When I started this blog, I didn’t have any intentions of making it a travel blog. After all, there are more than enough LFLs in Carteret County to keep me busy. It just so happens that 5/7 of my posts have been out of town. This one, too, was scheduled to be from a LFL in Washington, D.C. My sister-in-law, Tinsley, and I took a quick trip up the coast, stopping at 3 North Carolina lighthouses on our way to the capitol. But, alas, I was so excited to be in the city and there was so much to look at that I completely forgot about my mission until we were on the drive home. I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t get to see some LFLs in a place I likely won’t go back to for awhile, but the quality of any given box seems so random that I’m not worried that I missed out on some super box just because it was in D.C.
THE WALK
I was still in need of a book so I decided to go to Atlantic Beach since I hadn't been to a LFL in that town for the blog yet. After having a few drinks at home, I begged Wes and Tinsley to be my DD and take me over the bridge. I knew that there was a LFL pretty close to The Circle, the main public beach parking area in AB. I told them I’d just be a few minutes and took off with Duffy in search of the nearest one on the LFL website's map.
The walk was a short one, probably less than a mile round trip. There wasn't much to see, but I did snap a picture of this mural on the side of one of the two Wings that seem to be mandatory in every southern beach town.
THE LITTLE FREE LIBRARY
FROM THE WEBSITE:
Lat: 34.6998592 Long: -76.7367634
I am a retired school librarian. Books continue to be my love and passion. My motto has always been "get the books into the hands of the people"! My son made this library for me for Christmas and we finally have it up and running. Our street is a walkway to the beach and I'm hoping people, young and old, will stop by and pick up books for their day at the ocean. Keep on reading!
This box is super cute with its starfish knob and beachy paint color matching the house it sat in front of. If you think about it, a beach house is the perfect place for a book sharing box. People always want a book to read on the beach so they'll stop and take one, but people may not want to pack all their books back home so they'll stop and leave one.
It was the first LFL I have come across that came with instructions which I thought was pretty neat. I can't remember the first time I came across a LFL, a fact that makes me kinda sad because I would like to think back fondly on that experience, but I know there are still lots of people who don't know about this little pieces of heaven on earth and would benefit from an instruction sheet.
Although I got to the box in just a few minutes, I knew as soon as I opened it that Wes and T we’re going to be waiting longer than I had promised. This was the treasure I have been seeking, a diamond in the rough, a shark’s tooth in a pile of broken shells. As I type this post, I want to get in my car and go rescue a few of the books I left behind.
I stood there, reading and re-reading the back covers of several books until Duffy literally just laid down on me. If Duffy was getting impatient, Wes and T were already there. I knew I would have to pick a book based on something other than the summary because I was interested in the plots of about 5 of the books. Looking at the backs of the books once again, I noticed the picture of Yaa Gyasi, the author of one of the books I had shortlisted, and realized that I had not read a book by a black woman for the blog yet. I knew that needed to change.
I took this book, and this book only (finally following the rules for once), and headed back to find T and Wes. I found them sitting on a bench on the boardwalk, only mildly irritated that I was gone three times longer than I said I would be. I asked them to wait just one more minute before we left so I could get a picture of the book while I was still technically on the walk. Little did I know that taking a picture in front of the beach at the beginning of my journey with this book would be so similar to how the book's journey ends, but we'll get to that.
The plot caught my attention because it is about half-sisters who never knew each other and the way their lives were drastically different based on where and by whom they were raised. A plot I know a little bit about from personal experience.
My dad ----- may or may not but probably did or it was all a ploy for money who knows not me because the story changes based on the day ------ had a daughter when he was very young, around 15 I think, with a girl he met one summer. This daughter was known about by my dad's family as well as by my mother, but she did not exist to my brother and myself until she literally showed up on our doorstep when I was in high school.
We lived way back in the country, out of town and up a hill and in the holler. That means we didn't get a lot of visitors that we didn't know, except one time when the FBI showed up and Dad thought they were Jehovah's Witnesses and tried to run them off by waving a Bible in their faces but that's a different story for a different day. So when an unknown vehicle pulled up in our yard, it always made me a little nervous. I knew this wasn't the FBI or the Jehovah's Witness because neither group would be caught in a beater like that, but turns out I had a right to be nervous. I answered the door to a woman who was probably in her mid-to-late twenties. A woman I had never seen before in my life. A woman whose first words to me were, "Hi. I'm Sandra. I'm your sister."
I'm not going to say that I changed her name to protect the innocent, but Sandra isn't really her name.
I don't remember much else about that first time I met her. I don't know if I invited her in or if I went and got my parents while she stood on the porch or the look on my dad's face when he saw her standing next to his "other daughter". I'm glad I can't remember anything else about that day other than her introductory sentence.
I do remember the aftermath. The tears that came when my parents told me "the whole story" and the tears that would randomly attack me for weeks afterwards. The betrayal I felt. The death of the concept I had of who my parents were. The first blow, of what would become many, to the relationship I had with my parents. The anger I felt, for her and for myself, that has never really gone away.
There is a lot to our story, most of it not mine to tell. The part that is mine, the hurt and the anger and the confusion, is what drew me to this book. When I read on the back flap, "...two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other...", I felt a knowing stir inside me. I don't know what it feels like to be born in 18th century Ghana, but I know what it feels like to question your family and to wonder how your beginnings affect your future.
Even now, almost 15 years later, I'm not sure if she is actually (biologically) my half-sister. I was desperate then to see some part of my father or some part of myself in her. I had studied Mendel and I mentally cataloged her physical characteristics - medium height, brown eyes, brown hair. I didn't know her mother, though, so I couldn't make a Punnett Square to rule out my father as her father.
Physically, we didn't really look alike, but I soon found that we had something else in common besides (possibly) our sperm donor. She loved to read, just like me. That's what she spent her money on, just like me. That's what she did all day when she was supposed to be cleaning the house, just like me. I was jealous of her because I was supposed to be my daddy's only little girl, but I was almost as angry at her for loving to read. For one, reading was supposed to be MY thing, what made me special. If I wasn't my daddy's little girl and if I wasn't the only one in our sphere who would rather live in books than in the real world, then who was I? For another, it seemed to prove on some level that we really were related. Our nurturing might have been different, but there was just something in our genes, in our nature, that made us both readers.
I have spoken to Sandra exactly twice since I left home over a decade ago, but I think about her a lot. Our lives, like the two half-sisters in Homegoing, are very very very different and I don't have much to say to her. The one thing we could probably connect over is reading. Maybe I'll send her this book and she'll read it and then she'll call and we'll talk about it for hours and it'll be the first step toward a real relationship. Or maybe, like Effia and Esi, we'll never speak again and our great-great-great-great-grandchildren will meet at a party in California and never know how fateful that meeting really is.
THE BOOK
This book begins in 1760s Africa with the birth of Effia, one of the half-sisters born to Maame by a man who is not her husband. The first chapter chronicles Effia's life while the second chapter, which runs in an essentially parallel timeline to the first, chronicles the life of Esi (Maame's child with her husband). The entire book follows this pattern: telling the life story of one member of each successive generation from Effia and Esi's descendants.
I'm not sure if I've ever read a similar book, at least one that was categorized as a novel and not an anthology or collection of short stories. It is essentially a series of mini-biographies, each of which could likely stand alone as a piece of historical fiction and/or social commentary. Each person's story is related to their parent's story in that they had to have come from their parents, but sometimes that was really the only connection. There was so much social and political change, both in Africa and in America, between each generation that it was sometimes difficult to keep the thread of each line in mind.
Luckily there was a family tree in the front of the book to help me keep track. I found myself often coming back to that diagram because it was necessary to remember each person's family history to truly understand the importance of their individual story.
IT'S ALMOST LIKE THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT
I loved this about the book. I loved that I could sit here with a bird's eye view and see how the actions of a white man in the 18th century had direct consequences for a black girl in the 21st century. Forget sending this book to my maybe-half-sister to rekindle our relationship. I want to send this book to every person I know who thinks that racism doesn't exist anymore, who thinks that the past is the past, who thinks that black people who are in jail or on drugs or in bad health or low income have "done it to themselves". I don't mean to downplay the importance of personal choices for both good and bad (and neither does the author as evidence by Carson "Sonny" Clifton's story). I do wish that the general white public (my younger self included) understood that black people in America do not always have the same choices as white people.
I started reading this book on a beautiful day in July when there was enough of a breeze that it was actually comfortable to lay in my hammock without immediately sweating to the point of dehydration. When I looked up for the first time hours later, I had read over 120 pages. I can't remember the last time I devoured a book that quickly (that wasn't a romance novel meant to be read in one sitting). The author does such an amazing job with painting pictures of the places, the physical landscapes and the cultural practices, that I couldn't put the book down. I was drawn in, especially to historical Africa, a place and culture that I don't know much about and which the author made out to be brutal and magical.
Effia's line stays in Africa until the last generation featured in the book while Esi is sold into slavery and her line's story takes place exclusively in America. Neither branch of the family tree has any real particular bloom of overall happiness. Effia's branches problems seem to center on the ways that your own culture can harm you (although some of those were directly or indirectly affected by the slave trade and presence of white men in Africa) while Esi's branch must contend with the white man in America.
Between learning new things about African history and culture in the context of personal struggles and my eager hope that it had to get better for the next generation, the first 120 pages turned really quickly. I would read just one more chapter, just one more story, hoping that the book was going to transform from a real downer into an uplifting human interest story like some sort of ESPN 30 for 30 episode. But it never did. Something was always going wrong for the character, usually something outside of their control like the slave trade, cultural belief in curses, the utter impossibility of living as a gay man in a time and place that would kill you for it, arranged marriages for power consolidation, tribal wars, gender roles controlling all aspects of a woman's life, the unpredictability of the weather on crop production, the laws designed to keep black people from living as free men, the laws designed to keep black people from rising in social or economic circles, absent fathers, drug addiction, etc, etc, etc. You name a human failing, stereotype, or historical highlight and the author wrote about it in this book.
If I have a negative thing to say about this book, it is that the scope, both within individual chapters and as a whole, is so vast that it sometimes feels unmanageable, difficult to comprehend, and overwhelming. Honestly, this is when the book started to drag for me. Things never really got better. Each generation just had a different set of problems. Instead of reading 1/3 of the book in one sitting, I found myself working hard to read even one chapter at a time. The book was still just as well written throughout, but it so true to life, both in the events and in the psychological insight of the characters, that it was painful to read.
But then I got to the final chapter, and I have to say again,
IT'S ALMOST LIKE THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT!
If it was painful for me to read, how much more painful was it to live? If it took weeks and weeks for me to finish a book for it to "get better" how many more years/decades/centuries is it going to take before it does actually get better?
The author literally spells it out for us in the final chapter of Esi's line. Marcus is a PhD student in sociology at Stanford who is having a hard time narrowing down his thesis topic because:
"How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H's story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he'd have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He'd have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father's heroin addiction - the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the '60s, wouldn't he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the '80s? And if he wrote about crack, he'd inevitably be writing, too, about the "war on drugs." And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he'd be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he'd gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he'd get so angry that he'd slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University."
Very mild spoiler alert: the story got better. There was a happy ending. Marjorie, the latest of Effia's line and Marcus, the latest of Esi's line, laughing together in the ocean, the family finally reunited.
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