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Reading "The Warmth of Other Suns"
... by Isabel Wilkerson.
I thought I'd read this before, but I think I bought it and then mentally collapsed it into the collection of all the primary sources, historical monographs, and fiction I HAVE read on the topic -- Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Hortense Powdermaker, W. E. B. DuBois, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, the papers of the Louisiana Central Lumber Company.
Anyway, I'm reading it now, and it is as excellent as I thought it would be. I want to read Caste, too. And then watch Ava DuVernay's Origin.
One thing it makes me remember is the anomaly of my grandmother's poetry notebook I found after her death, hand-typed in the early 1930s when she was in the only year she had of community college (at least I think it was one year? I know she didn't actually finish... add it to the dozens of questions I wish I had asked her and will never be able to ask her now).
She had typed copies of the poems she particularly liked, to which I assume she was exposed in Kansas City, Kansas around 1933 or so. The icon for this entry is a photo of her in KCK sometime close to then.
The poems were an eclectic mix, but the ones that caught and held my attention were the ones from the Harlem Renaissance, STILL UNDERWAY. How did a young white woman encounter and love these poems? Who was the professor at whichever junior college this was? I don't even know which college she went to for a year or two before marrying her high school boyfriend Dick Miller.
Countee Cullen -- there were at least two of his. Langston Hughes, too. Arna Bontemps.
It's another bit of evidence that complicates the expectations of history of race, and for that matter, gender. My grandmother's future sister-in-law was a lesbian (known to her family), living with her partner in Kansas City, by the late 1930s. Was my grandmother aware of Countee Cullen's or Langston Hughes' rumored (more than rumored in Cullen's case) sexuality? On the other hand, that same future sister-in-law, my great-aunt Billie Miller (actual name Willanore, a combination of her grandmother's and grandfather's names) was herself a horrific racist. Her family was in fact the first exposure I had to racist white people in my life, when I met her sister and more, her sister's husband, in Springfield, Missouri when I was four. Aunt Pat gave me my first Barbie, in fact, during that visit. I named the doll Malibu, which was the style of Barbie she was. Such a tangled weird tapestry.
I thought I'd read this before, but I think I bought it and then mentally collapsed it into the collection of all the primary sources, historical monographs, and fiction I HAVE read on the topic -- Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Hortense Powdermaker, W. E. B. DuBois, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, the papers of the Louisiana Central Lumber Company.
Anyway, I'm reading it now, and it is as excellent as I thought it would be. I want to read Caste, too. And then watch Ava DuVernay's Origin.
One thing it makes me remember is the anomaly of my grandmother's poetry notebook I found after her death, hand-typed in the early 1930s when she was in the only year she had of community college (at least I think it was one year? I know she didn't actually finish... add it to the dozens of questions I wish I had asked her and will never be able to ask her now).
She had typed copies of the poems she particularly liked, to which I assume she was exposed in Kansas City, Kansas around 1933 or so. The icon for this entry is a photo of her in KCK sometime close to then.
The poems were an eclectic mix, but the ones that caught and held my attention were the ones from the Harlem Renaissance, STILL UNDERWAY. How did a young white woman encounter and love these poems? Who was the professor at whichever junior college this was? I don't even know which college she went to for a year or two before marrying her high school boyfriend Dick Miller.
Countee Cullen -- there were at least two of his. Langston Hughes, too. Arna Bontemps.
It's another bit of evidence that complicates the expectations of history of race, and for that matter, gender. My grandmother's future sister-in-law was a lesbian (known to her family), living with her partner in Kansas City, by the late 1930s. Was my grandmother aware of Countee Cullen's or Langston Hughes' rumored (more than rumored in Cullen's case) sexuality? On the other hand, that same future sister-in-law, my great-aunt Billie Miller (actual name Willanore, a combination of her grandmother's and grandfather's names) was herself a horrific racist. Her family was in fact the first exposure I had to racist white people in my life, when I met her sister and more, her sister's husband, in Springfield, Missouri when I was four. Aunt Pat gave me my first Barbie, in fact, during that visit. I named the doll Malibu, which was the style of Barbie she was. Such a tangled weird tapestry.
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Other than my mom and one of her cousins?? aunts?? people in my family have always been so prosaic, just concerned with survival and family. I can't imagine what a fascinating discovery your grandmother's poetry notebook must have been.