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1mirrani
I read this book because it was a local read and it came highly recommended. I wasn't at all disappointed. I found it fascinating to read about the history in my state that I missed by being born too late to witness it. I made a LOT of notes.
My daddy was a Methodist minister, an "Eleanor Roosevelt liberal," he called himself in later years and at our house "nigger" was not just naughty, like "hell" or "damn,." It was evil, like taking the Lord's name in vain, maybe even worse.
This really explains it. I thought that was well done and it really set up the idea of how the book would go emotionally.
Tobacco put food on our tables, steeples on our churches, stains on our fingers, spots on our lungs, and contradictions in our hearts.
This is the song of so much of the south around here.
Even as a little boy, I already knew somehow that the Tysons were not always part of what white newspaper editors of the day called "the South," as in "/the South/ will not submit to forcible destruction of its customs and its culture." Is suppose they never stopped to consider that black people might be Southerners, too, or that people like my parents might love the South and hate segregation.
Loved this line. You'll find a lot of me saying that in this post, I think.
The law meant little in Oxford. Many people nowadays think that after the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed radical discrimination in public accommodations, cafe' owners and city officials read the news in the morning paper and took down all those WHITE ONLY and COLORED signs buy lunchtime. But this landmark legislation did not make a dent in Oxford.
Reality, hard in the face. So many people my age or younger believe that's what happened because that's what the books say people did.
And the worst abomination of all, of course, was sex between a black man and a white woman. It was that sin--or the faint hint of it--that got Dickie Marrow Murdered.
It took me many years and a Ph.D. in American history to find my way toward the roots of this strange folkway.
It goes on to describe the whole process, which is really easy to understand, once it's explained to you. But beforehand I'd bet you never gave it a thought. After reading this book I ended up reading another (about slavery) called Abraham's Well and while reading it I found myself applying this stuff to what people say today, mainly that they can't swim. I really see things in a different light now. Can't decide if I'm better or worse because of it.
At some point, one of us asked Daddy exactly why he had taken us to see the cross burning. "I want ed you to know what hate looks like," he said.
This is all that needs saying about the situation. You can /feel/ it. This author is good that way.
When the meeting opened with everyone standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, my farther would not say the words. "It said 'liberty and justice for all,' and I knew that was a lie, and just not true," Daddy told me years later. "I knew it ought to be true, but it was no more true than the tooth fairy. I couldn't say it."
Some part of this is still true today, sadly. But we're getting there.
He clashed more openly with his own father in those years when his mind was growing in all directions like ten acres of kudzu.
Loved this line.
In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.
Another line I liked, as did 49 others.
The story that the teacher tells the church people is well written. It's 21% of the way in and worth a read by itself, even if you know what's coming.
It is possible that I had not yet fully comprehended that adults are engaged in a relentless conspiracy against the privacy and dignity of their offspring.
I had a chuckle at this.
"I was doing that stuff back then, sit-ins and marches and all the rest and nowadays nobody even knows what it was like. People right now think that the white man opened up his drugstore and said, 'Y'all come on in now, integration done come.' But every time a door opened, somebody was kicked in the butt; somebody was knocked down and refused and spit on before you went in them places. It wasn't no nonviolence in Oxford. Somebody was bruised and kicked and knocked around--you better believe it. You didn't get it for fee."
The truth about integration. Sadly it's the truth about all major change regarding prejudiced ideas.
Inside these warehouses were eight hundred thousand pounds of golden cured tobacco, a known flammable substance, worth a total of more than a million dollars.
Really? Who had any IDEA that tobacco was flammable? This was badly written, I thought.
Some people's worlds are organized around a wartime trauma, a lucky break, a crucial mentor, or a lost love affair. As the years pass, they come to see the whole world through that particular lens of loss or luck.
A real thought. And very true.
It baffles me that people think that obliterating the past will save them from its consequences, as if throwing away an empty cake plate would help you lose weight.
I might just use this one day.
Exiled from the country whose uniform he continued to wear, Herman's brokenhearted father moved the family back to Germany. The land that had produced Hitler seemed safer for a mixed-race American family that the nation that had lifted up Martin Luther King Jr.
Wanted to save this one too. Powerful stuff, made so by its simplicity.
Why linger on the past, which we cannot change? We must move toward a brighter future and leave all that horror behind. IT's true that we mus make a new world. But we can't make it out of whole cloth. We have to weave the future from the fabric of the past, from the patterns of aspirations and belonging-- and broken dreams and anguished rejections--that have made us. What the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don't understand is how deeply the past holds the future in its grip--even, and perhaps especially, when it remains unacknowledged. We are runaway slave from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.
This needs nothing else to be said.
The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.
Loved this line.
The only problem I had with this book were lines like "If my parents were frightened, they never told their children." Lines like that or copies of it started to drive me bonkers. Also some things were repetitive enough that I thought I'd already read parts of the book and "lost my place." I spent ages trying to figure out where I'd stopped reading before, even though I'd been using a kindle and it had saved my place.
My daddy was a Methodist minister, an "Eleanor Roosevelt liberal," he called himself in later years and at our house "nigger" was not just naughty, like "hell" or "damn,." It was evil, like taking the Lord's name in vain, maybe even worse.
This really explains it. I thought that was well done and it really set up the idea of how the book would go emotionally.
Tobacco put food on our tables, steeples on our churches, stains on our fingers, spots on our lungs, and contradictions in our hearts.
This is the song of so much of the south around here.
Even as a little boy, I already knew somehow that the Tysons were not always part of what white newspaper editors of the day called "the South," as in "/the South/ will not submit to forcible destruction of its customs and its culture." Is suppose they never stopped to consider that black people might be Southerners, too, or that people like my parents might love the South and hate segregation.
Loved this line. You'll find a lot of me saying that in this post, I think.
The law meant little in Oxford. Many people nowadays think that after the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed radical discrimination in public accommodations, cafe' owners and city officials read the news in the morning paper and took down all those WHITE ONLY and COLORED signs buy lunchtime. But this landmark legislation did not make a dent in Oxford.
Reality, hard in the face. So many people my age or younger believe that's what happened because that's what the books say people did.
And the worst abomination of all, of course, was sex between a black man and a white woman. It was that sin--or the faint hint of it--that got Dickie Marrow Murdered.
It took me many years and a Ph.D. in American history to find my way toward the roots of this strange folkway.
It goes on to describe the whole process, which is really easy to understand, once it's explained to you. But beforehand I'd bet you never gave it a thought. After reading this book I ended up reading another (about slavery) called Abraham's Well and while reading it I found myself applying this stuff to what people say today, mainly that they can't swim. I really see things in a different light now. Can't decide if I'm better or worse because of it.
At some point, one of us asked Daddy exactly why he had taken us to see the cross burning. "I want ed you to know what hate looks like," he said.
This is all that needs saying about the situation. You can /feel/ it. This author is good that way.
When the meeting opened with everyone standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, my farther would not say the words. "It said 'liberty and justice for all,' and I knew that was a lie, and just not true," Daddy told me years later. "I knew it ought to be true, but it was no more true than the tooth fairy. I couldn't say it."
Some part of this is still true today, sadly. But we're getting there.
He clashed more openly with his own father in those years when his mind was growing in all directions like ten acres of kudzu.
Loved this line.
In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.
Another line I liked, as did 49 others.
The story that the teacher tells the church people is well written. It's 21% of the way in and worth a read by itself, even if you know what's coming.
It is possible that I had not yet fully comprehended that adults are engaged in a relentless conspiracy against the privacy and dignity of their offspring.
I had a chuckle at this.
"I was doing that stuff back then, sit-ins and marches and all the rest and nowadays nobody even knows what it was like. People right now think that the white man opened up his drugstore and said, 'Y'all come on in now, integration done come.' But every time a door opened, somebody was kicked in the butt; somebody was knocked down and refused and spit on before you went in them places. It wasn't no nonviolence in Oxford. Somebody was bruised and kicked and knocked around--you better believe it. You didn't get it for fee."
The truth about integration. Sadly it's the truth about all major change regarding prejudiced ideas.
Inside these warehouses were eight hundred thousand pounds of golden cured tobacco, a known flammable substance, worth a total of more than a million dollars.
Really? Who had any IDEA that tobacco was flammable? This was badly written, I thought.
Some people's worlds are organized around a wartime trauma, a lucky break, a crucial mentor, or a lost love affair. As the years pass, they come to see the whole world through that particular lens of loss or luck.
A real thought. And very true.
It baffles me that people think that obliterating the past will save them from its consequences, as if throwing away an empty cake plate would help you lose weight.
I might just use this one day.
Exiled from the country whose uniform he continued to wear, Herman's brokenhearted father moved the family back to Germany. The land that had produced Hitler seemed safer for a mixed-race American family that the nation that had lifted up Martin Luther King Jr.
Wanted to save this one too. Powerful stuff, made so by its simplicity.
Why linger on the past, which we cannot change? We must move toward a brighter future and leave all that horror behind. IT's true that we mus make a new world. But we can't make it out of whole cloth. We have to weave the future from the fabric of the past, from the patterns of aspirations and belonging-- and broken dreams and anguished rejections--that have made us. What the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don't understand is how deeply the past holds the future in its grip--even, and perhaps especially, when it remains unacknowledged. We are runaway slave from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.
This needs nothing else to be said.
The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.
Loved this line.
The only problem I had with this book were lines like "If my parents were frightened, they never told their children." Lines like that or copies of it started to drive me bonkers. Also some things were repetitive enough that I thought I'd already read parts of the book and "lost my place." I spent ages trying to figure out where I'd stopped reading before, even though I'd been using a kindle and it had saved my place.
