Hal Roth (2)

Mr. Roth has collected stories told on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a country place where blacks and whites have lived and farmed alongside each other for a very long time.

Mr. Roth's collection of stories is broad and interesting but the way he has presented them detracts from their value.

Mr. Roth says clearly at the outset that he has deliberately obscured the origins of the stories and rightly so because there is no way now for storytellers to consent to their tales being included in show more this collection.

But I think Mr. Roth takes hiding his sources too far. Some of the stories clearly originate in the 1920s while others are more modern. Some take place at the top of the Eastern Shore, some farther south. Some take place on the riverbank and seashore. Mr. Roth does nothing to help us place these stories in either time or place. Each vignette is written as a paragraph or two that is completely divorced from its neighbors. There is nothing here of Mr. Roth or of the storytellers or their communities. I am reminded of a book of limericks.

I received a review copy of "Conversations in a Country Store" by Hal Roth (Secant Publishing) through LibraryThing.com. show less

The fourth book I read this year was The Monster's Handsome Face: Patty Cannon in Fact and Fiction by Hal Roth. I grabbed it in Delaware on the way back from the holiday trip-to-the-pseudo-inlaws' place, because there are two things that I like to come away with whenever I visit someplace new; a new bird observation and a new book on the local history or folklore.

This book wasn't particularly well-written, in places it was downright disorganized, and it only would have been a chapbook if the show more author hadn't taken the measure of quoting multi-page passages of a number of other, out-of-copyright works on the same subject; but it told a fascinating story. Patty Cannon enjoyed a brief stir of nationwide fame just after the civil war, when a well-regarded novel and several allegedly non-fiction books were written on her leadership of the Cannon-Johnson gang, her many murders, and her suicide by poison when the law finally caught up to her. These accounts generally make much of some things she may well not have done - killed her first husband and one of her children, for instance. The petty treason. They also play up the ways in which she subverted femininity. According to the stories she wore men's clothes when committing highway robbery, and could wrestle and shoot with skill.

What she actually, undeniably did, and did well, was organize the kidnapping of free black people from as far north as Philadelphia and sell them back into slavery. She would do this by offering them jobs, rooms, or merely companionship and a drink, luring them to an out-of-the-way place, and simply tying them up. Once they were kidnapped and sold, the newly enslaved (or re-enslaved) people would have no recourse unless they could find, without money or their own time, and in an era before resources like telephones or the internet, a white person who would testify to their identity and free status in court. As 'chattel', they themselves could not testify on their own behalf.

Naturally, she became something of a folk bogey among the local free black population; who needs to make up the devil when you've got one? But she was far from the only person with this business model. The law tended to overlook these matters, and in least one case a local sheriff ran the kidnapping gang. Quaker abolitionists from Philadelphia funded a crusade against her, but in the end, she was arrested after human remains turned up that were said to be those of a slave dealer who had come to do business with her and instead been killed for the money he carried.

This is some crazy shit you don't hear about in school.

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