Would you like to celebrate Black History Month by reading a good book? Here is a recap of the best black history-themed books, fiction and non-fiction, that I've read and reviewed over the past year.
Love and Whiskey: The Remarkable True Story of Jack Daniel, His Master Distiller Nearest Green, and the Improbable Rise of Uncle Nearest. Fawn Weaver. Melcher Media Inc., 2024. 376 pages.
While I've never been much a drinker, and I don't have a very discerning palate when it comes to alcohol, I was intrigued when I stumbled across a short video of Fawn Weaver discussing her new book. I read it, and I loved it. It's a great story of American history, but it's so much more. It's the story of an inspiring woman who should be an example of achievement, but I had never even heard her name until I stumbled on that video. It's a great story of historical and genealogical mystery solving. It's also a great story for aspiring entrepreneurs and business people, especially women and people of color.
Fawn Weaver's journey is incredible. The daughter of a Motown music songwriter and producer turned preacher and a minister's wife who published books on marriage and family, she left home and school at 15, lived in homeless shelters, and worked various jobs until, by age 20, she had become the head of a successful public relations firm. That success led to more success, with stumbling blocks along the way. One day, she happened to read a story about the relationship between Jack Daniel and his distilling mentor, Nearest Green. That story implied that the relationship had been mischaracterized by social media (gasps of shock and disbelief!), and she was hooked. She made it her mission to uncover the true story. She and her husband relocated from Los Angeles to Lynchburg Tennessee to do research. Three years later, she had turned the prevailing narrative on its head and discovered a totally unique, and previously unknown, episode of American history, and they founded a brand new distillery, named Uncle Nearest to honor the first known black master distiller in American history, to preserve and to tell the story. This truly is a great American story, accessible on many levels, even for people who aren't whiskey connoisseurs.
Devil In A Blue Dress. Walter Mosley. W.W. Norton, 1990. 220 pages. Book 1 of 15 Easy Rawlins novels.
Walter Mosley has been one of the hottest names in crime fiction since at least the publication of the book in 1990, but I'm only now getting around to reading Devil, the first in his series of novels centered on Easy Rawlins. Easy, the nickname of Ezekiel, is a Houston transplant to Los Angeles in 1948. He's working and has bought a small house, living a life that attracted many black southerners to California during the Great Migration and WWII days. Then, he loses his job and finds himself involved in a complicated mystery involving a powerful and wealthy man who has absolutely no qualms about using violence and hires Easy to look for a woman on the run. She's on the run in LA's black neighborhood, where Easy would have easier access. The story is a page-turner, and Easy Rawlins is a great character. I will definitely be continuing his saga.
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A Life in Red: A Story of Forbidden Love, the Great Depression, and the Communist Fight for a Black Nation in the Deep South. David Beasley. John F. Blair, Publisher, 2015. 224 pages.
During the 1920s and 1930s, maybe as many as million Americans called themselves Communists or leaned toward the principles of communism, attracted by the promise of economic equality. It is not at all surprising that a large number of black Americans were drawn to communism, not only for economic equality and opportunity, but also for the promised racial equality. Jim Crow laws, lynchings and racial violence, and racial discrimination were ubiquitous throughout the United States, and, in the 1930s, the hardships of being black in America were exacerbated by the Great Depression, the rise of the KKK and racist demagoguery, and the racist implementation of the New Deal.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union worked to capitalize - pun intended - on the situation by inserting agents on college campuses and in black neighborhoods to recruit and to promote communism. Some promising organizers were educated and trained in the USSR and then returned to the US as paid agents and agitators. Some even saw their ultimate goal as the creation of a black state in the Deep South, following a violent revolution if necessary.
Herbert Newton was one of those black agents. Along the way, he met and married Jane Emery, the white upper-middle class daughter of a former national commander of the American Legion. His activities got him beaten, arrested, and indicted for promoting insurrection in Georgia for passing out party literature. An insurrection law in Georgia at the time (struck down by the US Supreme Court in 1937) made that activity a capital offense. For her communist beliefs and for marrying a black man, Jane was committed to a mental institution by a Chicago judge. A Life in Red makes the most of limited information to depict the lives of the couple, including their friendship with author Richard Wright, who lived with them for years. Jane served as a sounding board and inspiration for many of his works including Native Son. Not a great book, but not bad. 3/5 stars.
Can't We Be Friends: A Novel of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. Eliza Knight and Denny S. Bryce. William Morrow Paperbacks, 2024. 384 pages.
Thanks to the internet, people are becoming more and more aware of an extraordinary friendship between two of the most famous women of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald, legends in their fields, at the peak of their careers. I've never been a jazz fan, and I've never sat down and listened to Fitzgerald. To me she was just that lady who popped up on 1970s variety shows and broke the glass with her voice in a commercial in the 1980s, but I recognized her great talent. I've seen some of Monroe's movies and thought they were interesting, but I know much more about her personal life because of the "scandals" and conspiracies. Historical fiction authors Denny Bryce and Eliza Knight have written a very entertaining novel about the deep friendship that emerged from letters that Monroe wrote to Fitzgerald asking for voice lessons. Their common bond, besides real mutual admiration for each other's talents, was struggle. For Fitzgerald, the external struggles were against racism, sexism, and body-shaming, while she struggled internally with finding true love and doubting her mothering because she left her son to be raised by an aunt while she toured the world. For Monroe, there was the sexism of Hollywood which not only affected her earning power and personal control over her career, but it also led to type-casting and unfair accusations of unprofessional behavior. Then, there was her horrible track record with men, which was both a cause and a symptom of her mental instability, depression, and self-doubt that led to major alcohol and pills addiction.
The book is not a biography, but the authors obviously did a great deal of research, and they created an enlightening and entertaining novel which has added to my understanding of and appreciation for both women. (By the way, much of the recent internet storytelling gets it wrong, apparently. Yes, Marilyn may have helped Ella get bookings in certain L.A. clubs, but Ella wasn't ignored by those clubs because she was black. Black women like Dorothy Dandridge, Earth Kitt, and Lena Horne performed in those clubs frequently. Ella was ignored because she had a fuller figure than those women.)
Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching For James Brown and the American Soul. James McBride. Spiegel & Grau, 2016. 256 pages.
In the past few years, author James McBride has published two extremely well-received novels, Deacon King Kong and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, but, in 2016, he published Kill 'Em and Leave, a biography, of sorts, of James Brown. It's biography-ish, but it's also a book about McBride's process and efforts to discover the truth about The Godfather of Soul, and along the way McBride also reveals a bit, and learns a bit, about himself. It's a difficult process because throughout his life Brown constantly told different stories to different audiences and made a concerted effort to keep almost everyone he ever knew from getting too close to the real James Brown.
In the opening pages, McBride posits that Brown was and is perhaps the most recognized, most famous, and most influential black man to ever live, and he sets out to make his case. It's a remarkable story. Abandoned by his mother (It's still disputed whether she left or was driven away by his father.), at a very young age, Brown was mostly raised by his father's extended family, several female cousins and aunts. He dropped out of school and did a three year stretch in a Georgia youth prison, becoming a school janitor after his release and singing in churches and juke joints in Georgia and South Carolina before becoming one of the biggest names in music. What a life. The spending, the women, the bands, the career. Quirks on top of quirks. Brown never went anywhere without thousands in cash and cashiers checks on him. He, like many old-school black performers, having been cheated before, demanded cash payments before taking the stage. In his Augusta Georgia home, he had a "money room" filled with shoeboxes of $100 bills and wheelbarrows of silver dollars. He frequently gave cash, jewelry, and cars to friends and associates. The IRS came after him, wiping him out twice. Each time, he back. When he died in 2006, his tax troubles were resolved, and his estate was estimated at $100 to 150 million.
In spite of all the tragedies and hardships Brown experienced (in some cases, caused) in his life, the biggest tragedy may have been what happened after his death. Brown's will left everything but personal belongings, about $100 million, earmarked to create an educational foundation for poor Georgia and South Carolina children. To date, none of that money has been used for that purpose. Instead, it has gone to lawyers hired by Brown's various children and wives to fight the will, and the fortune fell to $2-4 million. In 2021, a resolution of sorts was finally reached, maybe, but legal battles continue, and Brown's wishes haven't been met.
This was a great read. I really enjoyed it.
Wild Women and the Blues. Denny S. Bryce. Kensington, 2021. 384 pages.
1920s Chicago: speakeasies, bootlegging, gambling, Al Capone, mob wars, numbers running - the backdrop for this historical fiction work, but with a difference. The action takes place in black Chicago, the section called Bronzeville, so it's a 1920s story that's both different and familiar simultaneously. The center of the story is centenarian Honoree Dalcour, a sharecropper's daughter who moved to Chicago as a child, telling her life story to an aspiring young filmmaker, Sawyer Hayes, who has discovered a possible unknown film by the successful black filmmaker of the era, Oscar Micheaux. Honoree had a role in that film, and Sawyer can't resist tracking down the last living link. Honoree tells him her story. Abandoned as a teen by her mother and by her first love, she becomes a dancer in a speakeasy at 19, but she has dreams of bigger things, even stardom on Broadway. She gets a break when she's hired to dance at Chicago's most prestigious black-and-tan (club that allows integrated audiences) speakeasy, the Dreamland Cafe. Her revelry is cut short, however, when she is unwittingly involved in murder and mob double-crosses that forever alter her life. The result is page-turner revealing a well-researched world and multiple family secrets that had been hidden for nearly a century.
An entertaining read.
...And Your Ass Will Follow. George Clinton. Audible Original, Words + Music, Volume 39.
If you love music and audiobooks and are an Audible subscriber, you may have already discovered the "Words + Music" series there. Each volume is about two hours long and features a particular artist discussing his/her life and work, complete with lots of music samples.
This particular volume features legendary funkster George Clinton who blended everything from doo-wop and soul to funk and rock and sprinkled in bits like songs he heard at friends' bar mitzvahs to create the one and only Parliament-Funkadelic sound, becoming one of the most influential and sampled artists in history. He talks about the musical influences that literally surrounded him growing up in his New Jersey neighborhood where he interacted with diverse people and cultures and knew people famous and becoming famous from Sarah Vaughn to Dionne Warwick to the Shirelles. He talks about his own musical journey from assembling a group in junior high to rejection by Motown to the Mothership. It's a fun ride. Check this one out or look for your own favorite artists on Audible.
Homage: Recipes and Stories From an Amish Soul Food Kitchen. Chris Scott. Chronicle Books, 2022. 272 pages.
I love food and cooking and the huge role food plays in culture and history. If you had told me that one of the greatest books I've seen about soul food in the past couple of years was about AMISH SOUL FOOD, I would have called you crazy. But here it is, and it's a great addition to my cookbooks.
Chef Chris Scott is a former competitor on "Top Chef" and a successful restaurateur, and his book is a really personal history of his family history, the African Diaspora, and the Pennsylvania Dutch/Amish immigrant experience. His formerly enslaved ancestors left the South after the Civil War and settled in Pennsylvania Dutch territory, and they blended their African, southern, soul food with the Amish traditions of their new home. That's how food and culture work, always blending and evolving. And why shouldn't these seemingly distinctive foodways blend? What is soul food but food that takes you home to family, traditions, and history and comforts you? So every culture has its own version of soul food. Scott grew up with both soul food traditions, and he makes it his mission to prepare and serve food that showcases all of the elements of his background.
The book has great stories, absolutely beautiful photos - some of the best photography I've seen in recent cookbooks, and delicious recipes that I look forward to trying soon.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. James McBride. Riverhead Books, 2023. 400 pages.
In recent years, James McBride has published two of the most highly acclaimed and popular novels of the century: Deacon King Kong and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. I'm of two minds when I read McBride. On one hand, I can easily see why they're so popular. The reader is set down in an incredibly rich world populated by some of the most complex and fully developed characters and storytelling that has ever been published. It doesn't matter who the reader is, black, white, northern, southern, the world that McBride reveals is foreign and strange, and, yet, it is so inviting. On the other hand, McBride's writing is so detailed and complex that his books can seem to drag. Like Faulkner, he seems to have an aversion to ending sentences. Some tangents seem to go on too long. Every scene has to have pages and pages of backstory, sometimes reaching back generations. One would not ask McBride to write a technical manual or anything else that requires bluntness or directness.
Heaven and Earth is set in the 1930s in the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown Pennsylvania. Chicken Hill is predominantly black with a few dozen Jewish families mixed in. The groups tend to keep to themselves, but the nexus is a Jewish couple named Moshe and Chona. Moshe owns a theater, and he brings in jazz, blues, and klesmer musical acts, drawing black and Jewish audiences to Pottstown, to the chagrin of white Pottstownians. Chona runs the grocery store on Chicken Hill, never making a profit because she always extends credit and gives away candy, toys, food, and merchandise to anyone in need. Women gather at the store to gossip and problem-solve. Moshe and Chona's lives are changed when they take in a deaf black orphan boy to protect him from being committed to an asylum. His plight soon involves lots of Chicken Hill's most vivid characters, and it's entwined, somehow, in the mystery that opens the book. In 1972, police uncover remains of an unknown person murdered in 1936, and the mystery is solved at the end of the book, but not until the reader is totally immersed in the lives of the people of Chicken Hill. It's amazing writing.
James: A Novel. Percival Everett. Doubleday, 2024. 320 pages.
I must admit that I was apprehensive about reading James. I had tried reading Everett's previous critically acclaimed novel, Trees, and honestly didn't like any part of it. I only read a few dozen pages. I also have a general aversion to hugely popular things, usually steering clear. Finally, I have had mixed reactions to "re-tellings" of classic stories. I recently enjoyed The Good Wife of Bath but found Demon Copperhead lacking. Nevertheless, I decided to plunge into James, and I'm glad I did.
Mark Twain has always been one of my favorite Americans, and there's no doubt that his incredible insight into Americans and American hypocrisy and foibles is in a class by itself. Whether it's Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn or any of his other stories, speeches, travelogues, or novels, Twain pulled back all the coverings and painted astonishingly accurate portrayals of the American zeitgeist, the "spirit of the time." In James, Percival Everett proves that he also has that gift. James is a retelling of the story of Huck Finn and Jim, his escaped slave friend and companion. True, Everett's Jim is not Twain's Jim, but that's ok; Everett makes him better. He is now older, with a wife and child, he's literate, and he teaches the enslaved people in his world the essentials of language and behavior that allow them to survive in slavery. The enslaved people in Jim's world are all at least bilingual, wearing metaphorical masks around whites - speaking and acting ignorantly - while using correct grammar and speech to discuss sometimes deep issues amongst themselves. Jim and the other enslaved people in his world offer a brilliant look into slavery and race. Many of Jim and Huck's adventures are captured in this book, and there are new adventures, and tragedies, along the way. There's a major surprise twist and a "Django" like twist at the end, but I found neither jarring. Jim - rather, James - emerges as a brilliant character and hero, and it's a great novel. I think Twain would have approved.
