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Julius Lester
I love it when historical fiction starts with a forward. It so often gives insight into the philosophy of the writer, how they conceptualise history and what they see as the role of stories in that. Julius Lester sets out his view of history as a story of the masses who form cultural currents rather that of the 'great men' who typify them and, within that, a story of the individuals that make up those masses. When people talk and educate about black history it is often in terms of great figures but, as Julius Lester writes "While it is necessary to know of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojurner Truth, and may other figures in black history, they comprise only one facet of that history." Increasingly often we see picture book biographies of these important figures, they often try to gain a certain universality by talking about them as children and this can work well but it would be lovely to see more books of all types taking the attitude of Julius Lester and telling stories of the millions of other black people who are less well known. This is a story of movements but it is also a social, domestic history of everyday people living everyday lives.
A collection of short stories is a wonderful way to explore historical fiction, it allows for a range of perspectives and viewpoints and builds a sense of history as a process of narratives and their interactions, sometimes competing, sometimes complementing. Wordhoard is a fantastic example of this and, while it lacks that additional layer of exploring how we tell stories, so is this. It was perhaps even more important in 1972 when this book was published to emphasise that black history is not a monolith and to move away from the danger of single stories.
As with To Be a Slave, his earlier non-fiction book in Puffin, Julius Lester takes stories from before and after abolition and a key theme is how little changed for many slaves.
The first story talks of a Blues singer who moves from plantation to plantation as a way of living freedom as an actuality rather than another form of life constrained, living in the orbit of white poeple with all the societal power. It has a lot of depth of character, particularly moving is the description of how he had grown up, too afraid to hate the white men, hating his mother for being unable to stand up to them and transfering that hatred to other women in his life. It is a story about the profoundly damaging effects of slavery and if it was the only story in the book I would feel the need to preface sharing it with the caveat that this isn't all black people but as part of a collection, telling multiple stories, it is fantastic.
Louis is the story of a man with a very different experience of slavery, he escapes almost by default - prompted by the danger of being sold rather than a desperation for freedom but what he finds on the underground railroad fundamentally changes his world view, he sees black people who are free to learn, think, choose and interact as communities. His journey shows the desire of escaped slaves along the railroad to help others make a life, as they had, and the ending has a shade of Catch 22 in its unexpected sudden fierce joy.
The next story skewers the hypocritic white man who professes to be against slavery without taking any actual steps to support abolition or to examine his own privilage and address the white supremacist nature of society. It also addresses the myth of the belevolent master and the faithful slave living in symbiosis. Here it provides a great contrast to The Chimneys of Green Knowe which fails to highlight this more insidious prejudice.
Another story does not centre slavery at all but the way in which Bob Lemmons uses a deep knowledge of horses to herd up wild mustangs, slavery is still mentioned - a part of every black person in America's story at that time - but it is not the driving force of character, in a sense Bob is the freest black character in the book, not defined by his opression but by his passion.
The other stories talk about a family ripped apart by a sale and the desperate need for it to stop in a story with an image of chilling clarity inspired by a footnote in a study of slavery in coastal Georgia. The range of stories constantly makes the reader think about different things and I really liked all of them. I only have one quibble about the book and that is that all the stories are from the point of view of male characters (with the possible exception of the last where a man tells the story of his female ancestor) this is a shame in a book that otherwise gives a good diversity of perspectives, I would have loved to have been able to read another volume of 6 stories about black women at this time. All the stories in the book are based on real people and documentary evidence which adds an extra weight of authenticity to their telling.
This book would be good for a young adult audience and could be used well in its entirity in a secondary school, some of the stories have themes too mature for primary school but most could be used there too. The book consistently uses the n- word and any use of it would have to contextualise that, it would have been good to include some of that contextualisation in the forward to support independent readers and I would hope that would be more likely to happen today.
Finally I wanted to share a quirk of my particular edition, it contains a slip (below) saying it is a review copy which is a lovely piece of ephemera for my collection. Luckily, I have easily complied with the stricture not to publish my review before 24th February 1977.
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