by Kam Williams
How Long Will They Mourn Me? The Life and Legacy of Tupac Shakur, Candace Sandy and Dawn Marie Daniels, Ballantine Books, ISBN: 0-345-49483-0, $6.99.
Tupac Shakur was larger than life. A gifted rapper, poet, and actor, he was fearless, prolific, and controversial – and often said that he never expected to live past 30. He was right. On September 13, 1996, he died of gunshot wounds at age 25. But even ten years after Tupac’s tragic passing, the impact of his life and talent continues to flourish.
How Long Will They Mourn Me? celebrates Tupac’s unforgettable life – his rise to fame; his tumultuous dark side, marked by sex, drugs, and violence; and his indelible legacy. Although Tupac’s murder remains unsolved, the spirit of this legendary artist is far from forgotten. How long will we mourn him? Fans worldwide will grieve his untimely death for a long time to come.
Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America, Evan Carton, Free Press, ISBN: 0-7432-7136-X, $30.
Often sanctified, demonized, and caricatured, John Brown is one of the most intriguing and controversial Americans who ever lived and the private citizen who may have had the greatest impact on American history. Carton brings a new vision to this dramatic story by inviting readers into the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of Brown, his family, and the interracial cast of famous and obscure men and women who assisted or opposed Brown’s radical campaign to force an end to slavery in America. Drawing on archival resources that contain personal documents of the Brown family and many who knew them, worked with them, and fought with them, Carton recreates one of the most remarkable families and critical moments in American history.
Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas, Pocket Books, ISBN: 1-4165-2482-7, $14.
When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she’s assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of the community, but there are those who are threatened by her and the change that her presence in the South represents. Finding inner strength as she helps lift the veil of oppression and learns valuable lessons about race, social change, and violence, Celeste prepares her adult students for their showdown with the country registrar. All the while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also in Mississippi for the summer.
Odessa: A Child’s Story, Norma Register, Authorhouse, ISBN: 1-4259-2808-0, $14.40.
It’s been said that every girl “marries” her father. But there were no observable signs that Odessa Fenton would one day seek to do so, as both Odessa and the father she knew were poor and Black, while the man she would eventually come to love was not only married but well-to-do and white. This is a story about a post-Depression foster child who struggles to find social acceptance and professional success in the face of great odds.
Choke, Darnella Ford, St Martin’s Griffin, ISBN: 0-312-34803-7, $13.95.
For Vanessa, a low-income housing complex in the middle of the desert in El Mirage, Arizona, represents all that is wrong with her life. Her neighbors get it on all night long, she and her daughter witness a murder in the courtyard, and her ex-husband keeps showing up and getting into her pants. The one bright spot in Vanessa’s life is her daughter, Kennedy, and Kennedy’s love for the piano. She is practicing to audition for an esteemed music academy that Vanessa can in no way afford – especially after losing her housekeeping job. But Vanessa isn’t one to give up, and she’ll do anything to help her daughter succeed, even if it means selling her body and soul.
The Taylor Ranch War, Dick Johnson, Authorhouse, ISBN: 1-4208-8979-6, $15.70.
When Shirley Romero was a little girl in the isolated and mostly Hispanic town of San Luis, Costilla County, southern Colorado, her family and friends went fishing, gathered firewood and had festive holiday picnics in the timbered canyons of La Sierra under snowcapped Culebra Peak. Then in the spring of 1960, Jack Taylor, a tough timberman from North Carolina, told the poverty-level villagers he had purchased 77,500 acres on the mountain, one of the last major remnants of a huge and famous 1844 Mexican land grant. The land became known as the Taylor Ranch, and the purchase changed the lives of the villagers forever.
Mrs. Big, Maryann Reid, St. Martin’s Griffin, ISBN: 0-312-34199-7, $13.95.
Loletta Hightower has a taste for finer things, but her current job as a receptionist makes it exceedingly difficult to maintain her lifestyle. Although she can use her skills to squeeze some bucks out of her athlete of the month, she’s looking for a little more security – in the form of a ring. Her dreams come true when she bags Kavon “Big” Jackson, a major NBA player. But she quickly learns that having a rich, famous husband isn’t just about the fancy lifestyle. Loletta soon finds herself caught with an abusive husband who has a big temper and an even bigger wandering eye. She begins to wonder if the nightmare will ever end. However, she’s got a few surprises for everyone up her sleeve. As recent headlines and reality shows dictate, the wives of athletes, like Loletta, are no longer behind the bench. They are front and center keeping their marriages together. Unfortunately, Loletta has a tough fight ahead of her.
The Soul Of A New Cuisine, Marcus Samuelsson, Wiley, ISBN: 0-7645-6911-2, $40.
In The Soul Of A New Cuisine, the author returns to the land of his birth to explore the continent’s rich diversity of cultures and cuisines. From spice blends and rubs, condiments, sauces and dips, salads, sides, soups, stews, vegetables, breads, fish and seafood, poultry, meat and game, desserts, and drinks, this stunning and lavishly photographed volume offers an exciting culinary world waiting to be discovered. Samuelson encourages readers to reach beyond the recipes and incorporate the relaxed, communal spirit of African cooking into everyday meals. The widely-varied cuisine and resplendent spirit that emerges in The Soul Of A New Cuisine is a window on a tantalizing new cuisine, as well as the inspiring diary of a boy’s search for home.
In the Shadow of My Sister, Elizabeth A. Smith, 5th Street Books, ISBN: 978-0-9776359-3-1, $14.99.
After a lifetime of disappointments, Dana Russell has finally endured enough of her sister’s behavior. Dana is determined that her beautiful sister Simone won’t get the chance to sink her teeth into the most perfect man either sister has ever encountered. Dana has always competed with her sister for friends, lovers and everyone else’s attention, but this time she has made up her mind to win.
Paris Alvarez has come into Dana’s life purely by chance and she is determined to keep him at all costs. Meanwhile, Simone tries every trick she has to destroy Dana’s relationship with Paris, even if it means shaking their family to the very core and risking her own life in the process.
Lick, L. Young, Reality Publishing, ISBN: 0-615-13028-3, $19.95.
Imagine a story set in the mid 1980s in Chicago, Illinois that follows the infamous “Tylenol” poisoned pill scare that began during 1982. However, unlike the several lives claimed by the use of medicine laced with cyanide, Lick begins with the deaths of forty-five people from all walks of life, who reportedly die from “heart attacks.” The deaths appear to be random. And in a city the size of Chicago, no one takes any real notice. After all, in a city with millions, heart attacks are just normal everyday occurrences, often an unfortunate part of stress associated with living in a pressure cooker environment. But are they all?
Man Overboard, The Ramblings, Songs, Visions, Poems, and Laments From A Man Overboard, William P. Powell, Author House, ISBN: 1-4208-7949-9, $14.50.
This book is described by its author as a thought-provoking and enlightened and inspirational book that illuminates and transforms the thoughts of the mind and stimulates self-examination. The author states that, in a moment of time, life had dredged up a heap of all his misery and set it in sight of his heart. That precipitated a vast storm bearing a massive downpour of tears and from those tears, and while in that dark place, this book was written. He states he found a profound but simple meaning to life. A must read that crosses gender and all belief systems.
Book Reviews by Kam Williams
Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture, John Strausbaugh, Afterword by Darius James, Tarcher/Pengui, Hardcover, $24.95,
384 pages, illustrated, ISBN: 1-58542-498-.
“Listening to Knipp, a white man, impersonating Shirley Q. Liquor, a Black woman, was one thing. Actually seeing a white man in blackface drag on a stage in New York City in the 21st Century was an entirely different experience… there is much about Shirley that seems a throwback to more openly racist times. Her character is an easily recognized stereotype: the Black welfare queen.
She’s a single mother on government assistance, who claims she has never worked a day in her life. She speaks Ebonics with a broad Gulf States drawl.” She has nineteen ‘chirrun.’ In one of her routines, ‘Who Is My Baby Daddy?’ she croons the children’s names, including Cheetoh, Limbo, Curtis, Lemonjello, Orangejello, Kmartina, Velveeta, Cocoa Puffs, Maybelline, Gingivitis, Brylcreem, Nyquil and Sh*thead. She drinks malt liquor, smokes too much, drives a Cadillac…
At its best, Knipp’s humor is inspired satire of an America seen from its lowest rung, poking equal fun at Blacks and whites, rich and poor. At his worst, Knipp stoops to traffic in the lowest, most common, racist jokes.”
-- Excerpted from Chapter 1, “Blackface in the 21st Century”
During the 19th Century, minstrel shows were responsible for providing the most popular and enduring form of entertainment across America. “Coon shows,” featuring characters with names like “Jim Crow” and “Sambo” toured the country with casts comprised of white clowns darkened by a combination of burnt cork and bright red lipstick.
In the first half of the 20th Century, such showbiz greats as Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Shirley Temple, Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor could still be found performing in blackface whether on the Broadway stage or in Hollywood movies. But with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the practice finally fell in disfavor and was deemed socially unacceptable.
So, it naturally comes as something of a surprise to see that some folks are choosing to break the taboo in the 21st Century as we witness a resurgence of what had come to be considered a shameful stain on the nation’s past. John Strausbaugh examines this phenomenon in Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture, a book which carefully chronicles the history of minstrelsy from its inception in 1832, through its assorted permutations, right up to the present-day incarnations.
To a certain extent, the author blames gangsta’ rap for the genre’s re-emergence, since that music’s free use of the N-word has been seized upon by whites inclined to rationalize resurrecting the mindset of yesteryear. As Strausbaugh explains,
“The word ‘nigger,’ which for decades was so taboo
it could be rendered only as ‘the N-word,’ began to resurface
in the 1990s. While still extremely controversial and scandal-
provoking, its ubiquity in rap lyrics created a social context in
which some white Americans have felt emboldened to use it
as well.”
Though at times disturbing, as in its posture that hip-hop, as the latest form of minstrelsy, is simply carrying on a racist tradition of ridiculing African Americans in the most demeaning ways imaginable, Black Like You, nonetheless, simultaneously offers an excellent analysis of a dysfunctional culture perhaps already too permeated by self-hatred and an inclination towards the toxic mistreatment of minorities to bother adhering to any politically-correct ideals.
Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away, June Cross, Viking Adult, Hardcover, $24.95, 320 pages, illustrated, ISBN: 0-670-88555-X.
“My mother was an aspiring actress. She had separated from my father, a well-known song-and-dance man, shortly after I was born, in January 1954. My mother had met him backstage at the Paramount in 1949, before television changed show business forever.
They said I looked exotic, she classic. Together- a bamboo-colored redhead carrying her olive-skinned, curly-haired daughter- together, we seemed alien. Skin fractured our kinship… Even at four, I knew that something was amiss.
Excerpted from Chapter 1, “Bedrock”
Ten years ago, PBS aired a documentary entitled Secret Daughter, a gut-wrenching bio-pic about the life of little orphan June, abandoned by both of her parents at an early age to be raised by strangers in Atlantic City. What made Ms. Cross’ story so compelling was not the fact that her father was Black and her mother was white, but that her mother was such an ice princess when her long-lost daughter tracked her down with a camera crew to ask her why she had dumped her on the doorstep of people she barely knew so many years ago.
June came off as oh-so-masochistic trying to kiss-up to her cold-hearted mom, Norma, who did little to hide her annoyance that this sepia skeleton would come jumping out of her closet at a time when she was happily-married and had a white daughter with actor Larry “Corporal Agarn” Storch of F-Troop fame. Anyway, after hitting an emotional dead end retracing her roots, one would think that Cross would drop the “Love me, Mommy!” act and move on with her life.
But with both her mother and father, Stump, now deceased, June decided that it was time to write a memoir of the same name. Unfortunately, the book is not nearly as riveting as the already televised account of her unfortunate ordeal. The problem is that she is far too inclined to give her absentee-mom a pass, ostensibly because the woman was white, and that segregation is an acceptable excuse for their separation back in the Fifties.
While I admire the author for wearing her various vulnerabilities on her sleeve, she obviously remains damaged goods and inclined to make delusional rationalizations when, in my opinion, she ought to be tap-dancing on her mother’s grave (and maybe on Stump’s, too.) June just doesn’t understand that there’s never an acceptable excuse for the way that racist witch denied and mistreated her till the day she died.
Before she tries to convince the world that her mother was misunderstood and actually really loved her, June needs to convince herself, and then figure a way to erase the monster we saw on that damning PBS broadcast from our collective memory.
Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof, Kola Boof (aka Naima Bint Harith),
Doors of Kush, Harcover, $25, 441 pages, illustrated, ISBN: 0-9712019-8-6.
“The Hip Hop Holocaust would signal the birth of a new ideology amongst American Blacks, a new cultural ethic that would eventually migrate to Blacks all over the world—a cultural ethic that now openly embraced and promoted materialism, misogyny, disloyalty and anarchy. Whereas the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements had unified Black people worldwide and brought about independence and nation-building in Africa, and a huge renaissance in self-love, unity and empowerment… -- the Hip Hop Holocaust destroyed all that.
“This was the music that eventually renamed the mothers of the men who performed it—‘bitches’ and ‘hos’ – and made it fashionable to be colorist (against Black women) and self-centered (bling-bling). I call it a ‘holocaust’ because it effectively killed the core community in Black America and completely bamboozled the Black youth and separated them from their true worth… no one was willing to stand up to the Hip Hop anarchists.
I was there, a new American and a Black child in 1980… What others praise as a revolutionary new expression of the ‘Black man’s’ experience in America… I regard, in retrospect, as a poison against the people.”
-- Excerpted from Chapter Six, “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of”
For some reason, it often takes an expatriate to make a seminal contribution to a culture. Such is the case with Kola Boof, whose heartbreaking and brutally-honest autobiography, Diary of a Lost Girl, might be the most brilliant deconstruction of the plight of present-day African Americans yet written.
The title of this alternately thought-provoking and moving memoir was ostensibly inspired by Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, the literary classic which chronicled the last days of a Dutch teenager trying to maintain her sanity, humanity and a sense of optimism while making sense of the Holocaust as Nazism enveloped Europe.
Well, Ms. Boof, whose real name is Naima Bint Harith, has written an equally-evocative account of her own harrowing tale of survival. Born in The Sudan in March of 1972, she was orphaned at the age of seven after her parents were murdered for speaking out against the government’s involvement in the revival of the slave trade. After being abandoned by her grandmother for being too dark before finding temporary political asylum in Great Britain, she arrived in the United States a year later a “trembling, frightened wreck.” She was adopted by a kindly African American couple with a big family who lived in a nice house in a residential section of Washington, DC.
Sadly, the host of woes of Biblical proportions being visited upon the unfortunate little immigrant just continued. Tested more than Job, besides hearing her mother and father die, Kola suffered circumcision, a heart attack, betrayal by a bisexual boyfriend, molestation, statutory rape, discrimination, ostracism and accusations of being a witch, all before getting out of her teens.
It is important to note English is not her native language, so she had the additional burden of learning to communicate in a new tongue. But of all the challenges she would face in America, it appears that none would prove to be as difficult as dealing with the self-hatred and second-class status she found among Blacks.
Speaking frankly about such taboo subjects as the color-coded caste system among African Americans, she bemoans how brothers “judge the worth of Black women by (a) how light-skinned they are, (b) how Euro-slender they are, and (c) the texture of their hair.” But she doesn’t let sisters off easy either, indicting them for trying to adapt to a European standard of beauty and thereby “becoming walking billboards for the general society’s message that whiteness is superior.”
Kola Boof is never one to mince words; thus, her iconoclastic ideas aren’t for everyone. “You should not come into this book expecting to like Kola Boof,” she warns. “My purpose as a literary artist is not to be liked, but to be understood—regardless of whether I’m right or wrong… I spent my whole life being dictated to by American media and nigger media about what to believe and think—and so now it’s my turn, as an African woman and womb-bearer, to do the dictating. If you don’t appreciate my candor—then write your own goddamned book; this one is mines.”
Reserving perhaps her harshest words for Islam, which she repeatedly criticizes as anti-female, Boof claims to be in hiding due to death threats. If true, this development is no surprise, given the serious accusations leveled on these pages, and the fatwas issued by Muslim fundamentalists in reaction to such relatively mild detractors as Salman Rushdie.
When not excoriating Islam, Boof recalls, with a refreshingly unguarded honesty, her assorted sexual and romantic liaisons ranging from Osama bin Laden at one extreme, to a married Jewish businessman at the other, with a rainbow coalition of lovers betwixt and between, with a stated preference for Black men. In sum, Diary of a Lost Girl is an admirable addition to the genre of African American autobiography. For, warts and all, it represents the unalloyed emotions of an intelligent, defiant, controversial, frequently profane and proud Black woman, a survivor who somehow overcame one of the worst childhoods imaginable to share an abundance of intriguing, if debatable, insights about her adopted homeland.
Postscript: While the Internet is abuzz with rumors and speculation surrounding Kola Boof, for purposes of this review this critic simply assessed Diary of a Lost Girl on its own merits, without entertaining extraneous issues raised elsewhere.
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution, Simon Schama,
Ecco Press, Hardcover, $29.95, 496 pages, illustrated, ISBN: 0-06-053916-X.
“Seeing the Revolutionary War through the eyes of enslaved Blacks turns its meaning upside down…The vaunted war for liberty was a war for the perpetuation of servitude. The contortions of logic were so perverse, yet so habitual, that George Washington could describe [Virginia Governor] Dunsmore as ‘that arch traitor to the rights of humanity’ for promising to free slaves whilst those who kept them in bondage were heroes of liberty.
“[Therefore] for Blacks, the news that the British were coming was a reason for hope, celebration and action.”
-- Excerpted from the Introduction
In order to appreciate Rough Crossings fully, you have to be prepared to throw out virtually every preconceived notion you are probably harboring about the birth of this nation. The self-serving myths long propagated about the American Revolution would have us believe that the Founding Fathers were a brave and idealistic freedom-loving bunch who altruistically took up arms in the name of independence over the issue of taxation without representation.
Truth be told, it turns out that the Civil War wasn’t the first to be waged over slavery on this country’s soil. The real reason for the revolt in 1776 had more to do with the colonists’ reluctance to abolish slavery than with differences over the King’s tax rate.
As a consequence, the leaders of the rebellion were all slave owners, including such supposed heroes as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Patrick Henry. But I bet you never heard of Henry Washington, a slave of General George who escaped from the plantation to enlist in an all- Black British regiment to take up arms against old wooden choppers. Why did Henry do so? Because England had promised freedom outright to any slaves from rebel plantations who agreed to fight with the Redcoats.
Thanks to Columbia University Professor Simon Sharma, author of Rough Crossings, we now know that Henry Washington was not alone. Although the history books canonize Crispus Attucks, a Black man, as the first patriot to die for the noble cause at the Boston Massacre, it seems that he had aligned himself with the wrong side, at least as far as the interests of Africans in America were concerned.
In fact, for every Attucks, there were probably a thousand Henry Washingtons. While the Loyalists eagerly recruited Blacks, in 1776, Congress passed a law specifically excluding slaves from massa’ George Washington’s Continental Army. The author refers to this wholesale flight of runaways as the Revolutionary War’s “dirty little secret,” estimating that about 100,000 slaves defected during the conflict.
Yet, the Father of Our Country, whose virtues continue to be extolled in hypocritical history books as a man who could never tell a lie, is exposed, here, as an inveterate two-face who deliberately defamed his opposition as being against freedom when it was he and his racist cohorts who had answered the call to arms to preserve the institution of slavery. In sum, Rough Crossings represents a long-overdue revision of fiction into spellbinding factual narratives which answer lots of long-suppressed questions about a seminal period in American lore.
Required reading as a counterbalance to all the patriotic claptrap we’ve been fed for generations.
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