Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

Source of book: I own this

 

Sometimes, the reason I end up reading a book is a bit of luck or circumstance. I found a Franklin edition of Tar Baby used somewhere (I forget where) at a low price, so I grabbed it. Honestly, I hadn’t ever heard of it. Morrison’s other books are better known, including the ubiquitous high school/college assignment book, The Bluest Eye, which is the only book of hers I had previously read. 

 

This is a great selection to kick off Black History Month with, in my opinion. These days, more than ever, it is necessary for those of us human beings of good will to keep the faith when it comes to diversity and basic human decency. The current regime is already purging the truth from NPS sites, including the reality that our founding fathers enslaved people. 

 

One of the many ways to stand against white supremacy and fascism is to continue to read, talk about, and share books by black authors. Every year since I started this blog in 2011 I have chosen at least one book to ready for Black History Month. The list is here, and also includes other books by black authors, and a few books by white authors about black history. 

 

Tar Baby is not, however, one of this year’s selections. I is just a book by a black author that I wanted to read and got around to last month. Stay tuned for the official selections later. 

 

This book is a bit different than The Bluest Eye and Morrison’s other books. For one thing, it is set in modern times (meaning the 1970s in this case) rather than the past. It also is relatively free from racialized violence. The violence that does occur is also much more personal, if that makes sense. 

 

The book takes place mostly on a fictional private island in the Caribbean. The scene partially shifts to New York City, then a small black town in Florida. There are also references to Philadelphia and Paris, where some of the backstory took place. So it has a rather cosmopolitan feel to it. 

 

There is also the sense of the opening of a world, of an expansion from the intimate living-room drama to the larger stage, and an expansion from personal relationships to the greater culture, as the book progresses. 

 

I also think the book is fascinating because it focuses every bit as much on its white characters as its black ones. Everything is interconnected, and what we learn about each character reveals the others at the same time. 

 

There aren’t that many characters in the book. Valerian Street is an absurdly wealthy man. He took over the family candy business in his youth and grew it, selling out and retiring when it became apparent that his son Michael has no interest in it. Michael, as we later find out, hasn’t seen much of his parents in years. He has taken a different path, working in social work on the Navajo Reservation, and generally doing the liberal hippie thing in constructive ways. 

 

Michael is Valerian’s only child, and the child of Margaret, who was a much younger beauty queen sort who caught the rich guy. She is pretty shallow, but also in deep denial about many things, and many such women are. 

 

Working for the Streets are Sydney and Ondine, a black couple who have been with the Streets for decades, first in Philadelphia, and now on Isle des Chevaliers. The relationship is particularly strained between Margaret and Ondine, however. 

 

Also a part of the household is Jadine, Sydney and Ondine’s niece. She is extraordinarily beautiful, and somehow Valerian took an interest in her. And not in the creepy way of old rich white guys: he paid her way through college, enabling her to work as an artist and model in Paris. For the first part of the book, she is back on an extended visit. 

 

There are a couple of minor characters: Gideon (aka “Yardman”) and Therese (“Mary”) whose real names the Streets have never bothered to learn. 

 

And finally, there is the character who turns everything upside down: Son Green, an American black man who has stowed away on a ship, but ends up escaping to the island. 

 

He hides out for a while, before being discovered in Margaret’s closet, to the horror of everyone. Except Valerian, who does the least expected thing and invites Son to dinner. 

 

Christmas is approaching, and Margaret is sure that Michael will come to visit this time, and has invited an old professor of his to join them.

 

This sets the stage for a gradual unravelling of the various relationships, the revelation of some dark secrets, and the opportunity for Morrison to explore not only the minefield of race and class relations but also the question of authenticity. 

 

How does one “live authentically” as a black person? Is it to take Jadine’s path and succeed - indeed thrive - in the white world, playing by white rules? Or is it Son’s approach, to disdain the systems he is in, and refuse to live by the rules they impose? And, for that matter, where do Sydney and Ondine fit into this idea of “authenticity”? Are they less authentic because they have chosen to stay in their “place” because it keeps them fed and housed and has resulted in a tremendous advantage for their niece? 

 

Beyond that, there are a lot of twists and turns in the book, which I won’t reveal. 

 

Morrison’s writing is excellent as usual, and her use of dialogue to reveal her characters is a masterpiece. This is a book that I was thoroughly immersed in start to finish, enjoying the use of language while caring a great deal about each character. 

 

And that is the thing too: there are no true villains and no true heroes in this book. Margaret and Valerian are pretty horrible in the way of super-rich and privileged white people, but not uniquely horrible. And they are more complicated than that, and thus are somewhat sympathetic characters. 

 

This leads to the title. We all are familiar with Joel Chandler Harris’ story from his Uncle Remus books. The rabbit is taken in by a figure made of tar, and becomes furious when it refuses to answer him. So he punches the tar baby, getting stuck. 

 

Harris didn’t invent the folk tales, of course, and didn’t claim to. He was a journalist with a listening ear, and wrote down the folk tales he heard from black folk. As Tar Baby itself notes, another version of the story has the farmer create the tar baby, not the fox - there are multiple versions told. 

 

But the old tale raises a number of fascinating questions. Why was it that the lack of an answer infuriated Br’er Rabbit? What might that represent in the broader culture? What does the briar patch mean? One explanation is that Br’er Rabbit as the trickster represents black people, and the substandard habitations they have been all too often limited to are like a briar patch. Not a great place to be, but home enough, and not without advantages. 

 

I mention this because of the episode in the book where Son takes Jadine back to his hometown - which certainly seems a bit of a briar patch to her. 

 

In the context of Tar Baby, there is also another question: who is the Tar Baby in the story? Is it Jadine, entrapping Son? Or Son entrapping Jadine? Or something else altogether. Morrison’s introduction to the edition I own hints at some meaning, but coyly refuses to answer the question. Perhaps this is for the reader to find for themself. 

 

I noted a few lines in this book that I wanted to mention. First up is the issue of class. Sydney and Ondine take an instant dislike to Son, and even refer to him as a “swamp nigger.” Clearly they think they are a lot higher class than he is - they work as domestics, not manual labor. 

 

Son, on the other hand, sees the “higher class” black culture as essentially borrowed white culture. At one point, he calls Jadine a “white girl,” saying that she, like the white people, assume that he is a rapist. She becomes furious and flings back at him that he doesn’t get to determine who qualifies as a black woman. 

 

Later, Gideon talks with Son about Jadine. 

 

“Your first yalla? he asked. “Look out. It’s hard for them not to be white people. Hard, I’m telling you. Most never make it. Some try, but most don’t make it.”

 

There is another passage, where Son observes Yardman. It’s an interesting observation. 

 

He stared at his back. Yardman, she called him. That was Yardman’s back. He knew backs, studied them because backs told it all. Not eyes, not hands, not mouths either, but backs because they were simply there, all open, unprotected and unmanipulable as Yardman’s was, stretched like a smokehouse cot where hobos could spend the night. A back where the pain of every canker, every pinched neck nerve, every toothache, every missed train home, empty mailbox, closed bus depot, do-not-disturb and this-seat-taken sign since God made water came to rest. 

 

Another great observation is from Valerian. 

 

The unending problem of growing old was not how he changed, but how things did. A condition bearable only so long as there were others like him to share that knowledge. But his wife, twenty-two years younger and from another place, did not remember, and his friends were dead and dying. 

 

This is just one of many examples of how well Morrison writes characters. And I mean, she nails her white characters in a way that few white writers ever do with black characters. I felt I knew and know people like Valerian and Margaret, and can see myself in him at times. 

 

Valerian’s thoughts on Michael also resonate. This is a moment when Valerian sees how the members of his household look at Son at first, and realizes that when Michael called him and his servants “bourgeois” that this is what he meant. 

 

He had defended his servants vigorously to Michael then, with aphorisms about loyalty and decency and with shouts that the press was ruining with typical carelessness the concept of honor for a people who had a hard enough time achieving any. What he had said to Jade, he believed: that Michael was a purveyor of exotics, a typical anthropologist, a cultural orphan who sought other cultures he could love without risk or pain. Valerian hated them, not from any hatred of the minority or alien culture, but because of what he saw to be the falseness and fraudulence of the anthropological position. 

 

In our modern parlance, Valerian accuses Michael of “virtue signaling” - something my own parents have accused me of as well. As if any feeling of solidarity and empathy with those outside of one’s racial tribe exists only to make us feel better about ourselves. Which is horseshit. One look at Minneapolis and the way that white people have literally put their lives on the line to protect their immigrant neighbors is enough to indicate that maybe, just maybe, empathy and solidarity can and do exist across lines. And always have. 

 

I’ll end with an observation by Son, about the way race and wealth make a person blind to others. 

 

Son’s mouth went dry as he watched Valerian chewing a piece of ham, his head-of-a-coin profile content, approving even of the flavor in his mouth although he had been able dismiss with a flutter of the fingers the people whose sugar and cocoa had allowed him to grow old in regal comfort; although he had taken the sugar and cocoa and paid for it as though it had no value, as though the cutting of can and picking of beans was child’s play and had no value; but he turned it into candy, the invention of which really was child’s play, and sold it to other children and made a fortune in order to move near, but not in the midst of, the jungle where the sugar came from and build a palace with more of their labor and then hire them to do more of the work he was not capable of and pay them again according to some scale of value that would outrage Satan himself and when those people wanted a little of what he wanted, some apples for their Christmas, and took some, he dismissed them with a flutter of the fingers, because they were thieves, and nobody knew thieves and thievery better than he did and he probably thought he was a law-abiding man, they all did, and they all always did, because they had not the dignity of wild animals who did not eat where they defecated but they could defecate over a whole people and come there to live and defecate some more by tearing up the land and that is why they loved property so, because they had killed it soiled it defecated on it and they loved more than anything the places where they shit. 

 

Ouch. That’s a sick burn, but it is true. And if you aren’t picturing Trump and Musk’s faces - and those of so many more like them - you should be. Hey, one of them even used AI to generate a video of himself shitting on all of us. He’s just more honest than most of them.

 

I will mention that there is some domestic violence in this book, and another scene of two women hitting each other. Which, by the standards of a Morrison book is pretty tame fare. There is also a homicide that occurs offscreen, so to speak. 

 

But I think the real “trigger warning” this book may need is that it shines an ugly light on the assumptions that underlie our capitalist imperialism and the people whose exploitation our lifestyles depend on. Morrison doesn’t lecture, doesn’t preach really. (Although occasionally a character will.) She shows rather than tells, and the most uncomfortable part is that she sees all too clearly into the hearts of her characters. They aren’t exactly villains, but everyone has a huge blind spot or two. 

 

As a final thought on the book, I love that it does not offer easy answers. In fact, I don’t think it offers answers at all. 

 

Instead, it says “here is reality” and asks “what do you think should be done about it?” 

 

It’s good writing too, if I didn’t already make that clear. Morrison is one of the best writers of her era, a master of character and description and thoughtful exploration of important themes of our time. And perhaps all times. 

 

We Do Not Part by Han Kang

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2024, the first female Asian writer to do so. I previously read her book, The Vegetarian, back in 2020, and it became one of the favorite books of one of my kids. 

 

I had been meaning to read more of her books, and this one became available when I needed an audiobook for my commute for rehearsals and concert. 

 

We Do Not Part is definitely not quite as weird as The Vegetarian. It is also much more political, after a fashion. Like some of her previous books, it is partly about a traumatic violent episode in post-World War Two Korea, one that is fairly unknown to us in the United States, despite our complicity in it. 

 

For me, the book had some very good parts, and a lot of beautiful writing. However, it also suffered from a certain amount of inconsistency, and got bogged down in the historical accounts to an extent that it felt like she really wanted to write a non-fiction book just on the massacre, rather than a novel with episodes from the past. 

 

The massacre in question took place just before the Korean War broke out. For background, Korea was occupied and colonized by Japan for quite a long time before the war. You can read some of that history in Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which I thought did a good job of integrating the history with the modern day story. 

 

When the war ended, and Japan was defeated by the allies, Korea was “freed.” Which meant they got ruled by a US military regime, then a US-backed dictatorship. 

 

In the run-up to the Korean War, various rebel groups, many of them communist or leftist, vied for control of the country. Eventually, the hostilities escalated from a civil war to a proxy war between the US and China, with the Korean populace considered mostly expendable. 

 

One of the most sordid episodes before the war took place on Jeju Island, a large volcanic island off the south coast of Korea. I had never heard of it, but it is apparently a big tourist destination due to its milder weather. 

 

In retaliation against the rebels, the government murdered tens of thousands of civilians - men women, children, and infants. These ended up in mass graves, the existence of which was brutally suppressed by the Korean government until decades later, when the dictatorship was replaced by a democracy, and the survivors were able to put enough pressure on the government. 

 

For this book, Han Kang weaves elements of autobiography with fiction and with the historical events. 

 

Kyungha is a woman who seems to be a stand-in for the author. Like the author, she suffers from migraines, and has developed vivid nightmares after researching a massacre for her latest book. 

 

She reconnects with her long-time friend from college, Inseon, who is an artist, carpenter, and filmmaker. The two of them decide to do an artistic film about the massacre, one that utilizes Kyungha’s nightmare of trees shaped like humans with snow falling on them. 

 

Then, Kyungha receives a text asking her to come immediately to the hospital, and discovers that Inseon has severed some fingers while working on the carved trees. She also needs a favor: her bird has been left alone at her remote home and needs water and food immediately. This will require Kyungha to drop everything and fly to Jeju Island, find her way to the remote property, and see if the bird is living or dead. 

 

And all this occurs in an unusually strong storm that has dropped snow all over the island. 

 

Essentially, this, with some history of both Kyungha and Inseon, their families, and their relationship, which is kind of ambiguous, makes up the first half of the story. 

 

We get some hints of what is to come. Inseon’s mother was a child who, along with her older sister, survived the Jeju Massacre, losing the rest of their family in what turns out to be highly traumatic and horrible ways. 

 

For the second half, which is divided into two further parts, the line between reality, history, and hallucination becomes seriously blurred. The ending is ambiguous - what really happened? Was any of it real? And that actually works okay, although I do think that kind of ending is a bit trendy right now. 

 

The bigger problem is that so much of the second half becomes Inseon and Kyungha sorting through all the old newspaper clippings and other research that Inseon’s late mother did to research the massacre and try to find out what happened to her brother. 

 

And what I mean by that is that the plot goes so off track into the past, with laborious detail, statistics, anecdotes that are unconnected to the actual characters of the story - it really becomes more like a nonfiction account of the massacre as it occurred in multiple places - that the momentum of the book is lost. I also think that the author gets bogged down in her outrage at the inhumanity of the US-sponsored dictatorship and its thugs that she ceases to write in an effective or compelling way. It feels self-indulgent. 

 

Now, I do understand that some of this may be because I was never the intended reader for this book. It was written in Korean, for Korean readers, who I presume are more likely to see the incidents the way we Americans might see our own Civil War, and find the details more personal and thus compelling. 

 

For me, it was enough to get a taste of things. I can understand that our own understanding of the Korean War (like the Vietnam War) is deeply flawed on multiple levels. Both came from the end of a colonialist occupation. Both ended up as proxy wars between the great powers. And in both cases, the great powers either slaughtered civilians themselves, or encouraged the local governments and armies to do so. Although equally true is that things would probably have gone pretty FUBAR even if the US had stayed out of Korea entirely. Humans are just shitty, no matter our ethnicity. 

 

It is a shame that the book felt this way, because, had the historical stuff been edited better, and the book shortened by a good hour or two, it could have been a tight, effective story. Nothing important would have been lost by summarizing the historical details rather than creating a documentary within a novel. 

 

That leads me back to the main story, the one of two women who are bonded in a fascinating way. They each have their family trauma, and it helps to know the background. 

 

The atmosphere of the snowstorm is amazing, and the language of the descriptions is gorgeous. How much is original and how much is the translation by Emily Yae Won and Paige Aniyah Morris is not clear to me, but the combination makes for truly beautiful writing. 

 

At its best, the book is luminous and evocative, terrifying and sublime, deeply emotional yet restrained. For much of the first half, and for the final moments, I was completely sucked in and immersed in the storytelling. 

 

And then, an hour would go by at a time, and I struggled to listen, as it got bogged down in the details. 

 

I wonder if the curse of being an award-winning author is that editors are afraid to tell you to make cuts. Because I really think that had there been better editing, a better focus on the essentials rather than detail, and a little less of a preachy outraged tone, this could have been a truly amazing book. 

 

It’s still worth a read, I would say, because the good is so good, and you can, at least on the printed version, skim a bit when it starts to feel like a documentary. 

 

The audiobook, read by Greta Jung is good. Jung does a good job overall of portraying the characters. My only quibble is that at times it is a bit difficult to pick up the switch from the voice of Kyungha and Inseon, and since the stories being told shift often, this can make it a bit difficult at times to keep straight whose family story is whose. It’s a tough one to do, of course, because you have two women who are fairly similar - you can’t rely on dialect here at all. Overall, though, a good listening experience. 

Mojave Ghost by Forrest Gander

Source of book: I own this

 

My wife occasionally finds interesting collections of poetry by modern authors. This book is one of those.

 

I wasn’t really familiar with Forrest Gander before reading this book, which is one of his more recent ones. Gander is a native Californian, born in the Mojave Desert (of the title) - specifically Barstow. Which, if you know, you know.

 

He has written not just poetry, but fiction, nonfiction, and translations. His Pulitzer Prize came from one of his poetry collections, but he has won other awards for his translations from both Spanish and Japanese. 

 

Gander originally got his degree in geology, and had been planning to further study paleontology. However, a cancer diagnosis made him reconsider everything, and he switched to writing. 

 

He has taught, traveled, collaborated with artists in other media, and generally followed his own path. 

 

Mojave Ghost is an interesting book. It consists of a single rambling account of his journey along the 800 miles of the San Andreas Fault, primarily the part in the desert. But it isn’t exactly narrative. It is mood, observations, aphorisms, philosophy, and a bit of anything you might write a poem about. Throughout, it is haunted by his ongoing grief over the death of his first wife, but also twined with his awakening love for his current partner. 

 

It is one of those books that you don’t so much read as let it wash over you. And yes, it needs to be read aloud. The words are delicious, and the sounds are part of the meaning. There are a lot of unusual words, unusual choices of words, and some that seem almost made up. The meaning is in the sound, in the implication. 

 

Rather than try to further describe it, I figure I will just quote a few of my favorite passages. Understanding, however, that they are better in context, and that I could have picked many times as many. 

 

Back here, he imagines her

everywhere he looks. As the spring hills boing green.

 

All awake are the crows.

 

Flayed by the paper cut of her scent in his memory.

 

For her, it was home. This town

where various stirps of Christian 

fundamentalism intersect 

with unchecked retail sprawl.

 

Now the train just pass on through.

 

I’m not sure if this is referring to Barstow or not, but it could fit any number of desert railroad towns that are now just where the trains pass through on their way to somewhere else.

 

Back at Lana’s Diner, watching the woman

at the far table sweep her hair to her other shoulder

and flash her teeth at her companion.

 

Red sauce, says the woman when her eggs come,

and the waitress returns with ketchup.

 

As I’m picking up my check

from the table where I’ve eaten alone,

the waitress calls Come again, and

instinctively I answer, We will.

 

Handwritten note near the cash register:

Do Not Lean Arm on Pecan Roll.

 

So I pay up and step into humid

rock-flavored afternoon heat.

Dark pompadour clouds casting giant shadows.

 

There is so much in that passage. We all know the sort of diner, of course. The devastating realization that the speaker still thinks in terms of “we” even though she is no more. And that line about leaning on the pecan roll. That is hilarious. 

 

As latent with futurity as a closed stopcock,

the dawn redwood before it leafs out.

While in a brief sideshow, our lives take place nearby.

 

It’s so contagious: your quick, rubato, navel laugh.

 

Walking side by side

through Armstrong Woods,

its terminated air strong as snuff,

We feel the kick-in of elation.

 

Only in your company do I

concentrate and hold together

like the tightening vortex of a tornado.

 

I’ve wandered in Armstrong Woods several times, most recently with my wife, who adores the redwood forest. But how about that last stanza? There are these emotional punches throughout the poem, seriously excellent writing about feelings that can’t be entirely captured with words. 

 

Snorting at the uselessness of poetry, the proctologist

we meet at the New Year’s party is armed

with a restricted vocabulary of catch phrases and 

pomposities. A mind, you whisper to me

as we turn away, can rivel up like an old apple.

 

The words become so small, they cannot stand.

 

Oh god. Yeah, we all know that type.

 

Not, you say, to fall back

endlessly into the routine of ourselves.

Nor to compose ourselves always

from the same syllables.

 

I love that one. 

 

You tell me a heartache is not an object of perception.

I wonder. But what do I know of your heart?

 

Experience is first a matter of feeling.

Even the feeling of not having a feeling.

 

The tokens of love we exchange

don’t express love’s meaning so much

as its ineffability.

 

So my experience of you is infinite. Never

contained within your dimensions.

 

So many of the parts I loved are like this, trying to grab onto words that give a vision into inner life. This, in my view, is why the loss of poetry in our culture is one of the reasons for the rise of toxic masculinity and men who channel everything into anger. We need poetry. 

 

When they tell me it’s narcissistic 

to speak of regrets, to let myself circle

in this whirlpool and to go on

about it, when they tell me I need

to move forward, to focus outward,

to offer my attention to others,

 

aren’t they themselves prompted 

by an overbearing concern for control

which is another form of narcissism? Isn’t

this very mourning a constancy

to something beyond myself? Don’t

I have the right to my own experience

of heartache and anguish and failure?

 

You do, child. But not for so long.

 

At peace means despair

has settled in its place.

 

There is a profound truth there: that a concern for control, and particularly that form of control that demands that the sufferer avoid making others uncomfortable, is itself an expression of narcissism. I know it was (and still is) used as a weapon against me. Why do I bring up the past? Why can’t I just say only nice things? Why can’t I move on?

 

Maybe I can’t because I am still in mourning for the loss of my family, of my autonomy regarding college, of the love and acceptance I needed. 

 

I also find that enjambment does some good work in the second stanza. Reading aloud brings out “Isn’t” and “Don’t,” the speaker’s rebuke to the false comforters. 

 

Again, throughout the book, grief is mixed with the thrill of a new love. One does not displace the other. Both are true at the same time. 

 

I recall the human event 

of you turning your face

toward me for the first time. How

many lives before I fail to see it so clearly?

 

There are times when, in our mind at least,

we must swim back upstream

to where the love originated.

 

That it might be what it was and is again.

In bed and out.

 

Because all that is in me is in your eyes.

 

You, who are the discharge of my singularity.

 

So very good. 

 

She wasn’t fixed, necessarily, on happiness

which she couldn’t, in any case, distinguish

from luck. What she wanted was to flourish.

 

Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.

 

The one exception to the poem as a running stream of thoughts and events is a section near the end where Gander sets a single stanza on each page, each with a Haiku-like image of a person or place. I picked this one, because I kind of resemble it. 

 

In long-sleeved shirts and hats with neck flaps,

they hike a thaumaturgic canyon path

limned with tall mustard flowers.

 

The final section is entitled simply “Coda,” and is a single stream of consciousness. The writer is at a place where the effects of the fault are visible, the rupture of the rocks, the displacement. It is in that desert place somewhere, but identifying details are sparse. The ending of the poem is so good that I will end this post with it. 

 

Heat and silence. Still, the ground insists

its openings will be filled. Why

not apply? Apply myself. Over and over. This argument

goes beyond me. I who have never been

homeless. Groundless. Am I just going to stand gobsmacked

at the mirror while my years run out? What

 

is left of experience that hasn’t

been measured? Is there

an app for that? As I bend, I feel

the weight of the specimen stones

I carry in my jacket pocket slide forward.

As I continue my solo descent

along the canyon’s seam. As I sip

and hold a quick breath. As I slip from sight

into a chimney of rock. 

 

I definitely enjoyed this book, and will probably have to add some more of his writings to my library. 

 

Radium Girls by D. W. Gregory (Empty Space 2026)

Back in 2017, I read The Radium Girls by Kate Moore as a random read off the library’s featured shelf. It certainly is eye-opening about the callousness of corporate capitalism when it comes to worker safety. That issue seems more relevant than ever, with the Republican party hell-bent on removing regulations that protect workers and gutting the agencies that enforce the rules. 

 

When I originally saw that The Empty Space was going to do this play, I assumed that the play was based on the book. It turns out that the play actually came first, by a decade. I have no idea if the play inspired Moore to write the book, but because the underlying facts drive both stories, the tales that both tell are essentially the same. 

 

Since I already wrote a summary of the basic facts in my prior post, I will just copy it here:

 

In the period of time spanning from the beginning of World War I through the 1930s, glow-in-the-dark faces for watches , gunsights, and aircraft instruments were in great demand. Back in that time, this was accomplished by using a paint containing the element radium, combined with zinc sulfide. The radioactive radium would stimulate a glow from the zinc. 

 

The radium paint was carefully applied to the dial by skilled painters - almost all of them young women hired for the task. In order to get the fine brush point, the painters were advised to use their mouth and tongue to shape the bristles before painting - a practice which predictably led to the workers ingesting radium. While radium was well known to be toxic at the time, this fact was hidden from the young women - and in some cases deliberate lies were told to them regarding the danger. Within a few years, the women began to experience radiation poisoning, and many of them died at young ages as a result.

 

In what is well known to lawyers and law students as a common theme of history, the corporations lied, bribed, threatened, retaliated, and fought against all attempts to hold them legally responsible for killing their workers. Finally, some courageous lawyers, working mostly for free, teamed up with the most determined of the workers, and won. Soon afterward, laws were changed to protect workers, and OSHA was created, to prevent this sort of horror from happening again.

 

The book is plenty long, and has the time to explore the stories of many more women than the play does. In addition, the book follows both the New Jersey factory (the one in the play) and also the Illinois factory (which is not in the play.) 

 

This matters a bit to me as a lawyer, because, while the New Jersey lawsuit settled (as depicted in the play), the one in Illinois actually went to trial, and involved some serious lawyer badassery from Leonard Grossman, who worked pro bono, taking the case all the way to the US Supreme Court. The appellate case actually made it into my law school education on the issue of when the Statute of Limitations begins to run when there is ongoing damage that was concealed. 

 

The play follows two of the women involved in the New Jersey lawsuit against U. S. Radium, Grace and Kathryn (Katherine in real life). 

 

It has been far too long since I read the book to remember all of the personal life details of the various women, so all I can say is that I think the play takes a few artistic liberties. 

 

For example, I can’t remember the whole thing of Grace putting off marriage and then getting left by her fiance Tom being in the book, although I might have missed it. What I was able to confirm from my notes on the book is that another Catherine, who spearheaded the Illinois lawsuit, tragically dying before it went to trial, was in fact married to a man named Tom, who didn’t leave her, but in fact stayed in the lawsuit after Catherine’s claim became one for wrongful death. 

 

Other than that, and regarding the legal and regulatory issues, I believe the play hews closely to the underlying facts.

 

This particular production was by local theater The Empty Space, which I have often praised in this blog, and for many years. It is a local gem that has been a big part of our lives since my wife and I were young adults. 

 

Making her directorial debut this time is our longtime friend Marina Gradowitz. And by “long time,” I mean literal infancy. It has been a great pleasure to watch her grow up and turn into a thespian badass. 

 

Usually, we have seen her on stage - and she is an excellent actor. If she is not on stage, she is typically behind the sound and light boards. 

 

For this play, not only did she direct, she also designed the sound (including the music), and the set, which I thought was really cool. In fact, so cool that I took a picture. 

 

As usual for The Empty Space, a lot had to happen with a minimum of space, budget, and time. Scenes had to change quickly, actors had to cover multiple roles, and actors had to project without microphones. In other words, the usual things that require creativity and vision. 

 

Marina added a decent bit to the play that wasn’t officially in the script. The most notable addition was in keeping the dead radium girls on stage after they start dying. Instead, they wore creepy masks and “haunted” the action with careful and disconcerting choreography. In a dramatic moment at the end, they take the masks off one by one as a reminder of the closing words of the play, that they were never mere “workers” as their bosses saw them - “I never saw their faces” is the lament of Arthur Roeder - but women, humans with value and worth. And faces. 

 

I thought it worked really well. It was a constant reminder of the steadily growing body count, the price of profits, the legacy of the lies. 

 

The other artistic decision that I thought was good was that instead of having an on-stage narrator filling in the details, as in the original, this was done through “radio broadcasts” - news coming over the airwaves. And it was done with that old-fashioned lo-fi vibe from the era. I loved it, and thought it made the flow of the play better. 

 

I should also mention Ron Warren’s light design. In keeping with the theme, there was a lot of lurid green, but also contrasting colors, done in a way that some really cool shadows were cast on faces and sets. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was effective. 

 

The central character of the play is Grace, played by Charlotte Smith, who I have seen on stage quite a few times, although not usually in a lead role. She did an excellent job, sliding between the optimism of youth, determination for justice, and grief at an early death sentence. This is a pretty heavy play, so the brighter moments mattered a lot. 

 

The counterweight to Grace is Arthur, the president of U. S. Radium, who was largely responsible for the coverup and the character assassination of the victims. It was the discovery of his lies (and alteration of the report on the dangers of radium) that swung the litigation in favor of the victims. 

 

In the play, he is given more nuance than I recall him having in the book. Not that he is any less villainous. But he is given the chance to be haunted by the evil he has done, and given the chance to have second thoughts. 

 

Alex Mitts took on that role, a bit of a departure from his usual roles as the nice guy. I found it a perfect casting, and one of the finest performances he has done. (And I generally enjoy his work a lot.) From the beginning, I could feel the tension between the nagging of his conscience and the pressures from the shareholders and the reassurances from the company lawyers and scientists that the radium is safe. 

 

In fact, in the play, Roeder actually drinks some of the radium water quack remedies that are being pushed by the corporation. So he himself may well be doomed. 

 Grace (Charlotte Smith) and Roeder (Alex Mitts)

 

As I noted, there are a lot of doubled parts, and quite a list of secondary characters drawn from real life. A couple of times it was a few beats before I figured out whether (for example) an actor was a doctor or a lawyer after a quick change. But mostly it was smooth. 

 

I’ll specifically name Corissa Garcia, Alex Singh, Ian Sharples, Matthew Borton, Kiera Empsey, Carlie Wood, and Jason Dollar as holding down the supporting roles. There were a number of others in bit roles, and overall it was a good job. The story came through, which is the most important part. 

 

The vision for this production was excellent, and it was well executed. 

 

It really is a powerful story, and a devastating one. We aren’t that far removed from those pre-OSHA times, and our safety infrastructure is fragile and under attack. 

 

We really should have learned that industry cannot and will not police itself. It didn’t during the Gilded Age, when industry owned politicians. It didn’t during the Soviet era, when industry was owned by the government. It will never put people over profit, which is why it must be forced to, by regulation, investigation, and enforcement from outside entities - government, the press, unions. 

 

Radium Girls runs this weekend as well, so go see it if you can. 

 

March by Geraldine Brooks

Source of book: I own this

 

I had high hopes for this book. My youngest kid read Horse, another book by the author, and liked it. And, the book won a freaking Pulitzer. 

 

Unfortunately, this book was disappointing. The key problem was its use of lazy anachronism which rendered its female characters fundamentally unbelievable. 

 

I have run across this phenomenon before, of course. Plenty of genre fiction authors like to put 21st Century feminists in the past. For example, The Lie Tree is a murder mystery set in the past, with a protagonist who talks using modern feminist terms. But it is also YA and not exactly serious literature, so I just enjoyed the mystery. 

 

Serious literary fiction - particularly historical fiction - should be held to a higher standard. Which this book does not meet. 

 

The premise of the book is interesting, and it has its moments. 

 

The book is a riff on Little Women, which I read with a couple of friends in preparation for reading this book together. “March” is Mr. March, the father in that story, who goes off to be a chaplain in the Civil War, gets ill and nearly dies, and is brought home to convalesce. 

 

March is all about March, and also about the story that was never told about what went down. It is, I would say, intended as a bit of a corrective against the dynamic in Little Women, with Marmee being the impossible angel who never has a bad thought, and dad being the beloved and noble figure. 

 

Because Little Women has autobiographical elements, it is easy (and probably accurate) to see Mr. March as being the same person as Bronson Alcott, Lou’s father. 

 

And he was, well, a character. 

 

Part of the Transcendentalist movement, he was the True Believer, the ideologue, the guy who lacked basic practicality and common sense. 

 

Reading through his life story, it is clear that he had great intentions, and incompetent and misguided execution of those intentions. He also seems to have been allergic to taking advice from smarter people, including his long-suffering wife. 

 

This all comes through well in March, and is in my opinion the strongest part of the book. 

 

The book tells of March/Bronson’s early days selling notions in the South, where he (with his typical lack of common sense) fell in love with plantation culture, while failing to notice that it was propped up by the brutal enslavement system. 

 

It also tells briefly of the Alcott’s time as a stop on the Underground Railroad. It isn’t difficult to see that part of the challenge of that was for Marmee to keep Bronson from blowing their cover and getting his ass into hot water. 

 

And that was the one thing that the Alcotts actually succeeded at. 

 

Mention could be made of his ill-advised attempt to disrupt a trial. Or his many failed attempts at teaching, where he let his ideology get in the way of doing a competent job. 

 

And, my favorite, which was, sadly, NOT in the book: that time he tried to do a vegetarian commune except he was so extreme that he refused to use manure to fertilize the crops, because that was stealing from the cattle. 

 

(Note: I have cats. I can assure you that they have no interest in what you do with their shit…as long as you keep that litter box nice and clean for them.) 

 

Oh, and one more: the real-life Bronson may not have actually served in the Civil War, but he did get gravely ill…and shared his germs with Thoreau, who likely died of that infection. 

 

Plot spoilers ahead.

 

So, in March, Bronson Alcott’s letters and diaries and writings are drawn from, sometimes word for word, particularly his letters home while out volunteering. The incidents in the book that were not from Bronson’s life were based on other real-life events. Battles, personal incidents, and more. 

 

But there are a number of incidents which are filled in from the author’s imagination. 

 

The key one is the existence of an enslaved woman named Grace, who serves as part of the love triangle along with Bronson and Marmee. And the first part of the book is pretty darn horny. 

 

Which is, in my opinion, a bit of unnecessary artistic license. In the book, the couple has passionate sex by Walden Pond, resulting in a hasty marriage and the conception of Meg. In real life, the first Alcott daughter was born a perfectly respectable 10 months after the marriage. It was the marriage which was “scandalous,” as the couple - ages 29 and 30, by the way - got engaged without her family’s permission. But it can’t have been too scandalous - her brother (who introduced them) performed the ceremony. 

 

We also learn that during his trip south, March/Bronson met Grace and had an affair of some sort with her. (He is a thoroughly unreliable narrator, so we can’t believe what he says.)

 

Later, by coincidence, they meet again during the Civil War. Maybe they rekindle their affair? It isn’t clear. And then again, she becomes his nurse during his illness.

 

At this point, we get the story, not from March/Bronson’s point of view, but from Marmee’s.

 

And this is where the book totally lost me. (Although to be fair, there were huge problems already when it came to Grace, so…)

 

Marmee finds out about the affair, confronts Grace, etc.

 

The whole episode is so anachronistic that I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief any further. 

 

Because the Bronson portion of the book was at least based on his writings, he came off as fairly believable. His voice seemed to belong to his era. 

 

But neither Grace nor Marmee would have acted like that, or talked like that, or really existed in those forms at all. 

 

Let’s start with one thing at a time. 

 

So, initially, Grace is plausible. An enslaved woman who is really the daughter of the master, and raised with a higher level of education. Okay, that did sometimes happen. 

 

Along comes March, who becomes buddies with the master, while clearly having the hots for Grace. Fine, plausible. 

 

But from there, things go sideways. The idea that somehow Grace would bare her heart to this white guy who not only was buddies with her enslaver but who continually put his foot in his mouth is ludicrous. Grace is no fool - and neither were other enslaved people. Which is why, in books written by the enslaved who freed themselves - see Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - they made it clear that you never told a white man more than you had to. 

 

Ironically, Brooks gets this right in the episode of the young woman on the Underground Railroad. We never learn her name, she never tells her story. 

 

And this is to people who are literally helping her to freedom. Not to some random white guy crushing on the master’s library. And certainly not to someone who easily could (and eventually does) get her beaten within an inch of her life. 

 

Of course March would be that stupid. But Grace would not. 

 

So then we get into that stupid scene where Marmee hears March call Grace a term of endearment. 

 

Neither Marmee nor Grace behaves how any reasonable person would have in that era. Or any person at all. 

 

I start with the fact that social expectations were different regarding male sexuality. 

 

Most men lost their virginity to either a sex worker or a servant/slave. This is not merely well established fact, but it was socially expected. Male virginity and marriage was not expected, and was widely looked on as showing a lack of masculinity. And women thought this way too. (Seriously, I’ve read the books by female authors!) 

 

In a more recent book I read, The Ministry of Time, there is a great reference to 19th Century sexuality. A main character, brought back to the present from that time, is tested for STIs, and comes back negative. The modern doctors correctly conclude that he is likely a virgin. 

 

This isn’t to say that there weren’t men who were virgins at marriage, but that social expectations were to the contrary. 

 

The likelihood that Marmee cared about March’s sexual history before marriage is extremely low. And given March’s delirium at the time he uses his term of endearment to Grace, there is no reason she would automatically assume she was a current (or even past) lover. 

 

But even more ludicrous is that she pretty much stalks Grace, shows up at her employer’s house, and confronts her. Why on earth would she do that? What is the point? 

 

If she thought Grace was a threat, she could simply, like any white woman of the era, made a complaint and ruined Grace’s life. Or at least had her reassigned. Why would you make a scene, make yourself look bad, and possibly put Grace’s life at risk?

 

And, on the other side, why the hell would Grace once again bare her soul to this furious white woman?

 

All she would have had to do - and would have done in real life - would have been to deny any connection. March presumably mistook her for someone he used to know. He was clearly delirious. And all black people look alike, right? (Sarcasm font, but you know what I mean in this context.) Just deny and play dumb - a little code switch would have been so easy for an intelligent black woman with lots of experience. 

 

And then, Marmee would look even more crazy and foolish than she already did. Which is why I strongly doubt she would have bothered with a confrontation. Even if she were as foolish and impulsive as March/Bronson, she surely would have known this wouldn’t end well unless she got a confession. Which rarely happens in real life. And would certainly not have happened in this case.

 

Marmee is essentially a 21st Century semi-feminist woman, one that both is justifiably frustrated with the double standard and holding modern views of expectations of male behavior. (Modern religiously biased expectations, one might say.) 

 

Okay, so I have vented properly about this. (My wife, for what it is worth, shares my frustration with lazy anachronism in writing.)

 

In thinking about why Brooks struggled with this, I have a few theories. 

 

First, she is an Australian white woman writing about the American Civil War. Now, I am not one of those who thinks writers should only write what they know. But I also have reservations about writers inserting themselves in unfamiliar contexts and cultures, at least without a great deal of care. 

 

For example, I suspect that a white American writer would be equally clumsy writing about indigenous Australians during the age of conquest. There are things a guy like me would miss - the nuances, and the cultural baggage that still remains from the era. 

 

Another theory is that Brooks seems good at imagining herself in this book. Marmee reacts to March and Grace the way Geraldine Brooks would respond. Grace reacts to March and Marmee the way Geraldine Brooks would respond. 

 

March feels real, because he is based on Bronson Alcott and uses his words and ideas. Marmee would feel more real if she sounded like, to use a couple of examples, Mary Wollstonecraft or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 

 

I want to contrast this with a few books written by other authors that felt far more resonant. First is James by Percival Everett, which our book club read a couple years ago. The other is Tar Baby by Toni Morrison, which I am reading right now. 

 

In both cases, the white characters seem thoroughly realistic. Both male and female characters feel realistic. 

 

And the reason why is that they act, talk, react, and behave consistent with their time, place, and station in life. As a white guy, I feel like I have met people like the characters, whether in real life, or in books of the era. (Everett’s white characters are better than Mark Twain’s black characters - it’s quite striking.) 

 

One final quibble, which would have been minor if the other issues hadn’t been there: the book isn’t subtle, but rather preachy. I won’t get into it, but there were times I felt the book dragged for that reason. It was set up to show the ills of the enslavement system, and the unconscious prejudice of New England, which is fine, but it felt to me a lot like Brooks was trying to educate people who had no idea that the North was racist too. Or even that rape was endemic to the antebellum South. 

 

That said, there were some things that I thought were well done in this book. 

 

I thought that a lot of the section from March’s point of view did a great job of letting his own sense of self-importance and white-saviorism show through in his own words. He is clearly unaware of what he sounds like, and that makes him a good - and believable - character. 

 

The more that a scene is drawn from historical records, the more believable it feels. This includes the battles and the incidents in Alcott’s trip through the South as a young man. 

 

While a bit preachy, I did appreciate that the book captured the general resistance toward the education of black people, and the mistreatment of “contraband” - the freed peoples that the Union army failed so badly. 

 

There were also plenty of pithy comments on religion which seem fully true today as back in the day. 

 

The anti-war ideas of Marmee are the most era-appropriate of her views. 

 

And, at the core of the book, I think that it does capture a lot of the complexity of Bronson Alcott: his noble aspirations, his lack of sense, his talent at doing and saying the wrong thing, his inability to spot con artists, his unwillingness to listen to advice and take counsel. Again, the part of the book from his point of view is better written. 

 

I’ll share a few of the quotes that were interesting to me. This one, from Alcott’s writings, is good. 

 

“I find it suits me, this job of chaplain. I am, indeed, a ‘chapel man,’ who carries within himself all that’s needed for worship. At last, it is possible to have a part in faith without carved pulpit or Gothic arch, without lace altar cloth and without robes, save my suit of unornamented black.”

 

Or this one:

 

One of these, who was clearly dying, said he was a Catholic and asked if I was a priest. Knowing full well that there was no priest to bring to him, I looked around to see if we were overheard, and then I whispered to him that I was. I let him make his confession, and gave him absolution as I had seen the Fathers do it. I have wondered, since then, if I did wrong. I cannot think that even the exacting God of Rome would find so. 

 

And this one:

 

If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.

 

There is a nice call out to the Quakers, who are well documented as having been the backbone of the Underground Railroad and the Abolitionist movement generally. 

 

In Concord, because of our work in the Underground Railroad, we had come to know many who fit the latter description. Mostly they were Quakers, whose abolitionism and pacifism sprang from the selfsame core belief: there is that of God in every person, and therefore you may not enslave any man, and neither may you kill him, even to liberate the enslaved. 

 

And one here from Marmee’s point of view:

 

I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with. 

 

I am reminded of the profound and powerful poem, “The End and the Beginning” by Wislawa Szymborska, also about the process of rebuilding after war. 

 

By the way, the above passage is one that I felt was likely that Marmee could have thought in that era. 

 

I’ll end with a bit that really nails the problem with March/Bronson: his savior complex and sense of self-importance. Marmee may sound a bit modern here, but I believe the sentiment is realistic. 

 

“Brave enough! How brave do you need to be to satisfy yourself? I said pride, and pride it is, when you speak so. For it is not enough for you to be accounted commonly courageous. Oh no: you must be a Titan. You must carry all the wounded off the field. You must not only try to save a man, you must succeed at it, and when you can’t, you heap ashes on your head as if all the blame were yours - none to spare for the generals who blundered you into that battle, or the stretcher bearers, who also fled for their lives; or for Stone’s own panic, or for the fact that he never troubled to learn to swim, not even a modicum of blame for the man who shot him…You did not kill Silas Stone, or Zannah’s child. The war killed both of them. You must accept that.”

 

This is really the story of March’s life: go in trying to be the hero, ignore what the smarter people advise, do something stupid, and fail. Or, in some of the cases above, just try and fail - the incident on the battlefield was not March’s fault, and he had no time to think. 

 

In this sense, we can all draw a bit of a lesson. We can’t do everything. We won’t succeed at everything. But we should try, and we should listen to others, and we should be humble enough to realize that our powers are limited, and that all we can do is what we can. We are not responsible for outcomes, just for our actions. 

 

I really wish I had been able to like this book. It was a promising premise, it had its moments, but it was ultimately doomed by anachronism and difficulty in creating believable female characters.