Me, I’m a fool for history. Show me a place where something really happened and tell me the story so I can see it in my mind and I’ll be your friend forever, even if the story is sad. So much has happened where I live that I’ve always got plenty to read but there’s one bit of regional history that I haven’t found captured in books. It’s time someone wrote about the Rhythm Club Fire. It happened seventy-five years ago today, in Natchez, Mississippi. Natchez was a medium-sized county seat then of about fifteen thousand people, sixty percent of whom were African-American. Because this was during the cruel and moronic Jim Crow period, the town was effectively split along racial lines and white and black people co-existed with a minimum of interaction. The divide was so deep, I’ll bet that almost half of Natchez had no idea their town was known as a place for great music. A few years before, a group of African-American entrepreneurs (self named, The Money-Wasters Social Club) had turned a long narrow building in the business section of town into a nightspot called The Rhythm Club. The place may not have looked like much…
I have a condition I think of as “The Book Bug.” Whenever I approach a large collection of books or I get my hands on a new one, my pulse jumps, my heartbeat quickens and I seem to get a slight fever. I’ve had the condition for decades. It hit me as a kid whenever Scholastic Books distributed their lists of new paperbacks and I was allowed to purchase two. (My attempts to increase the order provided early lessons in negotiation and the Bug returned when the books were delivered.) The air around books is rarefied to me and I’ve been known to get a book rush when I enter a big library, a good book store or a list of new book reviews. I’ll probably need a defibrillator if I ever visit the Library of Congress. Up till now, I’ve assumed I’m the only one with this silly malady and I’ve been too embarrassed to admit it. Thanks to My Reading Life, I now know it’s a condition I share with the writer, Pat Conroy. Conroy is, of course, one of the novelists whose stories are a combination of imagination and autobiography and he is the first to admit…
It’s easy to get lost in a good book. Not every book has this power but some stories can pull you in like the undertow and as long as the book continues, your consciousness is split between your familiar world and the narrative of the story, where you live fully and completely in its pages. I love getting sucked into a story but, between you and me, it’s painful when it happens because I always finish these books with a sense of bereavement. The consciousness I’ve been tuned into since the early pages slips away with the ending and leaves me back in this existence, a bit breathless and diminished by the loss. It takes a while to get used to this life again. So, be warned if you pick up a copy of Duma Key: despite the loss, evil and horror in its pages, you won’t want this story to end. It’s the confession of Edgar Freemantle, a man learning some Americans have more than one act in their lives. The first act of his ended when a work accident stole his arm, the ability to communicate and, in the end, his marriage. Stuck and unhappy, Edgar decides to…
My ex-boss and I used to have the same discussion every year on this date. April the fifteenth was a historic day for both of us for different reasons, neither of which had to do with taxes. Both were watershed events with long-term ramifications and my boss and I would debate which one had the greater historical impact. I wish I agreed with my boss: Jackie Robinson’s debut as the first African-American player on a Major League Baseball team is a thing worth celebrating because it marked progress toward real democracy in America. Unfortunately, thirty-five years before Mr. Robinson walked onto the field, April fifteenth dawned over a flat, cold Atlantic and a handful of huddled lifeboats where a magnificent ocean liner should have been. Taxes and baseball are national but the world changed with the sinking of the Titanic.Titanic’s tragedy was a world-wide event. Although almost half of the souls on her board were either American or British, the rest came from every corner of the globe. Citizens from every inhabited continent set sail in Titanic and when she went down families in twenty-seven countries lost loved ones. (Japan’s sole passenger, Masabumi Hosono, survived the wreck but was ostracized…
Not all monsters are hideous or born to evil. From no less an authority than Wikipedia, the term monster comes from a Latin word that means an aberrant occurrence or creature. Well, a significant number of people have defied society’s expectations and as a result, were judged as monstrous by their peers and brave by later generations. One example is Beryl Markham, the subject of Paula McLain’s Circling the Sun. Beryl Markham is usually remembered as the first aviatrix to fly from Europe to America alone. Her dramatic crash-landing on the bare edge of the Nova Scotia coast and her tremendous good looks made her accomplishment extraordinarily good copy for 1930’s magazines and newspapers.The interesting point is that Ms. McLain’s story doesn’t dwell on the flying accomplishments that put Markham on the pages of aviation and gender studies textbooks; instead she looks at the events that led to this woman creating history. McLain’s novel focuses on the Kenyan upbringing that shaped so much of Markham’s character. As the daughter of a British horse-trainer in Africa, Markham witnessed the European land-grab/colonization drive of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. She knew both the native African tribes-people trying to maintain their culture…