Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, by poet and essayist Camille Dungy and published last week, is just a lovely book in so many ways. The descriptions of the natural world, in particular of her garden and the plants she fills it with, are very finely observed and evocative. The portrait she paints of her relationship with her husband and daughter are sweet and loving, even in moments of disagreement and tension. She writes beautifully about the life of a writer.
And oh...the politics woven throughout...those are wondrous as well.
The publisher’s blurb about the book frames it around a tension between the gardening plans of the author—the only black family in the neighborhood within the predominantly white city of Fort Collins, Colorado-- and the neighborhood Homeowners Association restrictions on what could be planted. That’s a bit of a MacGuffin. This specific confrontation is dispensed with in a few pages early in the book: while there had once been a woman who walked the streets with a ruler measuring the height of people’s lawns, for the most part the neighborhood is benignly accepting. When a 140 square meters of soil and mulch are deposited in their driveway and in the street in front of their house on a windy October day, neighbors helped with securing the horticultural treasure beneath weighted tarps. And even more:
But I am lucky. The neighbors I speak to claim to be grateful we moved in, cultivating the most heterogenous environment on our street, both with our presence as a Black family and with our landscaping decisions. Our HOA eliminated its rules against “non-standard landscaping,” and the town of Fort Collins actively works to help residents create landscapes that support native plants and insect populations and lower the strain on our precarious water supply.
But if the HOA confrontation is a MacGuffin, the issue of race remains central to the book, though that was not necessarily at the forefront of her mind when she first envisioned it:
In the proposal for the fellowship that bought me the time to write a new book, I made it clear that I wanted to write about my yard. Those crocuses. The patches of purple iris. A cluster Mexican sunflowers. Tithonia, that volunteered in our back garden in 2018. At first, I suspected the Tithonia were an undesirable weed. Then they blossomed into flowers so gorgeous I brought friends to the house to see them. Nine feet tall and topped with orange blooms like a cross between a zinnia and a gerbera daisy….I wanted to spend a year thinking about the soil that surrounded me: what grew from it, and why.
But the real world crept in, particularly in 2020 with the calamitous Covid shutdown, and the summer of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests. But even before that, she was drawn to the themes of race and of feminism. In February of 2020, even before the above list of horrors entered our lives,
I’d come to the end of the time I could dedicate to writing one afternoon, when this paragraph tumbled from my fingers:
None of these are accidents: the omission of Black and Brown stories from the literature taught in the schools set up to serve white people; the condescension my professors conveyed when they considered a Black woman’s writing; the absence of stories in canonical environmental prose of women actively engaged in the work of mothering; the prioritization of narratives of solitary men in the wilderness. These conventions are part of a design.
And so, the history of her family is woven into the work. Her great-grandfather was a farm demonstration agent in Louisiana. He traveled the back roads, teaching young Black men about planting crops. He sometimes found himself sharing that information with white farmers as well, but his efforts were not necessarily appreciated.
Once, refusing to listen to his lessons about crop rotation and allowing fields to sometimes lie fallow, a gang of white men encircled my great-grandfather’s new Ford. They wouldn’t be taught how to prosper by an “uppity” Black man. The white men told my great-grandfather, “A horse and cart will do just fine next time you come around these parts.”
Her maternal great-grandfather ran a successful plumbing and sheet metal business, and hired a younger cousin as an apprentice. One morning he opened the shop to find that young man’s body thrown onto a worktable, along with a menacing note. She writes “white men in that town made sure my great-grandfather knew he wasn’t going to be allowed out of the limits imposed on his Black body. Except through death.”
Though there is much beauty and comradeship in the Fort Collins life she and her family enjoy, the overwhelming whiteness of the city is unavoidable. She cites statistics regarding the social networks of whites nationwide: their social circle is on average 91% white, and the Black friend of one white person is likely the Black friend of another white person, making the networks even smaller “[T]hough I might have counted nine white friends at that church,” she writes, “when asked if they had any friends who identified as Black, all nine of them may only count me.”
She describes a sermon given by the white pastor of her church on the Sunday after Trump’s 2016 election. Her mother had written a prayer card seeking protection for “Black people, Latinx people, LGBTQ people, women and children, refugees and other immigrants, people of non-Christian faiths—especially Muslims—disabled people, and people with health concerns.”
When the pastor finished reading Mom’s long list of people to hold up in prayer, he added a sentence for context: “Let us pray for those who are on the outside of our society looking in.”
I looked around the sanctuary, hoping for evidence that someone else seemed shocked by his language. besides my family, no one seemed troubled….
[After the service], Tears in my eyes and throat, I told the pastor, “The language you used during the prayers of the people was hurtful and dangerous.”
He looked wounded and surprised.
“All those people you listed,” I continued, “ we are not ‘on the outside of society looking in.’ We are part of this society! We are at the very center of what America has been built upon. But the rhetoric you used during your addition to that prayer is the rhetoric of exclusion”
The morning after Trump’s election, she and her family kept the blinds closed, when usually they would joyously open them to the garden outside. But they were afraid, afraid of passersby catching a glimpse of the African art and decor on their walls, afraid of the outburst of released racism that Trump’s election seemed to have unleashed. It was not an idle concern. Not long after the election, a group of white male Colorado State University students surrounded a Black student on his way to a class her husband taught. They shook their fists at him and said: “Obama can’t protect you. Our guy’s in now.”
The onset of the Covid epidemic opens her thoughts to the treatment of women, as well as to racism. Her daughter’s grammar school is shut down, and like parents—especially mothers—across the nation, she has to deal with home-schooling. She ties together her thoughts with a combination of a 1970s-era phrase that was popular for kids to throw at their parent—“I didn’t ask to be born!”—and a line from Mary Oliver’s poem A Summer Day: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life.”
I wonder if the ubiquity of that phrase in my childhood has to do with the increasing number of mothers entering the workforce during those years. The frustration women felt, trying to be breadwinners and still play the role of mothers, pretty wives, bakers, cooks, house cleaners, gardeners, tutors, seamstresses and PTA board members. There weren’t enough hours. It was impossible to be the kind of mother those working women, their children, and, it seemed, the world thought ideal. Perhaps what happened in those years was happening in my house too. I was a woman, and a mother, balancing competing expectations of what I should be doing with my “one wild and precious life.”
But I don’t mean to make the book sound overly polemical. Throughout are glorious descriptions of nature, of the slow, detailed enjoyment of watching and assisting a garden grow. There are lovely moments of love between the author, her husband and her daughter. There is much history as well of gardening, horticulture, and Black traditions in both. There are memories of children frolicking in the cooling mists of trucks rumbling through the streets spraying DDT (“It’s a wonder we survived,” her mother says.) There are musings on such topics as the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which in 2008 dropped words like minnow, sycamore, ferret, dandelion and blackberry to make room new words like blog, broadband, voicemail, and chatroom, along with vandalism, endangered, and cautionary tale.
It’s a book that makes you want to walk the earth appreciating both the wonders of nature, and the complexities of our society.
THIS WEEK’S NEW NOTABLE NONFICTION
- The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys—and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy, by James Risen. For decades now, America’s national security state has grown ever bigger, ever more secretive and powerful, and ever more abusive. Only once did someone manage to put a stop to any of it. Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The dark truths that Church exposed—from assassination plots by the CIA, to links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, to the surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI—would shake the nation to its core, and forever change the way that Americans thought about not only their government but also their ability to hold it accountable.
- The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two, by Steve Drummond. Months before Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that the United States was on the verge of entering another world war for which it was dangerously ill-prepared. The urgent times demanded a transformation of the economy, with the government bankrolling the unfathomably expensive task of enlisting millions of citizens while also producing the equipment necessary to successfully fight--all of which opened up opportunities for graft, fraud and corruption. In The Watchdog, Steve Drummond draws the reader into the fast-paced story of how Harry Truman, still a newcomer to Washington politics, cobbled together a bipartisan team of men and women that took on powerful corporate entities and the Pentagon, placing Truman in the national spotlight and paving his path to the White House. The Watchdog provides readers with a window to a time that was far from perfect but where it was possible to root out corruption and hold those responsible to account. It shows us what can be possible if politicians are governed by the principles of their office rather than self-interest.
- The Joy of Politics: Surviving Cancer, a Campaign, a Pandemic, an Insurrection, and Life's Other Unexpected Curveballs, by Amy Klobuchar. During the past few years, as our country has faced unprecedented challenges, Senator Klobuchar has been in the room where it happens—on the Senate floor for critical votes during the pandemic, at the debate podium during one of the most critical presidential elections in US history, and in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists stormed the building, interrupting the certification of the electoral college. It was well past midnight when Klobuchar stood beside then-Vice President Pence to officially certify President Biden's victory. In her candid, honest, and at times bitingly funny memoir, the pragmatic senator shares insider stories from these historic moments, while also inviting readers into her personal life.
- Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution, by Tania Branigan.
“It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,” Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia. Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?
-
Unbroken Chains: The Hidden Role of Human Trafficking in the American Economy, by Melissa Ditmore. The years of the COVID-19 pandemic have brought to light the exploitation of workers. In this moment of heightened visibility, Unbroken Chains demands that readers examine the hidden sector of American trafficked labor and understand its prevalence across our economy. Drawing from nearly two decades of research on US and international human trafficking, Melissa Hope Ditmore sets forth the harrowing stories of human trafficking survivors and grounds their accounts in the long history of US indentured servitude, looking to its iterations in chattel slavery, Chinese contract labor, and prison labor. In this groundbreaking investigation of American trafficking, Ditmore unveils the unnerving reality that forced labor permeates many industries beyond sex work: in almost every aspect of consumption, people who create our everyday necessities are working amid inescapable exploitation, often without pay. Unbroken Chains tells these workers’ stories: They are nannies for New York City’s diplomatic elites and door-to-door magazine salespeople in the American South. A trafficked person may have harvested your produce, sewn your clothes, or cleaned your apartment lobby. Ditmore offers readers an illuminating window on the world of forced labor, which exists within our own, and a road map for participating in its destruction.
- Who Cares: The Hidden Crisis of Caregiving, and How We Solve It, by Emily Kenway. When the auth became the primary caregiver for her terminally ill mother, her life was changed forever. Although she was lonely, she was far from alone: millions of caregivers all around the world are silently suffering from poverty, isolation, and burnout. Saving their nations’ economies billions by providing nonprofessional care, these people—primarily women—remain largely ignored by politicians, in part because the demands of care itself keep them from effectively advocating for their needs. Blending expert research with insights from her own experience, Kenway shows us that building a world that cares for its caregivers requires us to fundamentally reimagine the role of care in our society, bringing it from the margins to the center of our collective life.
- American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body's Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life, by Jennifer Lunden. When Jennifer Lunden became chronically ill after moving from Canada to Maine, her case was a medical mystery. Just 21, unable to hold a book or stand for a shower, she lost her job and consigned herself to her bed. The doctor she went to for help told her she was “just depressed.” After suffering from this enigmatic illness for five years, she discovered an unlikely source of hope and healing: a biography of Alice James, the bright, witty, and often bedridden sibling of brothers Henry James, the novelist, and William James, the father of psychology. Alice suffered from a life-shattering illness known as neurasthenia, now often dismissed as a “fashionable illness.” In this meticulously researched and illuminating debut, Lunden interweaves her own experience with Alice’s, exploring the history of medicine and the effects of the industrial revolution and late-stage capitalism to tell a riveting story of how we are a nation struggling—and failing—to be healthy.
Although science—and the politics behind its funding—has in many ways let Lunden and millions like her down, in the end science offers a revelation that will change how readers think about the ecosystems of their bodies, their communities, the country, and the planet.
- When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach, by Ashlee Vance. With the public fixated on the space tourism being driven by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, Vance focusses on new, scrappy companies—Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab— that have a different set of goals: to make rocket and satellite launches fast and cheap, thereby opening Earth’s lower orbit for business. Vance has had a front-row seat and singular access to this peculiar and unprecedented moment in history, and he chronicles it all in full color: the top-secret launch locations, communes, gun-toting bodyguards, drugs, espionage investigations, and multimillionaires guzzling booze to dull the pain as their fortunes disappear.
- Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, by Henry Grabar. Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don’t resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed—and in some cases demolished—our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation’s most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else?
- The Lost Sons of Omaha: Two Young Men in an American Tragedy, by Joe Sexton. On May 30, 2020, in Omaha, Nebraska, amid the protests that rocked our nation after George Floyd’s death at the hands of police, thirty-eight-year-old white bar owner and Marine veteran Jake Gardner fatally shot James Scurlock, a twenty-two-year-old Black protestor and young father. What followed were two investigations of Scurlock’s death, one conducted by the white district attorney Don Kleine, who concluded that Gardner had legally acted in self-defense and released him without a trial, and a second grand jury inquiry conducted by African American special prosecutor Fred Franklin that indicted Gardner for manslaughter and demanded he face trial. Days after the indictment, Gardner killed himself with a single bullet to the head.
The deaths of both Scurlock and Gardner gave rise to a toxic brew of misinformation, false claims, and competing political agendas. The two men, each with their own complicated backgrounds, were turned into grotesque caricatures. The twin tragedies amounted to an ugly and heartbreaking reflection of a painfully divided country.
- Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature, by Elizabeth Winkler. The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. Whisking readers from London to Stratford-upon-Avon to Washington, DC, she pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare across the centuries. As she considers the writers and thinkers—from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices—who have grappled with the riddle of the plays’ origins, she explores who may perhaps have been hiding behind his name. A forgotten woman? A disgraced aristocrat? A government spy? Hovering over the mystery are Shakespeare’s plays themselves, with their love for mistaken identities, disguises, and things never quite being what they seem.
- Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War, by Sarah Watling. An attempted insurrection, a country divided, a democracy threatened. It was the Spanish Civil War of 1936, surprisingly, that Sarah Watling found herself drawn to when confounded by the tumultuous politics of our present day. This was a conflict that galvanized tens of thousands of volunteers from around the world to join the fight. For them, the choice seemed clear: either you were for fascism, or you were against it. Seeking to understand how they knew that the moment to act had arrived, Watling sifts through archives for lost journals, letters, and manifestos, discovering a trove of work by writers and outsiders who had often been relegated to the shadows of famous men like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. She encounters the rookie journalist Martha Gellhorn coming into her own in Spain and the radical writer Josephine Herbst questioning her political allegiances. She finds the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner embracing a freedom in Barcelona that was impossible for queer women back at home in England and, by contrast, Virginia Woolf struggling to keep the war out of her life, honing her intellectual position as she did so. She tracks down the stories of Gerda Taro, a Jewish photographer whose work had long been misattributed, and Salaria Kea, a nurse from Harlem who saw the war as a chance to combat the prejudice she experienced as a woman of color. Here were individuals seizing an opportunity to oppose the forces that frightened them.
- Class War: A Literary History, by Mark Steven. A thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the globe and more than two centuries of history, Mark Steven traces the history of class war from the Haitian Revolution to Black Lives Matter. Surveying the literature of revolution, from the poetry of Shelley and Byron to the novels of Émile Zola and Jack London, exploring the writings of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Assata Shakur, Class War reveals the interplay between military action and the politics of class, showing how solidarity flourishes in times of conflict.
- The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos, by Lawrence M. Krauss. “A teacher once told me that the purpose of education was to impart awareness of one’s ignorance, and out of that come humility and curiosity. Lawrence Krauss is the joyous incarnation of that teacher. His prose is limpid, his manner is patient and good-willed. He uses an archaeologist’s brush (as it were) to dab at the outer limits of our understanding. He is one of our finest and most readable celebrators and explicators of science, and in The Edge of Knowledge he has found his perfect subject. Both layperson and scientist can travel with Krauss and know the thrill of both the known unknowns and the anticipation of the unknown unknowns. The Edge of Knowledge is also a precious cabinet of curiosities—I did not know that black holes were first proposed by a clergyman in 1783. Science has taught us much in the past 400 years, but the basics of the everyday—time, space, matter, consciousness and life itself—do not yet have their definitive descriptions. Krauss convinces his reader that ‘there remain remarkable mysteries to be uncovered.’ As Darwin famously observed, there is grandeur in this view of life.”— Ian McEwan, author
- Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain, by Andrew McCarthy. When actor/author Andrew McCarthy's eldest son began to take his first steps into adulthood, McCarthy found himself wishing time would slow down. Looking to create a more meaningful connection with Sam before he fled the nest, as well as recreate his own life-altering journey decades before, McCarthy decided the two of them should set out on a trek like few others: 500 miles across Spain's Camino de Santiago. Over the course of the journey, the pair traversed an unforgiving landscape, having more honest conversations in five weeks than they'd had in the preceding two decades. Discussions of divorce, the trauma of school, McCarthy's difficult relationship with his own father, fame, and Flaming Hot Cheetos threatened to either derail their relationship or cement it. Walking With Sam captures this intimate, candid and hopeful expedition as the father son duo travel across the country and towards one another.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
If you’re not already following Readers and Book Lovers, please go to our homepage (link), find the top button in the left margin, and click it to FOLLOW GROUP. Thank You and Welcome, to the most followed group on Daily Kos. Now you’ll get all our R&BLers diaries in your stream.