‘The River Between Us’: A story of survival and transformation

Posted in Articles, History, Interviews, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2013-05-11 23:59Z by Steven

‘The River Between Us’: A story of survival and transformation

The Kansas City Star
2013-04-12

Edward M. Eveld

It’s the eve of the Civil War in Richard Peck’s novel “The River Between Us,” and the country is rearranging itself for the coming conflict.

A prelude to the convulsion plays even in the tiny river-landing town of Grand Tower, Ill. That’s where 15-year-old Tilly Pruitt notices that the boys her age are taking sides and itching to fight, including her twin brother, Noah.

A riverboat heading north stops in their town, likely the last one on the Mississippi before the war, and deposits the elaborately adorned Delphine Duval and her mysterious companion, Calinda.

Peck’s book, a challenging historical novel for young adult readers, is the current selection of the FYI Book Club.

The Pruitt family takes in the newcomers, although it is barely surviving a hardscrabble life with no help from an absent father. From there the tale provides portals into multiracial politics and culture, the brutal reach of war and the confluence of family secrets and identity.

The multiple-award-winning Peck has written dozens of books for young readers. He will visit Kansas City May 3 for a Kansas City Public Library event with several other noted authors.

Here are edited excerpts of our conversation with Peck.

 Q. Why a Civil War story?

A. It’s a story that found me. I was trolling for whatever I might find in New Orleans historical museums, and I began to read about the real estate of the French Quarter. I learned that a majority of it before the Civil War was owned by women of mixed race who were called quadroons. They were the mistresses of white men, given homes and livings, and they were very fashionable and proud. They knew that if the South lost the war, they would lose their status. So they sent their daughters away. Those who were light enough to “pass” were sent north.

And you wondered what happened to them.

Yes, I chose a girl who could pass for white, particularly if she were among unsophisticated people who wouldn’t know. The story became about a girl who has to reinvent herself in an “alien” country. And, of course, it’s a love story. When she comes down the gangplank on the last riverboat to stop in Grand Tower before the war, Noah is there to see her. He’s lost in a dream of love, but he also wants to fight. He wants to be a Yankee soldier…

Read the entire interview here.

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The River Between Us

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels, United States on 2013-05-11 23:45Z by Steven

The River Between Us

Puffin
2005-04-21
176 pages
5.06 x 7.75 in
8 – 12 years
Paperback ISBN: 9780142403105

Richard Peck

Awards

  • National Book Award: Finalist
  • Scott O’Dell Award
  • ALA Notable Book
  • ALA Best Book for Young Adults
  • Riverbank Review Children’s Books of Distinction
  • Booklist Editor’s Choice
  • NYPL’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing
  • IRA Book Award
  • Book Sense 76 Top Ten Selection
  • Parents’ Choice Award

The year is 1861. Civil war is imminent and Tilly Pruitt’s brother, Noah, is eager to go and fight on the side of the North. With her father long gone, Tilly, her sister, and their mother struggle to make ends meet and hold the dwindling Pruitt family together. Then one night a mysterious girl arrives on a steamboat bound for St. Louis. Delphine is unlike anyone the small river town has even seen. Mrs. Pruitt agrees to take Delphine and her dark, silent traveling companion in as boarders. No one in town knows what to make of the two strangers, and so the rumors fly. Is Delphine’s companion a slave? Could they be spies for the South? Are the Pruitts traitors? A masterful tale of mystery and war, and a breathtaking portrait of the lifelong impact one person can have on another.

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Paul Marchand, F.M.C.

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels, Passing on 2013-05-11 22:18Z by Steven

Paul Marchand, F.M.C.

University Press of Mississippi
1998
184 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-57806-798-5

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Never before published, a 1920s novel disputes prevailing attitudes on racial character and identity

Chesnutt wrote this novel at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, but set it in a time and place favored by George Washington Cable. Published now for the first time, Paul Marchand: Free Man of Color examines the system of race and caste in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Chesnutt reacts, as well, against the traditional stance that fiction by leading American writers of the previous generation had taken on the issue of miscegenation. After living for many years in France, the wealthy and sophisticated Paul Marchand returns to his home in New Orleans and discovers through a will that he is white and is now head of a prosperous and influential family. Since mixed-race marriages are illegal, he must renounce his mulatto wife and bastardize his children.

Chesnutt resolves Marchand’s dilemma with a surprising plot reversal. Marchand, although white, chooses to pass as a black so that he can keep his wife and children. Thus by altering the traditional narrative that Cable, Twain, and Howells had developed for their fiction on mixed-race themes, he exposes the issue of race as a social and legal fabrication. Moreover, Chesnutt shows Marchand’s awareness that traits of inferiority and superiority are not based on “blood” but on other factors. In him Chesnutt has created an admirable male character responsive to human needs and civility rather than to artificial institutions.

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The Reading Life: Authors Emily Clark, Bill Loehfelm And Dennis Formento

Posted in Audio, History, Interviews, Louisiana, Media Archive, United States on 2013-05-11 21:38Z by Steven

The Reading Life: Authors Emily Clark, Bill Loehfelm And Dennis Formento

The Reading Life
WWNO 89.9FM
University of New Orleans
2013-04-23

Susan Larson, Host

Emily Clark, Clement Chambers Benenson Professor of American Colonial History; Associate Professor of History
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana


Emily Clark

This week on The Reading Life, Susan talks with Tulane professor Emily Clark, whose new book is The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World, and novelist Bill Loehfelm, whose amazing new thriller, set in New Orleans, is The Devil in Her Way.

Listen to the interview with Dr. Clark  (00:00:50-00:12:06) here. Download the interview here.

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‘Yokohama Yankee’: a family’s lineage in both Japan and America

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Biography, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, United States on 2013-05-11 21:16Z by Steven

‘Yokohama Yankee’: a family’s lineage in both Japan and America

The Seattle Times Books
2013-04-01

David Takami, Special to The Seattle Times

Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan’ by Leslie Helm Chin Music Press, 360 pp.

Leslie Helm’s remarkable family memoir begins at a point of personal distress. At a memorial for his father in 1991, he feels conflicted about his relationship with his father and memories of his childhood. A few weeks later, Helm and his wife decide to adopt a Japanese child. This momentous prospect triggers unease about his lifelong ambivalence toward Japan and prompts him to explore his family’s long history in the country.

Now a Seattle resident and editor of Seattle Business magazine, Leslie Helm is bilingual in Japanese and has worked as a journalist in Japan for Business Week and the Los Angeles Times.

Helm’s great grandfather, Julius Helm, traveled from his native Germany to Japan in 1869 near the start of the Meiji Restoration when the country was emerging from 200 years of feudalism and self-imposed isolation. Reformers were eager to modernize Japan and looked to Western Europe and America for guidance. Helm helped upgrade the Japanese military and subsequently built a successful stevedoring business that thrived for more than half a century in the port city of Yokohama

Read the entire review here.

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Some of the leading families of Virginia, who took pride in claiming descent from John Rolfe and Pocahontas, took umbrage at being classified as inferior non-whites.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2013-05-11 03:33Z by Steven

Political considerations forced [John Leslie] Powell and [Walter Ashby] Plecker to amend their iron-clad, white-supremacy law [The Racial Integrity Act of 1924] that defined as white only a person with no trace of non-white blood. Some of the leading families of Virginia, who took pride in claiming descent from John Rolfe and Pocahontas, took umbrage at being classified as inferior non-whites. This concern led to the creation of the “Pocahontas clause” which classified as white those individuals with no other non-caucasic blood than one-sixteenth or less the blood of the American Indian. Following this amendment, the bill sailed through the legislature. Thus, once all “historically-white”, upper-class Virginians were protected, the law gained tremendous support. Racism, science, and social control interacted to mediate the law’s provisions. The law would remain in effect, unchanged, for 43 years. Throughout that time it would be enforced by vigilant county court clerks and local vital statistics registrars. As late as 1945, Plecker lobbied a lawyer to push for a conviction under the miscegenation statute: “We attach great importance to this case, and we hope that you will fight it to a finish in the effort to secure an annulment for miscegenation, not for desertion or any other cause.” Plecker sought validation of the law through strict racial classification and a mass of successful precedent-setting prosecutions.

Gregory Michael Dorr, “Principled Expediency: Eugenics, Naim v. Naim, and the Supreme Court,” The American Journal of Legal History (Volume 42, Number 2, April, 1998), 127-128.

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The longstanding attempt to legislate Indigenous-Asian relations out of existence continues to cast its shadow today.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2013-05-11 03:04Z by Steven

The longstanding attempt to legislate Indigenous-Asian relations out of existence continues to cast its shadow today. Cathy Freeman is identified as Australia’s most famous Indigenous sportswoman, but she is also of Chinese descent. In the late 19th century, her great-great grandfather moved from China to northern Queensland, where he worked on sugarcane farms. In 2001 Freeman supported Beijing’s bid for the 2008 Olympic Games because of her Chinese heritage, but the English-language Australian media has entirely overlooked it. By contrast, in Chinese-language media inside and outside Australia, Freeman’s multicultural heritage is celebrated; many Chinese-Australians even hoped Freeman would win gold in the Sydney Olympics because of her Chinese descent. Is the suppression of Freeman’s heritage a sign that white Australia still wants to keep Asians and Aborigines apart?

Peta Stephenson, The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story, (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007), 2.

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The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story

Posted in Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Oceania on 2013-05-11 01:42Z by Steven

The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story

University of New South Wales Press
June 2007
256 pages
234 x 153mm
Paperback ISBN: 9780868408361

Peta Stephenson, Honorary Fellow
Asia Institute, University of Melbourne

An engaging account of the ways in which over hundreds of years Indigenous and Southeast Asian people across Australia have traded, intermarried and built hybrid communities. It is also a disturbing exposé of the persistent—sometimes paranoid—efforts of successive national governments to police, marginalise and outlaw these encounters.

Contents

  • Introduction
  • 1. Trading places
  • 2. Makassan meetings
  • 3. Dangerous liaisons
  • 4. Colonial encounters
  • 5. Paranoid nation
  • 6. Invasion narratives
  • 7. Where are you from?
  • 8. Detoxifying Australia
  • 9. Old roots, new routes
  • Bibliography
  • Interviews
  • Index

Introduction

With a gun in hand Ah Hong, a Chinese cook and market gardener, shouted these words at the police: ‘you sleep with black women too. My woman’s got my kids.’ It was Alice Springs in the early 20th century and Ah Hong had committed the ‘crime’ of fathering three ‘mixed-race’ children. Ah Hong met Ranjika, a Western Arrernte woman, after the white man who stole her from her tribal husband abandoned her. Government officials targeted Ranjika and Ah Hong’s children for removal because they were of mixed Aboriginal-Asian descent. Reminding local officials that they also had sexual relationships with Aboriginal women. Ah Hong underlined the hypocrisy of fining or deporting Chinese and other Asian men because of their relationships with women or Aboriginal descent.

Around the same time, more than 2000 kilometres east in Queensland, another triangular relationship between Aboriginal, Chinese and white Australians was being played out. White authorities had seized Princy Carlo and her family (like many other ‘fringe-dwelling’ Aborigines) from their home country and packed them off to a government reserve more than 200 kilometres south-east. Princy Carlo was a mixed-race woman of Chinese and Wakka Wakka descent (from the Eidsvold district of southern Queensland, about 430 kilometres north-west of Brisbane). She did not yield to the assimilationist intent of government policy. Instead, she and her family established a camp they called ‘Chinatown’ at the Aboriginal settlement of Barambah (now Cherbourg).

The longstanding attempt to legislate Indigenous-Asian relations out of existence continues to cast its shadow today. Cathy Freeman is identified as Australia’s most famous Indigenous sportswoman, but she is also of Chinese descent. In the late 19th century, her great-great grandfather moved from China to northern Queensland, where he worked on sugarcane farms. In 2001 Freeman supported Beijing’s bid for the 2008 Olympic Games because of her Chinese heritage, but the English-language Australian media has entirely overlooked it. By contrast, in Chinese-language media inside and outside Australia, Freeman’s multicultural heritage is celebrated; many Chinese-Australians even hoped Freeman would win gold in the Sydney Olympics because of her Chinese descent. Is the suppression of Freeman’s heritage a sign that white Australia still wants to keep Asians and Aborigines apart?

The Outsiders Within is the story of the triangular relationship between Asians, Aborigines and white Australia. The three anecdotes just recounted are the tip of an historical iceberg. A unique and fascinating tradition of cross-cultural alliances between Indigenous and Asian Australian people exists in Australia, but it is largely unknown. In Broome, Western Australia, by the 1940s, cross-cultural unions between Indigenous and Asian people had become so commonplace that a majority of the Aboriginal population had some Asian ancestry. And, while Broome is an exceptionally multicultural society, an Indigenous-Asian heritage is a feature of most communities across northern Australia. Nor is it confined to the north: as this study shows, it stretches south to the metropolitan centres and, more recently, in the work of artists, film-makers and writers it has become part of a vigorously pursued project to understand Australia’s past and present differently. For the story we have to tell is both troubled and troubling. It obliges us to confront a legacy of discrimination, and to ask why the social, political and geographical legitimisation of Australia as a nation-state depended so profoundly on declaring Indigenous-Asian alliances illegitimate…

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The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing

Posted in Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2013-05-11 00:10Z by Steven

The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing

New York University Press
April 2013
288 pages
22 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814772492
Paper ISBN: 9780814772508

Greg Carter, Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Barack Obama’s historic presidency has re-inserted mixed race into the national conversation. While the troubled and pejorative history of racial amalgamation throughout U.S. history is a familiar story, The United States of the United Races reconsiders an understudied optimist tradition, one which has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, bring equality to all, and fulfill an American destiny. In this genealogy, Greg Carter re-envisions racial mixture as a vehicle for pride and a way for citizens to examine mixed America as a better America.

Tracing the centuries-long conversation that began with Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer in the 1780s through to the Mulitracial Movement of the 1990s and the debates surrounding racial categories on the U.S. Census in the twenty-first century, Greg Carter explores a broad range of documents and moments, unearthing a new narrative that locates hope in racial mixture. Carter traces the reception of the concept as it has evolved over the years, from and decade to decade and century to century, wherein even minor changes in individual attitudes have paved the way for major changes in public response. The United States of the United Races sweeps away an ugly element of U.S. history, replacing it with a new understanding of race in America.

Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • 1. Thomas Jefferson’s Challengers
  • 2. Wendell Phillips, Unapologetic Abolitionist, Unreformed Amalgamationist
  • 3. Plessy v. Racism
  • 4. The Color Line, the Melting Pot, and the Stomach
  • 5. Say It Loud, I’m One Drop and I’m Proud
  • 6. The End of Race as We Know It
  • 7. Praising Ambiguity, Preferring Certainty
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Index
  • About the Author

Introduction

In April 2010, the White House publicized Barack Obama’s self-identification on his U.S. census form. He marked one box “Black, African Am., or Negro,” settling one of the most prevalent issues during his 2008 presidential campaign: his racial identity. This choice resounded with the monoracial ways of thinking so prevalent throughout U.S. history. People who believed he was only black because he looked like a black person or because many others (society) believed so or because of the historical prevalence of the one-drop rule received confirmation of that belief. The mainstream media had been calling him the black president for over a year, so they received confirmation of this moniker.

Many people who had followed the adoption of multiple checking on the census found his choice surprising. Surely, as president, he would be aware of the ability to choose more than one race. To pick one alone went against everything activists wanting to reform the government’s system of racial categorization had worked for in the 1990s. Many found it surprising that the man who had called himself “the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas” would choose one race. After all, he had used this construction far more times than he had called himself black, giving the impression that he embraced his mixture along with identifying as black. That snippet, along with images of his diverse family, had been part of what endeared him to mixed-race supporters. Similarly, his campaign’s deployment of his white relatives built sympathy with white voters. Some people argued that he had failed to indicate what he “was” by choosing one race. He made the diverse backgrounds in his immediate family a footnote. But, recalling Maria P. P. Root’sA Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People,” a pillar of contemporary thought on mixed race, they had to respect his prerogative. He had the right to identify himself differently than the way strangers expected him to identify.

Three lessons emerged from this episode: How one talks about oneself can be different from how one identifies from day to day. How one identifies from day to day can be different from how one fills out forms. And on a form with political repercussions, such as the census, one may choose a political statement different from both how one talks and how one identifies. Obama had always been a political creature; he never did anything for simple reasons. By the regulations, the administration could have withheld the information for seventy-two years. Instead, it became a small yet notable news piece in real time. Publicizing his participation in the census could motivate other minorities (beyond those who knew the history of multiple checking) to do so as well. More likely, he was thinking about the 2012 election. His response to the 2010 census could influence voters later on. If the number of those who would have hurt feelings over a singular answer was less than those who would find offense in a multiple answer, then a singular answer was the best to give. Even though mixed-race Americans took great pride in Obama’s ascendance, they were a small faction to satisfy.

Then why did Obama take so much care to cast himself as a young, mixed-race hope for the future? Because even though the number of people who identify as mixed race is small, they hold immense figural power for the nation as symbols of progress, equality, and utopia, themes he wanted to associate with his campaign. In other words, he piggybacked onto positive notions about racially mixed people to improve his symbolic power. At the same time, he nurtured the stable, concrete, and accessible identity that people so used to monoracial thought could embrace, not the ambiguous one that challenged everyone.

Interpretation of current events such as this can disentangle the complexities we encounter here and now. However, while historical analysis always enriches the understanding of current events, writing history about current events presents a pitfall: they are moving targets resisting our attempts to focus on them. Similarly, following figures such as Obama lures us into announcing sea changes in racial conditions. Americans of all walks like indicators of progress. But addressing racial inequality calls for more than well-wishing. As a guiding principle, we should remember to appreciate that these are stories that have no resolution, much like the story of racialization in general. The meanings of mixture, the language we use to describe it, and its cast of characters have always been in flux.

Even before colonial Virginia established the first anti-intermarriage laws in 1691, efforts to stabilize racial identity had been instrumental in securing property, defending slavery, and maintaining segregation. The study of interracial intimacy has labeled racially mixed people either pollutants to society or the last hope for their inferior parent groups. To this day, many Americans label each other monoracially, interracial marriage remains a rarity, and group identities work best when easy to comprehend. However, at the same time that many worked to make racial categorization rigid, a few have defended racial mixing as a boon for the nation. Ever since English explorer John Smith told the story of the Indian princess Pocahontas saving his life in 1608 (a founding myth of the United States), some have considered racial mixing a positive. These voices were often privileged with access to outlets. Many were men, and many were white. This study reconsiders the understudied optimist tradition that has disavowed mixing as a means to uplift a particular racial group or a means to do away with race altogether. Instead, this group of vanguards has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, to bring equality to all, and to fulfill an American destiny. Historians of race have passed over this position, but my narrative shows that contemporary fascination with racially mixed figures has historical roots in how past Americans have imagined what radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips first called “The United States of the United Races.”…

Read the entire Introduction here.

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Much of South America and Mexico is today inhabited by a mongrel race white-black-red mixture.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2013-05-11 00:09Z by Steven

Much of South America and Mexico is today inhabited by a mongrel race white-black-red mixture, one of the most undesirable racial intermixtures known, as I can testify from my own observation of similar groups in Virginia.

W.A. Plecker, “The New Family and Race Improvement,” Virginia Department of Health: Virginia Health Bulletin, (Volume 17, Extra Number 12 (8), 1925). 17. (Source: DNA Learning Center). http://www.dnalc.org/http://www.dnalc.org/view/11280–The-New-Family-and-Race-Improvement-by-W-A-Plecker-Virginia-Health-Bulletin-vol-17-12-8-.html.

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