A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Arna Bontemps’s Story of the Negro, one of the 1949 Newbery Honor books, dedicated to Bontemps’s friend Langston Hughes. The book begins with a short discussion about the great variety of peoples in Africa (the short pygmies, the tall Watussi) and the history of great African civilizations (most especially Ethiopia, and yes I did yell “Like Elizabeth Wein’s Lion Hunters!” when the Axumite Empire made a cameo), then segues into a clear, concise history of slavery in the United States, starting in 1619 in Jamestown and expanding outward from there. It ends with a then-current reference to the United States’s newly self-appointed role as global standard-bearer for freedom and democracy: Many decided to keep their eyes on the Negro people of the United States. This would be their test of democracy’s promises.

Reading the book in 2023, it seems fair and even-handed, but I was curious if it sparked controversy when it came out. (This was, after all, the era when Garth Williams got in hot water for The Rabbits’ Wedding, in which a black rabbit married a white rabbit.) However, there’s no mention of controversy on Wikipedia. Possibly tempests in teapots have always been descended with the capricious arbitrariness that they often show on Twitter.

Another entry in the Newbery sweepstakes: Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s Moccasin Trail, in which young Jim Keath runs away from home to go trapping with his uncle, nearly gets killed by a bear, is afterward nursed back to health by the Crow, with whom he lives for six years before taking up trapping again… at which point he hears that his siblings have moved to Oregon, and rejoins them, and the rest of the book is about his struggle to reintegrate into white society.

This is a lively and dramatic premise, and the book is full of adventure, and it was published in 1952 so it’s very much Read At Your Own Risk for, you know, everything about that entire premise.

What I’m Reading Now

Someone (skygiants?) posted about Karl Schlogel’s The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World, and of course I had to read it. The book is enormous, so I’ll probably be reading it for a while; so far we have taken a stroll through the Arbat (the most famous open-air flea market in Moscow) and discussed Soviet museum culture. Schlogel notes that during Soviet times, there were almost no books published around regional towns (the history, culture, geology, etc.) so often the local museum was the only source to learn about the place.

Schlogel also mentioned a 1929 Soviet movie, Fragments of Empire, in which a White Army soldier who has suffered from total amnesia for the last decade suddenly begins to remember and rushes into St. Petersburg… only to find that the city has totally changed! Statues of Lenin everywhere… hammers and sickles on the coins… so much new construction! I watched it on Youtube and it was an Experience.

Also delighted with this Soviet joke: “There is nothing so unpredictable as the past.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Next week I’m going on a four-day camping trip at the Indiana Dunes! I’m still pondering which books to bring, but I’ve definitely decided that Elizabeth Enright’s The Four-Story Mistake will be one of them.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Possibly because it is so cold, possibly because my writing brain has dried up, I have wanted to do nothing but read this week and I have read MANY books, starting with a boatload of Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and Her Unicorn graphic novels. I’ve now read all of them except #13, Unicorn Famous. Slightly sorry that I binged them rather than spreading out the joy a bit more, but you know what, sometimes you just want all the joy all at once.

On a less joyous note, I finished Alex Beam’s American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church, which spends the first half establishing why most of the non-Mormons around Nauvoo loathed Joseph Smith. I too would have reservations about a so-called prophet who set himself up as the temporal authority in a town of 10,000 of his most fanatical followers, who have set up their own large and constantly drilling militia! Especially if said so-called prophet also had the habit of informing teenage girls that God has told him that they are destined to become his plural wives, while publicly claiming that he’s definitely not practicing polygamy AT ALL.

This makes it all the more impressive that Beam manages to make the murder of Joseph Smith so terrifying in the second half of the book. Yes, a bad dude, yes, clearly something must be done, but summoning him to the country jail and then letting him cool his heels there for three days till one of the various anti-Mormon militias (everyone had a militia in the 1840s!) mobs the jail, tossing aside the six guards and storming up the steps to shoot Joseph and his brother to death. Clearly something must be done but also clearly NOT THAT.

And I finished Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s Sawdust in His Shoes, which is about a circus kid who accidentally ends up living on a farm for a year after his dad dies. I was on tenterhooks about how the book would manage to resolve this whole farm-circus dichotomy - having him abandon the circus for the farm is sort of like having a character abandon a magical land forever, and therefore unsatisfying, BUT having him leave the farm without a backward glance after spending an entire book establishing his life there is ALSO unsatisfying…

I won’t spoil exactly how the book squares this circle, but I will say that I DID find it very satisfying, and I also really enjoyed reading about mid-twentieth century circus life - in fact, just mid-twentieth century American life in general; to a modern reader, Joe’s life on a late forties farm seems just as foreign as his circus life.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which is currently misery porn about a medieval lesbian nun, who despite not wanting to be a nun at all has been assigned as prioress to a nunnery that is both starving AND suffering from a choking sickness. Has anyone read this? Does it get less miserable? Maybe I should give it up on the general grounds that my favorite nun book is Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede, which is about nuns who WANT to be nuns, and “I hate being a nun” nuns are never going to scratch the same itch.

What I Plan to Read Next

The 2022 Newbery Awards were announced on Monday, so my reading list just got an infusion of five new books! Fellow readers of Elatsoe may be pleased to hear that Darcie Little Badger got a Newbery Honor for her second novel, A Snake Falls to Earth.

Eloise Jarvis McGraw's The Moorchild is dedicated "To all children who have ever felt different." I don't believe I read this dedication the first time round - I was not in the habit of reading dedications when I was eleven - and it is perhaps just as well, because I already identified with the book so hard that I might very well have picked it as my desert island book if anyone had asked me at the time.

At the center of this of course is Saaski herself, the moorchild of the title: a member of the fairy Folk who is exchanged for a human child because she's half-human herself, and therefore can never fit in the Mound. And yet she doesn't fit with the humans either, with her dark skin and dandelion fluff of hair and overlong fingers (I latched onto this finger detail so hard that I gave it to my OC at the time) and her habit of forever running away to the Moors. "Freaky odd," the village children call her, and her only friend is the tinker's boy Tam, who comes sometimes to the moors with his pipes.

Saaski's journey to find - not a place she belongs, but a person she belongs with - resonated with me terribly. The book still hits me emotionally when I reread it now. I'm even more conscious of the pervasive sense of loneliness in this book: not just Saaski's but Tam's, Old Bess's, even Saaski's parents Anwara and Yanno, who love their child but can't understand her.

But I have enough distance from it now to admire the beautiful craft of the book too, not least of which is the marvelous grasp of historical detail. Saaski's daily chores (milking the cow, setting the bread), and the yearly chores of a small village farm - swarming the bees, retting the flax - are woven into the narrative with perfect naturalness, as are the thick swarms of herb names that dance across the narrative as Saaski brings them to her grandmother, Old Bess.

I loved (and still love) Old Bess almost as much as Saaski: a tough, tart-tongued village healer, who holds her peace and keeps her counsel and watches over Saaski, and loves her even though she knows from the start that Saaski is a changeling child - perhaps because she sees something of herself in Saaski. Old Bess is not one of the Folk herself (in fact, the Folk have written runes on her door to warn each other of danger: even they know Old Bess is a force to be reckoned with!), but she's an outsider too, and yet has built up a life in the village despite that.

There's also a lot of beautiful, beautiful description in this book, as vivid and absolutely unobtrusive as the historical detail: the simple images of the moor as "broom-gilded" (broom being a yellow flower), or the scene where Saaski and her one friend Tam play their pipes together and Saaski's bagpipes sing "over and under his little pipe's shrill melody like a bramble vine twining a sapling."

And the metaphors McGraw uses to describe mental states, too, are beautiful vivid and apt. After a bad start to the day, Saaski rushes up to the moors to "let the music mend the jagged edges of the morning"; or Saaski's struggles with her mostly-submerged memories of her time with the Folk, which she strives to push away and yet sometimes yearns to remember, so that when someone mentions a familiar name, it "streaked across her memory like a shooting star and vanished into the general dark."

God, what I would give to write a metaphor like that. There are a lot of books I admire without wanting to have written them, but this one - I would give anything to write a story that means as much for other people as this has meant for me.