Wednesday Reading

[asakiyume]

Before we went to the Everglades in 2016, I started reading Marjory Stoneman Douglas's seminal work on it, River of Grass. It was not only hugely informative but beautifully written. At that time, I discovered that she'd written novel for young people (I think we'd call it middle grade, these days) called Freedom River (originally published 1953). It takes place just before Florida becomes a state and features three boys: a White boy, a Black escaped slave boy, and a Miccosukee boy. I was curious to read it for all sorts of reasons, including an idiosyncratic one: a 1994 reissue has illustrations by a cousin of mine (first cousin once removed; he's my dad's age).

Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born in 1890 and lived to be 108; in addition to being a tenacious environmentalist, she was also an advocate for women's rights and a charter member of the ACLU in the South. In 1948, appalled to learn there was no running water in the Black sections of racially segregated Coconut Grove, she helped set up a loan program so that the community could be connected to the sewer system and helped pass a law that no houses in Miami could be built without toilets. (Thanks go to Wikipedia for all this information.)

So--she was a social activist. But she was already in her sixties in the 1950s. So it's been very interesting, so far, to see how she handles this story of these three boys.

So far, I think she does a great job with Eben, the escaped slave, though she's into physical descriptions of both him and Billy, the Miccosukee boy, in a way that's a bit uncomfortable-making, for me anyway. She spends most time in the head of Richard, the White boy, and ugh, it's not a very fun place to be. The book jacket describes Richard as an abolitionist, but on the contrary, his "rescue" of Eben amounts to reenslaving him, and he aggrandizes himself to Arabella, the prissy daughter of the Big House, by bragging about owning Eben.

What's super curious is how nonpresent women are. The main characters are boys, and women are pretty much just pasted in the background here and there as part of the scenery. One does emerge briefly from the scenery to give a powerful warning, however. Eben has been feeling very pleased with himself because he's been able to save the White overseer's ass by showing him how to correctly plant and later process indigo. And then he has this encounter with an old slave woman:

The skin of her face hung from her cheekbones colored like a bruise. Her bare feet were misshapen in the dust. Her chin was propped on the angular turn of her wrist. Her arm was like an old stick ... Her thick voice spoke to him in the language of his mother. "Watch how you step there, young one. The further up the monkey climbs, the more he shows his tail."

"Grandmother," he gasped, "Grandmother. Do you know me?"

"I have known hundreds of you," her toothless mouth muttered. "Proud you, black boy, climb the tree. Monkey, you. Never think the white man does not see. Never think you will not be cut down."

Very sobering.

The scene where Richard and Arabella are studying together is very annoying for all sorts of reasons, not least because it makes use of that trope of irritation/annoyance-that-actually-indicates-liking:

That yellow hair hung down her back, too, in curls, in the silliest way. She had a ring on her finger she was always showing off. She sat with her white ruffled skirts stuck out around her as if she thought she was too fine to live. She had a perfectly ridiculous way of curling her lips at him. Pink. They were bright pink.

How do I hate that snippet, let me count the ways! The fact that the character really does sound unappealing, and yet it's clear that Richard is fascinated by her. The fact that she's nothing more than this: ruffles, a ring, hair, lips.

I really think I hate this trope more than straight-up love at first sight.

So... that's a lot of thoughts for a children's novel that I'm only halfway through. Oh! And yes, I picked it up again because Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School being in the news reminded me that I owned it and hadn't yet read it.

Comments

[evelyn_b]

That sounds fascinating! And I've been meaning to read River of Grass since I saw a feature about it in a book collectors' magazine.

[asakiyume]

River of Grass is LONG, and I didn't read it cover-to-cover, every word, but the parts I did read were so full of both knowledge and beauty--it was great.

[sartorias]

The writer sounds fascinating!

[asakiyume]

I agree! What a life!

[minoanmiss]

This sounds like a book worth calling up the "reverse-suck fairy" aka the "fair for its day and I appreciate the groundbreaking stuff" fairy. But/and the incipient romance is very eyerolly and annoying.

*makes a note*

[asakiyume]

I see touches of essentialism to her, qualities that she endows whole peoples with, or whole civilizations, but that seems nevertheless to go side by side with a belief in the dignity and worth of all people as people.

[petrichor_pirate]

I like reading your comments about the book, though I doubt I'd pick the book up myself. You definitely pull out the interesting bits.

[asakiyume]

I doubt *I* would have picked it up to read if I hadn't had the family connection. It's interesting though, in the way random things can be.

[amaebi]

Thank you so much. I had vaguely assumed that Marjory Stoneman Douglas was a local dignitary and nothing more, I think....

[asakiyume]

Yeah, she's an amazing figure. It's largely thanks to her work that the Everglades weren't entirely drained. Wikipedia also has this quote from her on the subject of public health:

You can have the most beautiful city in the world as appearance goes, the streets may be clean and shining, the avenues broad and tree lined, the public buildings dignified, adequate and well kept ... but if you have a weak or inadequate health department, or a public opinion lax on the subject, all the splendors of your city will have not value.

[khiemtran]

It's interesting how much just thinking of something as a "river" rather than a "swamp" changes your perception of it. Where I grew up, there were a few "lakes" that barely ever had any visible water in them, but they were always lakes to us. I wonder how we would have thought of them if they had been labelled as giant swamps.

[asakiyume]

Such a good point. Our actions are based on our perceptions, and language can completely alter our perceptions.

I've thought of you several times so far reading this, because there are some beautiful sailing descriptions. Although I can't know for sure, I have a strong impression that she, like you, knows what she's talking about when she writes about sailing.

[khiemtran]

That's interesting! I wonder if any of my U.S. sailing friends have read it...

[asakiyume]

I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it--the sailing scenes are just moments in the story--it's just that they felt very much in flavor like what you've written:

"Overhead, suddenly, swept a screaming cackling flight of parakeets. He looked up startled as they flew straight for the beach trees, and saw the high light strike them into green jewels against the brightening sky. Then with a rush the breeze was in the sail, spreading it, stiffening it, tipping the light boat a little. The tiller came alive under his hand. Water chattered at the bow. The wind, full behind him, sent him rushing forward with a sense of speed, of flight, of swiftness, so that he could have shouted with delight."

[wayfaringwordhack]

She sounds like an amazing woman. Like all of us, she did seem to have blind spots in regard to the thoughts on gender, etc., that were prevalent in her (and yes, our) time.

Those icky, enraging parts of that book make me think of the biography I read of Kit Carson. So many problems regarding race, sexism, etc.

[asakiyume]

My best guess about the sexism is that she thought of herself as writing this for an audience of boys, mainly White boys, assumed White boys thought this way about girls and women, and duplicated those attitudes to make the character authentic and recognizable/sympathetic to that audience. Never mind that she clearly knew--from not being that sort of woman herself--that women didn't have to be that way. Or maybe there was internalized misogyny going on, where she thought of herself as an exception.

What's funny is that she was willing to try to educate/edify her White male reader away from racism (in a sense**) but not the sexism.

**In a sense, because she still suggested that there were inherent differences, maybe not in a biological-genetic sense, but in a cultural sense. Even while seeing Eben and Billy as complete, whole characters, and while clearly valuing at least Miccosukee culture, she still seemed to suggest they were categorically different. And it's a conundrum, because it's wrong to erase all differences and make everything one uniform sludge, and it's wrong to exotify and define individuals in terms of their culture and their culture in terms of its difference from your own--but it's hard to explore something that is different without doing that. I think the wrongness of any approach is maybe something that people carry within them, and it gets expressed in different ways depending on the person and the era. I think some people--and I'd say she was one--struggle against that and to honor and celebrate humanity at large, including humanity that's different from themselves--but we're all flawed beings, and our failures to do that 100 percent show up, especially from the vantage point of a different era.

[gale_storm]

Oh! Yes, that would bug the living sh!t out of me, too! *shudder* Thank you for the warning! :-D

[asakiyume]

Hee, no worries.

[sovay]

Her thick voice spoke to him in the language of his mother.


That's a powerful line.

The further up the monkey climbs, the more he shows his tail.

That's either a real proverb or Tom Waits read this book, because he restates it slightly for the opening line of "Misery Is the River of the World" from Blood Money (2002): "The higher that the monkey can climb, the more he shows his tail."

the further up the monkey climbs...

[asakiyume]

I definitely have the sense I've heard the expression before too. The Internet offers it as a Jamaican saying but this page shows English-language usages of the expression going back to the 1300s. I'm guessing Margery Stoneman Douglas was riffing on the Jamaican version.