In the Presence of the Sun by N. Scott Momaday

Source of book: I own this. 

 

I haven’t entirely made a habit of reading for Native American Heritage Month until last year, but I have read a variety of books by Native American authors over the years, including with my kids. 

 

I picked this book up used, after reading Momaday’s gorgeous poem, “Prayer for Words,” in my anthology of native nations poetry. In the Presence of the Sun is a hybrid book, containing poetry and prose, and a real mix of topics and styles, as well as illustrations by the author. This book was published in 1991, but Momaday has been writing for a long time. His book House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer back in 1969. 

 

The book is divided into four parts. The first is entitled “Selected Poems,” and I assume it consists of poems that were previously published, although it is not clear when or in what collections. The second is a section all about Billy the Kid, kind of a free-wheeling account of Momaday as a child having imaginary adventures with the legendary outlaw, both in prose and poetry. The third is “A Gathering of Shields,” short vignettes about the ceremonial shields of the author’s people. The final section is “New Poems.” 

 

A number of poems particularly stood out. Here are my favorites. 

 

Buteo Regalis

 

His frailty discrete, the rodent turns, looks.

What sense first warns? The winging is unheard,

Unseen but as distant motion made whole,

Singular, slow, unbroken in its glide.

It veers, and veering, tilts broad-surfaced wings.

Aligned, the span bends to begin the dive

And falls, alternately white and russet,

Angle and curve, gathering momentum. 

 

A beautiful poem about a beautiful bird. The shift in perspective from the ground to the air is wonderful. 

 

Plainview: 3

 

The sun appearing: a pendant

of clear cutbeads, flashing;

a drift of pollen and glitter

lapping and overlapping night;

a prairie fire.

 

Probably the poems I loved best in this collection were ones like these, which capture a moment in time, and paint a striking picture. 

 

This next one has one of Momaday’s most striking illustrations, which works with the poem to make a multidimensional image in the brain. 

 

The Fear of Bo-talee

 

Bo-talee rode easily among his enemies, once, twice,

three - and four times. And all who saw him were

amazed, for he was utterly without fear; so it seemed.

But afterwards he said: Certainly I was afraid. I was

afraid of the fear in the eyes of my enemies.

 

That insight is outstanding. Most of us are the most dangerous to others when we are scared. Which is why demagogues stir up fear as a way to accrue their own power. 

 

The next one is part of a larger poem entitled “The Colors of Night.” There are eight total colors: white, yellow, brown, red, green, blue, purple, and black. Each has a poem that corresponds to the colors, but in unexpected ways. While all are good, I thought “Red” was particularly intriguing. 

 

There was a man who had got possession of a powerful

medicine. And by means of this medicine he made a 

woman out of sumac leaves and lived with her for

a time. Her eyes flashed, and her skin shone like

pipestone. But the man abused her, and so his medicine 

failed. The woman was caught up in a whirlwind and

blown apart. Then nothing was left of her but a

thousand withered leaves scattered on the plain.

 

The only part of the “Billy the Kid” sequence I will feature in this post is a short poem that I really love. It doesn’t have that much to do with Billy the Kid, however. The poems and stories that do feature him are so intertwined that quoting a portion would fail to make sense. So just enjoy this poem. 

 

Trees and Evening Sky

 

He saw the black trees leaning

In different ways, their limbs

Tangled on the mottled clouds,

The clouds rolling on themselves;

A wide belt of four colors,

Yellow, orange, red, and black;

And stars in the tangled limbs.

 

The section on shields starts with an introduction to how shields function in the Plains culture - it is both a tool and an expression of who its owner is. The paragraph-long descriptions of different shields are accompanied by drawings of each shield as well. I’ll quote one of the stories.

 

The Floating Feathers Shield

 

When Gai-talee was still a boy, learning how to hunt, he had a wonderful dream. In it he saw a great bear on the side of a mountain. The bear stood still for a long time, waiting in the shadow of a high stone ridge near timberline. Then a shape hurtled on the ridge, and the bear reared suddenly and took in his claws an eagle from the air. For a moment there was an awful frenzy; then again the stillness, and dark feathers floating and fluttering down on a little wind. 

Gai-talee told Many Magpies of the shield he wanted, and it was made according to his dream. Gai-talee raided many times in Mexico, and he carried his shield with hm. They say that Gai-talee’s shield is well known below the Llano Estacado. 

 

A couple of poems from the final section are worth quoting. 

 

Wreckage

 

Had my bones, like the sun,

been splintered on this canyon wall

and burned among these buckled plates,

this bright debris; had it been so,

I should not have lingered so long

among my losses. I should have come 

loudly, like a warrior, to my time. 

 

And this one: 

 

Rings of Bone

 

There were rings of bone

on the bandoliers of old men dancing.

 

Then, in the afternoon stippled with leaves

and the shadows of leaves,

the leaves glistened 

and their shine shaped the air.

 

Now the leaves are dead.

Cold comes upon the leaves

and they are crisped upon the stony ground.

Webs of rime, like leaves, fasten on the mould,

and the wind divides and devours the leaves.

 

Again the leaves have more or less to do

with time. Music pervades the death of leaves.

The leaves clatter like rings of bone

on the bandoliers of old men dancing. 

 

Momaday’s strength as a poet is in his striking and original word pictures, and I very much enjoyed this collection. 

 

Normal People by Sally Rooney

 

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I had been intending to read some Sally Rooney, preferably Conversations With Friends, but it was made into a television series, which meant long waits for the book. This book, Normal People, was also made into a series, but that was earlier, and the rush had died down, so I went with this one. In an interesting twist, the earlier book was on the screen a few years after the later one. I decided to read this book as my vacation read for our recent week in San Diego. 

 

In any case, I had heard good things about Rooney’s writing, both as writing and as a representative voice for a generation - Millennials - in a way that older writers could never be. I guess this makes me officially old now, as a Gen Xer, but whatever. 

 

 Whatever one makes of generational differences, the fact is that this is good writing by any standard. I was particularly reminded of Vonnegut because the language is mostly simple, understated, and yet packs an emotional punch and a depth of psychology that makes this story and its characters compelling. 

 

The book follows two characters over the course of about five years, from the end of high school through college, and takes turns looking at the events through the eyes of each of the two. With the exception of backward-looking passages, most of the book is written in present tense, which is a bit disorienting at first until you get used to it, but it works in this case. 

 

Rooney explores the class divide throughout the book, but also the respective emotional traumas that affect the pair. 

 

Marianne comes from a well-off family, but one which is pretty troubled. Her late father was abusive, and hit both her and her mother. Her older brother appears to be a lot like his father, and, although his abuse of Marianne doesn’t get physical until the end, he is still a pretty nasty guy. 

 

Connell, on the other hand, is solidly working class. In fact, his mother cleans Marianne’s family’s home as one of her jobs. His dad impregnated his mom when she was 17, and has never been in his life. So, we have a pair of missing fathers that loom over the story. 

 

Marianne and Connell also know each other from school. He is a highly popular student, a soccer star, and one of the smartest kids at the school. Marianne, on the other hand, is socially awkward, and deeply unpopular. However, she too is highly intelligent, so it isn’t a complete surprise that the two of them end up attracted to each other. 

 

Because of the gap in popularity and class, Connell asks Marianne to keep their relationship secret, which she does. However, when Connell asks another girl to the big school event, she feels betrayed and breaks it off. 

 

They both end up attending college together, where the tables are turned. Marianne is more at home in the upper-class world, while Connell is unfairly kept on the outside due to his unfamiliarity with and inability to understand upper-class culture. 

 

For the rest of the book, they remain drawn to each other, and try to reconnect several times. They also end up involved with other people from their own class: Connell with the seemingly fine but a bit boring Helen, and Marianne with the sadistic capitalist Jamie, the first of a series of cruel men she ends up with. 

 

For Marianne, she finds that being abused is a sexual turn-on, presumably because of her own unresolved trauma; while Connell finds it appalling, and cannot bring himself to go that direction even at Marianne’s request during one of their reconnections. Connell, on the other hand, struggles to feel worthy of a true passionate love. 

 

This isn’t really coming close to explaining this book, I’m afraid. So much of it takes place at the internal level, with a lot of complicated feelings. The ambiguous ending leaves one wondering what will end up happening to the two of them, even though it is difficult not to root for them choosing each other in the end. 

 

One thing that really did strike me about the story is that it takes young love very seriously. There is a human tendency among older people to dismiss the feelings and attractions of the young as “just puppy love” and similar statements. And to be sure, not all early attachments last. But I know plenty of people who met their lifetime love very early, and there is nothing trivial or unimportant about that love. In fact, that would describe me and my wife. We were each other’s first love, and nearly 25 years after we first met, we still have something going on. It wasn’t trivial then, and it isn’t trivial now. 

 

Furthermore, even attachments that do not last can be highly formative, and are for that reason alone of great importance. Rooney explores this idea with a lot of nuance and empathy. Whether or not Marianne and Connell end up together, they have profoundly affected each other not just physically but emotionally. Neither is the same as they would have been without each other. 

 

I also want to mention that my belief that women generally write about sex better than men do has been given further confirmation. There is a decent bit of sex in the book, because sex is a crucial part of the relationships the characters have. It isn’t gratuitous, or particularly graphic - unless you consider the emotional intimacy to be graphic, and it sure is. The sex is complicated, to be sure. Much of it is good, and that is a nice thing to see. Connell is a good lover, in the best meaning of that term, and he and Marianne seem to be highly compatible at first. There is also some bad sex - uninspired, unsexy - and that is before you get to the somewhat disturbing sex between Marianne and Jamie. Rooney writes it really well in all cases, though. It isn’t a male-gaze perspective, but a raw and honest examination of the ways that emotions and sex interact, for good and bad. 

 

Normal People was a good read, compelling and hard to put down, and satisfying for its depth. 

 

While small passages cannot really do it justice, as the book succeeds best as a whole, I did note a few lines. 

 

The first one reflects Connell’s thoughts after he first has sex with Marianne. His previous sexual experiences had been with girls who had then gone on to recount every detail to their friends, until the whole school knew the dirty details - including any disappointment he had been to his partners. Marianne, in contrast, was discreet, and, as Connell notes, “everything was between them only, even awkward or difficult things.” 

 

For me, this is how sex should be. I never got airing all the laundry about it. I am certainly glad that my own great love has been like that - what we have is between us, and we both aim to never humiliate the other to friends or family. This is one of the beauties of what Connell and Marianne have, and if they do end up together, it would be a big reason why. 

 

Although the details of the characters’ families are often withheld, we get small glimpses. How about this devastating bit regarding Marianne’s mother? After an incident with her brother, she withdraws into her usual coping method. 

 

But it wouldn’t matter if she did tell her, not really. Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child, Marianne resisted, but now she simply detached, as if it isn’t of any interest to her, which in a way it isn’t. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter’s frigid and unloveable personality. She believes Marianne lacks “warmth,” by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her. 

 

This one hit home really hard. My own family situation has been difficult for many years, although it wasn’t abusive like Marianne’s family. However, I do have a narcissistic sibling, who has been problematic since childhood. Unfortunately, my inability (or refusal, take your pick) to beg this sibling for love on the impossible terms that narcissists demand did get me labeled as the “difficult” child, the one who was - as the book puts it - frigid and unloveable. One of the reasons I found my wife to be such a breath of fresh air was that she never brought this drama, these demands that could never be fulfilled. I was taught that women were just like that, and if I wanted to have a successful marriage, I needed to learn to take the shit better. What a relief to find out that wasn’t even remotely true. 

 

I had a much more positive recognition in a passage about Connell. As a highly intelligent person, and one who is a reader, he found a good deal of solace in, among other authors, Jane Austen. He makes an astute observation:

 

It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.

 

This too has been my experience. Books require imagination, and imagination is necessary for understanding, empathy, and intimacy. At the most basic level, if you cannot use your imagination to put yourself in someone else’s place, how can you possibly make a connection? 

 

This for me has been the great tragedy of fundamentalism: it is, at its core, a rejection of imagination. And thus, it creates a pathological lack of empathy, and kills the ability for true intimacy. This truth explains as well why those who read - particularly those who read good writing and a wide range - tend to be the most empathetic - and imaginative people I know. And the converse too: those who are most closed-minded, the most bigoted, the most unempathetic tend to be those who, if they read at all, read within a very narrow range. The worst are those who limit themselves to fundamentalist religious writings, but a similar phenomenon appears with those who read only genre fiction, particularly of a sort that features people like them. I think in some cases, I have seen increasing fundamentalism go hand in hand with an atrophy of reading - whether this is a chicken or egg situation is not clear. Maybe it is both. 

 

Another delightful observation has to do with the interplay of communication and sex in a healthy relationship. 

 

Knowing that they’ll probably have sex again before they sleep probably makes the talking more pleasurable, and he suspects that the intimacy of their discussions, often moving back and forth from the conceptual to the personal, also makes the sex feel better. 

 

That has definitely been my experience. Intimacy feeds on intimacy, and there is nothing entirely like that combination of the physical and the emotional and the intellectual on earth. 

 

While this transcends class differences, there is another passage which is really telling about the ways that class cannot entirely be ignored. Connell gets a job with some acquaintance of Marianne’s family while he is in college, and he knows that this is a perk of their relationship. 

 

Rich people look out for each other, and being Marianne’s best friend and suspected sexual partner has elevated Connell to the status of rich-adjacent: someone for whom surprise birthday parties are thrown and cushy jobs are procured out of nowhere.

 

This also contains the seeds of how they end up breaking up, though. When the business goes bankrupt and he loses his job, he has to either move in with Marianne, or move back home for the summer. Connell cannot really bring himself to ask to move in - and Marianne is too clueless to understand his situation. She takes his move back home as a rejection of her, rather than his need to not ask for a handout from someone with more money than he has. This may be the most tragic moment in the book, this misunderstanding that isn’t ever entirely cleared up. 

 

Every bit as heartrending is the episode in Sweden with Lukas, a photographer who has a sexual relationship with Marianne over a winter, before she finally realizes she is just expressing her self-hatred. The description of Lukas is pretty chilling:

 

This quality of discernment, she has realized, does not make Lukas a good person. He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne, and makes art seem pointless suddenly. 

 

I should at least note in Lukas’ defense that he does the right thing and deletes the risque photos of Marianne at her request, so perhaps he isn’t as morally void as she things - or maybe he grows in a positive way. (This is more than another character - see below - is able to do.) 

 

The winter with Lukas is complicated for a number of reasons. She is on the rebound from a bad breakup with Jamie, for one thing. But for another, she has finally decided to avoid going home for the holidays. This was another thing that really resonated for me. I’ll go ahead and quote the entire passage. 

 

She’s decided not to go home for Christmas this year. She thinks a lot about how to extricate herself from “the family situation.” In bed at night she imagines scenarios in which she is completely free of her mother and brother, on neither good nor bad terms with them, simply a neutral nonparticipant in their lives. She spent much of her childhood and adolescence planning elaborate schemes to remove herself from family conflict: staying completely silent, keeping her face and body expressionless and immobile, wordlessly leaving the room and making her way to the bedroom, closing the door quietly behind her. Locking herself in the toilet. Leaving the house for an indefinite number of hours and sitting in the school car park by herself. None of these strategies had ever proven successful. In fact her tactics only seemed to increase the possibility that she would be punished as the primary instigator. Now she can see that her attempt to avoid a family Christmas, always a peak occasion for hostilities, will be entered into the domestic accounting book as yet another example of offensive behavior on her part. 

 

Yes to every bit of this. 

 

About 7 or so years ago, we stopped attending family holidays, after one particularly horrid Thanksgiving, in which it was very much a “peak occasion for hostilities,” the increasingly unendurable open season on criticism and disapproval of my wife by my mother and sister. It was after that that my wife decided she would never be part of another holiday gathering, and was prepared to spend it with friends instead. But looking back, this was an even more longstanding pattern, and I did some of the same things that Marianne did to try to cope. But nothing “worked” in the sense of making things better. That’s why we cut bait and moved on. And that choice has definitely been entered in the family ledger as an example of why I am the bad child. 

 

I mentioned above that there was a character who is unable to find redemption, and that is the minor character of Rob. We meet him early on, when he is showing nude pictures of his girlfriend to other guys without her consent. And hitting on and sexually assaulting Marianne. So, he is not a particularly good guy. 

 

But he next appears when his body is found in the river - a suicide. His funeral turns out to be the event that leads to Helen dumping Connell, but also the chance for some consideration of the tragedy of Rob. Why did he do what he did? It wasn’t as simple as “he’s a bad guy.”

 

Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance.

 

Connell knows that he himself has behaved this way - that was his first break with Marianne, after all: his concern about his status, which turned out not to matter in the end. Marianne later has her own analysis. 

 

He was also a very insecure person, obsessed with popularity, and his desperation had made him cruel. Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.

 

This line has been in my head ever since I read it. It is so true. A desperate desire for acceptance - for popularity and status - makes you cruel. (See: Trump, Donald, for the most public example.) And once you cross that line and intentionally hurt vulnerable others, you learn something about yourself. And that something is too ugly to really acknowledge, so it gets covered with layers of defenses and justifications. (In my opinion, this is one reason that fundamentalism attracts so many bullies: it provides endless justification for bullying - and opportunities.) 

 

There is one final line I want to mention. Marianne is in many ways an idealist. She wants to make the world a better place. But as she realizes eventually, her power is limited. This is a hard pill to swallow, but it is true. We have to simultaneously understand the truth of it, while never losing our willingness to do what we can anyway. 

 

Marianne wanted her life to mean something then, she wanted to stop all violence committed by the strong against the weak, and she remembered a time several years ago when she had felt so intelligent and powerful that she almost could have achieved such a thing, and now she knows that she wasn’t at all powerful, and she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, and at most she could help only a few people. It was so much harder to reconcile herself to the idea of helping a few, like she would rather help no one than do something so small and feeble, but that wasn’t it either. 

 

How much can someone like me do to stop the powerful from preying on the weak innocents? Not that much. But I still have to try to do what I can. And, as history has shown, millions of those small actions by millions of people make a difference, particularly in the long run. 

 

This book is bittersweet in a lot of ways, not just in that existential sense. You want a happy ending, but the ambiguous one we get is more realistic and arguably more satisfying. Will Connell and Marianne ever be able to be lovers in a healthy way? Who knows? Maybe? But they are and will be friends, and have each others’ backs like they always have. And maybe that is enough. Or maybe it was always the most important thing. The ending really sealed the deal on the book for me. It is really great writing, the kind that sticks with you, and the kind that leaves the same ache that any real experience of the bittersweetness of life itself gives. 

 

A final word about the book. The title references a recurring theme: Connell and Marianne yearn to be “normal people” - that is, like they think other people are. But as the book unfolds, it becomes obvious both that Connell and Marianne are better, deeper people than many of those around them; and that nobody is really “normal” the way they think others are. We are all that same combination of strengths and flaws and messiness - “normal people” do not exist, except in our imaginations. Acceptance of ourselves and others really boils down to that truth. 

 

A Mighty Long Way by Carlotta Walls Lanier and Lisa Frazier Page

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. While we don’t do this every year, sometimes we join the “One Book One Bakersfield” project put on by our local library. Some years, the selections have been great, while others have been pretty meh. The fun thing is that they usually get the author to come and lecture (or, in the time of Covid, put on a virtual meeting) to discuss the book. Unfortunately, I had to teach my Wills and Trusts class the night Ms. Lanier was here in town and missed it. 

 

The three previous One Book One Bakersfield selections I have read are:

 Broad Band by Clare Evans

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

 

A Dream Called Home by Reyna Grande

 

***

 

One of the difficulties of a book like this is that it is often difficult to tell what is the voice of the ostensible author, and what is the voice of the ghost writer. This is unavoidable in most cases, because the person with the great story to tell is not always - or often - a skilled professional writer. Having endured small portions of utterly dreadful writing by acquaintances, I can attest that some people can make a fascinating story sound deadly boring, or even unintelligible. So, it is generally better to have a good writer do the writing. 

 

But then, there is the commercial problem. Who is going to buy a book by Lisa Frazier Page about the Little Rock Nine? She may be a respected editor and reporter at The Washington Post, and she may have a track record for good ghost writing, but that doesn’t sell. What sells, particularly to us American sorts, apparently, is the first-person narrative - we think something is “more authentic” because the person themself “wrote” it. 

 

This is bullcrap, for the reasons noted above. 

 

So, with that fine whine out of the way, I will credit this book both to Carlotta Walls Lanier, who was the source of the story - but also to Lisa Frazier Page who did the actual writing of the book. And, I strongly suspect, the background reporting necessary to fill in the gaps in memory, the directed questions to draw out the necessary information, and the vision for how to create a compelling narrative out of a story that easily could have rambled. The seams show in a few places, but given the inherent difficulties of ghost writing, I thought it was well done. 

 

Even those who do not know the details of the integration of Central High in Little Rock Arkansas are likely familiar with a certain iconic photograph of a white student screaming racial epithets at one of the new black students. 

One of the other students was Carlotta Walls, the youngest of those who volunteered to be the first to integrate. This book is her side of the story, so to speak. 

 

Much of the book was very much as you might expect. There is the account of Carlotta’s family, her childhood, and the traumatic experiences she had at Central High. A few chapters at the end recount her later life, including President Clinton’s recognition of the Nine when he was governor of Arkansas. (Hey, remember when Arkansas could still elect democrats? Before the GOP went full KKK on us…) It is a good story, and Page tells it well. 

 

It is hardly a unique story - the desegregation in the South went like this nearly everywhere. White racists resisted integration, rioted and bombed the homes of black students and white allies. Governors refused to implement the law, requiring President Eisenhower to send in the troops. Black students were mistreated, in many cases causing lifelong trauma. Integration sorta happened, but then white racists found other, more subtle ways to resegregate, leading us to the present, when schools are still largely segregated in fact, although not in law. And, as usual, the schools with the most black students tend to be chronically underfunded, understaffed, and neglected. And so it goes…

 

But, to be fair, despite the things that have failed, our country has made progress. It still feels shocking to read about how little “mixing” occurred between races, or how freaked out white people got about sharing space with non-whites. Living here in California, where whites are less than half the population, it just feels weird to be in all white spaces. For example, our recent visit to the San Diego Zoo: we were constantly around people of all colors (and a number of visitors from foreign countries - it is a big tourist destination) and it just felt normal. But the idea of sharing everything from drinking fountains to tour busses to restrooms is fairly new. 

 

And that is one thing that really stood out about the book to me.

 

This is not the distant past. These people are mostly still alive.

 

Or, to put it in perspective in a different way: my parents were alive when this happened. These students were about 10 years older than my parents. My grandparents’ generation was the one that was freaking out about desegregation. My parents’ generation absorbed these lessons of hate so thoroughly that they stood and screamed these epithets. 

 

Not all of them, of course, as this book makes clear. But the racists were the majority, and the ones willing to use violence, so many of the good people kept their heads down. 

 

While it is not an excuse - there is NO excuse - the recency of this history explains in some part why so many of my parents’ generation of white people (particularly evangelicals) are such strong supporters of Trump and his KKK revival meetings. They came of age during Jim Crow, and that feels normal to them, just as much as racial diversity feels normal to me and my kids. 

 

The Hazel Bryans of the world are still with us - even if Hazel herself made some personal progress later in life. 

 

And so are the Carlotta Walls. 

 

I wrote down a few lines for this post, and figured they give some insight into both this story and our current moment. One of those is the direction that Carlotta’s mother gave her regarding how to respond to bigots. 

 

“Carlotta, we must be patient with ignorance and never, ever bring ourselves down to their level.”

 

This advice supported Carlotta as she increasingly experienced the ugliness of hate - it was a reminder that bigotry is a lower level of existence, and that the fault was never with Carlotta for being “uppity” - it was with those who refused to accept her equality with them. 

 

Another passage recounts the adds that were run in the local newspapers by….wait for it….local white churches, opposing desegregation. Why?

 

The ads asked questions that seemed to reveal the underlying source of all the fear: Would black boys and white girls be allowed to dance together at school dances? Would black boys and white girls be paired in romantic love scenes in school plays? The mere thought that their white daughters would be in such proximity to black boys petrified white mothers and fathers throughout Little Rock. 

 

I could spend an entire post on the psychological roots of this, from projection, to the underlying misogyny that makes male/female relations into a power hierarchy. But what is interesting is to see just how many people (again, of a certain generation) are still freaked out about interracial relationships. In Bill Gothard’s cult, they were strongly discouraged - on the grounds of “cultural differences” - and I have come to realize that this is more endemic in conservative circles than I thought. (Related: Theatricum Botanicum did a phenomenal riff on this in their production of All’s Well that Ends Well a number of years ago.) 

 

It was, of course, disappointing to see certain white churches leading the push for segregation - although in general, conservative white churches have resisted every call for racial equality, from supporting slavery to their current embrace of a white supremacist in Donald Trump. (Also their consistent opposition to the teaching about the reality of systemic racial inequality in our institutions.) 

 

As Carlotta puts it later in the book:

 

It never ceased to amaze me how often the bigots tried to hide their fear and hatred behind the banner of Christianity. 

 

I feel this so much. 

 

That said, there have always been other ministers and churches who have supported the civil rights movement. Carlotta mentions that once the troops enforced the desegregation, a group of ministers would escort the black students to school every morning - an interracial group of ministers. 

 

This protection was definitely necessary, as the racists still tried to disrupt things throughout the years Carlotta attended the school. 

 

I was also struck by a bit of reporting by the New York Times that is quoted in the book. After the students went in, a group of mothers and daughters became distraught, crying and screaming “The niggers are in our school!” Yeah. And remember, these were people close to my parents’ age. This is recent history. 

 

It truly did take the actions of President Eisenhower to make the desegregation stick. It is kind of odd to remember that there was a time when the luminaries of both parties were committed in some degree to the expansion of civil rights. Justices appointed by both parties ruled in favor of desegregation. Both parties voted for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. It wasn’t until Goldwater’s failed run at the presidency and the resulting swerve of the Republican party under Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” that the parties essentially flipped from where they were during and after the Civil War. 

 

This thread certainly runs through the book. There were always those who did the right thing in some way or another. Not many students were willing or able to fully stick their necks out, but a few did, and others tried subtly to give encouragement. Carlotta mentions Barbara Barnes, who gave quiet encouragement - later Carlotta found out that Barbara had a strongly segregationist grandfather who wanted her to withdraw from the school. She pushed back on his religious justifications with the words of Christ. I think we are seeing this sort of thing today as well, with the younger folk pushing back against the bigotry of their elders. 

 

Another story involves a girl named Becky who passed notes with one of the black students. They chose not to speak in the halls, because of the harassment, but they did make a friendship. 

 

The majority, however, fell into a third category, neither foes nor allies, but “neutral.” I think the whole passage here is worth quoting. 

 

The majority of students at Central fell into the third group: those who kept silent. They wanted all the “trouble” to end. They did not torment us, but they didn’t extend themselves to us in any way, either, even quietly. They did not want to be associated with one side or the other. They chose to remain neutral, as if remaining neutral in the face of evil were an acceptable and just choice. They turned away. They rendered us invisible. They are most likely the ones today who, when asked about the Class of 1957, try to reinvent history. Things at Central weren’t as bad as the nine of us have said, they have recalled in recent years. The mobs weren’t as big, they say, the bad guys and gals weren’t as bad, and the atmosphere wasn’t as tense. Well, of course that is how they remember the Central journey these fifty-plus years later. When I was suffering in those hallowed halls, they turned away. They chose not to see. 

 

One of my decisions after the election of Trump was that I would refuse to be a person who chose not to see, who remained “neutral” in the face of evil. It has cost me friends and family, as I knew it would. I wish that they had chosen to take the same journey away from hate and fear and prejudice and toward a more equal and mutual future. 

 

Another line that stood out as highly relevant today was this one, about the way that the local authorities downplayed the bombing of Carlotta’s family home. (A pair of young black men were wrongfully convicted of the crime, even though everyone knew they were not guilty, and that the real perpetrators were well connected and thus protected.) One prominent man wrote in the local paper that he was most concerned that the bombing was costing the city business. One of the black leaders responded that this was a cowardly response, and further, that “People all around the world today are judging American democracy by what is happening in Little Rock.”

 

Two points here: first, yes, this is why it is important to wield consumer pressure on companies. They in turn, not wanting to lose business, stop being present in communities that engage in bigoted and oppressive practices. In fact, this was one reason that Jim Crow eventually ended. Which leads to the second point: people all over the world are observing the US, and judging us on what we do. Another major reason for the end of Jim Crow was that our leaders realized that the Communist movement was gaining ground in the third world because American “democracy” that excluded people of color was unattractive to those who were not white. 

 

I wonder sometimes if today’s bigots understand just how much they have done to damage the reputations of Americans and America. Is it really okay with them that we have the reputation of gun-crazy, violent, stupid, and bigoted ignoramuses? I guess maybe they take pride in that, but many of their children are appalled. 

 

Here is another fascinating observation: a white woman who helped one of the black students when she was surrounded by a white mob found that she and her husband were branded “Communists” for doing so. One of my realizations over the last decade is that, in right wing American discourse, “communist” and “socialist” are mostly just code words for “n-----r lover.” It is what you say about someone who wants racial equality, or even just decent treatment for others. I’m hardly that far left, so it was a real shock to be called that as much as I have lately. And not for, say, calling for government ownership of the means of production, but just for saying maybe we should try to make it easy for people to vote. 

 

And the relevant parallels just keep coming! The governor of Arkansas was subpoenaed to testify in the bombing case, but he ignored it, claiming he as a chief executive, was not bound by court orders. Sound familiar? Trump may not read much, but he has the KKK playbook memorized. 

 

Also familiar: the determination of white supremacists to silence the strongest voices for racial equality. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was the most memorable of these silencings, but you can still see it in the vicious attacks on anyone who dares stand up against bigotry. And in the way our first black president and his family have been treated. 

 

The chapters on Carlotta’s later life were quite interesting. She didn’t realize her dream of becoming a doctor, and struggled in college. However, she found success later as a real estate broker. One interesting thing to me was that she served as a board member on the Colorado AIDS Project back in the 1980s, during the early days of the pandemic. The organization didn’t put their address on correspondence for fear of bombing - those of us who lived through those days remember the vicious hate surrounding the victims of the disease. Which is why we can recognize it now that it is focused particularly on transgender people. Carlotta draws an express parallel between racism and anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and notes that her own experience with hate helped her identify with others. 

 

One final passage struck me. Carlotta generally didn’t say anything about her high school experiences, and it wasn’t until the report on CNN surrounding the recognition by Governor Clinton that many of her friends and neighbors realized she was one of the Little Rock Nine. 

 

They all assumed I was just being humble. There was no explaining how desperately I had needed to forget.

 

I think this is important to understand, even if she couldn’t explain it. The battle for equality and justice may not be a war in the strict sense, but it is a war. It has its casualties and even its deaths. For children like Carlotta, they were the wounded, who sacrificed themselves for a better future for others. I think that is one thing this book makes clear. This wasn’t some feel-good story of progress so much as it was the story of a necessary fight against evil, with lingering damage to those on the front lines. In the struggle for justice, it isn’t enough to say “well things are somewhat better now, so it’s all good.” We have to recognize that the damage continues, and that we have a responsibility not just to cease doing evil, but to repair the damage that has been done. 

 

We still have a long way to go, and the world continues to watch. What will we as a society do? And, equally as importantly, what will each of us do? Which side will we fight on? Because there is no true “neutrality” when it comes to hate, injustice, and oppression.