was
I never saw a purple cow
I never hope to see one
But I can tell you anyhow
I’d rather see than be one.
PHOTOBUCKET.COM BY RESPHINA
Like many other plans from our early days together, when I thought I could achieve perfection, this one soon fell by the wayside and our path descended into the mucky quotidian.
I would like to try the same thing with Amanda. She already knows the pleasure of rhyme and rhythm. But Joe believes it is wrong to pay for learning, which should be its own reward. He is adamant, so I concede, though I still believe it’s a good idea.
I read poetry for months at a time, and then I let it go. Every time I come back to it I am renewed. Thank you, Poetry Daily, for the daily gift.
