When you can fly, there’s no burden you can’t bear.  When you can fly, gravity can’t touch you.  When you can fly…you can do anything.

I love the cartoon Static Shock, and so I was hoping against hope that my library either had Static in stock or had it available via ILL. Sadly, it did not.  But!  Icon: A Hero’s Welcome was available, and since I love Dwayne McDuffie (creator of Static Shock, one of the writers/producers of Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, and now a writer for Ben 10) (also, and not to put too fine a point on it, he started his own comic book company because he wanted to be able to write the stories he wanted to tell), I figured reading Icon was practically the same as reading Static.

The basic premise of I:AHW is “What if Superman was black?” Augustus Freeman IV crash lands on earth during slavery, imitates the looks of the person who finds him (a slave woman), and then lives a really long time.  He decides to become a superhero after a teenage girl, Rocket, tells him how helpful it would be for other African-Americans to know they have a hero of their own.

What I Liked

- Rocket is kind of amazing.  I love that Augustus is inspired by her, I like that she sees so much more for herself and the people she knows, I like that she calls Augustus on his inaccessible man on the hill persona (he’s a lawyer).  She becomes his sidekick not because he takes her in, but because she pushes him to do more.  That’s kind of cool.

- There’s a lot of commentary on race, gender, and class in the book.  Rocket, as an African-American teenage girl, has more possible complications for her life [she gets pregnant] than, say, Dick Grayson.  She is not an orphan but lives in the projects, so sees her relationship with Augustus as a way to access so much more.  And it’s not just his wealth that attracts her, but his access to education.

Race-wise, Rocket and her friends try to rob Augustus because they assume it’s a white person’s house, and they initially mistake him for the butler.  When Icon and Rocket show up to help the police, they try to shoot him.  Because, obviously, he must be a bad guy who is part of the plot against the mayor. Superman never has these problems.

I already mentioned some of the class effects re: Rocket, but there’s another subplot that discusses a community forgotten after a major riot in Dakota.  The book addresses turf wars, helplessness, and politics.

The book also operates as a commentary on what’s missing from the traditional superhero story that focuses on white, male characters.

What I Didn’t Like

- Calling it a dislike is strong, but the artwork is kind of dated.  The colors are very purple and yellow and, you know, 1990s’ Cross Colours.  So it’s fitting for the time, but dated for the now.  I still liked it overall.

In conclusion:  Solid characters, fantastic premise, and a solid story make this a very nice introduction to the Icon brand and Milestone Comics.  I really wish I could get my hands on Static now.  Moreso than before, even.

POC Reading Challenge:  14/15; YA Reading Challenge:  21/75

See larger image Icon: A Hero's Welcome (New Edition) (Paperback) By (author) Dwayne McDuffie List Price: $19.99 USD New From: $9.50 In Stock Used from: $6.07 In Stock Release date October 6, 2009.

So you will have to know something about the time and place where I come from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life.

Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston is another book I chose specifically for the Women Unbound challenge.  I read Their Eyes Were Watching God in undergrad and some of her literary criticism in my lit theory classes, so I thought it befitting to read about her life in her own words.

This book was a lot of fun to read.  Unlike Angela Davis, Hurston is a novelist as well as a folklorist, so her autobiography is alive with characters and settings.  The first half or so is told chronologically and the second half includes her musings on her friends, religion, race, and reading.  Even though the second half is not story-like in its narration, it’s still an easy and relatively fast read because it’s easy to hear Hurston’s voice and imagine you’re just sitting down for a chat and she’s telling you what she thinks.

The version of the book I read has a foreword by Maya Angelou and an afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In the foreword, Angelou calls the book “puzzling” because, although the book was written 1940-1941, there are no mentions of unpleasant racial incidents and that the nicest people Hurston encountered were whites–one of whom cautioned her not to be a “nigger,” which Hurston notes does not mean race, but a contemptible person of any race.  Angelou wonders who the audience for the book is.  At the end, to sandwich it, Gates says that Hurston gives an account of a “writer’s life, rather than an account, as she says, of ‘the Negro problem’” because so much of the book is focused on her sources of language (294).  I only point it out because I find it fascinating to think about how to read the book, especially since race is certainly not absent in the book.  In fact, there’s a part where the men in Hurston’s town are pretty sure someone’s been lynched, though she doesn’t use that word.  What Hurston does, and pretty masterfully, I think is make this point:

Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole.  God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them.  I learned that skins were no measure of what was inside people.

and also

I have no race prejudice of any kind.  My kinfolks, and my “skinfolks” are dearly loved.  My own circumference of everyday life is there.  But I see their same virtues and vices everywhere I look.

She shows most of her experiences as a young girl and young woman living in a world where people don’t ignore her race but she is not treated horribly because of it.  It makes sense that she would write the book this way.  Part of what incensed some of her contemporaries about her was her refusal to act differently around whites and her insistence on being fully herself.  No citation for that, but my professor told me so it must be true!  (It’s also mentioned in the afterword.)

In the latter half, she slams local politics, the way people relate to race.  She talks about love.  I found a lot of her conclusions interesting, mostly because she reminds me a lot of the character Temperance Brennan on Bones.  So, to that end, maybe it’s an anthropology thing?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I found her critiques of government and religion fascinating.  Which makes sense since she’s fascinating.  I also think the appendix and the section on race are brilliant satire.  I almost didn’t read the appendix because I thought it was just repeating what was in the text, but the appendix shows different versions of some of the chapters.  So the appendix offers a more complete picture.

There is some (a lot!) of narrative distance here.  The writing is personally impersonal or impersonally personal in a lot of ways.  I do understand Hurston as a writer, but I was disappointed that she skimmed over her time doing research and her experiences when she won the Guggenheim, etc., but it may be because she felt her contemporaries were familiar enough with her work.

What the book did do is make me want to go back and read some of her literary criticism.  While she makes a case for individualism, she obviously supports honest and authentic portrayals of culture as evidenced in her writing, and so I want to go back and read what she says about writing outside of the autobiography.

Women Unbound: 3/8; POC Challenge:  2/15

I was not anxious to write this book.  Writing an autobiography at my age seemed presumptuous.  Moreover, I felt that to write about my life, what I did, what I thought and what happened to me would require a posture of difference, an assumption that I was unlike other women–other Black women–and therefore needed to explain myself.  I felt that such a book might end up obscuring the most essential fact:  the forces that have made my life what it is are the very same forces that have shaped and misshaped the lives of millions of my people.

When I signed up for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge, I knew immediately that I was going to read Angela Davis’s autobiography.

I feel like I can’t even talk about this book without talking about why I wanted to read it.  So, a brief history.

I have seen this book practically my whole life because my mother owns it.  (It has a slightly different cover than the picture in this post.)  I never read it.

In college, I read Assata:  An Autobiography, and I absolutely loved it.  LOVED IT.  I was enthralled by her, wanted to know more about the Black Panthers.  So when my professor said he was going to teach a class on the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, I signed up.  [The Wikipedia page may be more accessible.]  And I read a host of literature by and about the Panthers.  We read Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown and George Jackson.  We read about Eldridge Cleaver and Li’l Bobby Hutton and the Soledad Brothers.  (My favorite book we read that semester was David Hilliard’s This Side of Glory.  I wrote a paper on it.)  I saw the movie. Still, I didn’t read her book.  (It wasn’t on the list.)

Angela Davis came to speak at Iowa State University when I was a student there.  I went; I was enthralled by her words.  She is an eloquent speaker.  Still, I didn’t read her book.

When I went to Oakland this summer, I considered going on the tour.  I didn’t go for boring financial and time reasons.  And still, I didn’t read Angela Davis’s book.

Until the challenge came, and I knew there was no excuse not to anymore.  In fact, I was going to make it my first non-fiction read for the challenge.  So when I went to my parents’ house for Christmas, I asked my mom if I could read her copy, and she told me yes, and I started it the day after Christmas.

And finished it a month later.

I was kind of surprised by how long it took me to read the book.  It’s well-written to be sure, and I have read these types of autobiographies before (see above), but for some reason I couldn’t quite engage with the book.  Then I figured out what it was.  The last memoir I read was I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and the two books are vastly different in style.  For one, Angelou’s book reads like a novel.  There’s dialogue and scene building and characters.  Not so with Davis.  And that’s when I realized I was reading the book wrong.

Romanticizing the plight of oppressed people is dangerous and misleading.

This is an autobiography, but it’s intention is not to describe people and places.  It’s not even to provide a clear snapshot of Davis’s transformation into a revolutionary leader.  Her assumption is that the reader understands all of that (probably because it was first published in 1974, on the heels of the Black Liberation Movement).  When I guide my students in their reading, I always tell them they should be able to answer one question clearly at the end of a selection:  “What am I supposed to do, think, or feel after reading this?”  I know what I wanted to think and feel when I was reading.  But what I actually wound up realizing is that this is the chronicle of the events that led to Davis being on the FBI hit list.  It’s to show what she was actually doing and involved in while the charges were being trumped up against her.  It’s also to show the conditions of prisons and prisoners, the importance of communication between prisoners and those outside, the reasons we shouldn’t isolate their experiences from our own.  It’s to show the systematic oppression of blacks and women and black women.

Prisoners–particularly Black prisoners–were beginning to think about how they got there–what forced them into prison.  They were beginning to understand the nature of racism and class bias.  They were beginning to recognize that regardless of the specific details of their individual cases, most of them were in prison because they were Black, Brown, and poor.

When I finished the book, I didn’t feel like I knew Angela Davis the person or the adolescent, the way I felt I knew Marguerite after reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or even Harriet Jacobs after reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or Frederick Douglass or David Hilliard.

But I do understand Angela Davis as an intellectual and a fighter.  I understand her approach to activism, the fact that she won’t tolerate bullshit from the people she works with or the people who sought to silence her. I also understand that there are benefits to being educated, to being a part of the intelligentsia, and to knowing and understanding our rights.

This is, in actuality, her defense.  She talks about her trial and that she and her legal team had set up a fantastic defense, intended to last days or weeks.  But it was condensed to three or so days once it became clear that the prosecution had nothing on her.  But the thought and care put into the autobiography shows what she put into her opening and closing statements of her trial.  This is the narrative to support her defense, not the narrative, necessarily, of her life.  It’s her story in her words and it paints a complete picture of the woman who stood trial, why she stood trial, and how she accounted for her time before and during her trial.

Jails are thoughtless places. [...] The void created by this absence of thought is filled by rules and…fear.

When I saw Angela Davis speak at ISU, she spoke again of the importance of connections in prison.  She spoke about the importance of narratives, and how important it is for the voice of the people to be heard.  She talked about how the media shapes our responses and our forgetfulness.  All things addressed in her autobiography.

The tremendous energy of the movement which had so swiftly transformed my jail situation was energy my sisters and brothers had a more than equal right to.  I tried to assuage some of my pain by establishing contact with sisters and brothers in prisons all over the country. [...] I answered letter after letter from prisoners…More than ever before I felt a need to cement my links to every other prisoner.  My very existence, it seemed, was dependent on my ability to reach out to them.  I decided then and there that if I was ever free, I would use my life to uphold the cause of my sisters and brothers behind walls.

I’m glad I got over my assumptions of what I thought the book should be and appreciated for what it is.  It’s a political document, not a story narrative.  It’s Angela Davis speaking in her own voice and constructing her own narrative and making sure her story isn’t forgotten.  But it’s also a call to not let other people’s stories be forgotten.  It’s a call to keep fighting for the rights of those who maybe can’t speak for themselves, especially political prisoners.  It’s a call for a continuing social justice movement.

What had just unfolded was incontrovertible proof of the power of the people.

Women Unbound Challenge:  1/8; POC Challenge:  1/15

“Superman’s not brave. [...] He’s indestructible. You can’t be brave when you’re indestructible. It’s guys like you and me that are brave, Angus. Guys who are different and can be crushed–and know it–but go out there anyway.”

Athletic Shorts:  Six Short Stories by Chris Crutcher is…a book of six short stories.  All of the stories except one feature characters from his books Stotan!, Running Loose, and The Crazy Horse Electric Game.  Of those books, I have read exactly none–not that it matters.  The stories are accessible and stand up well on their own.  They are also slightly spoilery for the other books–not that that matters either.  If anything, they made me more interested in the stories and worlds featured.

What I Liked

- My favorite story is probably the first one, “A Brief Moment in the Life of Angus Bethune.”  Mine and Hollywood’s since it was turned into a movie.  At any rate, Angus’s parents are awesome, his voice is awesome, and the story is a lot of fun.  It’s one of the two more light-hearted of the six stories, so that’s also a plus.

- Even though these are short stories, they are clasic Chris Crutcher, dealing with issues of death, racism, abuse, guilt, homophobia, and bullying.  You know, the usual.

- “The Telephone Man” is the story about racism and it is uncomfortable to read because it’s from the POV of a racist, but I liked its honesty.  Before each story is a small explanation for it, and this is what Crutcher says about Telephone Man:

Racism speaks volumes about those who hide behind it, says exactly nothing of those at whom is it directed.

I think the story does a great job of exposing the kid who hides behind racism and also where he gets his ideas.  (Hint:  It’s his daddy!)

- I loved the story about homophobia.  It was very affecting.  Great characters.

What I Didn’t Like

- I think there was maybe one story I’d count as a weak link.

In conclusion:  One weak link makes for a very solid short story collection.  It’s  a great introduction to the themes that dominate Chris Crutcher’s works as well as to his storytelling style.  I liked it a lot.

YA Challenge:  3/75

“If you’re colored you get the short end of the stick.  If you’re a woman, you get the short end of the stick.  So what do we get for being colored and women?”

Jolene sighs.  “Beat hard with both ends of a short stick.”

Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith has a very cool premise:  Ida Mae Jones wants to join the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots), but, in order to do so, she has to pass for white.

What I Liked

- Like I said, the premise is very cool.  It’s a great way to introduce the history of World War II, race and racism, and also women pilots.  Women pilots!  That’s just cool by itself.

- The women characters.  I loved all of the women, and I especially loved all of their reasons for joining because they were so varied.  There is also a  fantastic camaraderie between Ida Mae and her two closest comrades:  Patsy Kake (LOVE that name) and Lily.

- Jolene, Ida Mae’s friend back home.  Jolene is awesome.

- The cover is fantastic.

What I Didn’t Like

- Sigh.  This book just didn’t sit well with me.  I love the premise, but my main issue with the book is that the issue of passing felt so surface.  I never felt that Ida Mae was ever in danger, and passing IS danger.  When I think of Imitation of Life–the Lana Turner version–there are so many moments where the desperation of Sarah Jane and the threat of being black are so palpable, and in this story I never get that.  Part of it is the setting.  Because the training is so removed from any town, Ida Mae is only fearful of getting too dark in the sun or her hair curling up, but…several of the women protect their hair.

There is one scene SO PROBLEMATIC that I think it’s what derailed everything for me.  Ida Mae is in a store, and there is a black man there.  The man TALKS UNDER HIS BREATH to Ida Mae, and there are no consequences.  This is pre-Emmet Till, okay?  In what keeps being described as a deeply racist Texas.  I just cannot believe that there was no present danger in the story at all.  And then I found what Ida Mae does at the end with regards to a job opportunity so unfathomable that I just…yeah.

So, in conclusion, the passing aspect was poorly handled for me.  All of the dangers of passing were very tell instead of show.

- I also didn’t really care about Ida Mae’s brother Thomas, even though he is basically the reason she joins the war effort.  He’s so absent from the story that whether he came home or not really made no difference at all to me.  I…do not think I was supposed to feel that way.

- The story was very dry.  One of my favorite books is A Northern Light, which is also historical fiction, and I was very caught up in Maddie’s world and story separate from the historical focal point.  It felt like the point of Flygirl was the history lesson of WASP more so than anything else.  Which, honestly, is fine if that’s what you want in a novel.  But I wanted a story to latch on to.

- I also didn’t feel like the story ever really explored the breakout quote.  In some ways, Ida Mae’s choice is the very essence of the quote–hard, even impossible, choices–but, on the other hand, the lack of danger, and her ease at moving between worlds didn’t really give the story an opportunity to go all the way there.

In conclusion:  I have really mixed feelings about this book.  The writing is good, the premise is very cool, but I found the execution lacking.  I just wanted more.  More Jolene, more implications, more feeling.  The women are very kickass, though.  Very much so.

ETA:  I read this with the Women Unbound challenge in mind.  The book is definitely about the options available to women and the choices they make and how they’re treated once they make those choices.  One of the big issues in the book is the lack of respect the women get from men they encounter–some of whom are tapped to train them–and how they’re not given their due by the very armed forces they’re fighting so hard to help.  That part of the story, btw, did work for me.  It’s just the passing stuff that didn’t.