Category: Media & Journalism

Remembering race and hate in 1950s America…

…& as portrayed in Robinson’s “Home”

This middle book is certainly the most political of the series; offering a socially critical view of that immediate post-war decade, as “out the ashes of…” these prosperous times are being relativized by a simmering discontent as many old norms are being questioned, and young men and women begin to come to the fore unencumbered by the prejudices of previous generations.

I am especially thinking here about Jack Boughton’s increasing despair at his father’s ambivalence to the plight of black Americans and rising tide of civil unrest, for example whilst watching the Montgomery riots on the newly bought TV:

The old man said, “I do believe it is necessary to enforce the law. The Apostle Paul says we should do everything ‘decently and in order’ You can’t have people running around the streets like that.

Home, Marilynne Robinson, Virago UK paperback ed. p. 102

And when Jack raises the matter of Emmett Till the following exchange ensues:

“[…]the Negro […] attacked the white woman?” Jack said, “He was a kid […]fourteen […]he whistled at a white woman.” His father said, “I think there must have been more to it […] There was a trial.” Jack said, “There was no trial. He was murdered. He was a child and they murdered him.”

p. 163

And I am particularly thinking about this at the moment in conjunction with this excellent feature in the New York Times, enhanced with brilliant images, reporting on the legacy of Emmett Till’s murder and the ways people choose to, or choose not to, memorialize.

…
In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy visiting from Chicago walked in to buy candy. After being accused of whistling at the white woman behind the counter, he was later kidnapped, tortured, lynched and dumped in the Tallahatchie River.
The murder of Emmett Till is remembered as one of the most hideous hate crimes of the 20th century, a brutal episode in American history that helped kindle the civil rights movement. And the place where it all began, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, is still standing. Barely.
Today, the store is crumbling, roofless and covered in vines. On several occasions, preservationists, politicians and business leaders — even the State of Mississippi — have tried to save its remaining four walls. But no consensus has been reached…

The New York Times February 20 2019

Literature is of course another way of memorializing, and Marilynne Robinson indeed incorporates the racial tensions and ambivalence of her youth (that so often evolved into hate) in her writing. I dare say too she would admit her anger and sadness that so much remains unresolved, and even have in a different way become exacerbated.

“Virginia Woolf? – Snob!

Richard Wright? – Sexist! Dostoyevsky? – Anti-Semite! ” So, Brian Morton asks in The New York Times, just how should we read great writers from the past whose moral blind spots offend us?

I read the above piece while underway yesterday – a really good contribution I think to the fiercely debated topic of how to approach literary works written in the historical past. I particularly liked Morton’s time machine analogy! And I was of course immediately alert to the “snob” accusation against Virginia Woolf – one which I happened to use of her a couple of days ago. It seems as a reader I instinctively cope with the “snob” Woolf under the guise of a time-traveler as Morton suggests. Though “snob” is a rather mild description, one could just as well attach the “anti-semite” tag to her also – the stereotypical language she uses of Leonard Woolf and his family, amongst others, would be untenable today. Nor would it be hard to find, from she an icon of women’s literature, some ideas that may today be considered sexist; for even she was not immune to the patriarchal conditioning rooted in the class structures of the society in which she lived. And her ideas on race and intelligence were very much colored by contemporary thinking on social-Darwinism and eugenics popular in her social milieu.