Second Student Reading--the N word, the J word, the K word and writing about Race and Bigotry

I had very little time to prepare for my second ever reading, which I learned of only on the morning of a busy day. Since my printer is busted, I had a friend print a section of the novel I am just now querying, and headed to the event. The Color of Safety covers a century and has multiple story lines. I chose a section from one that follows a light-skinned African-American protagonist and his red-haired, Jewish fellow-volunteer during 1964's freedom summer, when students from both north and south headed into the heart of Jim Crow terrorist country to teach civics and help Negroes (as they were called then) register for the vote.

It wasn't until I sat in the auditorium editing the pages, that I realized that this section contained enough racial slurs to choke any person of color--or white liberal--who might happen to be in the audience.







These weren't my slurs. They were those of Klansmen outside the boys' window.

And they're certainly not the only racial or religious slurs in the novel. When you're writing about race, class and bigotry over the Twentieth Century, there is no honest way to avoid typing many, many racial slurs. The world was full of them. African-Americans were blatantly stereotyped in almost any main stream film before the 1950's. Comedy routines were often based on racial and ethnic stereotypes. Heroes in novels of that era often described as "the Anglo-Saxon ideal."

1942's Holiday Inn, Bing Crosby
et all in "pickinninny blackface."
(Except for the actual black members of the cast.) 

Early Vaudeville Marx Brother Routine
mocking various ethnicities in "Fun in Hi Skule"
includes German Herr Teacher, Izzy, the "Hebrew
Boy," and rural Irish "Patsy Brannigan." 

Bert Williams, a huge star on Broadway in the early part of the 20th Century.
A light-skinned black man, he often played roles in blackface.

Throughout the last century, the line between ethnicity and race has moved steadily whiteward. If you look at census records from the earlier part of the 20th Century, immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Greece and Eastern Europe it's clear that all were once considered "racially" different from Anglo-Saxons and Northern Europeans, although over the twentieth century, they gradually have been brought into the status quo, just as Latinos are now being allowed to join. Members of religions once shunned--Catholics, Jews, Mormons--can even run for office without national frantic outbursts of contempt for their faith.

Of course, bigotry against these groups still exists. And bigotry against African-Americans still runs rampant, as anyone witnessing the contempt repeatedly expressed for Obama--a sitting President-- can attest.

To write an historical novel and not have people think and speak in a bigoted mindset is to whitewash history. (Pun absolutely intended.)

Still, as I stood there in front of the (small) audience, I had to take a deep breath. Every N word, every "Boy" and worse uttered by a Klansman, made me mentally wince. I also flinched inwardly every time my young light-skinned protagonist expressed the naive notion that he must "teach the impoverished adults of this rural Mississippi community to be brave."

Afterwards, I asked my audience if they understood the irony of his ignorance, the huge risk the Negro elders took even to attend a Freedom School, even to speak to Northerners, outsiders, the courage it took to ask to register to vote knowing that just asking the question could and often was a death sentence.

I was so relieved to find that the audience understood what I was doing. That they came on the journey with my characters. One man said he had just finished reading a book about Freedom Summer and that I had channeled it "brilliantly." (Well, he did say that.) We must have the courage to write history the way it really was, to tell of humans the way we really are.

That was the first time.  I hope it will get easier. It matters.

Andorra, Malta, Iceland, All Reading This Blog

This week, we discovered a quiz game online called Sporkle, and obsessively tried to fill in a map with all the countries of Europe within a seven minute limit.

Go ahead. Try it. I dare you. See if you remember how to spell Liechtenstein, and where Malta is, and which countries all the little Baltic states have become. Make sure to add the Papal States, Andorra, Belarus, Slovakia, Slovenia, Moldova and Macedonia. (They included Kosovo as a state, though I think it's still technically a region.) Warning: This map mostly likely will not help.
 

But we should have gotten Malta. We were just studying about Malta, from the Middle Ages, through the Crusades through its days as a British colony, and even some of it's ancient Jewish history. (Malta, being an island in the middle of the major waterway, has been conquered by just about everybody, and been a base for a lot more.)

The amazing thing is, people from all these places have read this blog. Even Malta. This is probably not a big deal, and people who have been blogging for longer probably have this happen all the time, but I, personally, am thrilled that Swedes, and Ukrainians, Monegasques and Moroccans, Estonians and Albanians have all clicked on something that led them here.

By the way, take the quiz and tell me how you do.

Do Evil Geniuses Ever Call Their Mother?

This is what one child asked me this morning. Do Evil Geniuses Ever Call Their Mother?

Hi, Mom, so good to talk with you. 

Winter Adventures #2--Trebuchets, Fruitcakes and Santa Claus Gnomes

A few years ago, when I was looking for a family adventure for New Year's Day, I saw a notice that said someone was hosting a small event. They had hand-built their own trebuchet, and were planning to test it by flinging uneaten fruitcakes at a Santa Clause figure.

This is a trebuchet. It is a a catapult who has its leverage compounded by use of a counter weight--that big chunk mod wood hanging at the back, between those two wheels that look like they should be powering a paddle boat down the Mississippi. On this one, you would ratchet back the lever by use of those wheels, and load up the sling (in our case, with a fruitcake). When you release the lever, the counterweight comes down and makes the sling go even further. (I knew none of this before we went on our adventure, by the way.)  
The wind chill was about 25 below, and the snow was pretty deep. Our little family made up four of the seven people who came, and one of our family was in my womb. (Which was the warmest place to be.) Another two were a romantic couple, one was another quirky person, and the fourth was the head of the engineering department at a local university.










We all stood in the cold while the trebuchet builders (local artists) did indeed fling a fruitcake at a santa gnome,  carefully working out their aim, until they bashed the poor guy over--he was already pretty battered, I should say. And of course, the fruitcakes held up for repeated artillery experiments, as they let us shoot the thing off, too. Our child was the only one there--other parents who were more experienced with winter knew better than to brave frostbite for a trebuchet and a santa gnome--but we won the day, because the engineering professor had just assigned his grad students a trebuchet-making contest, and asked my kid to be a judge for it.

Through this, we met the founder of a hands-on kid-based engineering museum near us, a lovely woman whose cheap wig was so frequently askew that I knew she was going through chemo.

Here she is, Rebecca Shatz, and here is the bad wig. She was an engineer who wanted to share her love of engineering with the world. She was also the mother of two kids like mine, the kind who are a challenge to corral. Whenever we ran into her, she gave me hope--her two boys were growing into fine young men. She also founded a coder dojo to teach children how to computer code.

Rebecca died last July, of her cancer. I'm so glad we knew her. I'm so glad there are thousands of children who have gotten and will get to learn about engineering and computer coding because of the generous choices she made.

All of which means I'm so grateful that we were crazy enough to hang around in the cold watching a fruitcake whiiiiiiiiiiiizzzzzz through the air and deck that ratty little Santa gnome.

Howling With The Wolves--For Real

Yesterday, we braved wind chill well below zero to help fundraise for a wildlife science center. The lure was dog-sledding, and the event one we have attended before, which means I have gotten to dog-sled with my eight-month-old in a baby backpack, plus the year there was no snow, and they harnessed all the kids to a dogsled wagon and let them pull it all day long.

We got to hear a lot of insider gossip on the DNR, Congress, science and wolf biology, and also got to hear a fascinating lecture on Marbury V. Madison, the landmark Supreme Court Case (1804) that established that the courts always have judicial review over laws passed by Congress. (It seems Congress is attempting to remove wolves from the endangered species list and declare this law as beyond the purview of the courts.)

The snow was not so good this year, and the one of the lead dogs didn't like the dog behind her, so the sledder couldn't let us steer this year--a major disappointment. Also, our feet became completely frozen, so that they had to be thawed by hand in the education building, a long, slow process.


But later, as we toured the facility, with the sky dimming down, the wolves began to howl. I'm a singer and a damned good mimic. There is no way that I could not join in. I don't think they noticed. I don't think they cared if they did. But for me, standing there howling with wolves--even enclosed, rescued wolves in a scientific breeding program--turning my face to the sky and singing out musical howl after musical howl--that was worth everything, even the frozen feet.

Burn Notice Morality Play Ends. Yeah, yeah, spoiler alert, what, four years later?

Well, I finally finished the last Burn Notice episode. Michael Weston's story arc--will his efforts to save his career, reputation and country cause him to lose his soul? (along with a concussion, a sinus infection and some writing avoidance) --kept me binge watching through all seven seasons. Yes, his acting was extraordinary. Yes, he seemed to go to the depths of the human soul. Yes, there's a but coming. It's all about the writing.

The trope of Weston at the mercy of evil geniuses with world-ruling ambitions, it got tiresome after the fifth iteration, no matter how fabulous the performances. (By the way, did you notice how the "clients" were almost all eminently forgettable--intentionally so it seems--while the villains were mostly top-notch character actors?) Bruce Campbell and Coby Bell as Michael Weston's best buddies, became cutesy sidekicks after awhile--a waste of great talent--while the brilliant Sharon Gless and Gabrielle Anwar remained anything but.

Still, Anwar's Fiona Glenanne had to fight against a one-note character who got profoundly noble and then had to keep saying, "Michael, you're losing yourself, and I can't watch it anymore," for seven long years. Gless had a more powerful character arc, and she worked it like the pro she is--and I get the arc about her willingness to sacrifice for her family--but honestly, after seven years of watching Fiona and Michael invent detonators out of a tampon, some sealing wax and borax, are you telling me that Madeline Weston and Jesse Porter couldn't think of anything better than her sitting in her living room with a ciggie and the blast button, blowing herself to pieces? "This is for my boys."

And of course, they had fun blowing up the last building. 

Burn Notice: Evil Geniuses Seeking World Domination. A Very Large Club?

I'm hoping against hope that this is my last Burn Notice Post. As I chug through the last season, it occurs to me, I do not believe that there are this many Evil Geniuses in the World. Yes, I'm sure there are many folk who are evil, who would love to Dominate the World, even without wearing a dominatrix costume. But the problem with a TV series that thrives on paranoia theories about government agencies is they usually burn--pun intended--at least one Evil Genius a season, if not four or five. And after awhile, no matter how brilliant the character actors, all these dominating Evil Geniuses tend to bleed together, (pun intended) while the writing team begins to sound like conspiracy theorists who think Washington is run by ten-foot insects taking over people's bodies. (Though come to think of it, that might explain Trump's hair--isn't that what a ten-foot walking stick would think human hair looks like?)

Also, do they all have to work at forcing Michael Weston to psychoanalyze himself? Honestly, only Dead Larry, the brilliant Tim Matheson, stands out from the crowd.

Anyway, next time a series is putting out a casting call for Evil Geniuses, they should rethink their plot lines. I can't be the only person getting tired of this one.

A few Burn Notice Evil Geniuses, in no particular order: