Women Who Love Books Club: September 2008

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Get to know the women who love books

Each member was asked to answer a series of questions about themselves. Here are their responses in the order they were received.

Member profile - Aderonke

Approximately when did you join the book club?
I am one of the original members of the group. We started in the fall of 1994.

What was the first book you remember reading?
It was an Enid Blyton book – Folk of the Far Away Tree, or something like that. I had gotten it as a Christmas gift from an elderly great aunt.

Who is your favorite author?
There are many. One is Maya Angelou. I read my first book by her in college – “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. I couldn’t put it down, I laughed and cried and laughed again.
Another is Isabelle Allende. I want to read all her books, I’ve read about five so far.

What book has stayed with you long after you read it?
Sacajawea by Anna L. Waldo. Before I brought the book I had never heard of this courageous woman – she guided Lewis and Clarke as they forged their way across the US to find the Pacific Ocean. She survived starvation, freezing temperatures and Indian attacks all while carrying her baby son on her back. What a woman!

Another is “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines. I started crying as I read the last sentence in the book as I reflected on the path the young man’s life had to take in order for him to learn some valuable lessons.

Which book(s) have you read more than once?
I tend not to read books more than once.

What type of books do you enjoy reading?
If I had had to answer this question about seven years ago I would have said thrillers, spy novels and a good mystery. Now I am interested in reading about relationships between people. I especially enjoyed “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” by Lisa See. It touched me because it explores the relationship between two women during a period of time and about a culture I know nothing about – 18th Century China. The book transcended time and culture and I was able to connect with the women on many levels.

If you were stranded on a desert island what are the five books you would like to have with you?
The Bible
The Koran
Anything by Khalil Gibran
Does my ebook count because I would have tons of titles on it?

What is your favorite quote from a book?
“Oh reason not the need our basest beggars are to the purest thing superfluous”. I think that is how the quote goes, from King Lear by William Shakespeare. It’s one of the few quotes I remember. Please don't quote me on it because my memory isn't as good as it used to be.

If you were to write a book what would it be about?
Grief and mourning as a young widow.

Feel free to add a paragraph about yourself.
I love books and have done since I can remember. There was a time in my life I would never have left the house without a book, just in case I had a spare minute to read. I remember being almost panic-stricken after I left the book I was reading at a friend’s house in Seattle and I was about to get on a plane. Even though I was running late, I took the time to find a newsstand and purchased another book. Then I had her courier the forgotten book to me. It would have been cheaper to buy another but I, more importantly, wanted to finish the one I had started. I have another story of going fishing and getting squid juice over a book I was engrossed in. Every time I think of that book I remember the summer heat, humidity and the smell of that story.

Member profile - Frances

Approximately when did you join the book club?
At the beginning.

What was the first book you remember reading?
Are you kidding? It is a stretch to remember the last book.

Who is your favorite author?
At the moment Ekhart Tolle and I doubt we will select his works for book club reading.

What book has stayed with you long after you read it?
Would you believe Captain Corelli's Mandolin. It could be because I read it twice - once, guessing what all the strange words meant and second, with a dictionary.

Which book(s) have you read more than once?
See above.

What type of books do you enjoy reading?
Books that take me to other cultures and give me a new perspective on life and the world than I had previously.

If you were stranded on a desert island what are the five books you would like to have with you?
Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth, Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsh, a fat, waterproof, bound and lined diary, Fearless living by Rhonda Britten and maybe this would be a good time to read the Torah as I'd have plenty of time and Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom.

What is your favorite quote from a book?
You must be joking! I don't have favourite anything except a beach and the sparkling shoes I got in Argentina.

If you were to write a book what would it be about?
What it is like being mixed race in a racially divided environment.

Feel free to add a paragraph about yourself.
I live a life that is envied by some and terrifying to others.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Books we have read along the way

This entry will have no timelines or rules. We are trying to put together a list of all the books we have read as a book club. The book club has been together since about December 1994. While there have been a number of people who have come and gone and come back again, the four original members are still a part of the group.

As we remember a book it will be added to the list. Here goes:

Island Beneath the Sea - Isabel Allende

http://www.amazon.com/Island-Beneath-Sea-Isabel-Allende/dp/0061988243/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281395753&sr=1-1

Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese

http://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Stone-Vintage-Abraham-Verghese/dp/0375714367/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281126336&sr=8-1

What is the What - Dave Eggers

http://www.amazon.com/What-Vintage-Dave-Eggers/dp/0307385906/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281386022&sr=8-1

The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown - Lorrie Glover and Daniel Blake Smith

http://www.amazon.com/Shipwreck-That-Saved-Jamestown-Castaways/dp/0805090258/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281396058&sr=1-1

The Caligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim

http://www.amazon.com/Calligraphers-Daughter-Novel-Eugenia-Kim/dp/0805092269/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281395698&sr=1-1

Man Gone Down - Michael Thomas

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Gone-Down-Michael-Thomas/dp/0802170293/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281396130&sr=1-1

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing - Traitor to the Nation - M. T. Anderson

http://www.amazon.com/Astonishing-Octavian-Nothing-Traitor-Nation/dp/0763636797/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281396331&sr=1-1

Half a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

http://www.amazon.com/Half-Yellow-Chimamanda-Ngozi-Adichie/dp/1400095204/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281396205&sr=1-1

A Yellow Raft in Blue Water - Michael Dorris

http://www.amazon.com/Yellow-Raft-Blue-Water-Novel/dp/0312421850/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281396257&sr=1-1

Loving Frank - Nancy Horan

http://www.amazon.com/Loving-Frank-Novel-Nancy-Horan/dp/0345495004/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281396283&sr=1-1

The Book of Negroes/Someone Knows My Name - Lawrence Hill

http://www.lawrencehill.com/the_book_of_negroes.html

The Pirate's Daughter - Margaret Cezair-Thompson
http://www.amazon.com/Pirates-Daughter-Novel-Margaret-Cezair-Thompson/dp/0812979427/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228558569&sr=8-1

Jesus Land: A Memoir - Julia Scheeres
http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Land-Memoir-Julia-Scheeres/dp/1582433542/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228558908&sr=1-1

One Drop by Bliss Broyard

If you are interested in reading more about this book and the author visit: http://blissbroyard.com/

Here are two reviews of the book.

Books of the Times

A Daughter on Her Father’s Bloodlines and Color Lines By JANET MASLIN

Published: September 27, 2007

After the literary critic Anatole Broyard died in 1990, his family arranged a memorial reception at a suburban Connecticut yacht club. It was a club that claimed to have no black members until, after Mr. Broyard’s death, his mixed racial lineage was made known. After that, the club cited him as evidence of integration.

What was it like for Mr. Broyard to keep his secret in such surroundings? For a self-made man who had come so far in life, reading so many books in the process, did the clubhouse’s view of Long Island Sound bring to mind the grand illusions of “The Great Gatsby”?

Not likely, says his smart, tough-minded daughter, Bliss Broyard, in “One Drop,” an investigative memoir about her father’s life. (Mr. Broyard was a longtime book critic and editor for The New York Times and an essayist for its Book Review.) As this fascinating, insightful book makes clear, Mr. Broyard left a legacy of racial confusion and great autobiographical material, not necessarily in that order.

Ms. Broyard shares her father’s bracingly unsentimental spirit, to the point where she knows that he had none of Jay Gatsby’s self-congratulatory outlook or sense of American tragedy. More to the point, she says, “It never seemed to occur to him that someone might want to keep him out.”

When a guest at the memorial service noticed three light-skinned black people sitting with the Broyards, he was surprised that the family had so much help. But those weren’t the servants; they were black Broyards who had been kept at arm’s length by Anatole, whose birth certificate listed him as white. By the time he got to Connecticut, after early years in New Orleans, a Brooklyn boyhood and time spent in the Army and Greenwich Village, he no longer talked about his lineage. Black friends assumed he was black. Whites didn’t ask what they thought of as rude questions. It was a rare moment in the Broyard household — say, when dinner guests realized that Bliss and her brother, Todd, knew nothing about their black heritage — when race seemed to make any difference at all.

Only after her father died did Ms. Broyard begin to realize how little she understood. And so she began, in ways that elevate “One Drop” far above the usual family-revisionist memoir, to make up for lost time. She knew no Broyards in New York, but found plenty in Los Angeles, even bringing them together for a family reunion as an early step in her process of discovery. What made this gathering tricky is that some Broyards regarded themselves as white and others as black, drawing vehemently different conclusions from similar sets of facts.

Ms. Broyard knew that her father’s heritage was an open secret when she found a close confidant in Henry Louis Gates Jr., the renowned scholar. She got to know Mr. Gates by his nickname, Skip; she marveled at how generous he was with his time and interest. Then she learned that he planned to write the Broyard story for The New Yorker, and she was infuriated at having been so manipulatively treated. “Years later,” she writes astutely, “I’d realize that my biggest fear was that Gates, a stranger who had never even met my father, would understand him better than I could.” But she sharply excoriates Mr. Gates for his tactics, his glibness and the harm that she feels his article inflicted on her family.

When she published her first book, a story collection called “My Father, Dancing” in 2000, Ms. Broyard had not written about race. Yet her book was included in the African-American Book Expo in Chicago and on the Black History Month agenda. An investigation into her own past and her family’s was clearly something she could not avoid.

A half-hidden family history is no guarantee of an interesting one, however. And for all its prodigious research, “One Drop” deals more engrossingly with the stories of Ms. Broyard and her closest relatives than it does with the 18th-century origins of the Broyards in America.
Nonetheless, armed with the knowledge that genealogical Web sites are almost as popular as pornographic ones, Ms. Broyard zealously assembled an account of her roots. Among the first things she discovers about a large, Creole, New Orleans-based family like hers is that racial delineations and stereotypes make no sense at all.

And slavery, which she regards as a defining issue in matters of black identity, holds its own share of surprises. “In a few short hours, I’d gone from believing that my great-grandmother was born a slave to discovering that she’d grown up in a family of black slave owners,” she writes after one fact-finding trip. “These weren’t the noble tragic figures I’d been expecting to encounter.”

Though its scope is large, the heart of “One Drop” lies with the author’s father. She must try — as Philip Roth did in “The Human Stain,” a book that was seemingly prompted by the Broyard story but goes unmentioned here — to understand the choices that he made, whether by action or omission. In a speculative account of what happened when her father applied for a Social Security card, Ms. Broyard guesses at how he might have been flummoxed by the decision of what racial identity to choose yet unaware of how important this choice would be. “I doubt that my father walked away feeling that he’d redirected the course of his life,” she writes.

Drawing on both her father’s autobiographical account and some of what Mr. Gates had to say, “One Drop” culminates in a cultural and intellectual history of Mr. Broyard’s life and times. His Greenwich Village days (described in his book “Kafka Was the Rage”) were full of ambition and contention, not to mention consummate lady-killing. (Mr. Broyard was “New Orleans French, handsome, sensual, ironic,” according to the hotblooded diarist Anaïs Nin.) And some of his most assertive early essays about race and hipness made his bona fides clear.

Mr. Broyard proudly kept a 1950 issue of Commentary near the family’s dinner table. But the author’s identifying note had been neatly cut out of the contributor’s page. Now his daughter knows what it said: that Anatole Broyard was “an anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world.” And she wonders, with lucid and sharp introspection, how her own life would have changed if she had known that sooner.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

For most of the 1970s and '80s, Anatole Broyard was a staff book critic for the New York Times, writing two or three reviews a week for its daily pages, as opposed to its Sunday book section. My own career in that same line of work was just getting under way, and I paid close attention to what he was doing. He obviously was intelligent and erudite, but I sometimes felt that he was more interested in showing his technical skills than in giving books deep, fair readings. Still, he enjoyed considerable influence and was widely known in literary circles.

Broyard died in October 1990 after a long, painful and debilitating struggle against cancer, but continuing interest in him was insured by the disclosure that he was, as his wife told their two adult children, "part black." According to Bliss Broyard, "My mother explained that my father had 'mixed blood,' and his parents were both light-skinned Creoles from New Orleans, where race-mixing had been common. She said that his parents had to pass for white in order to get work in 1930s New York, which confused my father about what their family was, or was supposed to be." Broyard's response to this, as he moved from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village and began to live a bohemian life in the postwar years, was to "pass for white." He did so for the rest of his life, though many who knew him were aware, or suspected, that his racial identity was not precisely as he presented it.

Six years after Broyard's death, the New Yorker published an article by Henry Louis Gates, the well-known professor of African American studies, called "The Passing of Anatole Broyard," which was, predictably, the cause of much heated gossip in literary, journalistic and publishing circles. Now Broyard is back in the news with the appearance of this family history and memoir by his daughter. One Drop, Bliss Broyard tells us, takes its title from "the 'one-drop rule,' which classified as black any Americans with the tiniest fraction -- just one drop -- of 'black blood.' It had grown out of a practice dating back to slavery known as hypodescent, which assigned someone of mixed parentage to the lower-status race, and had become the legal and social custom in the era of legalized 'Jim Crow' segregation." The book is an account of her effort to discover just "how black" her father was and thus, obviously, "how black" she is.

It's a peculiar book. The author's sincerity and honesty are evident and appealing, and her subject is of continuing interest and importance even now, when an appreciable amount of heat has been drained from our old obsessions and fears about race. The problem is that One Drop is actually at least five books -- her father's story, her own story, her family's story, the story of "passing" and the story of racial identity in the United States -- and its author doesn't do a very good job of weaving them together into a seamless, coherent narrative. For well over 100 pages, she wanders this way and that, telling this story and that, interviewing this person and that, circling around the one story of greatest interest -- her father's -- but never really pouncing on it. Then she takes a detour of nearly 200 pages to explore the Broyard family's history in New Orleans. Not until she gets past page 300 does she finally focus fully on her father, and one can't help wondering how many readers she will have lost by then.

"My father had left behind so much unfinished business," she writes, and her hope is to wrap it up. This would be a difficult task in any circumstances, but it is all the more so in this case because of the exceedingly complex life, character and legacy of Anatole Broyard. He was by most accounts immensely charming and energetic, positively catnip to women (and quick to take advantage of it). But he was also boastful and vain, as well as an operator who, as one friend told Gates, was "exorbitantly in control" and "fastidious about managing things." Thus it is extremely difficult, for example, to figure out why he chose to pass for white, or to get much sense of how this choice weighed on him, as anecdotal evidence suggests it did.

He was born in New Orleans in 1920, into a family that had been there since the early 1750s when Etienne Broyard, "a white man from France . . . landed in the Louisiana Territory." Within a century "the Broyards had begun to be identified in public records as mulatto or free people of color." Bliss Broyard's research has convinced her that "the moment of mixing in the Broyard family" occurred in 1855, when her great-great-grandfather married a free woman of color. Her account of how subsequent generations of the family dealt with (or ignored) this legacy is interesting, but she insists on larding it up with a boilerplate history of American laws, controversies and customs regarding race. By her own honest admission she knew almost nothing about race in America until her father's secret was revealed, and to her credit she studied it closely; it really was not necessary, though, to regurgitate so much of what she learned -- most of which will be familiar to many readers -- in this book, which is too long by about 150 pages.

It's also unfortunate that she spends so much time fretting about her racial identity. The notion of crossing "from white to the other side" clearly has some appeal for her, and when her New Orleans relatives call her "pure white," she is uncomfortable, yet she just can't let go: "It had been nearly a decade since my father had died, since I'd learned of his -- and my -- African ancestry, since I'd begun reading and learning and talking about race. And despite my glimmerings of double consciousness, I didn't yet feel black. I was still waiting for an 'Aha!' moment, an affirmation of this identity down deep in my bones." Fortunately, within just a few pages of this unbearably PC declaration, Broyard admits that "the thought of how blinded I'd been in my obsession to find a slave ancestor made me feel sick with shame," which redeems her, as does this: "I hated the image of myself in [a black acquaintance's] eyes -- a silly white girl making a big fuss over nothing. I hated how uncertain I became when trying to locate myself on this racial landscape or even recognize its terrain. Torn between trying to pinpoint the boundaries between black and white and an urge to deny their existence at all, I was caught in a dialectical tug-of-war. The futility of my efforts reminded me of a skit I once saw in which a man kept moving a wooden chair around an empty white room, unable to find a spot that suited him, despite their being all the same."

As she seems finally to have understood, the whole notion of race is fraught with ambiguity. I won't reveal the results of the DNA tests she finally had done, but what they proved more than anything else is that racial identity is a complete mare's nest. In issues of race as in so many others, "Know thyself" is an injunction almost impossible to obey. Notions of racial purity are as false as notions of racial impurity; there's no such thing, though much of human history has been frittered away by people trying to legitimize race as the defining element in what passes for civilization.

Still, it's not really surprising that Anatole Broyard chose to live as he did. He didn't look in the least bit "black," and he wanted to enter the world of literature, which in the 1940s and '50s in this country was patently "white." He placed personal ambition ahead of racial identity or racial solidarity or whatever one cares to call it, and his daughter makes a pretty solid argument for him: "My father truly believed that there wasn't any essential difference between blacks and whites and that the only person responsible for who he was supposed to be was himself." To be sure, a black friend had a point when he "sniped that my dad was black when he entered the subway in Brooklyn and white when he got out at West Fourth Street in Manhattan," but that's the choice he made, and he managed to live with it.

His daughter asks: "Was my father's choice rooted in self-preservation or in self-hatred? Did it strike a blow for individualism or for discrimination? Was he a hero or a cad?" Those are good questions, and as Bliss Broyard well understands, they can never be definitively answered, though my own hunch is that "All of the above" gets somewhere close to the truth.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Women Who Love Books Club

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Get to know the women who love books

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Books we have read along the way

One Drop by Bliss Broyard

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