___________________________________________________________________________________199

A Dark Rose: Love in EudoraWelty’s Stories and Novels. BySally Wolff. (Baton Rouge, LA:Louisiana State University Press,2015. Pp. ix-xxv+199, contents,preface, notes, works cited, index.$48, hardcover)

Welty’s love of flowers and the naturalworld has been a popular topic in recent Weltyscholarship. As a result, Sally Wolff’s A DarkRose: Love in Eudora Welty’s Stories and Nov-els is a nice complement to other book-lengthstudies on Welty that deal with gardening andthe natural world. Patti Carr Black, along withartist Robin Whitfield, offers a series of illus-trated passages from Welty’s texts that reflecton such aspects of nature as flowers, birds, thesky, and trees in Eudora Welty’s World: Wordson Nature (2013), and Julia Eichelberger fo-cuses on letters that Welty wrote to DiarmuidRussell, her literary agent, and John Robinson,a longtime friend, in Tell about Night Flowers:Eudora Welty’s Gardening Letters, 1940-1949(2013), letters that not only comment onWelty’s growth as an artist during the 1940s, butthat clearly demonstrate the importance of gar-dening and the natural world in Welty’s life.The garden at Welty’s home in Jackson, Missis-sippi, is the subject of Susan Haltom and JaneRoy Brown in One Writer’s Garden: EudoraWelty’s Home Place (2011). Wolff’s text seguesinto this garden, offering a Preface, “Reminis-cences,” that treats her personal friendship withWelty and relates an afternoon she spent work-ing to restore Welty’s backyard rose garden thathad fallen into disrepair, armed with a knowl-edge of roses gained from her own mother,Elaine Wolff. Wolff continues to draw upon hernineteen year friendship with Welty throughout

A Dark Rose, thus of-fering an intimateglimpse into Welty’slife and work.

Wolff ’s titlecomes from a termused by Welty in Los-ing Battles. In her“Preface” she identi-fies “[a] dark rose” as“a complex, autobio-graphical image of the author and ametaphor for the provocative commingling ofthe comic and tragic in Welty’s life and art” (p.6). Wolff provides a thoroughly researched andinsightful analysis of Welty’s multidimensionalexploration of love, “both the tragic and comicstates—the light and dark sides” (p. 4) as wellas love’s ambiguity, complexity and mystery,whether in relation to marriage, divorce, orspinsterhood, even murder and rape. In herthoughtful examination of Welty’s oeuvre,Wolff aptly points out that most of Welty’s nov-els and stories treat either the presence or theabsence of love, and the symbolic rose, whichappears frequently, “represents devotion, home,love of family, lost youth—and grief” (p. xix).It is “the ’dark rose’” which “metaphorically il-lustrates the dichotomies and contradictionsWelty sees in love—faithfulness, hope, joy, andsharing balanced against loss, grief, and alone-ness” (p. 5), a process that both “complicatesand authenticates Welty’s writings about love”(p. 94).

Over half of the volume is devoted toWelty’s many short stories. In the first threechapters, Wolff treats the stories from A Cur-tain of Green and The Wide Net, noting thatthese first two story collections contain love-re-lated themes that are important to Welty’s laterwork. She provides close readings of a plethora

Reviews

___________________________________________________________________________________200

of texts, for instance, stories like “The Winds”and “A Memory,” where an understanding andknowledge of love is important to the femalecharacters, or “A Piece of News” and “TheWide Net,” which portray complicated maritalproblems involving reconciliation, or “PetrifiedMan” and “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies,”where communal settings offer women an op-portunity to “gossip about love” (p. 87). Woolfreturns to Welty’s stories in chapters seven andeight, treating The Golden Apples and TheBride of the Innisfallen, two collections that al-ternate “between the stories of thwarted andanticipatory relationships” (p. 146). Otherchapters are devoted to Welty’s novels. TheRobber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, and ThePonder Heart all treat marriage as does the laterLosing Battles and in the context of a numberof aspects of love. The Optimist’s Daughter isexamined in conjunction with One Writer’s Be-ginnings, two autobiographical works thatWolff considers “Welty’s tour de force” (p. 177)as they allow Welty’s “most complex depictionsand assessments of love” (p. 177).

The autobiographical nature of Welty’swork is not only considered in the section onThe Optimist’s Daughter and One Writer’s Be-ginnings; biographical threads are woventhroughout A Dark Rose. The rose garden ofWelty’s mother, Chestina, surfaces in the story“A Curtain of Green” and Chestina’s devotionas a mother in Delta Wedding. Ohio, Welty’sfather’s place of birth, is alluded to in “TheWinds” and The Optimist’s Daughter. Welty’searly work for the Works Progress Administra-tion (WPA) during the Depression era is impor-tant in stories in which Welty treats rural life.Her journey to New Orleans with CarvelCollins is central to “No Place for You, MyLove,” and her relationship with John Robin-son is significant in “Death of a Traveling Sales-man,” Delta Wedding, and The Optimist’sDaughter. The Welty family roses are firmly im-planted in “Kin” from The Bride of the Innis-fallen in addition to other works.

Valuable as well are the connections that

Wolff makes between Welty and WilliamFaulkner. An established Faulkner scholar,Wolff draws parallels between Welty andFaulkner’s works, pointing out, for instance, theconnections between stories like Welty’s “Flow-ers for Marjorie,” “Clytie,” and “A Curtain ofGreen” and Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” orsimilarities between characters such as Welty’sClytie in “Clytie” and Faulkner’s QuentinCompson in The Sound and the Fury or Mrs.Larkin in “A Curtain of Green” and Faulkner’sAddie Bundren in As I Lay Dying. There arelinks, also, in the locations used by both writers.“The post office in Welty stories functionsmuch as the general store or porch does forFaulkner” (p. 77), notes Wolff. In other places,the two writers vary, such as in their views ofthe past and the role of memory in works likeThe Optimist’s Daughter and Requiem for aNun.

Throughout the volume, Woolf treats a va-riety of topics close to Welty’s heart—family,community, human relationships, war, death,fertility, isolation, judgment, myth, vulnerabil-ity, gardening, and nature, among others—andshows how these topics turn into main themesand motifs that are skillfully intertwined withWelty’s interest in love and the metaphor of thedark rose, which she identifies as “Welty’s dis-tinctive signature” (p. 199). Petal by petal,Wolff gently but insightfully dissects the manyroses that make up the Welty canon and en-courages us to immerse ourselves in the worldof Welty’s literary garden.

--Catherine Calloway

A Lucent Fire: New & SelectedPoems. By Patricia Spears Jones.(Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press,2015. Pp. 192, notes, acknowl-edgements. $17.00, paper)

___________________________________________________________________________________201

The title of Patricia Spears Jones’s A Lu-cent Fire: New & Selected Poems is well cho-sen. While it originates from a line in one of herpoems, “Why I Left the Country: A Suite,” thistitle works on another level to meet the chal-lenge of putting together a selection of poems.Jones’s book captures how a fire burns. It is allone fire, rooted in one source, but it flares withdifferent shades and forms. As such, A LucentFire is illuminating.

A Lucent Fire begins with a few of Jones’searly poems, continues with selections from herbooks The Weather That Kills, Femme duMonde, Painkiller, Repuestas, Swimming toAmerica, and Living in the Love Economy, andends with new and uncollected work. Often,this kind of sampling shows how each book hashad a different focus or approach to form. In-stead, Jones’s selection reveals a poet with a dis-tinct voice whose subjects and style have alwaysbeen diverse, and her book titles serve as keysto the overarching themes in her work.

The speakers in A Lucent Fire inundate usin the American experience. “The Birth ofRhythm and Blues” takes root with a speakerconceived and born in Arkansas. That origin isconnected to American music, “Southernmostly, Black absolutely” (p. 35). “Arkansas,Mississippi, Tennessee / and Texas” might have“lonely roads,” (p. 35), but the poem revealshow this evolves into a force larger than thespeaker and her mother (with the connectionto the poet presented in the accompanyingnotes), an experiencethat is part of whatchanges the course ofAmerica and empow-ers A Lucent Fire toemploy diverse Amer-ican artists and Amer-ican places inexploration of Ameri-can issues of race, gen-der, and class.

Such Americanwomen are women of

the world, and Jones uses the American as herspeakers’ entry point into the world at large,taking us around the world and throughouttime. In such an existence, questions are as nat-ural as breathing. A Lucent Fire is full of ques-tions, not only in the three poems includedfrom Repuestas, but immediately in the book’sfirst poem with “Who owns the Sun?” (p. 18)and “Ancestress in woodblock / What has Jesusdone for you?” (p. 19). The speaker wonderseverything from “What is the color of Paradise?How would we know?” (p. 190) to the natureof civilization in “What the First Cities WereAll About.” “But joy, where is it?” (p. 146) asks“Life Lessons.”

A Lucent Fire faces the issue of economy,wealth and resources, and how we manage whatwe have, and it is particularly poignant when itcomes to the issue of love. The two “April 1994:Two Deaths, Two Wakes, Two Open Caskets”poems as well as the two “My Angel” poemswith the Passover poem that follows are only afew of many that deal with this subject. Jonesdeals honestly with suffering and danger. Thebook includes “The most beautiful woman inthe room nailed to a wall” (p. 84) in “Laura,”AIDS in “San Francisco, Spring 1986,” fear in“Painkiller,” and pain in “Second Person, Hurt-ing.”

No matter what the risk, Jones is not afraidto touch. She wants the shoe of racism and sex-ism to “pinch like hell” (p. 83) in “My MatthewShepard Poem.” The sensuality of poems suchas “Encounter and Farewell” and “5:25 A.M.”is palpable. “What Beauty Does” begins a jour-ney in “pine, sage, and cypress” (p. 171) to tran-scend scenery. While this poem entertains asJones often does with “I almost bought a footlong sausage. I almost bought a gun. / I did buycowboy postcards, mostly made for fun” (p.172), its appeals to the senses to reveal “Wherepeople steal / a drop of ore, / a native lower, / apiece of splendor / day in and day out” (p. 174).

A Lucent Fire demonstrates how thepoem’s form can represent the poet’s voice onthe page, the long line, the short, the pacing,

___________________________________________________________________________________202

the pause. The poems command the pages, withsubject dictating the form. Some of Jones’spoems have long lines, lush with words. Otherpoems have a compressed form, like a handballed into a fist. Set form is handled deftly, asshown in “Mythologizing Always: Seven Son-nets.” The repetition of the line “Who is theSaint of” and the phrase “Shall we” (pp. 101-102) in “All Saints’ Day, 2001” taps the powerof the call and response. Two different formsoften appear next to each other, creating addi-tional effect through juxtaposition. “NewBlues” extends across the page and wraps intoitself, right after “What the God of FireCharged Me” with its tighter form, sometimesonly a few words per line. Likewise, the lavishlines of “Notes for the Poem, ‘Beloved ofGod’/A Memory of David Earl Jackson” are fol-lowed by the tight “How He Knows Me.”Throughout A Lucent Fire, such organic formsallow each poem to use its space to its advan-tage.

To be lucent means to give off light, andPatricia Spears Jones’s poems do more thanthat, not only through the multitude of experi-ences that they share, but in how the differentparts of the flames work together in one fire.

--Angie Macri

Underwater Panther. By AngieMacri. (Cape Girardeau, MO:Southeast Missouri State Univer-sity Press, 2015. Pp. 87, notes. $14,paper)

Considering its overall level of educationand lack of support for the arts, Arkansas ishome to a surprising number of poets and writ-ers with national, and even international, rep-utations. Add to this ever-expanding,state-wide list the name of Angie Macri, an Illi-

nois transplant nowliving in Hot Springs.Ms. Macri’s debut col-lection won theCowles Poetry BookPrize, and she also re-cently received a fel-lowship from theArkansas Arts Coun-cil.

While much ofher poetry focuses onlandscapes, riversclearly dominate her consciousness and im-agery. Rivers meander throughout this collec-tion, and Macri’s sensual, but plain-spoken,language breathes life into them, much like thefog in a T. S. Eliot poem:

With the text of a breath, the Mississippireads her shore . . .

The orchards, the penetrating rootsof roses rubbed along her backas she stretched out, relaxedand wide. The clouds openedas white as the mouthof the snake, and she slid byinto cotton. (p.16) To Macri’s eyes, the American landscape is

a mysterious creature, breathing and shifting onits own. I lost count of how many times thename Kaskaskia is evoked, but it seems centralto this overall sense of wonder. Not surprisingly,Kaskaskia refers to both a river and small village(population 14!) in Southern Illinois that wasvirtually destroyed by the Mississippi River nearthe end of the Nineteenth Century, and wasevacuated again near the end of the TwentiethCentury when both the Mississippi and Mis-souri rivers ganged up on the poor town. Macriis deeply intrigued not only by the place but byits history as a home to Native Americans andFrench settlers.

. . . They marked timewith a bell brought upriver handover fist on bateau. It was lost

___________________________________________________________________________________203

to floods more than once, yet found,

and it (the vine) filled the land. We traced back those names: LaBrier,Montroy, Doza, Picou. Masswas said for French and Kaskaskiaand all mixed blood. (p.40)Beyond the people, this is a land inhabited

by birds, panthers, mounds, train tracks, coalmines, the bones of mastodons, blue-eyedMarys, leopard frogs, earthmovers. It is a com-mon landscape for most of us, but under thekeen eye of Macri, we are transported to adeeper vision of what is right in front of us. Thevarious aspects of the land become characterswithin these poems. Human characters emerge,but they are vague: shapeless, unnamed (for themost part), and often filtered through the gauzeof the coal mining culture:

The wife looks for her breath.Her husband mines the vein, loadingcars powered by steam. . . .

Ten men were killed in Januaryand six burned in December, the govern-mentrecording clothes, face and back,face, neck, and right hand, and so on.(p.51)“Marie Scypion” proves to be an exception,

as she is a defined persona, half-slave, half-Natchez. And in one of the most powerfulpoems of this collection, with its jarring shiftfrom first person to third, we are led down thepath of a mother and her children turned intomere property: “Apart from you, may my bloodbecome the Mississippi / that bears grain and furto the mouth of the sea.” (p.36)

The panther is the one character thatshows up regularly throughout this collection,as big cats will: unexpectedly and brimmingwith mystery. Underwater Panther opens withthe tale of a panther dying near the riverKaskaskia, but later as the narrator learns todrive an automobile she spots another.

Under unborn stars below Orion’s belt,

between County Line and Eden,I saw the panther once.

. . . the panther raised its head with slownessborn of nothing to lose, eyes illuminatedbeside a creek . . . (p. 65)Ultimately, this is a fine and rewarding first

collection of poetry that reinvents a familiarlandscape in language that is rich, moving, andsharp. It also features a gorgeous cover paintingby Arkansas artist, Kathy Strause, whose workhas been featured in a number of venues andgalleries throughout the state. This is a bookworthy of occupying the bookshelf of anyArkansawyer serious about poetry. Ms. Macri’scareer as a poet is off to a promising start.

--Marck Beggs

The Big Jones Cookbook: Recipesfor Savoring the Heritage of Re-gional Southern Cooking. By PaulFehribach. (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2015. Pp. ix-xxiv +265, preface, acknowledgments,notes on sources, index. $30.00,cloth)

From cornbread to cracklings, The BigJones Cookbook is a love letter to southernfood. Always mindful of each dish’s historicalorigins, chef and author Paul Fehribach believesheirloom regional southern cuisine has thechops to stand on par with the other great worldcooking traditions. He delights in history andshares the stories and traditions of the South’sregions through their varied, and sometimes for-gotten, dishes. Fehribach’s affection for the peo-ple of the past, who often developed dishes outof seasonality and scarcity, is infectious. All ofthe diversities that make this homegrownAmerican food tradition great are brought into

___________________________________________________________________________________204

focus, causing thereader to feel both ap-preciative and hungry.

Written, in part,as a service to hisrestaurant patrons,the book makes avail-able some of the mostrequested recipes fromthe revolving menu atBig Jones. Fehribachhas always made ahabit of sharing his recipes, all but his top-secretrecipes for fried chicken and his meticulouslyperfected cornbread. In The Big Jones Cook-book, all is revealed.

As a child, Paul Fehribach received an earlyeducation in seasonal eating. He fondly re-counts contributing wild blackberries to theflurry of activity that was his extended family’sshared farm kitchen. The ancestral family farmthat fed five generations still inspires him. InThe Big Jones Cookbook, Fehribach advocatesfor home cooking. Even if busy lives necessitatethat the new family table be located inside thefour walls of a restaurant, he believes that theethics of generations gone by can be learnedfrom when shared through an honest meal.When a dish is prepared by someone whoknows its origins and painstakingly prepares itin a way that harkens back to the disciplines ofthe past, it can nourish the consumer, bothbody and soul.

A native Indianan running the Southernflavored kitchen of his Chicago restaurant,Chef Fehribach isn’t tethered by southern rootsto any specific region, leaving him free to ex-plore all of the South’s offerings without bias,as an enthusiastic student of the institution:

The South has such an incredibly di-verse geography—from the Tidewater tothe swamps and the Sea Islands of the LowCountry and Florida; the rolling hills of theDeep South to the Caribbean-esque GulfCoast with its wildlife, world-class fishingand those storied swamps and bayous of

south Louisiana; the mind-bending flatnessof the Delta; all of the nuances of the inte-rior states of Tennessee, Kentucky andArkansas; and then the AppalachianMountains, one of the most biologically di-verse and majestically beautiful tracts ofland on Earth. (p. xiii)The Big Jones Cookbook acts as a primer of

Southern cuisine; each recipe is deliberatelylaid out to tell a story. In the text leading into arecipe, the author thoughtfully recounts the ori-gins of each dish. Each one honoring the time,place, and developer, be they a French Quarterrestauranteur, a coastal fishing community, asubsistence farm family in the mountains, or themasterful work done in an antebellum slavekitchen.

Historic, thoughtful cooking is the hall-mark of the Big Jones restaurant’s offerings, par-tially recounted in this book. In keeping withFehribach’s desire to retain the integrity of thefood’s origins, the menu is subject to change intandem with the weather and the seasons. Hewrites about how he values his personal, localrelationships with those who produce and har-vest the food that comes into his kitchen.

Once the products arrive, they are treatedin much the same way as one would imagineFehribach’s great-grandparents to have done.He believes the ingredients and preparation areintegral to the story being told in each dish.“Sure it was a lot of work, but in many familiesthroughout history, the joy of a beautiful mealhas always been worth the work of getting foodto the table. I argue all the time that the laborsof eating well are a far more worthy use of timethan most of what we do these days” (p. xv).More than a work of academia, The Big JonesCookbook shares many practical cooking tipsto guide the reader in achieving the true spiritof the dish; sometimes, that means lard.

Though many camps of Southern cookingtraditions agree to disagree about some things—sugar in cornbread, chicken and dumplings withhomemade noodles or lumps of spongy dough,the addition of tomatoes to a gumbo disqualify-

___________________________________________________________________________________205

ing the dish as a gumbo altogether—ChefFehribach makes heirloom Southern food relat-able and attainable. Not only has he made arecord to preserve the fading food disciplines ofAmerica’s Southern heritage, he provides acompelling starting point to assist the reader inrenewing the important institution of the fam-ily table.

--James Moore

Oil and Water: Media Lessonsfrom Hurricane Katrina and theDeepwater Horizon Disaster. ByAndrea Miller, Shearon Roberts,and Victoria LaPoe. (Jackson: Uni-versity Press of Mississippi, 2014.Pp. vii-xv + 156, appendix one, ap-pendix two, appendix three, notes,index. $54, hardcover)

Somewhere between 2005 and 2010, be-tween Hurricane Katrina and the DeepwaterHorizon oil spill, the world changed.

When the hurricane hit, intrepid reportersfor the New Orleans Times-Picayune valiantlykept the newspaper office open, using old-fash-ioned gumption and new-fashioned technologyto tell the stories of the people of the city andtheir struggles with the disaster. They won aPulitzer for their efforts.

Five years and several layoffs later,shrunken news media staffs, unable to get to iso-lated fishing towns in the bayous, fought overaccess to handouts from government agenciesand British Petroleum executives trying to min-imize the public fallout from the disaster. No-body won any major prizes covering theDeepwater Horizon spill.

By luck and design, the authors of Oil andWater describe the change and how it hap-pened. The authors, Andrea Miller, Associate

Dean for Undergraduate Studies and Adminis-tration at the Manship School of Mass Com-munication at Louisiana State University;Shearon Roberts, Assistant Professor of MassMedia at Xavier University; and VictoriaLapoe, Assistant Professor of Journalism andBroadcasting at Western Kentucky, are obvi-ously academics, but they take an accessible ap-proach that makes the work readable to generalaudiences.

The book, to use academic terms, is bothquantitative and qualitative. The first part pro-vides survey informa-tion of readers andjournalists, basedmostly in BatonRouge, on how theyview media coveragein general. Not sur-prisingly, readers be-moan the decline ofindependence andperceptions of qualityin their news media,and journalists see thedecline of jobs and access to sources.

The rest of the book is more an ethnogra-phy. The authors interview journalists, officialsand audience members, all of whom note howthe economics and the content of the localmedia has changed from independent voices topartisan ones.

The switch from the first chapter, whichreads like an academic paper, to the later chap-ters, which read more like popular non-fiction,can be a bit jarring. But that’s just a quibble.Overall, Oil and Water describes in depth anddetail what has happened to the media inLouisiana. But it’s more than that. It’s a micro-cosm of what has happened in every commu-nity in America.

--Jack Zibluk

___________________________________________________________________________________206

Hispanic and Latino New Orleans:Immigration and Identity Sincethe Eighteenth Century. By An-drew Sluyter, Case Watkins, JamesP. Chaney, and Annie M. Gibson.(Baton Rouge: Louisiana StateUniversity Press, 2015. Pp . ix-xvi+ 152, figures and tables, foreword,acknowledgments, conclusions,notes, works cited, index. $32.50,paper)

The city of New Orleans has become thecenter of recent scholarship focus, includingThe Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans(2012) by Lawrence N. Powell and Populatingthe Barrera: Spanish Immigration Efforts inColonial Louisiana (2014) by Gilbert C. Din.The Franco-Spanish and Afro-Caribbean his-torical background as well as the Creole cultureand the diversity of its population have charac-terized the extraordinary and colorful city forcenturies. Following the Treaty of Paris 1763,the French territory of Louisiana, located eastof the Mississippi River, came under Spanishrule. The crown immediately understood thatpopulating the colony was key to maintainingits influence in the region. Today, in additionto the Cabildo, the seat of Spanish colonialgovernment in New Orleans, diverse structures,monuments,and plaques remain part of thecity’s historic French Quarter landscape. As sug-gested in its title, Hispanic and Latino New Or-leans explores the “Spanish” heritage andidentity in the contemporary city. Combiningtheir respective research and expertise, the fourauthors uncover the complete story that startedfrom the immigration and settlement of a vari-ety of Hispanic populations that emerged dur-ing the eighteenth century to the surgingHispanics and Latinos in pos-Katrina SouthernLouisiana. Simultaneously, the work provides asophisticated analysis as the authors uncover

the complex relation-ship between ethnic-ity and racializedcategories peculiar toNew Orleans. Addingto the literature ofSpanish Louisiana’shistory, the authorsconnect the “Span-ish” sides of the city toLatin America ratherthan Spain. The studyshows an interestingcontrast between 1970s New Orleans, with afew people of Latino-Hispanic ancestry, and therecent and increasing numbers of immigrantsfrom different parts of Latin America and theCaribbean.

An interdisciplinary synthesis, the book isstructured around the different Hispanic andLatino communities that played a role in shap-ing the eccentric city. The authors’ use of theword Hispanic designates the cultural groupswith common Spanish heritage, while the termLatino is restricted to the geographical areasidentified as Latin America and the Caribbean.The book also attempts to shed some light onthe complex term Creole and explain its evolv-ing meaning over time and space. Presented ina chronological order (from the eighteenth tothe twenty-first century), each chapter focuseson tracing the story of a particular communitythrough the centuries. For instance, chapterone explores the Spanish efforts to stop aggres-sive Anglo-American encroachment onto theirLouisiana territory by recruiting groups of His-panic settlers, including Andalusians fromMalaga and Granada, as well as the Isleños fromthe Canary Islands, and the evolution of thesecommunities throughout the next centuries.The second and third chapters focus on theLatino Cuban and Honduran communities thatarrived in the nineteenth century as New Or-leans became the US gateway to the Caribbeanand Latin America and the networks estab-lished from the neocolonial era and well into

___________________________________________________________________________________207

recent times. Meanwhile, chapter four discussesthe long formed, but less prominent, Mexicancommunity that moved into the city followingthe Mexican-American war and how it hasbeen able to increase in number and influence,beginning in the mid-twentieth century andeven more since Hurricane Katrina. The immi-gration of Brazilians that became prominentafter Katrina, and their role within the contem-porary discussion over Latino identity, is cov-ered in chapter five. Finally, the closing chaptersurveys the emergence of other smaller (thoughcritical to the book’s central argument) commu-nities, including Central Americans(Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans),South Americans (Colombians, Peruvians,Ecuadorians, Argentineans and others) as wellas Puerto Ricans and Dominicans from theCaribbean. These small communities arrivedmainly during the second half of the twentiethcentury and after Katrina, which coincides withan economic and political immigration move-ment experienced throughout the UnitedStates.

The authors utilize a successful comparativeapproach as they consider the interactions andrelationships between these communities to ex-plore the larger debates about immigration andnational identity. Based on previous interdisci-plinary research conducted by genealogists, am-ateur historians, and academics, and relying onvarious sources, the work provides a compre-hensive understanding of the “Hispanic” and“Latino” side of New Orleans. The welcomestudy combines interviews, statistical analysis,and graphs, as well as an historical narrative toexplain the co-relation between Katrina flood-ing and the geographical movement of the stud-ied communities. Taken separately or as awhole, these chapters provide a deeper under-standing of “Spanish” immigration, influence,and identity in New Orleans from colonial topresent times, but also introduce general readersto a wide range of subjects including, ethnicity,race, gender, and assimilation.

--Sonia Toudji

Eighty-Eight Years: The LongDeath of Slavery in the UnitedStates, 1777–1865 by Patrick Rael.(Athens, Georgia: University ofGeorgia Press, 2015. Pp. vii-xix +329, list of figures, acknowledg-ments, prologue, notes, index.$32.95, paper)

Eighty-Eight Years offers a sweeping historyof slavery’s demise in the United States, ex-pertly placed in the context of the AtlanticWorld. It is a striking synthesis that also carriesits own powerful in-terpretation, standingout even among theseemingly endlessnumber of works thathave been written onthe subject of Ameri-can slavery. PatrickRael walks the readerfrom the colonial erathrough Reconstruc-tion, using a tightlypacked, yet readable,narrative that neverloses sight of two important questions: First,why did it take so long for slavery to end in theUnited States? And, how did this process differfrom the death of slavery elsewhere in the At-lantic World? Rael offers one simple and signif-icant answer that covers both: the inordinatepower of slaveholders. The so-called “slavepower,” a conspiracy decried by abolitionistsand Free Labor advocates, was more than anineteenth-century political boogeyman, Raelshows. The slaveholding elite possessed “an ad-vantage unreplicated in most other slave soci-eties in the New World” (p. 3).

___________________________________________________________________________________208

One lasting way in which slaveholdersmaintained their grip on the nation came in theform of the “enormous gift” (p. 72) bestowedthem by the constitutional convention of1787—the Three-fifths Compromise. By allow-ing 3/5 of the enslaved population to go towardoverall population count determining represen-tation in the House of Representatives, thefounders provided inordinate political power toslave states in the young country’s national gov-ernment. Slave regimes elsewhere in the At-lantic World never received such an advantage.The American slaveholding elite thus wieldedgreat power in the new Republic. For example,they protected the trans-Atlantic slave trade fortwenty years, and when that trade finally ended(with little fuss, as the slave population had be-come self-sustaining), they ensured that anyslaves confiscated in the execution of the banwere very likely transferred to the domesticslave trade. The slave power also protected mili-tias to ensure a force to guard against and quashslave rebellion.

But the other portion of the United States’divided house, the “free” North (which endedslavery slowly and created a racial caste), har-bored anti-slavery activism that would onlygrow with time as the gnawing contradiction ofslavery and the nation’s founding ideals per-sisted. The challenge to the slave power slowlymounted, with African Americans at the core.Rael rightfully emphasizes the part black rebelsand runaways in the South and black abolition-ists and activists in the North played in bringingdown slavery in the United States (a topic inwhich he has already demonstrated his expert-ise—see, for example, Black Protest and BlackIdentity in the Antebellum North). Abolition-ists and Americans against slavery’s spread be-came only more vocal as time went on in regardto the expansion of slavery and the great powerof slaveholders in a supposedly free society. Theactions of slaves to free themselves provided ev-idence that abolitionists—black and white—could use to make their case againstslaveholders’ claims that the institution was be-

nign and civilizing. Runaway slaves and aboli-tionists tested the enforcement of the 1850Fugitive Slave Act, for example, which requiredresidents of free states to comply with efforts torecapture people who had fled from slavery.Slaves’ actions forced public debate on the law,and stoked northerners’ disapproval. Rael’s nar-rative strikes balance in demonstrating thework African-Americans did in underminingslavery and forcing public debate while doingjustice to the many obstacles to those efforts.

Eventually the conversation forced by blackand white agitators broke the existing party sys-tem. As the slow process of limiting slavery andthe slave power seemed to be working—evi-denced by the 1860 election of a presidentialcandidate who energetically opposed slavery’swestward expansion and whose name had noteven appeared on the ballot in many southernstates—the slave regime took the drastic choiceto create the Confederacy, causing war. In thecontest that followed, formerly enslaved peoplebecame soldiers for freedom. This transitionfrom slave to soldier had occurred elsewhere inthe Atlantic World, but never on such a scale.Victory and freedom remained complicated,however. In fact, as Rael shows in his discussionof Reconstruction and Redemption, althoughAfrican Americans had enjoyed years of citizen-ship and political participation, white conser-vatives rolled back the progress in the South.Freedpeople, active and organized though theywere, found that northern Republicans’ resolveagainst political attacks, unfavorable court rul-ings, and the KKK’s terrorism waned over time.Northern activists failed to press beyond endingthe institution of slavery. The southern racialcaste system persisted, much as it had followingnorthern states’ emancipations decades earlier.Rael explains that white racist conservatives re-captured the post-Civil War South so effec-tively that the very memory of slavery itself isstill affected. Many people today are unaware ofslavery’s role in the conflict because it waserased by the losers of the war and replaced withthe more palatable narrative of states’ rights.

___________________________________________________________________________________209

Certainly anyone seeking a better under-standing of American slavery’s long life shouldread the book. Educators, even those alreadygenerally familiar with the topic, will find richmaterial to spruce up courses on American his-tory and the history of slavery, especially withinRael’s Atlantic context. Finally, the story toldin Eighty-Eight Years presents a wise lessonfrom the past—change comes slowly, incom-pletely, and at great cost when a wealthy eliteclass has embedded its interests into the nation’sfabric as deeply as slaveholders did in theUnited States.

--Kelly Houston Jones

I Freed Myself. By David Williams.(New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2014. Pp. xii-x + 243, index.$27.99, paperback)

More books have been written about theAmerican Civil War than about any other timein our nation’s history.Few of these workshave examined life asit was on the Confed-erate home front dur-ing the war. Evenfewer have examinedthe uprisings amongslaves in the Southduring the conflictand how such acts ofdefiance actuallyhelped to speed up thefinal outcome of the war.

As a youngster during the Civil War Cen-tennial, I was taught President Abraham Lin-coln freed the slaves. In his book, DavidWilliams challenges that notion and suggests allLincoln really did was sign a piece of paper,which meant absolutely nothing in the states

that were in rebellion. After reading I FreedMyself, you will be convinced black men andwomen had far more to do with gaining theirfreedom than we as American History studentsever learned in class.

Williams sets the tone of the book with thestory of escaped slave Duncan Winslow andhow Winslow joined the Union Army and waspresent at the battle of Fort Pillow, Tennessee.When Confederate troops began slaughteringblack soldiers, the wounded Winslow took ad-vantage of the confusion and made his way backto the Union lines. After being released fromthe hospital, Winslow became a farmer nearMound City, Illinois. One day a local politicianshowed up in the community, trying to raisevotes. During his discussion with Winslow, thecandidate said, “Don’t forget. We freed you peo-ple.” Whereupon Winslow held up his armshowing his old war wound and remarked, “Seethis? Looks to me like I freed myself” (p. 1).“Generations of Americans have grown up be-lieving that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaveswith a stroke of his pen by signing the Emanci-pation Proclamation,” Williams writes. “Lost inthis simple portrayal is the role that AfricanAmericans such as Duncan Winslow played inforcing the issue” (p. 2).

In chapter after chapter of his book,Williams gives example after example of howslaves in the South helped to emancipate them-selves. Such information has often been sweptto the back of the dust bin of history. Backed upby a mountain of scholarly research, the authordoes an outstanding job shining a much neededlight on the facts.

One example to note is the mention of sev-eral stories of slaves refusing to work for theirmasters with some even escaping off the plan-tation to hide in nearby caves or swamps. Ac-cording to Williams, the swamps in the Southhid a few communities of escaped slaves duringthe war.

It is interesting to note in the recent mo-tion picture Free State of Jones (BluegrassFilms, 2016), the main character of the film,

___________________________________________________________________________________210

Newton Knight, portrayed by Academy Awardwinning actor Matthew McConaughey, is ledto the local swamps by a young slave girl aftergoing AWOL from his Confederate unit and re-belling against the local authorities. WhenKnight arrives at the destination, he discoversseveral runaway slaves who are also hiding outin the swamp.

Tales of the slaves’ efforts to free themselvesquickly traveled to the North. “General JohnLogan, speaking to a crowd of potential recruits,echoed Lincoln’s assertion that saving theUnion, not ending slavery, was the war’s pri-mary objective. Yet, he acknowledged, ‘the ne-groes are getting free pretty fast. It is not doneby the army, but they are freeing themselves;and if this war continues long, not a slave willbe left in the whole South’” (p. 5).

Freemen and former slaves flocked to re-cruiting stations to wear the Army blue. Somenewly formed units like the 1st Kansas ColoredInfantry were recruited first by the state ofKansas before they were federalized. The 1stKansas would be the first all-black unit to fightagainst Confederate forces on October 25, 1862at Island Mound, Missouri. They would makehistory again at Cabin Creek, Indian Territory,on July 1-2, 1863, when they would become thefirst organized black unit to fight alongside theirwhite brothers-in-arms. By the end of the CivilWar, ten percent of the Union Army was madeup of African Americans who were credited byPresident Lincoln with having turned the tideof the war. One hundred and eighty thousandvolunteered for service in the US Army andnineteen thousand in the Navy, of which fortythousand paid the ultimate sacrifice for liberty.

Used more for labor projects than in com-bat, black soldiers were initially paid ten dollarsper month from which three dollars were de-ducted for clothing, resulting in a net pay ofseven dollars. In contrast, white soldiers re-ceived thirteen dollars per month, from whichno clothing allowance was drawn. Besides thelower pay, Williams points to the poor treat-ment black soldiers often had to endure from

their fellow Union soldiers. I am now a fan of David Williams. His re-

search on this subject is remarkable. I hope tomeet him one day and have him sign my copyof his book.

--Steven L. Warren

A Southern Writer and the CivilWar: The Confederate Imagina-tion of William Gilmore Simms.By Jeffery J. Rogers. (Lanham, MD:Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. vii-x +194, acknowledgments, bibliogra-phy, index. $85, hardcover)

Jeffery J. Rogers has compiled a thoroughstudy on the literary, personal, and politicalcontributions of William Gilmore Simms toSouth Carolina before, during, and after theCivil War. In his discussion Rogers makes himout to be a faithful supporter of the develop-ment of a southern Confederate identity duringthe war. The focus on Simms’s life duringwartime centers onthe impact thatSimms had with hiswriting in the South-ern Antebellum. Notonly does Rogers vi-brantly explore thesignificance of thissouthern writer’s con-tribution to the wareffort and its after-math, but also howSimms’s vision andwords centered onSouth Carolina during a tumultuous time inAmerican history. The aim of the book is to il-lustrate Simms’s contributions not solely basedon the relationship he had to Confederate iden-

___________________________________________________________________________________211

tity but to put to rest the negative impressionhistoriographers have had of him and his writ-ing during this time. By particularly looking athis contributions to the problems the South washaving, Rogers discusses how Simms was astrong and influential person in the SouthernAntebellum and an author who should not beoverlooked in American Literature and history.

Throughout the book, Simms’s involve-ment in the South’s political, economic, andterritorial problems is thoroughly discussed asthese were issues of impact that ultimately pro-moted the separation between Northern andSouthern states. By giving an historicaloverview alongside the contemporaneous in-sights of other authors on the topic of theSouthern Antebellum and Simms, Rogers lo-cates Simms as a contributor to Confederateidentity with an influence on people involvedin conflicts that ultimately led to the war. Ac-cording to Rogers, for Simms these issuesmainly revolved around the unjust treatment ofthe South economically and socially.

The book treats the controversy of thesouth versus the north by discussing the issuesof secession, unstable economic problems, andslavery that contributed to it. Simms’s involve-ment in these issues can be seen in his accountsthat contributed to the separation of the nation:he promoted an awareness of problems in hiswritings from a white Southern perspective thatprovoked the division amongst his countrymen.The events and situations that led to this sepa-ration are visible in his exchange of letters andin his published work, where his ideas and re-sentment of people that tried to pull down thevalue of southern states are clearly articulated.Southern authors were being affected by theterritorial and ideological disputes within theUnion, and that led Simms to feel that his voicewas taken into account but not thoroughly ac-knowledged. Rogers pays particular attention toSimms’s involvement in the movement to makeof the South a sovereign state. The discussionrevolves around how he became part of thegrowth of the Southern states as an autonomous

force. Roger shows how Simms never stoppedbelieving in the southern cause and how he pro-moted a southern identity through his writing.

Rogers focuses strongly on the literary abil-ity Simms had, particularly on his use of poetryand prose to explore his ideas concerning thelarger issues affecting the South. The discussionof the novel Paddy McGann; or, The Demon ofthe Stump shows the relationship it had toother pieces of literature, making it a manu-script that depicted Southern folklore, a satireof the current issues in the United States, andhis personal attack on other authors in theprinted medium. Paddy is one of the most mul-tifaceted pieces written by Simms, for it wentagainst the traditional forms of writing and hada creative approach to fiction. Paddy was, inRogers’s discussion, “a depiction of the fron-tiersman which is completely shorn of all ro-manticism,” and “his rustic life is an object ofpity as well as a source of comedy” (p. 133).Simms’s novel criticized the problems thatSoutherners were going through and did not shyfrom depicting any situations that persisted dur-ing the war.

Simms’s poetry also shows his devotion tothe promotion of a Confederate identity amongwhite people of the South, concerned with lib-erating themselves from the oppressive natureof the North. One such poem was “Lyrics of theSouth” where “Simms addressed himself to themen of the South directly, challenging them toguard their liberties and in doing so linked theRevolutionary past he knew so well to the causeof defending Southern Rights” (p. 158). In hispoetry, as in his other writings, Simms demon-strated his ability to create solidarity and unityamongst his people in the cause.

Later on in his life he wrote what was themost detailed account of the effects the war hadon the Southern states: The Sack and Destruc-tion of the City of Columbia, S.C. The bookwas published through the newspaper TheDaily Phoenix in bits and pieces and later col-lected as a pamphlet with revisions and ex-panded parts that portrayed the problematic

___________________________________________________________________________________212

time that Columbia experienced during thewar. Rogers remarks that “this text offers schol-ars an opportunity to read the original wordsSimms put into print in the immediate after-math of Sherman, prior to the modificationmade to the pamphlet version” (p 184). Thetext serves as a prime example of Simms’s abilityto catalogue the tumultuous events of the civilwar as they happened.

Simms’s writing found various venues ofpublication in his lifetime, and his contribu-tions to the war effort, the southern cause, andhis devotion to South Carolina abounded in hiswork. Rogers focuses on Simms’s observant eyefor matters happening in the South, the nation,and the war effort, and he effectively presentshow important Simms was in the formation ofa vision for the future of the short-lived Con-federate nation.

--Gerardo M. Muniz Villalon

Damn Yankees! Demonization &Defiance in the ConfederateSouth. By George C. Rable.(Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana StateUniversity press, 2015. Pp. 141, in-troduction, acknowledgments,notes, a note on sources, index,$38.00, hardcover)

After reading George C. Rable’s volume onwhat he calls the Southern “words of war” (p.3),against the “so-called universal Yankee nation”(p.8), even one familiar with the Civil War be-yond its military and political aspects realizesthat the depth of hatred toward their Yankeeadversaries was virtually bottomless. WhileNortherners attacked the effort to secede fromthe Union, Rable focuses on “what might betermed a standard or orthodox denunciation ofthe Yankee enemy” (p. 4). Such use of rhetoric

and the dehumanization that flowed from it,Rable makes clear, “undoubtedly lengthenedthe war (and Southern suffering)” by “shap[ing]the course of Reconstruction” and by “leavingan enduring legacy” (pp. 6-7).

Starting with the central role played bynewspapers in establishing Confederate denun-ciations of Northerners over the course of thewar, Rable properly notes that such a rhetoricalbase did not simply appear as of early 1861. Infact, the antebellum criticism of Southern in-tellectuals such as Nathaniel Beverley Taylorand William Gilmore Simms helped to lay thefoundations for a nation separate from theunion (p. 9). Deftly carrying such logic to itsend, Rable links the use of such rhetoric, suchas Northern bad manners and having no senseof tradition or place, to the sense that South-erners and Northerners were separate “races,”certainly in a cultural, but almost in a biologi-cal, sense (pp. 9-11). It is no wonder, as Rableestablishes, that Southerners saw themselves ashaving “no affinity with the slimy, hypocritical,bigoted fanatical race that landed at PlymouthRock” (p. 11).

Importantly for his argument that Southernanti-Yankee rhetoricboth lengthened thewar and helped toshape its impact,Rable extends South-ern assessments of theNorthern “race” bylinking their procla-mations of both Yan-kee cowardice and,more centrally, infi-delity with broaderterms as “rabble,”“riffraff,” “scum,” and “human vermin” (pp. 42,30-33, 18). Rable’s exploration of such rhetoriceasily moves from these expressions to the baseConfederate fears that historians and literarycritics have long noted: the “extermination” ofSouthern civilization by an inferior people withthe express purpose of abolishing slavery that

___________________________________________________________________________________213

would inevitably lead to “social equality,” “mis-cegenation,” and the “mongrelization” of “theEden of the Earth” (pp. 90, 80, 87). Such link-age between what one might call the grand andthe mundane is the principal strength of thiseasily accessible volume. Readers will appreci-ate Rable’s argument that a given culture useslanguage, no matter the evidence, to establish,reinforce, and consolidate an already precon-ceived sense of itself. Such an analysis raises acriticism that goes beyond the historical whiteSouthern power structure with its fears of race,gender, and class equality. Beyond the war, Re-construction, and their still-extant impactacross American life, Rable wishes to explorethe notion of American exceptionalism, sharedby the South and the North even while under-stood and expressed in different ways. Rable’searly decision to link “the psychological com-plexities of hatred” with the specific languageused to condemn those who have apparentlybeen one’s “enemy” since their arrival in theNew World suggests that not only did the firstSouthern, and for that matter Northern, immi-grants bring enmity with them, but they be-stowed it upon generations of their descendantsas well (pp. 2-3). Rather than escaping from thedecadence of the Old World, Rabel explores thereal possibility that our legacy as Americansbegan as we blinded ourselves, with a nod toJohn Ford, to a desired legend that becameprinted fact, but had little basis in actual reality.

In that sense, Rabel might have broadenedhis historical rooting of rhetoric by writing achapter which charted how antebellum South-erners labelled Northerners as Puritans andRoundheads while insisting on their own sepa-rate ethnicity as Anglo-Saxons. Such back-ground would have helped to contextualize howthe culture of pre-1860 America was implantedfrom its earliest origins with the seeds of civilwar. Given the past eight years, with an AfricanAmerican President facing a relentless series ofattacks against the legitimacy of his claim to theoffice, such a background chapter would havemade Rabel’s book that much more important.

With that caveat, I recommend Rabel’s book forlibraries, scholars of all sorts, and general read-ers.

--Richmond Adams

Hanging Bridge: Racial Violenceand America’s Civil Rights Cen-tury. By Jason Morgan Ward. (NewYork: Oxford University Press,2016. Pp. ix–xv + 326, illustra-tions, acknowledgments, notes,bibliography, index. $29.95, hard-cover)

“Everybody knows about Mississippi God-dam.” Indeed, the refrain from Nina Simone’sgut-wrenching song hints at a truth known bythe whole nation, a truth embraced particularlyby the Magnolia State’s neighbors, where suchphrases as “Thank God for Mississippi” repre-sent a firm belief that this particular southernstate has a darker history than others and thatthe weight of this past will, no doubt, keep it inperpetual darkness. After all, in 2014, the EqualJustice Initiative released a report on lynchingin the American South and placed Mississippi’sbody count at the top, with 614 dead from 1877to 1950. No one was surprised at this, just as noone was surprisedwhen Mississippi lateropted to keep flying astate flag that promi-nently features a con-troversial Confederatesymbol, even afterSouth Carolina—thevery headquarters ofAmerican sedition—ceased hoisting theConfederate battleflag at its capitol in

___________________________________________________________________________________214

the wake of a massacre of black churchgoers. Ifthe south as a whole is regularly made thescapegoat of the nation, then Mississippi is thescapegoat for the south: “Everybody knowsabout Mississippi Goddam.”

Of course, the problem with what “every-body knows” is that the details often get lost ina broader swath of stereotype and rumor. Espe-cially when it relates to a history of racial vio-lence, often only the final body count remainsin people’s minds—missing are the personalitiesand politics that perpetuated this heritage ofatrocity, as well as the legacy of resistance, thestories of those who confronted the violenceand undertook the hard work of changing thefuture. This is what makes more tightly focusedstudies of discrete events, or specific localities,so valuable, given how they highlight some ofthe interpersonal dynamics that get lost in thebig picture. And Ward’s Hanging Bridge ranksas among the best of the best, telling a three-part story of oppression and violence in ClarkeCounty, Mississippi, that employs as its corner-stone a rusty bridge over the ChickasawhayRiver known locally for the hangings that haveoccurred there.

The first of these hangings happened in late1918, when two men and two women (report-edly pregnant) were lynched in Shubuta, Mis-sissippi, for having allegedly conspired tomurder E. L. Johnston, a middle-aged itinerantdentist. By the time of this multiple murder, theNAACP had experienced a surging member-ship that saw branches established in everysouthern state, and known lynching investiga-tor Walter White was dispatched to the scene;his digging revealed that Johnston was knownlocally for his heavy drinking and had appar-ently forced himself upon numerous blackwomen, thus flipping the script of rape andracial purity. Though the publication of lynch-ing investigations like this could serve to em-barrass the United States internationally, mostwhite Mississippians, as Ward notes, “had gonethrough eighteen months of war sensing noconflict between [President Woodrow] Wilson’s

war for democracy and white supremacy” (p.58). On the contrary, patriotic fervor stoked thespirit of vigilantism, leading many AfricanAmericans to evacuate the south altogether.This northward migration “forged a link be-tween urban North and Deep South that wouldshape future civil rights battles” and extend thereach of black political influence (p. 86).

Ward’s next section covers the 1942 lynch-ing of two fourteen-year-old boys, hanged fromthe same bridge, for allegedly conspiring to rapea white girl. The author again delves deep intothe circumstances surrounding this murder, un-covering evidence aplenty to undermine thestory circulated by white authorities, as well asillustrating the wartime changes that influencedlocal, state, and national politics. In the midstof World War II, the United States could ill af-ford damage to the image it strove to developas an arsenal of liberty, and so the Justice De-partment sent agents to Shubuta to investigate,if only cursorily. The “Double V” rhetoric dreweasy links between Mississippi and Nazi Ger-many, while the black press latched on to thelynching for signs of resistance—such as theparents’ refusal to accept the bodies for burial—that might demonstrate a “rising new spirit.”

The last section centers not upon a lynch-ing but upon the emerging civil rights move-ment in Clarke County. However, the shadowof the lynching bridge is ever present here; asWard writes in his introduction, “Racial vio-lence—both in bursts of savagery that senttremors far beyond Mississippi’s borders and inthe everyday brutalities that sustained and out-lived Jim Crow—connects the generations andgeographies of America’s civil rights century”(p. 7). Ward specifically highlights the workdone by Head Start programs implementedunder the auspices of the Child DevelopmentGroup of Mississippi, revealing how this groupof poor blacks receiving federal funding for proj-ects of communal uplift constituted a signifi-cant threat to the white power structure. Too,just as the other parts of the book revealed theshape of wartime tensions, so does this section,

___________________________________________________________________________________215

which focuses specifically upon the year 1966,as local, all-white draft boards now tried to sendto Vietnam increasingly “troublesome” individ-uals engaged in activism—a rather stark con-trast to earlier strategies of preventingout-migration.

Geographer James A. Tyner, in Violence inCapitalism: Devaluing Life in an Age of Re-sponsibility (2016), argues that we must shiftour conception of violence from an exclusivefocus upon “killing” to encompass also “lettingdie,” the various policies that produce the sametoll but lack the active agent or perpetrator.Ward calls for a similar shift of perspective inHanging Bridge, writing in his epilogue, “Vio-lence has always shaped freedom dreams in therural South, but the definition of what was vio-lent proved broad and elastic. Mobs lynched,but segregation, poverty, and memory exacteda toll as well” (p. 253). Yes, Hanging Bridge is abook about lynching, but it moves beyond thenoose and the gun to illustrate how such actsexisted alongside a broader continuum of vio-lence—and, moreover, how this broader con-tinuum was resisted in ways both subtle anddynamic. As it turns out, what everybodyknows about Mississippi is rather limited. Wardreveals that we have so much more to learn.

--Guy Lancaster

Arkansas Women and the Right toVote: The Little Rock Campaigns1868–1920. By Bernadette Cahill.(Little Rock: Butler Center Books,2015. Pp. 115, endnotes, appendix,acknowledgments and call to ac-tion, bibliography, index. $24.95paper)

In Arkansas Women and the Right to Vote:The Little Rock Campaigns 1868–1920,

Bernadette Cahilltakes us on a walkingtour of Little Rock,complete with a mapto chronicle our jour-ney through the his-tory of Arkansaswomen’s struggle forthe right to vote. Byfocusing on LittleRock, Cahill presentsa microcosm of thewomen’s suffragemovement that began in earnest at SenecaFalls, New York, in 1848. She places Arkansaswithin the greater picture of the struggle, illu-minating its lost opportunity to become a trail-blazing state instead of having a women’ssuffrage bill laughed down in the General As-sembly.

But she also points out in its favor thatArkansas was eventually the first southern stateto enfranchise women to vote in state primaryelections, and the second state in the South(after Texas) to ratify the 19th Amendment,which awarded women the right to vote nation-wide. Until its passage in 1919, Cahill notesthat in being denied voting rights, half of theAmerican population—women—were “classedwith traitors, felons, idiots, vagrants and the in-sane” (p. 126).

Cahill narrows the field to twenty-four briefchapters focusing on specific sites around LittleRock, including gravesites of some key players.Many of the original buildings that housedmeetings, speeches, etc., are long gone. How-ever, recognizing a particular site, even if it is aparking lot today, somehow makes historicalevents more real.

Also contributing to the reality of Arkansaswomen’s struggle for the right to vote is Cahill’suse of primary documents from the early 1900s.Along with the Arkansas Gazette and Democ-rat, she also utilizes short-lived publicationssuch as the Arkansas Ladies’ Journal andWoman’s Chronicle, providing a window on a

___________________________________________________________________________________216

long-ago time.Some of the passages Cahill quotes are food

for thought over a century later, such as this1911 editorial from a statewide newspaper (stillin existence) declaring with great authority that“the great majority of American women . . . carenothing for the right to cast a ballot” (p. 109)and that anyone causing the “agitation” simplyneeded to “have something to employ hermind, and, having tired of theater parties, cardparties and poodles, her mind naturally revertsto the suffrage question. . . . The surest safeguardany woman can have is the protection and fi-delity of some good man” (p. 109). Poodles andgood men aside, Cahill takes an historian’s viewof the women who were ridiculed, arrested,beaten and tortured for seeking not to be sub-jected to taxation without representation.Throughout the book, pictures of important in-dividuals allow us to put human faces togetherwith names. Ample illustrations show buildingsand sites as they were then as well as those thatsurvived.

Cahill draws direct links between thewomen’s suffrage movement of the early twen-tieth century and the mid-century fight forAfrican-American civil rights, a campaign towhich Arkansas was no stranger. She notes howthe non-violent nature of the women’s move-ment influenced later civil rights leaders, stat-ing that the battle for women’s suffrage was “thelongest civil rights campaign in US history[and] was also the first successful non-violentcivil rights campaign in American history” (p.115).

A thread that runs throughout the book ismention of Little Rock’s formidable AdolphineFletcher Terry, who would go on to serve as amajor figure in the Little Rock school integra-tion crisis of the 1950s. While the reader mightwish for more information about Terry, there isthe excellent biography by Stephanie Baylesswhich Cahill cites in her bibliography.

Arkansas Women and the Right to Vote:The Little Rock Campaigns 1868–1920 is aslim volume, but its brevity may serve to make

it more readable than a thick book sitting on ashelf. The chapters can be read individually oras part of the book as a whole.

There are occasional references whichmight have benefitted from a few backgroundsentences, such as the Plessy vs. Ferguson deci-sion, but fortunately in the case of Plessy, thereis always Google. There are also some typos thatcan be off-putting, such as referring to JFK as-sassination site Dealey Plaza in Dallas as“Daley” Plaza.

Those are, however, minor critiques abouta valuable book that not only lets us observe,through contemporary accounts, what hap-pened but also what did not happen. It does notcanonize the participants, showing how squab-bles led to splintering the women’s rights move-ment into rival groups. Most significantly, itincludes a call to action that might well beheeded by Little Rock tourism officials and/orgraduate students: “Suffrage Walks” around sig-nificant sites in the city. Cahill’s easily-portablebook would make an excellent companion.

In brief, Arkansas Women and the Right toVote: The Little Rock Campaigns 1868–1920is a highly readable, fresh approach to the sub-ject. Rather than simply citing dates and facts,Cahill takes us on a walking tour of significantplaces around Little Rock in the fight forwomen’s suffrage, which has the effect of bring-ing us onstage for the drama. It is well re-searched through primary sources that even tellus what the women were wearing while theystruggled for the right to vote as citizens of theUnited States.

Any woman who reads this book and stilldoes not exercise the right to vote might wellrecall the 1911 editorial which said few womenwould vote if they had the right. Cahill’s bookshould inspire women not to prove them cor-rect.

--Nancy Hendricks

___________________________________________________________________________________217

Taken from the Paradise Isle: TheHoshida Family Story. Edited byHeidi Kim (Boulder, CO: Univer-sity Press of Colorado, 2015. Pp.vii-xxxv + 239, figures, foreword,acknowledgments, introduction,editorial notes, appendices, bibli-ography, index. $29.95, hardcover)

Taken from the Paradise Isle tells thestory—through journal/memoir excerpts, let-ters, and drawings (all now in the collection ofthe Japanese American National Museum inLos Angeles)—of George and Tamae Hoshidaand their children during World War II.

The Hoshida family lives in Hawaii;George was born in Japan and came to theUnited States as a young child, and his wifeTamae was born in Hawaii (a US territory atthat time). After the bombing of Pearl Harboron December 7, 1941, Japanese Americans liv-ing on the West Coast of the United States aresent to camps around the country amid suspi-cions that they would aid the enemy and showloyalty to Japan rather than the United States.In Hawaii, whose large Japanese populationmakes it impossible to send everyone to intern-ment camps (only about one percent of the eth-nic Japanese population was sent to camps),suspicions fall on men like George Hoshida whoare leaders in the community and are involvedin activities such as Japanese language schools,Buddhist or Shinto worship, and martial arts.

George Hoshida is arrested in February1942 and sent to a series of military and JusticeDepartment camps, where he spends nearly twoyears away from his wife and daughters (onechild is severely disabled, and one of his daugh-ters was born when he was away). Tamae, whois also physically disabled, eventually followsevacuation orders (unsure if they are compul-sory—though they seem to have been—butwanting to be reunited with her husband) andleaves Hawaii to go with three of her daughters

(one a newborn) tothe Jerome Reloca-tion Center inArkansas; her disableddaughter is left behindin an institution.After the couple nav-igates a tangle of redtape, George eventu-ally joins them atJerome (which hadHawaiians as about 10percent of its popula-tion), where they spend the rest of the war.George finally gets to meet his infant daughter,but that joy is tempered by sadness when theylearn that their oldest daughter has drowned ina bathtub in the institution where they havehad to leave her. The family eventually returnsto Hawaii.

Before his death in 1985, George diligentlyworked on his memoir (using his journals fromthe time as a basis), wanting to leave a recordfor his descendants. He wrote in the originalmemoir that he was aware of “defects” in thewriting but wanted to have the memoir in areadable form before his health failed. Charm-ingly, he asks readers to read with a pen in hand,correcting as they go.

Fortunately, editor Heidi Kim has done allthat work for us, presenting a fine story, withthe letters, memoir, and George’s drawingswoven together expertly. She silently correctssome of the language while leaving enoughalone to convey the true voices of George andTamae (who were required by the governmentto write their letters in English; Tamae’s is lim-ited). Kim has also added helpful explanatorynotes and additional sources for those interestedin an in-depth investigation of the myriad issuessurrounding Japanese internment.

In the memoir, George refers to himself inthe third person as “Yoshio” to, as he explained,achieve greater objectivity as he tells his story.The memoir is enjoyable to read, full of detail,but it is easy to get a bit bogged down in reading

___________________________________________________________________________________218

the letters, which George and Tamae fill with alot of comforting words for each other, implor-ing each to stay healthy and not to worry.While these platitudes can be monotonous forthe reader, they were no doubt soothing for thetwo to read during their separation. The lettersare also less compelling to read for logistical rea-sons—they could not have many details aboutthe war or the camps in order to get past thecensors, they exhibit a lack of knowledge aboutwhat was going on (through no fault of the let-ter writers!), and they often contain inquiriesabout other letters due to the sporadic nature ofwartime mail. While reading the letters, thereader can feel their frustration.

The most poignant parts of the story in-volve separation during important events—birth, illness, and death. Tamae is without herhusband through most of her pregnancy and forthe birth of their daughter; a man in camp withGeorge falls ill and eventually dies without hisfamily present; the Hoshidas’ daughter dies inan institution and they cannot attend her fu-neral. Despite these tragedies, there are brightspots, too: Tamae sends George flowers to cele-brate their ten-year wedding anniversary, andthey have a lovely reunion at Jerome inArkansas, with George arriving by train late atnight and finding Tamae (who had fallen asleepwaiting for him) in her barracks in the morning:“They stood there for a moment, which seemedlike ages, staring at each other—unable tospeak. Finally Yoshio heard himself speaking,‘I’m back!’ And they found each other in a pas-sionate embrace” (p. 222).

The writings often delve into the compli-cated issues surrounding what it means for peo-ple in George and Tamae’s situation to feel thatthey are truly American. George contemplatesgoing to live in Japan after the war, butTamae—who had never been to Japan—stren-uously objects, saying that they should stay inHawaii and continue to live as Americans.George eventually decides that he owes Amer-ica a greater debt than he owes Japan, havingspent most of his life in America. He also

evinces pride in Tamae’s family members whoare in the US armed forces, saying, “As Amer-ican Citizens, it is their duty to fight even theirancestral country. Hope they will show thatthey do have the stuff in them and that Japan-ese blood is good blood and not a traitor’sblood” (p. 177). The memoir also deals withsome other complicated racial issues whenGeorge arrives in the South. In Little Rock,during a train delay, they are told to go to thewhites-only waiting room, “but the men felt un-easy in there and preferred to go inside theblacks’ room” (p. 220). In return for sketchinga picture of one of the African American cookson the train, the men received star treatment:“It seemed that these black people, being dis-criminated against by the whites, must have feltspecial kinship to them as fellow minorities, andthis was one of their ways to show comradeship”(p. 220).

There are many high-quality books aboutJapanese internment, including memoirs, butthis book covers lightly trod territory, such asHawaiians facing internment and the intern-ment story from a woman’s point of view(through letters and through parts of the mem-oir that tell Tamae’s side of the story). Also, ofthe two Arkansas camps, Rohwer generally re-ceives more attention, so it is valuable to havemore written about the Jerome camp. Whilegiving a lot of historical detail, the book offersa truly intimate and memorable look at onefamily’s struggles, heartbreak, and joy.

--Ali Welky

Emmett Till in Different States. ByPhilip C. Kolin. (Chicago, IL:Third World Press, 2015. Pp. vii-xii + 72, chronology, notes.$18.95, paper)

___________________________________________________________________________________219

Philip C. Kolin’s Emmett Till in DifferentStates opens with a four paragraph, thirty-onesentence prologue in which each sentence istaken “verbatim from one of the numerous ac-counts of the trial in the Southern press in1955” (p. 3). Not surprisingly, these sentencesserve up a mixture of fact (“The judge allowedthe defense to record Mrs. Bryant’s testimonywith the jury out of the room”) and prejudice(“The mother of the boy will probably be saferin Mississippi than she has ever been in a gang-infested Chicago”), and the prologue concludeswith this telling summation: “It is best for allconcerned that the Bryant-Milam case be for-gotten as quickly as possible. It has received farmore publicity than it should have gotten” (p.4).

In the poems that follow, Kolin not onlypositions himself against this call to forgetful-ness, but he does so in a way that challenges theunivocality of the southern press circa 1955, en-couraging us to see the “Bryant-Milam case”from multiple perspectives of time and place, aswell as race, gender, and agency. For instance,in the two opening poems, “Facts about Me”and “Emmett’s Wallet,” Kolin gives the firstword to the deceased Emmett Till, but the sub-tle shift between titles—where Kolin employs“Me” to position Till as the subject of a poemthat Till narrates about himself and then uses“Emmett” in the next title to position theyoung boy as the object of a poem that he sim-ilarly narrates—alerts us to the deft play of per-spectives that will mark the poems to follow asthe murdered boy fluidly assumes “differentstates” throughout the collection. In additionto having Emmett Till give his own story intwenty-one poems, Kolin lets other first-personvoices emerge, with the boy’s story told by fig-ures as varied as Mamie Till, Moses Wright, Ma-halia Jackson, and Carolyn Bryant, as well othermore imaginative first-person personas such as“Emmett’s Sister,” “A Black Man FromChicago,” and even the “Chicago River.” Thesevoices are juxtaposed with third-person poemsof varied omniscience, as well as two first-per-

son poems of indeterminate agency whose “I”remains unfixed, and two first-person pluralpoems, one told from the collected perspectiveof the all-white jury, the other from “EmmettTill’s Brothers,” those “Graveless” lynching vic-tims whose “sole obituary / [is] etched” in Em-mett’s casket photo (p. 34). Together, thesepoems challenge the opening gesture of the pro-logue, providing “numerous accounts” that trulyembody numerous perspectives, and do thework of remembering rather than forgetting.

It is a testament to Kolin’s gifts as a poetthat a coherent vision of Emmett Till emergesfrom this dazzling multiplicity of perspectives.That vision achieves its best expression in “Em-mett Weeps over Chicago,” which finds theslain boy lamenting not over the city of hisyouth but over a “new Chicago” with its “slainchildren” who “wait / for eyewitnesses to re-cover from their memories / So many unwrittenlives” (pp. 60-61). Noting that his “voice iswell-trained in the chords of sorrow,” Till prom-ises that he will sing a “fated ballad” of these“lost children sketched in chalk,” a task that re-quires

KeeningAccusingRecountingHonoring MemorializingHoping, joining, rebuilding (p. 61)

What Emmett Till promises in this poem,Kolin delivers throughout his collection. LikeTill, Kolin is well-trained in the chords of sor-row, and he too weeps over the slain as an eye-witness to horror, accusing when accusation isneeded, recounting when objectivity is re-quired, honoring when honor is due. Throughthese different states of telling, Kolin is able tofashion a larger narrative of “rebuilding,” onethat not only works against forgetting but alsoin favor of hope and redemption. With eachpoem, Kolin does for Emmett Till what EmmettTill wants to do for the “generation of hemor-rhaged children” (p.60) in his “new Chicago”:

___________________________________________________________________________________220

that is, to speak what remains unspoken, andthrough that speaking to challenge our indiffer-ence to suffering and injustice.

With Emmett Till in Different States,Philip Kolin adds his voice to a rich poetic tra-dition. The best of these poems, such as “UncleMoses’s Dream,” “Searching for Emmett Till inthe Loop,” and “The Judgment of CarolynBryant,” deserve to be read in conversation withthe Till poems of Langston Hughes, GwendolynBrooks, and Audre Lorde, and the full volumeis exceeded only by Marilyn Nelson’s Wreathfor Emmett Till in ambition and execution.Above all else, however, these poems captureKolin’s singular understanding of history, onethat is unafraid of sorrow yet always embold-ened by hope. That message is as importantnow as it has ever been.

--Christopher Metress