I want to share a mental chain reaction that occurred because I read several novels outside my comfort zone. Books are powerful. Reading books in different genres, written by authors with different points of view, can transform our perspective.
I’ve been putting off writing this because my mental process centered on an issue about which many people have strong opinions. And this isn’t a political blog. This is a blog about aspiring authorship. However, becoming an author means becoming a reader, and I can’t escape the feeling that sharing this is an important part of my aspiration.
My purpose is to break down my chain reaction, show how words in books sparked certain thoughts and connections, and to encourage you to stretch yourself as a reader. Some of you will disagree with my opinions—my starting opinion, or ending opinion, or both. That’s okay, because my political opinions are incidental to this post, and are for demonstration purposes only.
I hope I spark a desire in you to have your own chain reaction, catalyzed by your own readership, centered on your own interests.
Two of my X Books selections were The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. The Underground Railroad imagines the underground railroad in the Antebellum South as an actual underground railroad, with tunnels and tracks and stations. The Hate U Give centers on a police shooting (black young man killed by a white police officer), and how the main characters, and a community, dealt with the subsequent events.
Both are good, but neither are for the faint of heart. The Underground Railroad has several stark (but readable) descriptions of the horrors/realities of slavery. The Hate U Give is full of profanity, so if you read it based on this post, you’ve been forewarned.
[Aside: I try not to use profanity (and often succeed), and I don’t like to read it. I don’t include it in my writing, even when I know my characters would use it. I’m torn about this, honestly, like I’m choosing between being true to my characters, or true to myself. I resolve this with compromises like “Frederick’s profanity grew ever more audible,” or “Ida swore at Frederick in a way that made every nun in the surrounding twelve and a half miles cross themselves without knowing why.”]
Maverick Carter, the father of the main character in The Hate U Give, was a member of the Black Panther Party, had a picture of Huey Newton on his wall, and often taught party beliefs at his children (who mostly responded the way all children respond when their parents try to teach them).
One of the phrases Maverick Carter used—Forty acres and two mules—embedded itself in my brain, and rattled around for several days after I read it. Maverick contended, as did the Black Panther Party, that freed slaves were promised forty acres and two mules as payment for their mistreatment, and the promise has never been fulfilled.
This phrase—Forty acres and two mules—got me thinking about reparations. According to OED, reparation is:
“the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.”
In the United States, the word reparation is often associated with financial reparation for slavery, and the subsequent oppression of freedmen, and their descendants. The gist of reparations is the idea that we, The United States of America, should give money to our black citizens because we, The United States of America, allowed slavery and Jim Crow laws to exist, and allow racial injustice to persist.
I’ve been skeptical of reparations. Would recipients need to demonstrate slave ancestry? How would the money be distributed? Lump sum, or installments? What amount? And I’ve been skeptical of those seeking reparations. Are a few loud voices seeking to profit on the suffering of those without voices? Won’t some people find ways to abuse the system? And will money even solve our current problems?
But the part of my brain that craves fairness—the part that gives me a rush of satisfaction when I pay off a debt—latched onto the notion that we, as a country, made a promise we didn’t keep. If Congress passed a law allocating forty acres and two mules to former slaves, shouldn’t we make good on the promise?
This prompted me to do some research, and what I found left a bad taste in my mouth. First, William Tecumseh Sherman made the promise in Special Field Order No. 15. In modern political parlance, the promise was an executive order (or close enough). As well-intentioned as it was, Special Field Order No. 15 was constitutionally dubious, which meant, unfortunately, General Sherman made a weak promise.
Second, that weak promise was broken only a year later when President—and Southern sympathizer—Andrew Johnson rescinded Order No. 15 and returned the land to the people from whom it had been taken: former slave owners who had just waged war against their own country.
Last, the order allocated forty acres, and that’s it. Sherman said the freedmen could borrow the Army’s mules, and so the saying became forty acres and a mule. The Black Panther Party apparently added an extra mule for good measure.
All of this was as satisfying as eating unadorned celery sticks. Thoughts of reparations faded to the back of my mind for several days, but they sprang to the surface when I heard a similar word, with a similar meaning.
I walked through our family room while my kids were watching an episode of Psych. It was the one where Shawn and Gus try to help a man wrongly convicted of murder—played by Anthony Anderson—earn his restitution. Restitution is the practice of compensating wrongly convicted citizens for the hardship inflicted by the government’s mistake (a few examples here and here).
Sound familiar? It certainly did to me, and I realized something as I stood and watched Shawn make fun of Gus: I have no problem with restitution. None. It appeals to that fairness part of my brain. If we, as a society, make a mistake, it’s only proper we do all we can to correct that mistake, even when there are arguments about amounts, and durations, and specific circumstances.
As I drifted toward sleep that night, I remembered something from my own family history. John Reed, my fourth great-grandfather, joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints sometime in 1830 while living in New York State. By 1838, John and his wife Rebecca moved to Livingston County, Missouri. On October 27, 1838, Governor Lilburn Boggs ordered members of the Church, including John and his family, “be exterminated or driven from the state” (the official language of Missouri Executive Order No. 44).
The following Spring, from the relative safety of Quincy, Illinois, John Reed wrote a letter (transcript seen below) to Congress seeking redress for his losses at the hands of the mobs in Missouri. This letter, along with similar letters written by other members of the Church, was delivered to Congress by several leaders of the Church (and was ultimately ignored).
I have an instance in my own genealogy of an ancestor who, wronged by a government mistake, asked the government to correct that mistake. I’ve never once questioned whether it was reasonable for John Reed to write this letter.
My thoughts swirled around the ideas of restitution and reparation, and I came to the conclusion that the only thing separating the two is the passage of time. With restitution—a concept I support—the aggrieved argues for redress. With reparation—a concept I squint at—the descendants of the aggrieved argue for redress.
Then I read the rest of The Hate U Give and The Underground Railroad. I read depictions of brutality, then flashed forward in time to and read depictions of the modern consequences of that brutality. I saw the colonial slavers in Africa, the slave ships on the Atlantic, the auction block, the plantation, the quest for freedom, then skipped through generations of various levels of racism and injustice, to today. I know they’re novels, but they’re novels rooted in important aspects of reality.
I read another book at the same time. Saints, Vol II (another one of my X Books selections) is a narrative history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints from the time they fled Illinois in 1846, through 1893, and covers the period in which the US Government used every possible pressure to eliminate the practice of polygamy in Utah Territory. Most of the Church, including my ancestors, didn’t practice polygamy, but the government’s efforts affected the entire territorial population. I wondered, as I read, what my life would be like if the oppression had continued to this day.
The two circumstances—slavery and oppression of blacks, and persecution of a territorial population—are barely comparable in scope and consequence, but there was enough for me to envision my life in other circumstances. I could envision a nation suspicious of me. I could envision fewer educational choices. I could envision poverty.
So, my opinion changed. I believe the concept of reparation is just. I don’t have answers for many of the logistical questions surrounding reparations, nor am I under the illusion that giving or receiving money will change everyone’s hearts. However, I can no longer ignore justice because it’s difficult to administer. I’d rather focus on ways we, as a nation, can repair the hurt we, as a nation, allowed to exist and persist. We should use every tool possible, including reparation.
Quite the chain reaction, all because I read a few books. You may disagree with my logic, or my assumptions, or my conclusion, but that’s okay, because I wasn’t trying to convince you of my correctness (aside: one of my mental dangers is the feeling of intellectual ‘completion’, meaning, the feeling I know the answer to a question and I don’t need to consider it anymore).
I was trying to show the powerful effect of reading.
The written word is a remarkable medium, especially compared to anything on a screen. Consider how much thinking took place because of books. That quantity of thought never happens when I watch The Office, or, frankly, anything else.
So, read something outside your comfort zone. Take the X Books Challenge, or find something similar to expand your literary horizons. If you’re like me, you’ll find books you like, and books you don’t. But either way, you’ll find the freedom and power that comes from expanding your mind.
Also, I need to thank my friend Curtis for nudging me into writing this. You can see our conversation to the right.
He didn’t know he was doing it, but he forced me to be honest about why I haven’t written a post in a while, and kicked my butt into gear. Thanks Curtis!
3 Responses
Dear Mr. Reed, As this is a public blog page I had intended to comment directly to you rather than commenting here and thereby imposing an obligation on you to take time away from your writing to respond. I would be happy to do so if you would like to email me directly. You have my personal email address. Of course there is nothing in my post that I should want to keep private, I simply want to afford you the option to not respond for as long a time as you would like to not have to respond. Arthur
Comment away. I should be posting (and commenting) more frequently, and my reasons for not posting were just excuses anyway.
Dear Mr. Reed,
As already noted, I had intended to send this directly to you rather than commenting here. Again, my intention was simply to avoid publicly obligating you take time away from your writing task to respond. I will count any response, even if it were to come a year from now, as a pleasant surprise.
Your aside about profanity was particularly pleasant to consider. A professor once gave me a gold writing nugget he had himself found in explaining that writers always have ethical choices to make when arranging words one after another. English is so wonderfully fraught with various ways to come at a story or a thought, and it can be quite perilous. An accusation, a plea for help, a conveyance of information, a report on an event—all of it presents choices to make in purposefully arranging words to create the desired effect. Some of my school chums would tell you the Queen’s English is the superior literary vehicle for this, while some of my yankee buddies would counter that suggestion with “Whatever dude.” Either way, what a stimulating and rewarding challenge it is to find a way to convey a character’s opinion or mood or reaction to something without actually using profane words.
I fear profanity in general has lost its effectiveness anyway. Profane words have become so commonplace in everyday conversation that most of them are quite meaningless and impotent in demanding that notice be taken. Cursing has become so ho-hum and void of proper use and effect that the only time I find myself taking much notice of it at all anymore is when a mutated form of it crosses my path. I heard someone say recently, “Oh my damn” when commenting in a friendly tone about a funny situation that was being talked about. It was delightfully funny and in no way a curse or profane utterance.
Your telling about the serendipitous chain-reaction of thought that came to you from willing yourself to hike through uncomfortable reading territory was quite thought-provoking, and prompts an aside of my own. One of the better word definitions I have preserved in my cupboard of tasty word treats is this one: “Serendipity: Looking for a needle in the haystack and finding the farmer’s daughter.”
I too find satisfaction in purposefully setting out to resolve discrepancies among my internal views of the world. It’s a worthwhile exercise to be sure, but delightfully dangerous as well—delightful if you value the process over the conclusion, dangerous if you do not leave room for expansion. For an unexpected shift in thinking, even one that warms the senses with endorphins, doesn’t always prove to be an adequate load-bearing pillar when shoring up a newly adopted philosophy or point of view. Even so, I too have come to value the unexpected pathways of thinking that come into view on the map of my intellectual topography, particularly after struggling up a steep thought hill or after pruning (or sometimes slashing) my way through synaptic trails choked with thorny brambles and soft uneven ground.
And I also quite enjoy the unexpected gems of thinking I find when grazing for intellectual nutrition among the thoughts of others. I am glad to know a little more about you now. Although I am not a gambler, nor do I think myself capable of being much good at it even if I wanted to become so, I do enjoy noticing “tells” that indicate something about a person. For example, I suspect you might subscribe to the idea of original sin, as indicated in your thoughts about reparations. If Adam and Eve committed the original sin— the sin that set in motion all other sin and injustice—it stands to reason they are the ones ultimately responsible for the proliferation of injustice down through the ages.
To the above my Christian friends would say, “Why that is absurd, that is precisely what Jesus was for”! Still, it begs the question: If none of us are responsible for introducing sin and injustice in the world, how far back is reasonable to look in seeking reparations or restitution? Do the injustices perpetrated unfairly on one generation by the generation before them absolve that generation to any extent of the injustices they perpetrate in turn on the generation after them? (To save you the trouble, I will admit up front that compelling you to read that last sentence probably entitles you to some sort of intellectual restitution for the effort it took you to read it 🙂
I shall close this letter now as I feel a landslide of thought beginning to break loose from a steep incline along one of my synaptic hiking trails. Time for a cool drink and a rest now before hiking further on this subject. Perhaps when I pass away one day I will request a word with Adam before entering the courtroom to appear before the Judge.
Always a pleasure to correspond with you. I am quite looking forward to your novel. May it fluidly progress toward completion and deep satisfaction for you.
Arthur
Comments are closed.