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.

Florida Man (and Woman) History, part 2

     Florida's rich and unique history has provided the inspiration for many authors. Here are some more works of fiction and non-fiction which have made an impression on me.

    On New Year's Day, 1923, a white woman named Fannie Taylor was beaten and bruised when her husband returned from work to their Sumner Florida home. Word spread fast that a black man had assaulted her.  The victim never named her assailant, but the sheriff immediately accused a resident of the nearby black settlement of Rosewood. An angry mob proceeded to Rosewood where they launched three days of murder and destruction which resulted in the deaths of at least eight people. Residents of Rosewood fled, the settlement disappeared, and, for nearly 60 years, Rosewood's existence and destruction were unknown to the outside world. In 1982, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times published a story, revealing the details to the world. Michael D'Orso published Like Judgement Day in 1996, telling the complete story.

    Devil in the Grove is one of two books about racial violence in Florida written by Gilbert King and set in citrus country. In 1949, in Groveland Florida, a seventeen-year-old girl claimed she was raped. Four black boys were accused of the crime. Coming to their defense was chief NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall. Of course, we know that Marshall was the attorney who successfully argued against segregation in Brown vs. Board of Education and later became the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, I learned a great deal about Marshall from King's book. Before the Brown case, he traveled around the South, acting as the defense for accused black defendants, like the Groveland boys.  The book really gave me a new respect and admiration for Marshall. At least in my prior education, Marshall had been presented as a second-tier figure in the civil rights movement. I think Devil shows that he deserves a lot more praise and recognition that he gets.  (The other King book is Beneath a Ruthless Sun; I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list.)

    

    The Nickel Boys , by Colson Whitehead, is a novel about the fictional Nickel juvenile detention center, and the abuse of the boys there. It's a grim read, but, like many novels, truth is stranger, or more grim, than fiction. The story is based on a real life institution called the Arthur T. Dozier School for Boys, the first juvenile detention center built in Marianna Florida and operative from 1897 to 2011. Throughout its history, Dozier was the site of horrific abuse administered by the staff, largely in the "White House," a structure built for the purpose of punishment. At least 100 boys died and were buried on the premises, in marked and unmarked graves.  

    Peter Matthiessen was also inspired by history to write the Shadow Country Trilogy, beginning with Killing Mister Watson. Watson was a real-life character who bragged of killing 57 people, including the notorious "Queen of the Outlaws", Belle Starr. In the late 1800s, he moved to the Florida Everglades, where he grew sugar cane, raised pigs, and collected wild bird feathers (At the time, feathers were in demand for women's fashion. As a result, some Florida birds were almost hunted into extinction.), and he terrorized his neighbors. In 1910, his neighbors stood up and killed him. The trilogy tells the story of the murder and the people who lived in the Everglades. Matthiessen is a great author, and I've enjoyed several of his books, including these.

Georgia in Mind

By Jeff Burns

I’m a proud native Georgian, but like every state, Georgia has many dark episodes in its past.   These blights cannot be ignored or glossed over.  As Maya Angelou wrote, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” 

These three books highlight three different aspects of racial injustice in Georgia and the South during the 20^th century, and I highly recommend them.

 

Like other southern states, Georgia actively practiced Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (by Douglas Blackmon).  Most people know about the perpetual cycle of sharecropping that kept blacks and poor whites (Many of my white ancestors were sharecroppers.) in bondage to landowners who needed cheap farm labor.  This book investigates the state and corporate sponsored enslavement whereby black men and women, arrested and/or convicted of crimes, petty or major, guilty or not, were forced to do hard labor as their sentence.  This labor force not only did work for county and state governments, but were also “rented” out to landowners and business owners for back-breaking free labor in the private sector.

 

Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South by David Beasley is the account of the two- term (1936-1940) Georgia Governor E.D. Rivers, the leader of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan, and the pardon racket that he actively ran that allowed white murderers to escape the death penalty and even earn pardons, while the justice system was totally stacked against black defendants.  Beasley tells the stories of a handful of white and black men convicted of murder and their fates.  In the process, he details the massive corruption of Governor Rivers, who made life and death decisions based on race and literally and openly sold pardons to white defendants.

 

University of Georgia history professor Robert Pratt wrote We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia, a thoroughly researched history relying on both archived materials and extensive oral histories that begins with the unsuccessful 1950 law school application of Horace Ward and moves on to the integration of Hamilton Earl Holmes and Charlayne Alberta Hunter in 1961.  Even in Georgia, history classes learn about the integration efforts at the Universities of Alabama and Mississippi, but often learn little about the integration of the University of Georgia, perhaps leading people to believe that it was relatively peaceful.  Pratt reveals the fallacy of that inference and exposes the deliberate and organized opposition to their integration.  It’s a fascinating read about a topic that is too often forgotten.

Read in the Chinese New Year

By Jeff Burns

            Happy Chinese New Year!  Gong Xi Fa Cai!  The Year of the Horse is here.  Celebrate by reading some Chinese and Chinese-American history.

            Unfortunately, the world lost author Iris Chang much too early.  She was the author of two excellent books I highly recommend:  The Rape of Nanking and The Chinese in America:  a Narrative History.   The Rape of Nanking is a disturbing but necessary account of the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s, particularly the atrocities committed in the city of Nanking.  Japanese troops systematically ransacked the city and brutally murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians.   Unbelievably, the story’s full scope was  not very well known in the West until Chang’s book, and the incident is still a source of tension in Sino-Japanese relations today, with some Japanese still denying that it happened.

 

            The Chinese in America covers the entire history of Chinese immigration to the US, beginning with the first Chinese laborers who came for the California gold rush and stayed on to work on the railroads and build communities here to the present day.  She covers the whole experience, including the nativist backlash, the effects of the communist-nationalist conflict in America, and the wave of immigration that followed the Revolution. 

            On Gold Mountain by Lisa See focuses on the gold rush experience.  In China, those who went to California were said to have “gone to Gold Mountain.”  She personalizes the story by making it a family history, supported by years of research, sort of like a Chinese –American version of Roots.  She succeeds in making the story universal and enthralling.

 

 

 

            Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation by Moon-Ho Jung is not quite as entertaining since it’s more academic in tone, but it introduced me to a fascinating aspect of southern history that I had never known about.  During Reconstruction, southern landowners needed labor to replace slavery; as a result, sharecropping, basically a new face of slavery, developed. Some planters came up with an innovative idea:  encourage Chinese immigrants to move to the South. Many Chinese seized the opportunity and moved to the Deep South, creating a very unique situation.  In the racially charged atmosphere of the Jim Crow world, these new arrivals were neither black nor white, and they found themselves suspended between the two worlds in many ways.  The book is about that unusual situation and the contradictions that were highlighted by the experiment and its effects on both the Chinese and on the South itself.

 
     

Jim Crow, the White House, and Burying a King

By Jeff Burns

            On this Martin Luther King Day weekend, I thought I’d recommend some very interesting books on the civil rights struggle that I’ve read in the last couple of years. 

After the Civil War, some blacks decided that they had to leave the South in order to exercise their newly won freedom.  Many of them moved to Kansas, where they built farms and all-black towns.  They called themselves Exodusters, in an allusion to the biblical Exodus, and Nell Irvin Painter documents their story in Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction.

Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner

That Shocked a Nation by Deborah Davis tells the story of a seemingly innocuous event that caused a firestorm of controversy that threatened the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.  In 1901, TR invited Booker T. Washington to have dinner with his family in the White House.  It was the first time a black man had dined in the White House, and the ensuing hysteria almost destroyed both men.  The book does a great job of telling the story of the event and the two men with fascinating insights.

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War IIby Douglas Blackmon brings to light the shameful practice used across the South for 100 years after the Civil War.  Black men were routinely arrested and convicted  on a wide range of charges, bogus charges in many cases.  When they were unable to pay their assessed fines or bails, they essentially became slaves of the jurisdiction, forced to work on city and county projects and even rented out to local businesses and farmers.  It’s a painful reminder that slavery did not end with the Civil War.

Do you ever wonder how “soul food” got to places like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia?  After the Civil War, some blacks moved away from the South, but it was not until World War I that there any real numbers.  During World War I (and later in World War II), factories in northern cities desperately needed workers, and thousands of southern blacks moved North to take advantage of the opportunity.  The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson chronicles this huge demographic trend from 1915 to 1970.  The book reflects her exhaustive research and interviews with over a thousand people, but Wilkerson masterfully tells the story through the lives of three individuals involved.

 

 

Whenever I taught the history of the civil rights movement in the past, I always talked briefly about Thurgood Marshall, pretty much just mentioning him as the chief attorney for the NAACP who led the fight to segregate schools in the Brown vs Board of Education case and as the first black Supreme Court justice.  I didn’t really know much more myself.  Then I read Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, and I learned much more about what a great America hero and courageous man he really was.  The book is about a horrific miscarriage of justice that occurred in Lake County Florida, the heart of citrus country,  in 1949 when four young black men were accused of raping a white girl.  Marshall organized and led their defense, at great risk to his own life.  As a result of reading the book, my respect for Marshall the man has increased tremendously, and I think he deserves much more recognition than he receives in civil rights history.

When MLK, Jr was assassinated in 1968, violence erupted in over one hundred cities across the country, but peace reigned in Atlanta, his hometown.  Rebecca Burns (no relation) wrote Burial for a King: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Funeral and the Week that Transformed Atlanta and Rocked the Nation about that trying week leading up to King’s funeral as Atlanta coped with overwhelming grief, despair, and tension as Atlanta became the focus of world attention and was saddled with the racist, segregationist Governor Lester Maddox, an active KKK member threatening violence, and the arrival of thousands and thousands of mourners including numerous national political figures and celebrities.  Burns tells the stories of numerous individuals who worked to keep the peace including the Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen, who was a phenomenal leader during the time.