All the Little People

     Legends about "Little People" can be found among cultures from around the world. In Europe, there are goblins,  gnomes,  and leprechauns, for example.  In Africa, there are the Kondorong and Kolparsi, among others. In Asia, there are stories of the Kenmun and the Bongas. Stories are also told throughout Oceania of little people, like the Menehune in Hawaii who are said to build stone structures at night. It seems that little people are a common trope, and Native Americans throughout the Americas also have their own little people stories. 

    Across every culture that tells little people stories, there are a lot of similarities amongst the little people. Of course, they're small, ranging from a few inches to 2-3 feet in height. They're often hairy and wear primitive or traditional clothing, if any. They are most active at night and/or in the deepest, most impenetrable, inaccessible forests, deserts, or mountains. More often than not, they are mischievous, stealing things and playing jokes on humans, but, usually, they are very helpful and caring, especially when it comes to children. Stories are told of little people appearing to a lost human and leading him to safety, or even coming to the aid of abused children. They are often depicted as protectors of children, animals, or forests.

    I've recently read two books that deal with Native American little people.  The first, Midnight Son, is not really a book. It's an Audible Original, but it feels like it may have been a podcast first. It's the true story of an Alaskan native named Teddy Kyle Smith, who was starting a career as an actor in independent films in 2012, when things seemed to fall apart for him. When his mother died, he seemed to snap. He went into Alaskan wilderness to hide out, and he shot and wounded a couple of hunters who unknowingly found his hiding place. A massive manhunt ensued, and he was captured. When he was captured, he immediately told stories of encounters with the little people of Native Alaskan legend, the Inukuns.  I won't say anymore, but I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this. It was short, and it was extremely well-told by the writer, James Dommek Jr, an Alaskan Native himself, who knows the area and people who knew Smith. 

    The second book is The Firekeeper's Daughter, by Angeline Boulley, published this year.  I would never expect to have read this book in a million years. It is wildly outside of my normal reading habits, but my wife heard about it and suggested it as a book for us to listen to in the car. Why is it such an atypical book for me? It's a Young Adult book and a Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection. Boulley is an Ojibwe woman, and the book's heroine is a young Ojibwe woman in 2004 who sees her life and her people going through a major crisis. It seems like Boulley had a checklist for what makes a great YA novel; it's got everything, strong, smart female lead character, drugs, alcohol, sex, love, incompetent and malicious adults, that rare super strong and supportive adult, sports, teen angst and insecurity, etc. Honestly, it took a while for me to get into; it just seemed to YA for me. However, I eventually got into the story, but what I really loved was the details of Ojibwe culture and reservation life that Boulley built into the story.  She even includes a strong little people thread. I would rate it 3 of 5 stars barely. I ended up enjoying it, but it's not my cup of tea. I enjoyed the cultural elements more than the actual story, but I can definitely see why it's so popular, and I know several readers who would enjoy it. I would definitely recommend it for older teens.

Phryne Fisher's Marvelous Mysteries

     No doubt, the British are all in when it comes to creating great fictional detectives: Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot, for example. British television has made many detective series into great period shows that we love to watch, like Father Brown, Grantchester, Maigret, and even one revolving around a medieval monk detective, Cadfael. The Canadians have even gotten in on the act with shows like The Murdoch Mysteries, following a turn of the 20th century scientific-minded detective. Almost all of these shows are based on novel series. However, one of the most fun detectives in fiction and television is Australian: the Honorable Miss Phryne Fisher.

    Phryne Fisher is the creation of Australian author Kerry Greenwood, and she is a thoroughly modern woman of the late 1920s, a wealthy flapper, in Melbourne, Australia. Fisher is a female detective, a socialite, and a philanthropist. She's a totally liberated woman woman who flies a plane, drives her own sports car, carries a gun, often wears trousers, and is sexually frank and open. As of now, there have been 21 Fisher books, an Australian tv series (In the US, the series can be seen on PBS, various streaming sources, Youtube, and the Ovation channel.) , and a feature film. She is surrounded by an interesting set of characters, like her personal lady's maid Dot, her servants Mr. and Mrs. Butler, a Scottish woman doctor, and two truck drivers who act as her investigators and "muscle" on occasion, Bert and Cec (pronounced Cess, from the British Cecil). Phryne herself is intelligent, funny, courageous, inventive, and she is the epitome of fashion. 

    Both the tv show and the books paint an interesting picture of life in 1920s-1930s Australia, reflecting class, race, and gender issues of the time. Just like in the US, the 1920s were a tumultuous decade of conflict between traditional and conservative. Miss Fisher's mysteries often deal with modern issues like illegal drugs, immigration, and sex trafficking.  The books are relatively short and quick reads, averaging a couple of hundred pages or 5-6 hours in the audio versions (which we are listening to - great narration so far). 

    If you're looking for a new mystery series, give Phryne a try. 

June is National Soul Food Month!

     The term "soul food" first appeared in the 1960s in an attempt to elevate the style of cooking that originated in the South, as the result of the African Diaspora. The enslaved Africans brought to the southern United States brought with them rich foodways, recipes, foods, and techniques that adapted and evolved as they merged with European and Native American cultures and incorporated new resources found in the Americas.  Soul food is in many ways synonymous with southern cooking, but not exactly 100%. Enslaved cooks had to develop recipes based on the left-overs, the not-so-desirable meats and vegetables that they had to eat. Since they prepared food for a large number of white southerners in homes and restaurants, soul food grew in prominence, so that a lot of what is recognized as southern cooking, popular in white and black homes, grew out of soul food. National Soul Food Month was created in 2001 to celebrate this important part of American culture.

    Here are four culinary historians whose works you should read if you want to learn more about soul food:

    Michael Twitty  (Twitter: @Koshersoul /Instagram:@thecookinggene/Michael W. Twitty on Facebook),  is a food writer, independent scholar, culinary historian , and historical interpreter personally charged with preparing, preserving and promoting African American foodways and its parent traditions in Africa and her Diaspora and its legacy in the food culture of the American South.  Michael is also a Judaic studies teacher from the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area and his interests include food culture, food history, Jewish cultural issues, African American history and cultural politics. He writes a blog called Afroculinaria (  https://afroculinaria.com/ )

    Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney, and certified barbecue judge who lives in Denver, Colorado. He's published several books on soul food.(https://adrianemiller.com/)

    Jessica B. Harris ( http://www.africooks.com/wordpress/ ) is the author of twelve cookbooks and histories of soul food in her over forty-year career as a journalist, and she is considered one of the most knowledgeable authors in the field. Her book High On the Hog was recently made into a docuseries on Netflix and features other historians like Twitty and Miller.

    

Toni Tipton-Martin just recently was named as a recipient of the Julia Child Award and grant, recognizing her influence on documenting American culture through food. (https://tonitiptonmartin.com/ ) .  

    

Florida Novels

 

    We've been living Florida for a year and a month now, and I'm still trying to make a dent in the reading list for my new state. I never knew that there were so many books about Florida and so many authors with Florida connections.  It seems like I meet or learn about Floridian authors, artists, and musicians every time I turn around.

    

    In a Florida Facebook group, these three novels were often recommended as Florida classics, even appearing on school reading lists, so they had to go on my reading list.

    I've already written about A Land Remembered by Patrick Smith. Published in 1984, this novel tells the story of three generations of Florida pioneers, the McIvey family. Tobias McIvey was the typical Florida pioneer, moving to Florida from Georgia in 1858.  He becomes a true Florida Cracker or cow hunter. Like many Florida pioneers, he found that he could make a living by herding the wild cattle that populated Florida and were descended from the first cattle brought to America by the Spanish in the mid 1500s. They were called Crackers because of the sound their long whips made as they herded the cattle. From that humble beginning, the McIvey descendants became real estate tycoons during the Florida land boom. The book is a great family adventure story that accurately describes the life and hardships faced by the frontier settlers.

    Alas, Babylon was written during the height of the Cold War, and it fits right in with other contemporary works with an apocalyptic theme, like Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach  or the movie Dr. Strangelove or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Published in 1959, the book tells the story of the aftermath of atomic war and the surviving citizens of a small town in Central Florida. All communications and supply lines are cut off, and neighbors have to rely on each other in order to survive. An unremarkable small town lawyer finds himself in charge all of a sudden, and he rises to the occasion. It was a good read, and I recommend it.

    Lay That Trumpet in Our Hands by Susan Carol McCarthy was published in 2003, and it is based on real events and involves some real historical figures. The subject is the racial violence that plagued Florida in the 1950s. Florida has had a very troublesome history when it comes to race, with numerous lynchings, the Rosewood and Ocoee Massacres, and house bombings in the 1950s, just to cite a few. Trumpet is the story of a white family in central Florida, told through the eyes of the twelve-year old daughter. It begins with the lynching of 19-year old family friend, committed by the Ku Klux Klan, which had a very strong presence in Central Florida. As events unfold, the story involves Thurgood Marshall, the true story of the Groveland Four (see the book Devil in the Grove), and Harry T. Moore. Moore was the head of the Florida NAACP, and, on Christmas night 1951, he and his wife were murdered when a dynamite bomb blew up their home. He was the first NAACP officer to be specifically targeted, and he and his wife are considered to be among the first martyrs of the 1950s Civil Rights Movement.  I liked the book well enough, but it's obvious that the author was greatly influenced by one of the greatest novels ever written, To Kill a Mockingbird. There are a lot of similarities including the young girl storyteller with a crusading Atticus Finch-style father. I could see this book being used for middle schoolers, but Harper Lee did it much better.

Let Your Freak Flag Fly !?

     Here, now, in the year 2021, the word "freak" is just one of many, many troublesome words that have been declared politically incorrect. However, there was a time in the 19th century when the word had a neutral connotation, usually referring to a person who is physically deformed or has some extraordinary medical condition or body modification. For some, the word even became a positive identifier for those people who exhibited their differences and unique traits to crowds  of the curious who paid to see them. There were some freaks who saw their differences as an avenue to a life they could not have dreamed of otherwise, a life of traveling the world, becoming celebrities, and earning a living. Unfortunately, there were also many acts of abuse, neglect, and cruelty committed against freaks, many of whom were mentally impaired. Historians and authors have found lots of engrossing stories within freak shows that hit on every aspect of human nature.

    Truevine is the story of two black brothers, George and Willie Muse, born to a sharecropping family in Truevine Virginia, a black settlement near Roanoke.  At the ages of nine and six in 1899, they were lured out of the tobacco field by a white man offering candy. Why? The brothers were albinos, and the man was a "talent" scout for sideshows, one of the men who made a living by traveling the country and finding freaks.  The boys' mother was devastated, and she spent 28 years looking for them. While she searched, the boys were told their mother was dead, and they were groomed to become one of the most well known sideshow acts of the early 20th century. Like many black sideshow performers, they were displayed as wild savages, plucked from the deepest, darkest jungles of some exotic locale. Named Eko and Iko, they were even billed as Martian ambassadors. Truevine tells their story, and the story of the efforts to find them and return them to their family.  The author, Beth Macy, also does a great job of describing both worlds that George and Willie were a part of, Jim Crow America and the sideshow world.

    The second book I'm recommending is not really a book; it's a podcast and an Audible original, Stephen Fry's Victorian Secrets.  I love Stephen Fry; he's one of my favorite celebrities. I enjoy his books, his movie and tv appearances, and his narration. Victorian Secrets is a great listen. Most of us have a very stereotypical view of the Victorian Age, that it was drab, dour, stuffy, reserved, and impossibly formal. Each chapter or episode goes beyond the stiff façade and reveals some very un-stereotypical stories. There are chapters on sexual fetishes, pornography, homosexuality, royal secrets, crime, etc., but there is also an interesting episode about sideshows and some of the more famous performers in Victorian England. Secrets  is definitely not for children, but adults will find it very interesting and entertaining.

    Bright and Distant Shores is a novel by Dominic Smith, an Australian-born writer of historic fiction. So far, he's written five books, and they all look interesting. Bright and Distant Shores is set in Chicago during the Gilded Age, late 1800s, early 1900s. The Chicago World's Fair is happening, skyscrapers are going up and changing the cityscape, and wealthy men are competing for the top spot on the social, economic, and philanthropic ladders.  One of these tycoons (a fictional insurance giant) wants to own the tallest skyscraper in the city, and, in the process, he wants to one-up his neighbor, Marshall Field, department store magnate who founded the famous Field Museum of Natural History. To top Field, he commissions Owen Graves, a young collector, to make a voyage to the South Seas in order to collect Melanesian and Oceanic artifacts to put on display. He also wants Graves to bring back living Melanesians in order to create a village on the roof of his skyscraper as a publicity stunt to draw crowds, creating in effect a human zoo. Human zoos were the rage in the late 1800s and early 1900s. World Fairs brought small groups of people from exotic locations around the world, and visitors saw representations of different cultures that they wouldn't be able to see otherwise. The exhibits soon became big draws in zoos, parks, and traveling shows in America and Europe. Justified as "science", the human zoo exhibits were generally sad and dismal places, and many of the exhibited people had terrible lives, succumbing to depression, disease, and death, hundreds or thousands of miles away from their homes and families. Shores is a great adventure story, following Owen on his voyage and telling the story of the Melanesian brother and sister that he brings back to Chicago.

    If you are interested in human zoos, here are a couple of other books published relatively recently about two famous individuals who were exhibited. The idea of human zoos obviously doesn't sit well with us in the 21st century, and the stories can be quite sad, but history can't always be happy.