Trace

Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
Lauret E. Savoy
Counterpoint (November 1, 2015), 256 pages
reprinted with a new preface by the author in 2021
Kindle edition $11.99, Amazon paperback $15.94

I suppose one might classify Trace as a memoir, but there are a lot of moving parts in this book. It contains travelogue, history, geography, geology, and genealogy. Savoy is on a quest for her roots.

She opens the book with a recollection of a childhood visit to the Grand Canyon. Her parents incorporated this visit, as well as visits to other national parks, as part of the family’s move from California to Washington, DC. Her father decided he would be in a better position to fight for racial equality if he were based in the nation’s capital.

Savoy’s story is centered on the fact that her parents were both of primarily African American background, but her father was light-skinned and could (sometimes) pass for white, while her mother was dark-skinned and never had that luxury.

The author writes about Oklahoma’s geography, mentioning the Cimarron and Arkansas rivers, two rivers which I knew well back in my Oklahoma days of the 1980s. She writes about how the five civilized tribes (she uses lower case and quotes in naming the people) could own Black people as slaves, a background from which her mother might have come. She says that while only an “elite few” did so, “more than seven thousand people with African blood lived in bondage in Indian Territory on the eve of the Civil War.”

Savoy offers a history of the early days in Oklahoma when free Black people founded towns in which they thought they could create productive lives for themselves. This was before the territory became a state governed by white men.

As a nature writer (at least in part), Savoy appreciates the nature writers who came before her. As a teenager she read the iconic Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and wondered how, as an American author, his only mention of slavery could be in reference to ancient Greece. She writes, “I so feared that his ‘we’ and ‘us’ excluded me and other Americans with ancestral roots in Africa, Asia, or Native America.”

Savoy describes the Washington, DC in which she lives as a youngster. She also delves deeply into the history of the city. It seems that it was located where it was partly because George Washington didn’t want to be far from his slave holdings or have the nation’s capital in a city (Philadelphia) that was antagonistic to the idea of enslaving people. Further, slave owners were a powerful lobby, and that helped ensure that slavery was legal there. (I recall Michelle Obama’s reflection in her speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”)

The author offers a brief history of the Southwest and notes how the original agreed-upon border between Texas and Mexico was the Nueces River. The government in Washington, however, decided that the proper place for the border was the Rio Grande, fifty to a hundred and fifty miles to the south.

Savoy paints a vivid portrait of a military base in Arizona where her mother served as a nurse. During World War II the base held prisoners of war, including Nazis. In that era, in that environment, the white Nazi prisoners had more rights and privileges than the African Americans on the base who were United States citizens and officers in the US Army.

Laurent Savoy has much to say about American history, identity, and racism. We need to listen to her.

Orwell’s Roses

Orwell’s Roses
Rebecca Solnit
Viking (October 19, 2021), 320 pages
Kindle edition $14.99, Amazon hardcover $20.35

When I saw this book reviewed I immediately knew that I had to read it. I had three reasons.

• George Orwell. I have long been a student of Orwell and his essays. I first learned to appreciate his essays when I was a senior at Pitzer College in 1975, and my first year out of college I bought everything of Orwell’s that was in print, including the Collected Essays. I still have those books.
• Rebecca Solnit. I read her memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence in 2020 when it was first released. I admire her sharped-edged feminism and her love of San Francisco.
• My maternal grandfather was in the wholesale nursery business. He was a partner in Hemet Wholesale Nursery and sales manager for Howard Rose Company. I grew up around roses. The Four Seasons community where we live was built on land that once nurtured Howard Rose Company roses.

Solnit opens the book by describing a visit she made to a small house where Eric Blair, who took on the pen name George Orwell early in his writing career, once lived and planted roses, something he described in his diary. She explains she was supposed to be at home recuperating from a serious illness, but a book contract imposed a severe financial penalty if she failed to complete a book tour in the United Kingdom. She persevered rather than accept the monetary penalty and decided that since she was in England she would visit the house where Orwell planted the roses.

Orwell was always something of an outsider. He went to boarding school on scholarship, something he described in his essay “Such, Such Were the Joys.” (There was, in fact, very little joy in that experience.) He then won a scholarship to the elite prep school Eaton. Solnit states he acquired “an accent that marked him as an outsider among the poor without making him an insider among the rich.”

The author covers a lot of territory. She discusses how Orwell wrote a lot about nature in many of his books, much more than we give him credit for. She recounts his time serving as a volunteer on the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War, where he took a bullet through his neck that was nearly fatal. Solnit emphasizes Orwell’s poor health throughout his life, starting with a lung ailment as a child and ending with the tuberculosis that took his life. And we hear about Orwell’s decision near the end of his life to live away from civilization on an island off the coast of Scotland.

It is not just Orwell’s life that Solnit documents. She spends a chapter discussing Stalin’s politicization of science. Solnit delves into the phrase “bread and roses,” once used by social progressives and notes at least three different people were credited with the phrase. In another chapter she talks about the various breeds and varieties of roses. Solnit takes us on a visit to Columbia, the country which provides the vast majority of roses sold in Ameri can supermarkets. She documents the long hours and poor working conditions of the people who labor there.

Speaking of labor, Solnit points out that the revolutionary artist Diego Rivera painted a mural for Henry Ford’s son. She wondered why an avowed communist would paint a mural for one of America’s most successful capitalists, but then she reflects:

Gazing upon the walls filled with images of auto assembly lines and workers dwarfed by machinery, I realized that capitalists and communists of the era shared a devotion to mechanization and to industrialization as phenomena that would allow human beings to transcend the limits of nature. Looking back it seems like hubris and dangerous delusion.

One cannot, of course, forget about Orwell’s ongoing interest in language and its use. Language plays a key role in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and is the focus of his famous essay “Politics and the English Language.” Solnit writes:

“Politics and the English Language” addresses language that is too loose, blurring, evading, meandering, avoiding. Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts language when it is too tight, too restrictive in vocabulary and connotation, when some words have been murdered and others severed from too many of their associations.

Orwell made a point of exposing injustice when he saw it, but Solnit does not give him a pass for failing to notice sexism when it occurred. She notes he was better at seeing racism. Despite her honesty in observing Orwell’s shortcomings, Orwell the writer is a beacon for Solnit. She refers to a “cluster of sentences that has long served me as a credo.” Those sentences end with Orwell’s words, “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

Solnit’s writing is clear and vivid. She takes us on a journey in which she not only offers little known details about the life of George Orwell but teaches us about a range of other topics as well.

Summer People

Summer People: A Novel
Marge Piercy
Open Road Media (April 12, 2016), 477 pages
originally published by Summit Books, a Simon and Schuster imprint (June 1, 1989)
Kindle edition $10.99

After finishing my previous nonfiction book I was looking for something countercultural. I knew I could find that by turning to Marge Piercy. I selected Summer People and was not disappointed. Now this was not sixties counterculture. The narrative in the novel takes place roughly contemporaneous with the publication of the book in 1989. Piercy mentions the amber screen of a computer. Many computer screens running the good old DOS operating system (yes, I know that’s redundant) in those days had black-and white or blue-and-white screens, but my computer at home in 1989 had an amber screen.

This counterculture existed (in the novel) on Cape Cod. Susan and Willie were married. Susan was a seamstress and fashion designer. Willie was a sculptor and carpenter. Dinah, a musician and composer, moves into the house next door, which shared the driveway with Willie and Susan’s house. They quickly ended up in a three-way relationship. All went well until Susan, with her misperceptions and inflated sense of self-importance, insisted that the arrangement end. That triggered a domino effect that drives much of the novel’s action.

I wouldn’t refer to Piercy’s work as literary fiction, but she knows how to develop a plot and create believable, three-dimensional characters. The women are strong and not dependent on men. Piercy’s novels have always had a strong feminist tone, and her women take ownership of their own sex lives and responsibility for birth control. (One male character, in fact, provides his own condom).

The title Summer People is a bit of a misnomer, as the book is not about the people who arrive at Cape Cod in time for Memorial Day and leave right after Labor Day, although they do play a role. It’s the year-round residents, Willie, Susan, and Dina that are central to the novel.

So while not great literary fiction, Summer People is enjoyable reading with a serious message about how people treat each other, even if the conclusion ties things together just a little too neatly.

How You Say It

How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do—And What It Says About You
Katherine D. Kinzler
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 21, 2020), 253 pages
Kindle edition $14.99, Amazon hardcover $20.99

As a writer and as a reader I place a lot of emphasis on the written word, and I think a lot about writing and styles of writing. However, the spoken word is important to me as well. I spent nearly four years in Toastmasters, leaving only when changes to the program made the organization less appealing to me. A linguist will tell you that language is about the spoken word far more than it is about writing. That was the message in John McWhorter’s Great Courses series on language families which I recently watched. It is the spoken word that interests Katherine Kinzler in this book.

Kinzler wants to understand, and wants us to understand, how the spoken word affects how we perceive other people. She is not a linguist, rather she is a psychologist. However, in doing the research that forms the basis of this book she took a multidisciplinary approach, working with individuals in multiple fields, including linguistics. She writes with the approach of a linguist, saying, for example, “African American English is a dialect of English like any other (including Standard American English).”

The author writes about the misconceptions that people have, for example that an ethic Asian might have difficulty learning a non-Asian language such as French. She describes how bias is pervasive in the media. In children’s movies, such as Aladdin, she points out that the bad guys have accents and the good guys don’t. Kinzler explores how an accent can have a negative impact on a person being hired for a particular job, even when they are fully qualified.

This is interesting material, and it presents an important set of social issues of which we ought to be aware.