Black History Month Reads: A Review of the Past Year's Reads

 

    A review of the black history themed  books that I've read since last February

Kugels and Collards:  Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina.  Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey.  University of South Carolina Press, 2023.  256 pages.

South Carolina became home to some of the first Jews to ever live in North America, with the first recorded Jewish settlers arriving in Charleston in the 1690s.  Over the centuries, more Jews arrived, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, then Germans, Russians, and Eastern Europeans, at the turn of the 20th century and, later, escaping the Holocaust.  Jewish families adapted and blended their traditions and foodways in their new home, influenced by contact with other ethnic groups, black and white, and by new and different ingredients that they found.  The result is this history and cookbook, containing some 80 recipes alongside dozens of stories about their creation and history.  As I've said lots of times in the past, it's hard to go wrong when combining food and history, and this book is a revealing insight into a particular culture.

Five-Carat Soul.  James McBride.  Riverhead Books, 2017.  320 pages.

This is a collection of previously unpublished short stories by one of my favorite writers of fiction, James McBride.  As one familiar with McBride's work would expect, the stories are full of deep insights into human nature and vivid characterizations, and most of them are  history related.  An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. Members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives. The final story is set in a zoo, with the animals as the characters grappling with the big questions about life, the natural order of things, and their relationship with the "smellies" - humans.  Each story is a treat.

The Residence:  Inside the Private World of the White House.  Kate Anderson Brower.  Harper, 2015.  320 pages.

If you enjoyed the murder mystery comedy "The Residence"  on Netflix, as I did,  you may have been surprised, as I was, to learn that it was inspired by a nonfiction book, a history of the White House through the eyes and recollections of the men and women who work there daily as maids, butlers, ushers, cooks, plumbers, electricians, engineers, florists, nannies, and even calligraphers and have devoted their lives to serving the nation by saving its First Families, often for decades.  The author interviewed dozens of employees and wrote a truly fascinating account of what goes on behind the scenes and out of sight of the public.  The main focus is on the administrations from Kennedy to Obama, but there are historical tidbits that cover the entire history of the White House, going back to its first occupants, John and Abigail Adams.  Getting the employees to share their experiences was quite a feat.  Only a handful of White House employees have ever published their memoirs, and there is a universal sense of pride and professionalism among the employees of "The House," as they call it, that exists almost nowhere else.  Employees are fiercely protective of the families that employ them and often reveal very little about their work even to friends and family members, sometimes not even revealing to acquaintances where they work.  For many, telling stories in public was unthinkable. Their work is demanding and draining, but they often form deep and lasting relationships with each other and with the Presidents and their families. This was a great read, a very informative and entertaining look at how things work, the people that make it work every day, and the First Families of the past 50 years.  (Readers may be surprised to learn which families, and family members, are the most and least fondly remembered.)

Harriet Tubman Live in Concert.  Bob the Drag Queen.  Gallery Books, 2025.  239 pages.  (Audio version 4hrs, 17 minutes)

Wow!  I had no idea what to expect when I first learned about this book, but I immediately pre-ordered it.  We've been fans of Bob the Drag Queen since his first appearance on "RuPaul's Drag Race" and have seen him on a couple of stand-up comedy tours, but a book about Harriet Tubman?  It blew me away.  Pure creative genius and one of the most original things that I've read in a very long time.

Picture it:  NYC, present day.  People from the past, including many major historical figures have suddenly returned to life.  There's no explanation, almost no attention paid to it in the story.  It's just the mechanism which makes the story possible.  Don't worry about it.  "The Returned" live their lives and integrate into the present.  Cleopatra, for example, becomes a hugely successful makeup and fashion Instagram influencer.  Harriet Tubman, and several of the people she led to freedom on the Underground Railroad, have returned, and she's on a mission, again - a mission from God.  She contacts Darnell Williams, a once-hot hip-hop writer and producer whose music career is struggling, and tells him that God has chosen him to assist in her mission.  While one might deny God, nobody dares to say No to Harriet Tubman!  Her mission:  create an epic hip-hop album and stage show, a la "Hamilton."  In her first life, Tubman freed about 700 people from physical chains, and many more indirectly.  Now, she's back to free millions from metaphorical chains of all sorts.  Darnell has his own metaphorical chains to break, and he goes to work, with Harriet's guidance, to break free into his own authentic self.  This is a fantastic work, and I so hope that Bob is actively working to create a real album and show; it could be bigger than "Hamilton."  I highly recommend the audio version.  Not only is Bob the reader, but it also includes two of the show's songs at the end.  (NOTE:  The photo above was generated using AI.  There is no known photo of Harriet Tubman spittin' fire.)

A Perfect Frenzy:  A Royal Governor, His Black Allies and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution.  Andrew Lawler.  Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025.  544 pages.   

While the American Revolution officially began in April 1775 at Lexington and Concord, two major events occurred in January 1776 that were pivotal in fueling the Patriot cause.  Thomas Paine published his pamphlet "Common Sense" laying out the arguments for independence.  The other event is perhaps less known today, but it was perhaps even more effective:  On January 1, 1776, the city of Norfolk, Virginia was burned to the ground.  No other American city in history has been completely and utterly destroyed as Norfolk was.  Twenty years later, visitors were still stunned by the vast ruins and fields of debris.  For 250 years, the Norfolk fire has been blamed on the British, specifically the royal governor Lord Dunmore.  As a result of the fire, Dunmore was vilified on both sides of the Atlantic and labeled a war criminal.  Patriot propaganda painted him as a cruel and witless libertine who hosted huge orgies with enslaved women in the Governor's Palace when he wasn't wantonly destroying the lives of his subjects.  Following the Norfolk fire, Dunmore was even shunned by his peers in the House of Lords who believed that he had gone too far.  Dunmore died in a state of ignominy, and his family was reduced to relative poverty, ostracized by the British upper class.  

The kicker?  Dunmore and the British didn't destroy Norfolk.  THE PATRIOTS INTENTIONALLY BURNED THE CITY TO THE GROUND, and this fact was always known.  The Patriot propaganda machine used the destruction to maximum advantage to stir patriotic fervor. The fact is that Norfolk was a Loyalist stronghold, and British warships did destroy a few dozen structures, mainly warehouses and docks, but 95% of the buildings destroyed were intentionally ignited by Patriot troops under orders from Patriot officers and political figures. Why? They wanted to punish Norfolk for being strongly Loyalist, and Dunmore, once extremely popular and respected governor among the landed gentry and yeoman farmers alike, had crossed the line.  He recruited and armed free and enslaved black Virginians to fight for Britain, promising freedom in return.  This book tells a great, formerly untold, story and illustrates that history is extremely complicated and never just black and white.  In this situation, you have black and white Patriots wearing engraved brass breastplates or embroidered shirts saying "Liberty or Death" going into battle against Dunmore's black Ethiopian Regiment troops wearing breastplates engraved with "Liberty For Slaves."

The Vice President's Black Wife:  The Untold Life of Julia Chinn.  Amrita Chakrabati Myers.  The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.  296 pages.

Even the buffest of history buffs outside of Kentucky have probably never heard of Richard Mentor Johnson, the ninth Vice President of the United States and presidential contender who was a US Representative and Senator for years and whose political career was enhanced by stories that he was the man who killed Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames. His family was among the first white settlers of Kentucky and was a prominent family in the area of Georgetown for decades.  However, Johnson's story goes much deeper, and it is an incredibly important and quintessential part of southern history and the legacy of slavery.   

For six months each year, Johnson lived in a boarding house in Washington while doing the young nation's business by day and attending the young society's most exclusive society affairs by night.  As far as Washingtonians knew, he was a lifelong bachelor.  His Kentucky neighbors knew different, and, later, political opponents used that knowledge to tarnish his career and to thwart his presidential aspirations.  The secret?   He was married.  To an enslaved woman that he "owned," a woman named Julia Chinn.  He and Julia had two daughters who were legally his property as well.  He never officially freed wither Julia or his daughters.  Julia died enslaved, and her daughters weren't freed until the ratification of the 13th amendment.  That doesn't make Johnson that unique.  The history of American slavery is the history of interracial sex, consensual and not consensual.  Slaveowners viewed enslaved women as their sexual property, and that view was universally accepted even if it was not stated aloud.  Slaveowners raped, cajoled, bribed.  Some treated their concubines as wives.  Some freed their lovers and children. Some sold them when there was too much gossip and people started noticing resemblances.  A few left their property to their enslaved or freed wives or children.  

Johnson stands out because he called Julia his wife.  The preacher of the church that Johnson's family co-founded married them.  He gave Julia complete and total authority to run his plantation and the Choctaw Academy (a federally funded school for young Choctaw men that provided a major income for Johnson) that was located on his property.  His daughters married local white men, and they and their descendants have "passed" ever since, with the vast majority of their descendants never knowing their family history until the last few years.  In this book, Myers digs deep to tell Julia's story for the first time.  Because there isn't much of a paper trail,  (Johnson's papers are sparse for such a political man.  It is thought that his brothers destroyed most of his letters and documents upon his death due to shame.), there is a lot of "could have," "probably," "possibly," and the like, and a lot of references to similar stories, but she does an excellent job of telling the important story and bringing it to light.  Important and extraordinarily complicated.  Spoiler alert: don't go thinking Johnson was heroic.

The Inheritors:  An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning.  Eve Fairbanks.  Simon & Schuster, 2022. 416 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, South Africa underwent a revolution, scrapping more than a century of harshly enforced racial segregation and minority rule and instantly pivoting to a majority-rule democracy - an unparalleled transformation.  Americans being Americans, and American media being American media, South Africa basically ceased to exist at that point because we have almost no attention span for domestic events in foreign countries, especially African countries.  The Inheritors provides an insight into that transformation for American readers, primarily through the experiences of three South Africans: Dipuo, a young black woman and anti-apartheid organizer, Malaika, her daughter born around the time of the transition, and Christo, a white Afrikaans farm boy who was one of the last South Africans drafted to fight in Angola.  Eve Fairbanks built relationships with the three over the course of a decade, and she basically allows them to tell their stories.  Readers learn about the struggles of the country through the struggles of these individuals as they try to cope with unprecedented change.  It's an extremely moving, enlightening, and thought-provoking book.

She Came To Slay:  The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman.  Erica Armstrong Dunbar.  37 Ink, 2019.  176 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.

If any American deserves a fresh, thoroughly researched, well-written, originally illustrated, biography that is equally accessible and enjoyable for everyone from grade school to adulthood, it is Harriet Tubman, and this is the book.  Of course, we all know the basics, that Tubman was the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad who personally escorted hundreds enslaved people to freedom after her own escape.  Some of us may know of her long career as an abolitionist before the Civil War and her service as a spy and nurse during the Civil War.  Fewer know that she became the first woman to lead an armed combat mission - a very consequential mission.  Even after the war, she never stopped, becoming an active suffragist and an advocate for veterans and for the aged.  Tubman's always been near the top of my list of greatest Americans, and this biography is great introduction to her life for yourself and for any younger readers in your life.  

The Fifties:  An Underground History.  James R. Gaines.  Simon & Schuster, 2023.  288 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.

Too many people think of the 1950s as a decade of conformity and complacency, picturing sock hops, soda fountains, and poodle skirts, but, as I tried to impress upon my students each year, there was always turbulence under that placid surface.  There was the rise of rock and roll and teenage rebellion which shocked older generations.  Beatniks challenged middle-class norms.  Artists shook up the art world.  The Red Scare and the Lavender Scare sent shock waves through government and society.  The civil rights and feminist movements started ramping up.  There was a lot of angst, anger, confusion, and conflict.  This book celebrates several individuals who were brave enough to stand - often alone - on their principles and lead fights that they believed needed fighting.  In particular, Gaines selects gay rights, feminism, civil rights, and environmental movements.  A couple of the people discussed are familiar names, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, and Rachel Carson for example, but the others aren't nearly as well known, or as celebrated as they should be.  There's Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and computer scientist who is considered the father of cybernetics, the forerunner of Artificial Intelligence.  There's Harry Hay who first envisioned a national gay rights movement in the 1940s.  There's Pauli Murray whose law school thesis provided much of the legal basis for Thurgood Marshall's arguments in Brown vs Board of Education and whose legal work made sexual discrimination unconstitutional. Gerda Lerner pioneered the concept of women's history as an academic field, despite being told by superiors and colleagues that there wasn't enough material to study.  Isaac Woodard was a black WWII veteran who was blinded by a South Carolina sheriff because he dared to look him in the eye.  These are all important stories that should be shared.  This book should be widely read.  Almost makes me wish that I was back in the classroom in order to share them. ... Almost.

Ring Shout.  P. Djeli Clark.  Tor Nightfire, 2025 (paperback, originally 2020).  192 pages.

If you liked the movie "Sinners," or other horror films by directors like Ryan Coogler and Jordan Peele, then this is the book for you.  It's horror, fantasy, and history all wrapped in one virtually non-stop action package.  The setting is 1922 in Macon and Stone Mountain Georgia.  The Ku Klux Klan has been reborn following the release of the movie "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915.  As black veterans returned from World War I and started standing up for their civil rights in Jim Crow America, the Klan mobilized and ramped up violence in response.  The Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, and a spike in lynchings are just some of the events referenced in this book.  In Clark's re-imagining, the KKK actually consists of two factions, the Klan, comprising the average American racists, and the Ku Kluxes who are actually demonic monsters created and fed by hate and who only exist by stirring and escalating hate.  A small band of women forms for the purpose of destroying the Ku Kluxes.  There's Maryse, armed with a magical sword gifted to her by three spiritual aunties who appear to her in visions, Sadie, a sharpshooter, and Chef, who disguised herself as a man and fought as a Harlem Hellfighter in WWI.  They're aided by Maryse's spiritual advisor Nana Jean and Molly, a self-taught Choctaw scientist and engineer who devises weapons and strategies along with her female apprentices, and Emma, a German Jewish social revolutionary communist.  Following some skirmishes and a major Klux attack on a juke joint in Macon, everybody heads to Stone Mountain, the site where the Klan was reborn and the first crosses were burned, for the final apocalyptic, the-fate-of-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance battle.   Clark blends history and horror with Gullah, African, and Caribbean folklore and delivers a very creative and original read and a great ride from beginning to end.

Forgotten Souls:  The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen.  Cheryl W.  Thompson.  Dafina/Kensington Books, to be published January 27, 2026.  240 pages.  Thanks to Kensington Books for the free advance readers copy for review.

It's taken far too long for the Tuskegee Airmen to get their just due for their service as the nation's first black military pilots and for their legendary record of achievements in World War II, but, at least in the past few decades, the veterans and their stories have been recognized.  Unfortunately, not all survived long enough to see it.  In fact, 27  of the over 1,000 Airmen were lost during the war, and their service and sacrifice was forgotten to all but their family. Cheryl W. Thompson, an investigative journalist and the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman herself, set out to uncover and tell the stories of those missing men.  The result is a really great history of the unit and the men who comprised it, and now, after 80 years, those 27 missing men are getting at least some of the respect they deserve.

Recipes From the American South.  Michael Twitty.  Phaidon Press, 2025.  432 pages.

This book is a must-have addition to any cookbook or southern history or southern food library.  It's the southern version of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in terms of scope and importance.  Michael Twitty has become one of America's greatest culinary historians.  He started out as a re-enactor, researching and demonstrating the foods and foodways of the American South that resulted from the blending of West African, Caribbean, Native American, and European cultures that resulted from the African diaspora and slavery.  His work illustrates both the importance of food history and the power of food to cross boundaries, erase differences, and unite people.  However, the region is vast, and even southern food is not monolithic.  Twitty presents 260 recipes that cover the entire breadth of southern cuisine.  The recipes are tested and prove, the photos are beautiful, and there are short histories of each dish.  Cooks will discover familiar recipes for dishes that their families have made for generations, but they will also discover new recipes and learn things about the old and the new in the process.  I've made some of the recipes and I will be making more, and the book has already become a first reference for me.  It is definitely a classic that should be on any southern cook's shelf.

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.  Wright Thompson.  Penguin Press, 2024.  448 pages.  

Place.  It is one of the most vital elements of the study of history.  It acts as a physical, emotional, and cognitive anchor, a three-dimensional primary document that transforms abstract events from the distant past into tangible, relatable experiences, providing invaluable context to the events that happened upon it and to the lives of the people who lived there, worked there, fought there, loved there, and died there. "Place" provides a connection that is not possible otherwise.  Think about the feeling you have on a battlefield or in a home or site, when your senses take it all in and  often both a new understanding and a new curiosity arise.   I've read very few books in my life that capture place as well as this book does.  Wright Thompson has mastered the craft and can teach lessons on the subject.  I've had this book ever since it was released, but I've only read it in the past few days.  After all, I knew the story of Emmett Till, I taught the story of Emmett Till every year, and  I knew it would be a tough read emotionally.  And it definitely is. It makes you despair and lose all hope for humanity (if you had any at the start).  If you know it, it makes you hear Nina Simone's song "Mississippi G*****n" on a constant loop in your head, and makes you believe that the world and country would be much better off if Mississippi had never existed, or at least hadn't been settled by any new humans after 1600, that Mississippi is hell on earth, populated by the moat deranged and depraved "people" in history.  (And when a native Georgian now living in Florida  says that, that's saying something.)  It is not all depravity, however.  The reader is introduced to some truly brave and heroic people that are usually not a part of the story:  friends and relatives of Emmett and his mother, witnesses who were previously ignored by the law and by the media, and people who have devoted their lives to keeping the story alive in the 7 decades since. This is not only a new history of the kidnapping and murder of a 15-year old boy and the intense and coordinated effort throughout the state over the ensuing decades to erase it from history and from the minds of white and black Mississippians, but it is also a history of Mississippi, the place, going back to before European contact and encompassing every aspect of its history.  The barn in which Till was tortured, mutilated, and murdered is like an epicenter of that history.  The Delta Blues were born, King Cotton thrived and collapsed, Indian villages were decimated, and the Archie Manning football dynasty was born, all within a few miles of the nondescript farm shed.  All of that comes to life in this book.  This book should be the required textbook for Mississippi state history classes. It should be required reading for all Americans.  

February 2025: Black History Reads Shelved in 2024

 

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.

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.

Graphic Novels for Black History Month

     I recently picked up four graphic novels about Black history recently that you may be interested in.

    

    The first two are Incognegro and its prequel, Incognegro Renaissance. They are interesting mysteries set in the 1920s, with interesting twists. The author, Mat Johnson, was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and the investigators who documented cases of discrimination and lynching throughout the country. Like his main character, Johnson is a black man who has a very light complexion, and, in fact, could "pass" for white. His character, Zane, is a writer, and he uses his skin color to infiltrate white racist lynch mobs and organizations. He then writes the stories using the pen name Incognegro, a play on the word incognito. In these books, he finds himself embroiled in a couple of interesting cases. 

    Strange Fruit  is a two volume set of short biographies of important and interesting black Americans that the majority of Americans may not know about, written by Joel Christian Gill.  Each book has 10 or 12 stories, several of the stories were new to me. They were all interesting, and well told graphically.