Mill Brook House News

Hong Kong University Book Talk on Ozu: A Closer Look

If you haven't read the book but you'd like to see the movie, here is the link: https://youtu.be/lISq-7bID94

 

Fox and I by Catherine Raven

This is a searingly beautiful account of Catherine Raven’s journey from alienation to healing through the ministrations of an unusual wild fox.  Raven is a survivor, a hardy soul from a dysfunctional family, highly intelligent, acutely sensitive, and brutally honest.  Trained as a biologist, she rambles through an eclectic sampling of natural history and her own observations while attaching them to carefully chosen if idiosyncratic selections from literature: Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Lafcadio Hearn, and, especially, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose Little Prince she reads aloud to the fox (!).  Why, she asks, is mankind so detached from the natural world?  Why do we push it away, relegating it to “scientific scrutiny” (and too often wanton destruction) instead of viewing and nurturing it with the totality of our humanity?  A question ever more relevant as we stand on the brink of losing so much of this world…  Raven’s helplessness in the face of a wildfire from which she cannot save Fox seems emblematic of our present struggles.  Her ability to move past his death and pull together the fragmented strands of her life should give us hope and, perhaps, suggest a way forward.

 

 

 

Dreams Deferred

In his children’s book, A Home Run for Bunny, Western Mass author Robert Andersen tells the story of local heroes Ernest “Bunny” Taliaferro and Tony King, high school athletes from Springfield, MA. Taliaferro, an immensely gifted African-American athlete, and King, captain of their American Legion summer baseball team, were set to compete in a regional championship. The year was 1934, the region was the entire Atlantic seaboard, and the playoffs were held in Gastonia, North Carolina. A Gastonia band greeting the boys, none of whom had otherwise travelled further than Vermont, stopped dead when Bunny emerged from the train, and a confrontation with Southern apartheid began. Bunny, so nicknamed because of his jackrabbit running speeds, was forced to register as his coach’s valet and sleep on a cot rather than a bed in the team’s North Carolina hotel. His demonstrated prowess on the field during practice further enraged the local community, and the boys endured not only cat calls and an avalanche of projectiles but threats of violence, purportedly from the Ku Klux Klan. When teams from Florida and Maryland refused to play with Bunny on the field and it became clear that the local police would be unlikely to protect the Massachusetts boys from an angry mob if Bunny played, the youngsters were forced to choose between a championship they could likely win, even without Bunny, and loyalty to their teammate.  Captain Tony voted to abandon the playoffs, and his team members agreed without a single dissent.

For the locals, it wasn’t enough that the Massachusetts team had withdrawn. Refusing to honor their segregationist rules made the team a target, so the boys left town in the middle of the night, ferried to an abandoned railroad station in cars driven by sympathizers who left quickly, fearing for their own safety. A train headed north made an unscheduled stop and eventually deposited the young athletes in Springfield, where news of the incident had preceded their arrival. A huge cheering crowd greeted them with more fanfare and celebration than would have followed an actual victory.  Many years later one team member remarked on the quirks of history: “If we had gone ahead without Bunny, even if we had won the championship, no one would ever have heard of us.” Protesting the national organization’s indifference to racism, Springfield’s American Legion Post 21 disbanded its team in 1935. It was not revived until 2010.

Andersen’s picture book, illustrated by Gerald Purnell, received many plaudits when it was published in 2013 for reviving the story of Tony and Bunny, though I wonder if the subject matter isn’t too sophisticated for the Winnie-the-Pooh set, who know little of valets, the intricacies of regional sports competitions, or Jim Crow laws (as distinct from slavery or the bullying little ones are likely to be warned about today). A novella for older children, replete with more detail and fuller explanations as well as the imagined thoughts and feelings of the characters, the sights and sounds of each location, the thrill of train travel, the joy of playing sports and so on would be a more appropriate vehicle. Andersen is reportedly working on such a project, and I hope it finds a willing publisher.

Although Andersen makes Bunny the focus of his book, the story is not told from his point of view, and, given the current topicality of "white privilege," we should note that Tony King is the actual hero of the tale.  He is, in Biblical parlance, "a righteous man."  Tony and his white teammates have choices; Bunny has none, and his experience in Gastonia would shape his life.  Both Tony and Bunny remained in Western Massachusetts, but Tony just celebrated his 102nd birthday; Bunny would die at 50. Like many Holocaust victims and World War II vets, he never once told his children about his humiliating and terrifying encounter with race hatred and segregation in North Carolina. Referring to a newspaper picture her mother had kept of the crowd greeting the returning players, Bunny’s daughter Linda Taliaferro said, “Our grandparents were in that picture, and they had such anxious looks on their faces. I asked my mother why that was. ‘They didn’t know if their son would be coming home dead or alive,’” was the answer.  

Throughout his life Bunny continued to exhibit extraordinary skill in sports and played on some Triple A teams after high school, but he turned down college scholarships, including one to Dartmouth, married a local girl, raised six children and worked at the Springfield Armory and then a tire company.  As an African-American athlete he faced dubious alternatives in the late 1930’s. He could have accepted recruitment to a college team from which he would inevitably have been cut anytime the team ventured south of the Mason-Dixon line.  (Ivy League teams notoriously sidestepped the scruples of 15-year-old Tony King.)  He could have joined the poorly paid, roustabout, and ultimately frustrating world of the Negro Leagues or served in a segregated Armed Forces.  Jackie Robinson, two years Bunny's junior, would do all of these things and, in 1947, break the color barrier in major league baseball, but this was hardly a foregone conclusion.

The 1930’s were a progressive period fraught with inconsistencies in which Jesse Owens, fresh from his triumphs in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was feted with a ticker tape parade down Broadway and, that same night, refused a hotel room in New York City; a time when Hattie McDaniel, awarded an Oscar (the first and last black actress so honored until Whoopi Goldberg in 1990) for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, was compelled to sit at a segregated table in the back of the auditorium during the ceremony.  Even the lives of celebrated African-Americans, living outside the South, were rife with racist booby traps.

That Bunny chose to stay in Springfield, where he was known, loved, and celebrated, is understandable, but clearly the suppression of so much talent took a toll. He died in 1967, the same year Thurgood Marshall was elevated to the Supreme Court and a few years after major Civil Rights legislation was passed by Congress—all too late for the Springfield athlete. Tony King and other former team members carried his casket; the summer of '34 had forged lifelong bonds.  King would live to see Barak Obama serve two terms as President and his 1934 team remembered and honored in the first decades of the 21^st Century.  But it is probably Langston Hughes who, in 1951, evoked the ethos of Bunny’s story most poignantly:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Jackie Robinson did not outlive Bunny Taliaferro by many years.  Robinson lived his dream while Taliaferro shelved his, but both suffered under the burden of the era's unspeakable racism, and neither saw a ripe old age.

Kagoshima, Mon Amour

My favorite city in Japan made the news a few months ago, following a burst of lava from the side of its volcano, Sakurajima, sited in Kagoshima Bay. Sakurajima has had small eruptions for some time now, which are of concern because a nuclear plant lies only 30 miles away. For me the concern is personal, for Kagoshima holds a special place in my heart that stretches back to childhood.

It all began in 1957 when my parents took me to see Teahouse of the August Moon, a service comedy about the early days of the American Occupation of Okinawa. I adored it. (That Sakini, the Okinawan interpreter, was being played in yellow face by Marlon Brando went by me completely.) I watched my first grown-up movies (Oklahoma!, Tammy and the Bachelor) that summer, but in retrospect I realize that the trip to see Teahouse was meant mainly as a softening up tactic. A few weeks later, my mother confided that we ourselves would move to Okinawa that fall. I was thrilled.

When did I become a Japanophile? Was it pouring over Little Pictures of Japan from the My Book House series (of which we owned every volume) or playing with the clamshell novelties my mother brought back from New York’s Chinatown that opened up into beautiful paper flowers when soaked in a glass of water? Didn’t all children at the time try to dig a hole to China (which, we were told, lay just below us on the opposite side of the earth)? Perhaps we were all incipient orientalists. But in my case, it lay very close to the surface.

Eagerly anticipating a land of pine-covered hills and kimono-clad geishas, I was horribly disappointed six months later to find myself on a sub-tropical island, whose bright sunlight was blindingly intensified by the ubiquitous coral dust. A battle 12 years earlier had scoured the island, leaving much of it treeless. Pampas grass and sugar cane grew where vicious fighting once took place and often covered deadly unexploded ordinance. As ubiquitous as the coral dust were American military vehicles and installations. No pine trees lit by moonlight, no geishas, no soft breezes, no distant mountains. Teahouse, it turned out, had been shot on the Japanese mainland, not on Okinawa. (A recently constructed Teahouse of the August Moon did exist in Okinawa, but it had been inspired by the movie, not vice versa.)      

Although the island abounded in ancient local arts, whose revival the American military government had encouraged (and—as per the movie—cricket cages were for sale in every local tchotchke shop), at nine I had no more ability to appreciate the local pottery and textiles than I had to discern Marlon Brando under his make-up. I longed for the classical arts and picturesque landscapes of “real,” Japan, land of lanterns, ukiyoe and fireflies.

I was ecstatic, therefore, as I embarked with my mother and sister on my first trip to the main islands of Japan. We left on the overnight boat from Naha, Okinawa’s capital city, and landed the next day in Kagoshima, the southernmost port city of Japan’s four main islands. This time it was love at first sight. My mother had splurged and booked us into a genuine ryokan [Japanese inn]. Our tatami-mat-covered room opened onto an exquisite garden, and waitresses in kimono served our dinner and made up our beds, futon [thick quilts—the foam rubber kind hadn’t been invented yet] spread on the floor.

The inn sat atop the kind of pine-covered hill I had been waiting a whole year to see and looked down over the city. Houses with black tile roofs lay below, a contrast to the red tile roofs of the more affluent homes in Okinawa, and they had good reason to be black. Sakurajima, sitting majestically in the distance, issued a thin plume of smoke from its conical peak. Smoke billowed, too, from the steam locomotives that pulled the trains that wound around the city in the valley below us.

I had not been on a train since I was three and could only dimly remember the experience. Trains did not even exist in Okinawa, so I could barely contain my excitement, knowing we would soon be on that train, heading north to other cities in Japan.

Watching the train and actually riding on it were two different things, however. These steam-driven vehicles had no air conditioning, and, it being summer, the windows were all open, allowing soot from the smokestack to blow in, covering passengers, seats, and floors alike. Tunnels, of which there were many, particularly on the tracks between Kyoto and Tokyo, proved particularly obnoxious as the smoke had nowhere to go except into the train. Passengers rushed to close the windows, rendering the carriage hot and stuffy. Mostly, though, the long slow journey—Kagoshima to Kyoto required an overnight trip—felt incredibly boring to a ten-year-old.

At stations, hawkers filled the platforms, selling bento [lunch] boxes, constructed from the thinnest of thinly shaved wood, and tiny clay pots of tea, and passengers purchased these refreshments through their open windows. Once their contents had been consumed, the empty boxes and teapots, along with disposable chopsticks, all ended up on the floor of the train. Bored by the journey and  fascinated by the perfectly shaped clay pots, whose covers served as tiny cups and which varied in color, shape, and markings from station to station, I amused myself by crawling underneath the seats on the train’s dirty floor to collect them, much to our fellow passengers’ surprise and my mother’s chagrin. (Incredibly, this saintly woman, at my insistence, carried a very large basket of these discarded vessels back to Okinawa for me.)

The little teapots and many other charms of mainland Japan notwithstanding, the trip was hard on one as young as I. The shrines and temples in Kyoto began to all look alike, and in Tokyo I spent a whole day in bed, possibly sick but probably just exhausted. We broke our return journey in the spa town of Beppu—no one had warned us how tacky spa towns in Japan can be—but the long trip south was as tedious as the trip north, and the inn in Kagoshima beckoned like a long lost friend. (Trains, I decided, were best experienced from that hill above the city.)

 Besides Sakurajima and the beautiful ryokan, Kagoshima featured Satsuma-ware, an elegant white ceramic with a crackled glaze covered by delicately painted bird and flower decorations. Shiny and colorful—in contrast to subtle earth tones of much Japanese pottery, including Okinawan—it captured my ten-year-old heart and has never lost its charm for me.

Satsuma-ware derives its name from the feudal Satsuma Domain, which was ruled by the Shimazu daimyo from Kagoshima. Satsuma,
along with other southern provinces, led the revolt against the moldering Tokugawa Shogunate that produced the Meiji Reformation. Satsuma had, in fact, colonized Okinawa in 1609, making it a vassal state, although the island remained “officially” independent until 1879—one reason its culture remains so distinctive—when it was officially annexed to Meiji Japan.

Two summers after that first rocky trip to mainland Japan, we returned to the U.S. (though not before docking in Tokyo Bay in the midst of the 1960 Anpo riots), but 1964 found us back in Okinawa.  The following summer my mother and I made a three-week trip to Kyushu, Honshu and Shikoku where we visited with family, friends, and an array of Japanese potters. Once again Kagoshima welcomed us and became the first stop on our pottery tour, where my mother hunted down the Korean potters whose ancestors had developed Satsuma-ware. The ryokan had been a one-time extravagance, so we stayed in a modern hotel with a large accommodating garden.

Although the shinkansen [bullet train] now ran between Tokyo and Kyoto, Kagoshima to Tokyo still required an overnight journey, but diesel engines had replaced the steam engines, and, sadly, plastic teapots had replaced the charming clay ones formerly sold on station platforms. (Progress, as we know, is a two-edged sword.) I had looked forward to this trip as keenly as the first one, but, at 17, I was old enough to relish every aspect of it. Mist rising from acres of rice paddies graced by egrets, wooden houses with sliding doors and tile roofs, blocks of traditional wood-framed storefronts with their goods out front for customers to see and living quarters—with a cup of green tea for special guests—behind the store—today these things are mostly relegated to movies, museums and theme parks, but they were my Japan. In Shikoku, emerald green rivers ran down the mountains alongside the road our bus travelled. In Tokyo I joined Hiroko, my father’s former secretary, at her local public bath, and far up in the mountains of Kyushu, we visited potters in Onda, where all day long pestles, fueled by water flowing off the mountains, pounded clay. Thrilling but tiring, our trip ended once more in Kagoshima, where our gracious hotel and our ship home to Okinawa awaited us.  

A year later I went to camp in Tokyo with my Girl Scout troop. We travelled TDY in an Army cargo plane, but when I stayed on after camp to visit Hiroko in Tokyo, I was back to using local transportation. I rode the shinkansen for the first time to visit friends in Kyoto, then, late one night, boarded the overnight train to Kagoshima. The next evening I met a family in the garden of the hotel where my mother and I had stayed the year before, and, seeing I was alone, they scooped me up the next morning and brought me to their home for tea and a visit before my boat departed. This would not be my last encounter with the warm hospitality of Kagoshima.

I returned to the United States, went to college, became an art historian, and spent many years in Europe. Finally, in my mid-30’s I reunited with my Asian past when I began to study the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. (Ironically, in Okinawa Hiroko had taken my father to see Ohayo, one of Ozu’s late films, and he had described the delightful comedy to me in some detail. When, many years later, I finally connected the film he had described, which for a long time was marketed in the U.S. under the title “Good Morning,” to my beloved director, I asked my father if he remembered it. Although his account of the film had imbedded itself in my mind all those many years before, he had no recollection of it at all!)

In 1991, I returned to Japan, having accepted a teaching job at a college near Nagoya. That summer, my husband and I travelled south, visiting friends and tourist destinations and managing to attend memorial ceremonies for the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From Nagasaki, we headed, for nostalgia’s sake, to Kagoshima to catch the boat to Okinawa. No overnight sleeper this time, but our destination nevertheless required us to travel all day by bus, ferry, and train. The city had modernized, of course, but its rolling hills and comparative lack of congestion made a soothing contrast to the crowded cities of Honshu. I purchased my own Satsuma-ware, and rediscovered the hospitality I had enjoyed as a teenager when the young host at our minshuku [Japanese-style B&B] insisted on performing a tea ceremony for us.

We took the ferry to Sakurajima, but the majestic volcano seemed less benign than before. A thin layer of ash lay over the city and more thickly on the volcanic island itself. Several volcanoes near Nagasaki had erupted within the previous two years, and the ash around Kagoshima looked ominous.

Sakurajima’s largest eruption in modern times actually occurred in 1914. Thirty-five people on the island died and lava poured into the sea, creating the land bridge to the city of Kagoshima that exists today. The city itself was covered in a thick layer of ash but otherwise remained intact. Subsequently, the volcano lay quiet until 1955 when small eruptions began, hence the smoke I witnessed first in 1957. In 2009 the volcano spewed lava and ash more than a mile above its crater and exploded most recently on Feb. 5, 2016. No one was injured and Kagoshima-jin [people] considered the 2016 eruption “average.”

The threat posed by Sakurajima’s increased activity arises mainly from the fact that the Sendai nuclear plant in Satsumasendai, former capital of the Satsuma Domain, lies only 30 miles away. The first Sendai reactor was built in 1984, the second in 1985. (Japan’s first nuclear reactor was built in 1966.) After all of Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down in 2011 in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown, Sendai was the first to re-open (2015). Why Japan builds reactors close to live volcanos or on tidal plains or builds them at all, given the likelihood of earthquakes, is a mystery beyond solving in this essay.

Mainly, Sakurajima’s 2016 eruption reminded me of a city dear to my heart, which, like so much of Japan, lives on the edge of disaster with calm and dignity and grace.

 

Sakurajima photographs by Steven Sternbach 

 

 

Historic Deerfield’s Leap Year Celebration

In John Ford’s enormously seminal film The Searchers (1956), two men spend five years searching for a young girl who has been abducted by Indians. When they find her, she has entered her teens and become one of the chief’s wives. At first she declares her allegiance to the tribe but later changes her mind and agrees to return home with the men. The reasons for her change of heart are never explained, nor did they need to be for a 1950’s audience. The girl had obviously come to her senses, remembered her past, and realized the advantages of returning to “civilization.” Such was not the case, however, with most white women captured as children and raised up in Indian tribes.

One of the best documented cases is that of Eunice Williams, daughter of a prominent Puritan clergyman, who with her father and brother, was captured in the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, by Mohawk Indians and their French allies and marched 300 miles to Montreal through deep snow. The raid was a small piece of the War of the Spanish Succession—the one that made Winston Churchill’s ancestor Lord Marlborough famous—which had spilled over onto the American continent. The raid took place before dawn on February 29 and is commemorated every leap year by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. (Pocumtuck is the name both natives and colonists used for Deerfield at one time.)

This year’s commemorative events included lectures, reenactments, and demonstrations of colonial housekeeping crafts.

 Re-enactors, many of whom had come considerable distance, staged the battle that took place after the attack on Deerfield when militiamen from Northampton and other nearby settlements, seeing flames, marched to Deerfield and engaged the French and Indians as the last of them were leaving the burning village. Turned back by an ambush, the militiamen were unable to rescue any of the captives. This year about twenty re-enactors, pretending to be Frenchmen, English colonials, Mohawk and Abenaki, stood in for what had been a battle involving about 300 men. This left much to the imagination, but a narrator helpfully told the story while the actors “did battle” on a field at the Deerfield Academy.

As for Eunice Williams, although her father and brother were eventually “redeemed” (ransomed) and returned to Deerfield, she never went home. Captured specifically to take the place of a Mohawk child who had died, and converted to Catholicism by her Indian family, who lived in close proximity to the French, she refused every attempt by her father and brother to persuade her to return. As a teenager, she fell in love with a fellow tribesman, and, although dubious about the inter-racial union, the local padre married them when they declared they would live together unwed if he did not. Throughout his life, her brother, a clergyman like his father and tortured by fears for her immortal soul, wrote to and of her, and, on occasion, she and her husband visited him, pitching their tent in his yard in preference to sleeping in the house. Eunice herself remained illiterate, so we have no record of what she actually thought about her life with the Mohawk, although her actions speak quite loudly.

For more on Eunice Williams and the conundrum she posed for her family, see John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive (1994). To observe the next commemoration of the 1704 raid on Deerfield, you’ll have to wait until 2020.

Labor Day, starring Shelburne Falls

Mid-June, 2012, had Shelburne Falls and much of the rest of Franklin County all a-gawk as the film crew for Labor Day came to town. For several days, the village of Shelburne Falls became “Holton Mills, New Hampshire,” with principal filming in or in front of many local businesses: Rethreads, Keystone Market, Baker Pharmacy, and the Greenfield Savings Bank, among others. Friday, June 15, was a particularly exciting day as an enormous crane photographed young Gatlin Griffith (Henry) cycling across the Iron Bridge.

Shooting also occurred in parts of Turners Falls, Millers Falls, Greenfield, and Belchertown. Western Massachusetts seems to have enchanted director Jason Reitman, who called its combination of landscape and architecture “like…in a dream.” (The Recorder, 9/2/12)

Turners Falls High School film teacher Jonathan Chappell landed a summer job with the film’s “locations department,” which involved scouting and selecting locations, managing them during shooting, and making the necessary arrangements with town boards and property owners.  Since Labor Day was shot digitally, Chappell, who teaches digital filmmaking, was able to observe his craft applied in a big-budget production 

Folks from Western Mass watching the film will note that Shelburne Falls flies by pretty quickly and many of the landscapes don’t really resemble their part of the state. That’s because much of the film, including Adele’s house, where most of the action takes place, was shot in eastern Massachusetts: Acton, Mansfield, Natick, Medfield, and Medway. (The house is in Acton.) The production company headquartered itself in Natick, and, logistically, it made [dollars and] sense to film close to Natick where possible.

Unfortunately, the finished film is a bit of a dud.  Jason Reitman, so adept at directing zinging dialogue between gifted teens in Juno, is at a loss directing passion as observed by a mostly mute pre-teen. (Anyone would be, but for this Reitman, who wrote the script, has only himself to blame.) The film’s unlikely premise, a love-starved woman harboring and falling for a fugitive, isn’t new (think the farm episode in Grand Illusion or Heinrich Böll’s Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, adapted to film by Volker Schlöndorff). But to convince us to suspend disbelief, the hunger and the passion have to be visceral, and Labor Day throws in too many complications to succeed in this department. The revelation near the end of Adele’s miscarriages, for example, helps us understand why she seems more catatonic than simply love-starved, but that story element, along with son Henry’s ubiquity, inhibits rather than enhances the passion.

The narrative’s back story is told mainly through unannounced flashbacks, which are unnecessarily confusing. Considered daring in the 1960’s, such flashbacks have increased in sophistication over the years and often add a touch of mystery, inviting audiences to unravel their meaning, but poor casting choices make those in Labor Day hard to follow, even for inveterate film-goers.

If the flatness of the story-telling, which picks up somewhat as the couple attempts to put their doomed flight to Canada in motion, hasn’t spoiled the film sufficiently, the ham-handed ending certainly does. Ratcheting through twenty plus years in less than ten minutes, two more incarnations of Henry and a nod to the lasting influence of the memorable Labor Day weekend on him—he excels at making peach pie—we finally arrive at a happy ending; but it’s too little too late—for us and, we suspect, the characters—despite the narrator’s assurance to the contrary.

For a few days, Labor Day sprinkled pixie dust on Western Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the magic didn’t extend to the big screen. Perhaps the project was too far-flung for Reitman’s talent or, perhaps, his budget. Since 2012, several other productions have shot in Shelburne Falls. Maybe one of these will immortalize the village in film history. Meanwhile, the stars, the excitement, and the recognition will have to suffice.

Three Children's Books

Not being either a school teacher, mother or grandmother, my familiarity with children’s books written after the 1960’s is sketchy at best, although I did read the entire Harry Potter series.  I was inspired to do a little catching up when author Sheila O’Connor stayed with us this past summer, and, later in the summer, The [Greenfield] Recorder ran a story about a new children’s book involving a Civil War vet buried in Greenfield.  

Sheila O’Connor,  Sparrow Road

Like O’Connor’s award-winning adult novel, Where No Gods Came, Sparrow Road is a meditation on absent or delinquent parents and a child’s inner strength and ability to cope in the face of such loss.  Sparrow Road, named for the novel’s erstwhile orphanage-turned-artist-colony, is also a celebration of the arts as a means of both communication and healing, a joy comparable to the lovely nature that surrounds the residents of Sparrow Road.  Everyone at Sparrow Road has an art, even the long-departed orphan Lyman, whom the book’s protagonist Raine reconstructs in her heart.  Like the author, Raine discovers her art to be writing, as she delves into Lyman’s story.  Through Raine and her artist friends, Josie and Diego, O’Connor suggests that we all have some art within us that can help to heal our hearts if we spend enough quiet time listening and opening up to it.

Sheila O’Connor,  Keeping Safe the Stars

In her second novel for children, O’Connor takes greater risks than in Sparrow Road, creating an eccentric trio of orphans who attempt to live on their own when their grandfather guardian, Old Finn, suddenly succumbs to a serious illness.  Unlike her other bookish, intelligent, scribbling heroines, O’Connor creates a Willa-Cather-esque character in her sturdy, independent narrator Kathleen Star (“Pride”), who prefers handiwork to academics.  The book explores in poignant detail the gap between a child’s limited understanding of the world and adult reality.  As in O'Connor's other novels, Keeping Safe the Stars deals with children who strive to keep family intact against a current of adults who are, in some combination, absent, ill, dysfunctional, or irresponsible.

         While children’s literature is littered with orphans, the better to create an unfettered, independent young person who can have adventures, O’Connor’s work seizes on the real agony and desperation of children cut off from the adults who should love and care for them.  The strong meat of Where No Gods Came, an adult novel, is tempered in the children’s books, but O’Connor pushes the envelope further in Keeping Safe the Stars than in Sparrow Road, provoking real discomfort in the reader as the children’s plight worsens until they finally hatch a plot to find the one adult who can help them.

Nancy Bestuhl,  The Mystery of the Lost Canteen

This story is based on a wooden Confederate canteen, recovered and decorated by one Charles Ulrich, who served first with the 25^th Connecticut Volunteers and later became one of the white officers who led all-black regiments (like the Massachusetts 54^th, subject of the film Glory).  Beginning in 1864, Ulrich led the 31^st USCI (United States Colored Infantry).  Ulrich’s family moved to Greenfield when he was a teen, and his body was returned to Greenfield when he died in 1902.

    Nancy Bestuhl’s husband found the canteen in his house in Virginia in 1950.  No one knows how it got there, but it obviously intrigued the author, a former school teacher, and her husband, so she wrote a story in which the canteen is found by a boy, Jimmy, in 2009.  The canteen serves as a kind of portal, and  Jimmy travels in time back to the Battle of Port Huron on the Mississippi River, the place Ulrich apparently found the canteen.  Jimmy meets Charles Ulrich and learns first hand the horrors of war, particularly as fought in 1863.

    The story seems, in many ways, superficial and simplistic, although the details of the battles are quite realistic, and, at the end, Jimmy meets a descendant of one of Ulrich’s black infantrymen.  The book’s high point comes when, halfway through, Jimmy helps Ulrich blow up a Confederate ammo dump and take several enemy soldiers prisoner.

 

 

The Children's Crusade

Bruce Watson's Freedom Summer

In the summer of 1967, I went to Holly Springs, Mississippi with a group of students from Michigan State to conduct a summer workshop for incoming freshman at Rust College, an historic black college, which had lost its accreditation because of low academic standards.  Products of segregated schools, Rust students had few academic skills when they entered, giving their teachers little to build on.  A remedial program intended to give freshman a leg up in reading and math, the 6-week summer workshop was intended to help the college raise standards and regain accreditation.  (Such remedial programs, ubiquitous on college campuses today, were more or less unheard of in 1967, when college classrooms overflowed with more baby boomers than they could handle.)

Before leaving for Mississippi, veterans of the program schooled us in how to behave, both off and on campus, to avoid either stirring up trouble with white Mississippians or breaking the rigid rules of our host college.  Rust strictly forbade any form of PDA—public display of affection—no matter what color or combination of colors the couple.  Frankly, this worried us more than the threat of violence, but we heard stories of “varmint guns” carried in the backs of pickup trucks and knew, in a general way, of violence throughout the South, targeting civil rights workers.  Although heinous race-based crimes had continued to occur in Mississippi through 1966, the state had, by 1967, settled down considerably since the infamous summer of 1964, when three young men were abducted and murdered, and the state was gripped by a veritable guerilla war.  In Freedom Summer, fellow Franklin County resident Bruce Watson documents that war and, to a lesser extent, its aftermath, the relatively peaceful Mississippi that I encountered. 

Mississippi in 1964 was considered so violently racist that even Martin Luther King avoided it, preferring to stage his actions in his home state of Alabama.  Taming Mississippi was left to SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). “Freedom Summer,” which, working out of Freedom Houses throughout the state, spearheaded voter registration drives and established consciousness-raising Freedom Schools, was the brainchild of Robert Parris Moses, SNCC’s field secretary.  Volunteers were recruited from college campuses across the country.  In the end about 300 young people, most under 25, participated in Freedom Summer, half of them Northern, relatively privileged, and mainly white; the others members of Misissippi’s chapter of SNCC, veterans of shootings, beatings and Southern apartheid.

On the first day of the project, three of the workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by Klan members, the county sheriff among them.  It would take the rest of the summer for the FBI to locate their bodies and issue indictments.  Watson’s narrative jumps skillfully between the FBI search and the events and achievements of Freedom Summer, using the stories of four volunteers from the North, one black, three white, two men and two women, to give a face to the narrative and tie it together.  Most poignant is the story of shy Fran O’Brien, who spent the summer teaching young children in a Freedom School, only to be abducted and beaten by Klansmen at the end of the summer.  At one point, Fran asks her young pupils to name the countries from which Americans had come.  The children begin with European countries and move on to China and India when Fran finally asks them “What about Africa?”  “Does that count?” they ask her dubiously.

Threats and violence came non-stop.  Highly organized, Freedom Summer volunteers kept in touch via a WATS line (precursor to 800 numbers) and wrote up logs, which recorded each incident.  Page 7 in one log leads off with a familiar name: “Holly Springs: … Threats of dynamiting Freedom House tonight.  Guys driving around with guns….” 

Celebrities came to Mississippi, some to entertain, some to volunteer, among them actress and activist Shirley MacLaine, as well as Richard Beymer, star of the film version of West Side Story, who worked alongside [my congressman] Barney Frank, a Harvard student at the time.  “I am prouder of being there than of anything else in my life,” Frank has said.  Harry Belafonte, along with a terrified Sidney Poitier, delivered $60,000 in cash to bankroll Freedom Summer’s final project, sending an all-black delegation to the Democratic National Convention.  Fannie Lou Hamer, activist from Ruleville, Mississippi, would become a celebrity (although never a wealthy one) because of that convention.

In the years after Freedom Summer, Mississippians came to be embarrassed by their singular status as the most racist state in America and, according to Watson, worked hard to modify that image.  Already in 1967, I found Rust students quick to tell me that Mississippi was bad, but Alabama was worse!

So many years after and with later generations of young people famous for their apathy and/or incubation of cynical right-wing extremists like Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist, one wonders why so many were willing to risk their lives in Freedom Rides, Freedom Summer, and other aspects of the Movement.  One answer is that the children of the 40’s and 50’s grew up acutely conscious that their parents had fought and sacrificed to win a momentous victory over fascism abroad.  They could do no less than fight it at home.  And then there was the martyred president, who had admonished them to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship … to assure the survival and success of liberty.”  Kennedy himself was taken aback when young people applied his words almost immediately to the Civil Rights struggle, but once spoken, they inspired a generation to fight the battles their elders would not fight.  

 

One Year After

The one-year anniversary of Hurricane Irene came and went, and I tried not to notice.  Grass has grown back, as best it could, given the drought.  The garden is re-established, still lacking many perennials but with improved soil and design; we have added a second garden, especially for daylilies.  We love the broad, mow-able path down to the brook that Jonathan, our landscaper, created out of the tangle of rocks, trees, and eroded soil the storm left.  We still miss our secure dog pen—created from the fence around the defunct swimming pool that became my garden—but we’re managing with enough fencing to keep the dog off the road.  With the constant labor these improvements have required, my sense of trauma has receded.

         But all disasters, natural and man-made, leave silences.  For us the sights, sounds, and, yes, smells of the goat farm are an echoing absence.  I stand long on the bridge by the former farm.  2004 (the year we bought Mill Brook House) is carved into it.  I can remember the construction and how we first visited the farm, using a temporary bridge to cross the brook.  John and his aunt had owned it only a year and welcomed more newcomers.  We admired the goats and the single Jersey cow.  I was glowing with excitement over our new adventure.  Hard to believe that seven years later the bridge would split apart and leave a car dangling over the edge of the ravine.*  I stare at the empty farm. A family lives there, but they do not keep animals.  Across the street the homeowner has purchased four donkeys, one pregnant, as pets.  They are shy and often prefer their pen to the narrow field along the road that she has fenced off for them, but they alleviate the silence.

     I return some weeks later to take pictures of the reconstructed brook, and then I hear it: a rooster crowing.  I look at the farm, and there are chickens in the coop and baby goats in the pasture.  As if a paintbrush wielded by Disney were filling them in, the animals are reappearing.  A week later a duck appears and sheep.  New folks, oh my! 

The Mill Brook at Mountain Road before the hurricane

The bridge at Mountain Road after Hurricane Irene

The Mill Brook at Mountain Road today

*A picture of the car hanging off a collapsed Mountain Road, which we included in our blog entry “Good Night, Irene,” was published three (!) times—once in reverse on the back cover—in the recent book of the same name, Good Night Irene, by Craig Brandon, Nicole Garman, and Michael Ryan.  The book details the stories and destruction from eight locations in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont (mostly Vermont).  About 25 pages are devoted to the Deerfield Valley from Williamstown to Greenfield, with several pages and pictures covering Charlemont.

Good-bye, Goat Rising

 

Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye

With enormous regret we announce the departure of John Miller and Goat Rising from the farmstead at the corner of Route 8A North and Mountain Road.  Goat Rising, under new ownership, has moved to Plainfield while John and his Jerseys have joined the centuries-old Appleton Farms in Ipswich.

John and his aunt purchased the farmstead in 2003, the year before we bought Mill Brook House. As John added Jersey cows to the goat farm, the herd increasing each year, the farm’s limited pastureland became an increasing liability.  The addition of the Curtis Country Store to the farm’s enterprises, delightful though it was, turned into another liability.  Recession, bad tenants, and a devastated real estate market combined to make for steep losses.  But the straw that broke the camel’s back seems to have been Hurricane Irene and the damaged bridge over the Mill Brook in front of the farm.  The months-long four-mile detour over dirt roads meant headaches for John and his family getting out and deterred customers for the farm’s store from coming in.  More losses. 

 

Ironically, the week John moved, the bridge was finally repaired.

 

 

 

The boutique farm with its prize-winning cheeses, raw milk, fresh eggs and delightful animals was the highlight of our neighborhood, a favored destination for a walk for ourselves and our guests, a wonderful of source not just of local produce, but of produce from animals we knew personally.  John’s mother was a superb baker, and after the Country Store closed, her cookies and muffins appeared serendipitously next to the ice cream freezer in the farm store, providing a quick pick-me-up after a day of painting or laboring in the garden.

 

 

True, it wasn’t all Irene’s fault, but the loss of Goat Rising after so many other losses from the hurricane is painful and deeply felt.

I attach my review of Brad Kessler's memoire of goat farming, which evokes our own fond memories of Goat Rising.

Book Review: Goat Song

This book was a natural choice, given the goat farm down the street from us.  Raising goats is clearly not for the dilettante or the faint-hearted, and we’ve seen evidence of that, too, in our immediate neighborhood.  One neighbor thought she would rescue a male kid, slated to be shipped off to more or less certain death by Goat Rising.  (Few males survive in the world of domesticated goats, where milk and cheese are the goal.)  Our friend stuck it out for several years, taking him for walks among the stones and boulders in the Mill Brook, but he finally became too much for her (though I believe she found another home for him, where he could continue being a pet).  Further up the road in Heath, we met a woman keen to raise goats as a hobby, but the young kids we saw on her property at the time have long since disappeared. 

            These failures become understandable when one reads of the sheer hard labor involved in raising goats in Brad Kessler’s Goat Song, which Kessler’s poetic style does not disguise.  The book makes a good companion and intriguing counterpoint to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her year-long quest to live off her land or that of local farmers.  Where Kingsolver is polemical, Kessler is lyrical and philosophical (and far more economical with words).  Where Kingsolver gives us current information about government policies and the sad, wasteful state of our food supply, Kessler delves into our pastoral and etymological history—all the English words that derive from Indo-European, Greek, and Hebrew for goats and herding, along with slivers of poetry and wisdom on same, passed down from the earliest civilizations to the present.  Where Kingsolver may leave us feeling frustrated at the imperfect state of our of lives and our government—most of us don’t have the time, the land, or the money to eat as much local produce as we’d like—Kessler leaves us feeling ennobled by our rich pastoral heritage, even as we experience it vicariously through his labors            

     Surprisingly, this tiny, erudite volume involves a certain amount of suspense: when one of the goats sickened, I couldn’t stop reading until I learned the outcome.  Ditto when the herd was threatened by coyotes.  (The battle with the coyotes calls to mind Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, where two characters duel over the merits of conserving vs. killing these predators.) 

            Romantics will revel in the connections Kessler discovers between pastoralism and the notion of a lost paradise, as well as his discussions of shepherd-kings, poet-herders, and the haunting music of herding. Animal-lovers will understand better what they already intuit but society too often denies: that out of our deep connection to animals arises our humanness. Foodies will enjoy Kessler’s blow-by-blow description of cheese-making, although theologians and devout Christians may wince at the parallels he draws between cheese-making and Christianity, however much the two crossed paths in ancient monasteries.

            By the end we understand that this rich tale has been Kessler’s own spiritual journey, even as it has rubbed off on us and contributed  to our own enlightenment.  “A goat has led me here,” he writes in his penultimate paragraph.  “I’m the boy in the Yiddish tale who’s followed her all along—she always knew the way back home.”