I finished Rebecca Skloot’s mesmerizing best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks two days ago, just in time for all the hype surrounding the HBO film of the book being shown last night. Here is imdb.com’s brief summary of the film: “An African-American woman becomes an unwitting pioneer for medical breakthroughs when her cells are used to create the first immortal human cell line in the early 1950s.”
(Practical tip: I don’t get HBO so I called Comcast. I was assured that I could sign up for HBO and cancel after one day and only pay for that day - which I have done.)
The most gripping narrative thread in the book (I listened to the audiobook in my car) is the element of forensic detective work by the tempestuous partnership between the author/narrator and Henrietta Lacks’s daughter Deborah. Together they teach themselves enough cell science to really figure out what happened to Henrietta’s cells. It is that journey of self-education, their exposure of shady ethics and insidious racism among many scientists working with the cells, the role of profit and exploitation in science, and the clarification of obfuscating scientific concepts that make the book so riveting. I thought it was fitting that HBO premiered the film (probably unwittingly) on the same day as the Science March.
It is through that journey that Rebecca and Deborah build an alliance and then a close friendship, which in turn brings Rebecca further into the Lacks family where she can both increase and share her knowledge.
HBO, however, decided to use their distinguished cast – Ophra Winfrey as Deborah, Rose Byrne as Rebecca, Courtney B. Vance, Leslie Uggams, and others in supporting roles – to focus on the human emotions by filling in so many family narrative gaps that the film seems to fictionalize a non-fiction book. Although the acting was excellent across the board, HBO chose to shortchange both the science and some of the context in favor of the drama. They did so in a superficial way, as well.
For example, Deborah’s changing moods, her jubilance and her despair, were functions (according to the book) not only of the tragedies and barriers she experienced in her life, but also of the pills she took when self-medicating. Poverty kept the Lacks family in the wretched category of the medically uninsured – despite the uncounted millions of dollars scientists and industrialists made off Henrietta’s immortal cancer cells. Even Deborah’s grandchild understood the correlation between one drug or another and the resulting mood. Another example is the absence of the back-story of Deborah's troubled brother Zakariyya (played brilliantly by Reg E. Cathey), who was brutally abused as a boy. By airbrushing the story, HBO’s film delivers a somewhat distorted and unclear emotional picture - one in which this Black family appears inexplicably dysfunctional.
My recommendation is that you read the book first – of course that is always my recommendation. Form your own sense of the key relationships and of the central themes. I’d love to hear from others who knew the book before they saw the film. Was this a somewhat missed opportunity for HBO?
My friend Eleanor and I hopped into Panera, knowing we could grab a booth and a nibble for a long-awaited visit. I have a home-made button on my backpack that says “Ask Me About My Book.” It’s been there since my last book, and I never remember until some says, “So tell me about your book.” Which happens not infrequently.
It’s a low-cost marketing strategy that relieves me from approaching people and lets them ask if they’re interested. The guy behind the counter is interested and so I give him a little leaflet about Lillian in Love I keep in my bag. We get our food and settle in, when the guy comes around and says that the whole staff wants to buy a copy together – how much does it cost? He leaves and comes back with $13 and I inscribe it to the “Panera Staff.” When Eleanor goes up to order a cup of coffee, they give it to her on the house.
A minute later a young woman who works in the back comes out and says she wants to buy two copies – one for her and one for her best girlfriend. I run out to the car where I keep some in my trunk. We get to talking: she’s half Brazilian, half Dominican but says her Portuguese isn’t all that good. She says she finds the topic very interesting – and I wonder which topic she means – old lesbians? senior housing? She asks me if I’ve written other books and Eleanor mentions Lillian’s Last Affair. She wants a copy of that too. I get one out of the trunk of my car and when I return she’s got another tenner for me. We hug.
It reminds me of my friend at dance, who’s just in the midst of doing an advanced degree and who is a fantastic dancer, who astonished me one night when I had the thrill of leading her in a dance. She said that having read my book, she feels like she’s dancing with a celebrity. An actual author. I realize that not everyone hangs out, like I do, with a lot of writers. These exchanges all made me feel so good. I’m desperate to feel good because otherwise, with fascism looming, I don’t feel so hot.
GET OUT is about the objectification, use, and abuse of the Black body. This is what makes it a horror film. It is also about solidarity and the crucial friendship between the protagonist Chris (played vividly by Daniel Kaluuya) and his captivating best buddy Rod William (Lil Rel Howery). Even though the two guys were rarely in the same space at the same time, TSA agent Rod was a viewer favorite. GET OUT is not, as some reviewers say, a satire about the awkward social interactions of Rose and her parents’ circle of friends when they meet her new Black boyfriend. The sustained tension of the film bears the weight of what racism feels like – not just what it looks like. Huge kudos to Jordan Peele (of the comedy duo Key & Peele) for giving us this “social thriller” (as he calls it) that he says has been living in his head since he was 13.
My thoughts:
GET OUT is the only horror film I’ve ever seen. So all the references to classic horror flicks that other friends of mine spotted in it went over my head. Nonetheless, my impression is that the horror isn’t the blood per se: it’s the racism. To me this film is about the Black experience of racism. It conveys how something that might appear to a white person as a micro-aggression, may very well have a much bigger impact on a Black person because of the context of their lives. Two hundred and fifty years of slavery were followed by the Jim Crow era, itself followed by contemporary types of institutional racism. Top this all off with a hateful President and a vicious regime. This very dangerous, very heavy reality can turn what seems like a small insult or a well-meaning asinine remark into something that feels perilous and threatening.
I understood this by thinking through the experiences behind my own fears:
Try to stick with me as I attempt to explain. The same day as I saw GET OUT, I happened to be watching a TV show called House Hunters while I was washing the dishes. It’s just one of those low-budget cable series about people looking for houses and realtors trying to meet the conflicting desires and needs of the couple/family/etc.
This episode featured a husband who, because of years of sports, had several knee operations and hated climbing stairs, so he was insisting on a ranch house. His wife said over and over to both the realtor and the husband that she had to have a two-story house because she would feel unsafe for herself and any future children sleeping on the ground floor. She repeated that she needed a staircase between herself and any potential intruder. The husband never heard what she was saying. As a big beefy white man he saw her desire for a two-story as frivolous.
But I could relate to what she was saying. I have been raped. It happened in the 60s. Not a day goes by, hardly an hour goes by, since then, that the fear of being raped again isn’t hovering close to consciousness. I relate to the house hunter’s fear of living on the ground floor. When I’ve stayed in the rural cabins of friends to write, I am afraid of the noises at night – not because it might be a bear or a wolf – but because no neighbors are close enough to hear me if I scream when some man breaks in.
Racism continues to color every experience in this country.
The house-hunting husband didn’t get it. He hasn’t experienced that kind of threat and has insufficient empathy. And too often white people don’t get the reactions of Black people to what the whites see as “compliments” or innocent “mistakes.” And not just because of slavery – which formally ended only in 1865 (just 50 years before my dad was born – not so long ago). Books have helped me understand the continuum of racism until today. When I read The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson, I understood for the first time how profoundly murderous the Jim Crow south was after slavery. She told of the man who was fatally tarred and feathered because he pointed out to a white shop-keeper that he had given him wrong change. How one man was mangled viciously, never to really recover, because of a false accusation that he had stolen a chicken. How surreally severe segregation became.
But although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ostensibly ended Jim Crow, in fact other kinds of institutionalized racism were developed, as I read in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. This includes almost every arm of the criminal justice system, from the massive funding of the prison-industrial sector, to draconian sentencing regulations, to the use of profiling tools like “stop & frisk”.
Now we are facing an openly racist, fascist agenda by a regime unlike any we’ve seen. The unrelenting, tenacious, pernicious racism of the United States is the true horror. I’ve rarely seen a film that has made me think so hard and so long about the experience of racism, and how, within my own life as a woman, I can find connective paths to insight about the oppression of others. I am grateful to GET OUT.
I am lucky to be at the Creating Change Conference with 4,000 other LGBTQ activists. We are so inundated by workshops and speakers that there is no time to go on Facebook or turn on the news. Yesterday was the last day of the Obama era and today is the start of the abyss, but I am deep in this Conference of commitment, surrounded by other activists, and happily in the bubble of hope. Here’s how my first day went, starting at the end.
The National LGBTQ Task Force appears to hire staff from such a range of ethnicities and sexualities that they get most things right. They connect with multiple queer communities because they ARE multiple identities. They are not a rich white male leadership with a symbolic weak “outreach” – their staff seems to encompass the richness of this country and therefore to draw us all in. As they welcomed us to the conference at the 8:00pm plenary, they immersed us immediately in the kind of true diversity they represent. For example, we were treated to an amusing and enlightening explanation of how to be at a conference that is being simultaneously translated into Spanish and Sign.
A memorial presentation for both the victims of Orlando and others murdered by homophobia and transphobia looked at the unspeakable wounds of that violence, especially to the Latinx community, and at the ways in which people pulled together to look after each other. I wept; everyone around me wept.
The Keynote speaker Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is a commanding figure – broad, clad in purple, with a countenance both handsome and strong. He schooled us in the real meaning of the concept of intersectionality. He spoke at length and with an unflagging passion about his Southern strategy, using the amazing successes of his alliances in North Carolina as examples. He talked about how people of color, poor people, and the LGBTQ communities share the same enemies and how we are used against each other. He has always walked the walk – convincing NAACP and many Black churches to support marriage equality during that struggle. His talk was interrupted countless times as we jumped up to clap and scream, recognizing the privilege of his insights. Just one quote: “Nothing worse than being loud and wrong. Every one of our statements must have a footnote.” I was a fan before I heard him in person and now I’m a fan forever.
Most of the day had been spent at the Aging Institute – looking at the activism of older people in the LGBTQ movement. I wrote on my evaluation form: “This is clearly one of the main attractions for the older people in the LGBTQ community who come to Creating Change. It is a day that is run with impeccable skill by the charming if masterful Serena Worthington, of SAGE. The variety of voices - mainly from among Philly's elder activists - enlivens a very long day and impresses with the range of ways in which elders are organizing to change the country. Serena manages just the right mix of small groups, interactive plenaries, riveting panels, and mixed media. Elders created and hold the history of our movement and should be more widely showcased at a time when history is being turned around and our achievements are being threatened.”
I should mention that at the Elder Institute I did my first reading of my new book Lillian in Love. I’m having a “soft launch” here and will really launch it in a couple of weeks from back home. The reading was prodigious fun and people bought over half the books I brought with me to Philadelphia. This evening I have a whole workshop to myself and to Lillian in Love, where I’ll read additional excerpts.
I’m a huge admirer of the splendid organization of this gigantic conference, but I do have one beef. Here is what I wrote on the evaluation form to the organizers. “The organizers of Creating Change do an astonishingly fine job of putting together a massive conference with many dozens of conflicting demands. However, they seem to have little understanding of the needs of the movement's elders. The Institute was held in the very furthermost, the very last room down a very long hall as distant from the elevator as possible. The nearest bathrooms seemed to be nearly a mile away, quite literally, back up that long hall, and along two more very long hallways. Many of the attendees have mobility issues and the Institute had to build in longer breaks just so people could get to the bathroom with the canes, walkers, and scooters. While aging is clearly not a priority topic, one is puzzled at the ignorance of the needs of our older activists. To add to what begins to feel like an insult, the Elder Hospitality Lounge is also the very furthermost down a hall of many Hospitality Lounges that winds around the entirety of this huge hotel. What could possibly be the thinking behind these barriers to our comfort and participation? Please place us close to the elevators in coming years.”
So, my dear friend who works in a stationary shop across the country offered to buy me a 2017 planner for my birthday, but even with photos, I couldn’t really pick one out from a distance. Same with the Internet. I need to feel the heft, to make sure the essential spiral binding works smoothly, to check if the cover is hardy enough to withstand going from my desk to bag to suitcase, to being taken out and put back a gazillion times over the year. Hopefully the paper doesn’t bleed through and it is light enough not to ruin my back when I’m carrying it.
Last year I got my 2016 planner from Ocean State Job Lots for $2 and it worked well for me until about September when it started feeling overworked, shabby, not so neat. Pages curled, the cover got wrinkled. It is really looking forward to retirement at the end of the year.
I do everything online except for my Planner. It’s my daily anchor: my appointments, my to-do list, my phone notes, my deadlines, my reminders. I’ve used one all of my adult life and know exactly which kind suits me.
I tried an independent bookstore first. They had well over a dozen, all of them arty, with one page full of an image on their theme (women authors or cats or birds or meditation sayings) and the facing page squeezing the week into tight horizontal slots. Half the weight and half the space is taken up by the kind of pretty pictures you could Google for.
I went to the big drug store but either those planners were too floppy or the cover was hard and awkward. I bought one but returned it when I realized how heavy it was.
Then I looked online at Target and saw what a big selection they had. I drove many miles to the largest Target within an hour’s drive. They had plenty of choice for weekly planners, but most of them were attractively designed to be difficult. One had the dates written in gold – I could only read them by holding them under the light and twisting the book this way or that to catch the glare. Another had everything in script that look all very calligraphy but impossible to decipher in a glance. In the end I bought one that is plain, not an ounce of decoration, but with a strong enough font that I can actually tell what’s written on it.
One more beef. Every 12 month planner should be 13 months at least and include the December of the previous year so that we can make a smooth transition without lugging two volumes. If they want to be extravagant, designers could include January of the following year as well.
Those designers who waste the majority of each page’s space on baubles and fireworks clearly don’t depend on planners like I do. I want a workhorse. The essential thing is that it gets the job done, although I do wish this one were prettier. If you have a sticker I’d love to slap on the front, send it my way!
I’m not generally a big fan of Phillip Roth, but I’ve gotta tell you. His novel The Plot Against America (2004) is the most prescient piece of literature I’ve read since 1984. Roth nails, absolutely nails what is going on in this country during the Trump campaign for President.
Here’s the premise. Heroic aviator Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Delano Roosevelt for President in 1940 by running on an anti-Semitic platform, promising not to get involved with WWII. He is cozy with Hitler and his crowd. There are rabbinical sell-outs, over-protective neighbors, and a young Jewish kid trying to figure it all out.
To read this book now, now! as in right now, is to be bedazzled by the parallels with the present presidential campaign. It’s also a page-turner, funny in parts, and compelling in its own right. I recommend that you get it immediately. It’s resonance with our daily reality will blow your mind.
By the way, I’ve read it as an audio-book in the car – and it worked well.
Murder Under the Bridge is a compelling and unique murder mystery. Written by Kate Jessica Raphael, an American with intimate knowledge of Palestine under Israeli occupation, this novel provides a glimpse behind the Wall dividing Palestine from the rest of the world. The action begins when Rania, a Palestinian woman police detective, discovers the body of a woman stranger on the outskirts of her village. The magic is not only in the message, but in the medium as well: a detective thriller is a palatable and effective way to reveal the minutia of the lives that the Conflict distorts. The author delves into the intricacies of relationships across genders, ethnicities, nationalities, generations, and most of all, the Occupiers and the Occupied.
The richness of the book is in the details, from the taxi system in Israel and Palestine, to the checkpoints that inflict daily humiliation on the residents of the West Bank. Raphael explores the subtleties by which trust and community are solidified or dismantled. By interjecting snippets of Arabic and Hebrew (immediately translated, but a glossary is included at the back of the book), we get insight into how knowledge of these two languages, along with English, plays out in the power struggles under Occupation. For example, Rania does not let on that she understands Hebrew, giving her a slight edge in conversations with her Israeli counterparts.
Prison is an ever-present and defining fact of life in Palestine, generation after generation. One prisoner Fareed, when accepting coffee from a jailer, “tried not to hate himself for his weakness. He had grown up on the stories of his father’s interrogations.” Betrayal and manipulation compound the struggle of people, especially women, to live their lives. Raphael manages to convey all of this without, for one second, lecturing. It flows from the action and the graphic descriptions.
Kate Jessica Raphael’s political and creative life changed after she spent eighteen months between 2002 and 2005 volunteering in Palestine through the International Women's Peace Service. During the writing of this, her first novel, she augmented her closely observed impressions with, she says, “the work of Israeli feminist and labor groups … and a detailed map of the area.” Raphael’s tasks as a volunteer included documenting human rights violations and accompanying Palestinians in their daily chores, using her international status to protect them. Out of Raphael’s intimacy with the Palestinian community comes this illuminating, exciting detective thriller that opens with a Murder Under the Bridge.
May I brag? I got this email from the kind and communicative Managing Editor of the only academic journal I ever published in: “The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture,” from the large publisher Taylor & Francis, which publishes scads of academic journals. He wrote:
“We've recently compiled our publication data over the past seven years and thought you might be interested in the positive results. We're happy to report that your article, "Women’s Liberation Explosion At Boston University (1969–70)," published in our 2014, 7.1 edition remains very popular and was one of our top ten most downloaded articles from Taylor & Francis in 2014… We're very happy to see the popularity of the article, and hope you will be as well. Thanks so much for your contribution to the Journal!”
But here’s what I’m really proud of. Academic journals and book publishers offer the most appalling contracts to writers of almost all publications. The journals don’t pay. They ask you to indemnify them against any legal challenges. They demand to hold the copyright of your work. And then they put your essay behind a paywall which means that it is only read by students and faculty of the universities that pay them for access.
I was approached by one of the editors about using my piece and was pretty happy about the idea of being included in the ivory tower for once – until, that is, I saw the contract. Since a contract is something that is negotiated between two parties – despite publications telling you “this is our standard document” – I started negotiating with them (with some support from my union's brilliant contract advisers.)
I told them that I would only indemnify them up to the amount they paid me: zero. I told them they could not own the copyright unless they were buying the piece outright, which wasn’t happening. I told them that I refuse to have my (unpaid) writing, about building a revolutionary movement, no less, behind a paywall.
To their credit, they agreed to all of it, every single counter-request, and the result is that people can actually get to my essay and read it. I know that the stakes are higher for people who make their living in the academic realm, but writers be advised: If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
You may have already read my piece, but if not, feel free – literally – to click here.
I have a bad habit. When someone recommends a book or – especially – a short story that they adore, I just click onto my expansive library site and order it. Sometimes this results in an insurmountable pile of books next to my bed. Sometimes this results in reading so many books at one time (including those I listen to in the car) that I end up finishing none of them.
Someone on Facebook mentioned a brilliant short story by Langston Hughes, a writer well-known for his poetry but whose prose I adore and admire. (I don’t read much poetry unless it’s by Verandah Porche or Charles Coe.) I had to do quite a search until I found a collection that contained that story. By the time my branch procured it from whichever other library in its network held The Ways of White Folks, I had forgotten which story I was intending to read. So I’ve read them all.
I have heard Black people say often that their survival can depend on knowing with precision the ways of white people, while keeping in mind that too often white people don’t have a clue about the sub-texts of Black lives. These stories are bulging with insights into white attitudes, into conscious (“Home”) and unconscious (“Poor Little Black Fellow”) racism. Hughes infiltrates deeply into the psyche of race during the 1920s-30s and by talking about white people, reveals something profound about the environment in which Black Americans must function. (Photo: Gordon Parks 1943)
I saw Toni Morrison, another writer I hold in high regard, speak when she was promoting her book Home. I wrote about the experience including this: “When asked how she achieves her books’ unique points of view, she said, “To take away the gaze of the white male. Once you take that out, the whole world opens up.” She suggested that this is a common approach of top black women writers, but not of African-American male writers, who are more likely to be wrestling with a prominent white male character.”
Langston Hughes does wrestle with white men in some of the stories in this collection. However, in several important stories, Hughes also speaks from the point of view of kindly bourgeoisie white women who take a talented young Black person under their wing with copious expectations and self-satisfaction. Check out the powerful “The Blues I’m Playing” for the interplay between the talented, independent-minded pianist Oceola Jones and her patron Mrs. Dora Ellsworth. Class, in fact, figures quite broadly in these stories, a number of which focus on characters who are musicians. The exploitation of Black women’s bodies is another strong theme as well, not the least in “Red-Headed Baby,” as painful a read as any story in this book.
Thanks to whomever it was that sent me on the search that led to this volume. I hope that I’m paying back the favor by encouraging others to read The Ways of White Folks.
I only recently heard about the writer Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958), a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. She was mentioned by Kay Bourne in one of the events she and her collaborator, the photographer Craig Bailey, are doing around the Boston area about the local history of Black artists. Kay mentioned Angelina Weld Grimké at a celebration of LGBT Black theater people in honor of The Theater Offensive.
Grimké wrote with gut-wrenching intensity about lynching and racism and Black families. Her famous play Rachel (1916) was Grimké’s response to the call by the NAACP for work that would counter the racism of D. W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation (1915).
I read her amazing short story “The Closing Door,” in the thick collection Black like us: a century of lesbian, gay and bisexual African American fiction, edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise. This story knocked me on my ass. The characters are drawn with a humanity that makes them seem present in the room, not the least Agnes, the anchor of everyone else’s feelings. When one of her brothers arrives from the South with desperate news of another brother, Agnes is catapulted into a terrifying depression. The range of perspectives inside this one home is monumental. And the ending is a weighty comment on the bittersweet complexity of motherhood within an oppressive Jim Crow environment.
Because I have not yet read much of her work, this post will necessarily be short. I write to share in the off chance that, like me, Angelina Weld Grimké is missing from your shelves. Work of such power and import may be something you want to experience.
Recent Comments