Lucking Out (2011)

The title of James Wolcott’s memoir suggests an unexpected quality of humility for a writer who is always interesting, entertaining, and smart, but also—decidedly—with smart-ass neener-neener tendencies. I loved his stuff in the Village Voice, Esquire, and wherever I found it, even when his beat was not a particular area of interest, such as broadcast television. But I had little idea of the full scope of his work and career. He came to the Voice on the recommendation of Norman Mailer, who liked a piece Wolcott wrote about him in Wolcott’s college paper in Maryland. Wolcott was 19, he dropped out of college to move to New York City, and he never looked back. He made friends with Pauline Kael, was perhaps the first writer to champion Patti Smith, haunted CBGB, monitored developments in porn and live sex (from a safe distance), became a student of ballet, and lived the 1970s NYC lifestyle, which meant thoughts (and experience) of street crime violence were never far. He scorns the new Disney-fied present-day Times Square, but allows that the old one was a scary place to be. He writes long twisting sentences that fill page-long paragraphs. Sometimes I got lost in the tangles, but I’ll put that on me, not him. He’s a great natural writer and a plain pleasure to read. I don’t always agree with him. He has no use for Joan Didion, but goes dewy-eyed over Kael more than once. I’m inclined to see it the other way. Wolcott has perhaps aged into a certain model of the egghead critic, preoccupied with culture as such, but that’s nothing to hold against a guy who can maintain high regard for both the Ramones and the New York City Ballet. I love that, and even more I love his witty, jazzing voice. Wolcott’s memoir is essential for anyone interested in New York in the ‘70s (the subtitle is My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in the Seventies) and it’s recommended generally for anyone into an absorbing read. I’m not sure if there’s beef between Wolcott and Voice rock critic Robert Christgau, but it feels like there might be. His passing treatment of Christgau (and Ellen Willis) is dryly hilarious, wielding a scalpel in multiple places.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Devil, Me, and Jerry Lee (1998)

I’ve been toting this little memoir around with me for years, thinking it was written by Myra Gale Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis’s controversial cousin, 13-year-old bride, and third wife. But it’s actually by Linda Gail Lewis, Jerry Lee’s youngest sister, 12 years his junior. Linda Gail—this book temporarily put me in the habit of calling everyone by two names—sang with Jerry Lee for many years and eventually tried to make it on her own. Her stuff can be found on youtube. She actually had more marriages than Jerry Lee—eight to his seven—and she’s perfectly candid about the Lewis clan being “over-sexed.” She doesn’t go into any more detail than that, for which I was grateful. It’s a short book, well under 200 pages, and mostly a lot of anecdotes and funny and interesting stories about their adventures. She gives the devil his due right up-front but never goes deep into that. The devil makes them drink or take drugs a lot and accounts for their being over-sexed and that’s about it. I would have been interested in some thoughts about hellfire. She doesn’t deny a lot of Jerry Lee’s behavior, but she does deny he ever killed anyone. Mostly she explains all his famous bad behavior by the drugs and some personal problems (“demons”), about which she says nothing can be done. I think she’s right when she says they do things differently in the deep South—Ferriday, Louisiana, in this case, and the Assembly of God church. Jerry Lee, like Little Richard, was more or less sincere about his pentecostal beliefs, though Little Richard might have been a little better about staying on the straight and narrow once he got there—relatively speaking. Linda Gail’s memoir is not particularly essential, but it’s quick and fun to read and offers another view into one of the great early rock ‘n’ roll stars. Linda Gail does argue that Jerry Lee and Elvis Presley were great friends and that reports of Jerry Lee’s envy for Elvis’s greater success are exaggerated. Well, maybe. She’s certainly doing what a loving sister can do for his reputation, but I’m disinclined to believe her on that point. Otherwise I mostly take her at her word. Some great anecdotes here.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Me, the Mob, and the Music (2010)

I enjoyed this memoir by Tommy James, written with Martin Fitzpatrick. All the “Mob” portions were interesting, I suppose—a key reason James waited so long to write it was waiting for certain figures to die. Most notably that included his kinda sorta mentor Morris Levy, who died in 1990, operated the Birdland nightclub, ran the Roulette label, and never paid James a fraction of the royalties he owed him. I was more interested in Tommy James the teenybop star because he was an absolute favorite of mine in junior high days. He played his first gig (a high school talent show) at the age of 12 and was playing professionally a year later with his own band. For many years he had to worry about being underage in the venues he played. The amazing story of “Hanky Panky” is told here, one with many twists and turns that broke open his career. In retrospect, he was at his rock ‘n’ roll purest with “Hanky Panky” and, later, “Mony Mony”—raw blasts of infectious power. But as a kid I was more infatuated first with the hothouse teen drama of “I Think We’re Alone Now” and then with the faux mellow psychedelia of “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” which I had not thought of for years and then played six times in a row the other day. Beauty! I know it’s plastic, inauthentic, and all that, but I just love it. The stories of all James’s hits and more are covered here, along with his three marriages, drug adventures (mostly speed and booze, he may never have taken a hallucinogen), and eventual substance abuse recovery and turn to Christianity. I could have done with a little less of the latter, though he never goes overboard. For me he’s not that likable, more of a hypocritical hedonist and general opportunist. But there’s no question of his talent. He got his break in 1966 and rode it into the ‘70s and beyond. He wrote and/or recorded some great songs I will probably never stop liking. The organized crime angle of this memoir is interesting and no doubt part of his success. He indulges a little “I’m cool because I hung out with gangsters” attitude, but reading between the lines it’s apparent it caused him a good deal of pain. When he hired a lawyer at some point who used forensic accounting to uncover Levy (and/or the Roulette label) owing James $40 million in royalties, Levy threatened their lives and they backed off. Full of strange and harrowing anecdotes, James’s memoir is thoroughly enjoyable, informative, and compulsively readable.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Life (2010)

Keith Richards's memoir is approximately what you expect—entertaining, full of itself, and about gossipy enough. He explores his relationship with Mick Jagger in some depth at various points but never comes up with much that's satisfying (we still can't get no). He addresses all kinds of areas where we appreciate learning more, or anything, such as the roles of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, Andrew Loog Oldham, or the Beatles, verifying or debunking old rumors. Oldham did force Jagger and Richards to start writing songs. I don't know what's more amazing—that they turned out to be so good at it, or that it was never their idea and someone had to make them do it. Richards makes it clear he doesn't buy the idea that the Rolling Stones were "really" Brian Jones's band. It's convincing to the extent that the catalog of originals by itself makes a case for the Stones being what they appear to be—Mick's and Keith's band. Richards also goes into his legendary drug use, which is more generally the "OK boomer" portion of the book. I ended up being more interested in him as a craftsman and artist. He calls "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man" the best of the Stones, which I agree with, noting they have an amazing amount of good material in different eras. As with most memoirs and bios we're pretty much there for the middle—the beginning (grade school) and end (post-1980, off all highs) tend to drag. The drug tales and all the exotic travel and homes grow tiresome too—maybe Robin Leach narrates these parts of the audio book? I appreciated learning that a legendary change of blood to escape addiction and/or drug tests was only a legend after all. Never happened. I did wonder—the rich, after all, are different from you and me. Which reminds me, another reason I like Richards is he's one of the minority of Brits who declined a knighthood when offered, unlike Sir Mick and Sir Rod and a good many other Sir rebel rockers. He shares that choice with David Bowie, who Richards otherwise makes fun of and reminds me why I have a hard time liking him. Richards is a strange mix of working-class and rich-most-of-his-life, with his deepest commitment to rock 'n' roll and the blues as a sound that is made on a guitar. I could do without the outlaw drug stories, but I loved his recipe for bangers and mash. He's just that kind of guy.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Pity poor Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams. Trapped in 19th-century egalitarian society, burdened by his ancestry, pursuing an immoderately modest career as a historian and teacher. His autobiography (far more heavy than mere memoir) is considered one of the greatest in American literature. Yet it never mentions that he was married (let alone the tragedy of it)—I spent a lot of the book idly wondering if he were gay. Though it tells many details of his life it is more on the order of a think piece on history and historical patterns. His ideas about the Virgin Mary representing the primary motivating force of the 12th century (yes, the 12th, it's all explained), and the electric dynamo that of the 20th century, get a lot of gloomy oxygen here. He worries a lot about science, fully aware of Darwin and evolution. The reason I say we should pity him is in how he was just a little early for the things that would really get to him. If the trend in human affairs is alarmingly away from order and toward chaos, then relativity and especially quantum mechanics would have unnerved him badly. Though he considered himself a failure as historian and teacher, no one else did, and his sweeping historical perspective is often impressive. His approach is allusive and indirect—he expects you to know as much as him, though likely very few do, then or now. And not me—sometimes, especially toward the end when he tries to pull together all the pieces into a unified field theory of history, I glazed over, I must admit. Adams is at once deeply American and yet deeply elitist. His one reference to Mark Twain is mocking, he admires Henry James but brother William James more, and his best friends were even more accomplished than he was. He was in London as a young man for the duration of the Civil War, working with his father who was the ambassador to Britain. That's probably the best part in terms of history, event, and detail, with a wonderful view of Britain and the European powers during the time. But this morning I keep coming back to the fact that I had to go to Wikipedia to find out not only that he was married, but that his wife was mentally ill and killed herself. Talk about compartmentalization. That's some strange stuff to leave out of an autobiography. It certainly fits with the constant of Adams's doleful tone, etched with small sparks of venom. I don't come away from it feeling I know that much about Henry Adams except as something like the brooding spirit of American history. It's a stiff jolt of American character, not always recognizably human, perhaps the intent.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic. (Library of America)

On Writing (2000)

I haven't read that much Stephen King, maybe a half-dozen of his novels, but I have a real fondness for two nonfiction volumes: Danse Macabre, a critical horror overview, and this one, a writing manual and memoir with free-rolling digressions, rudely interrupted by a roadside accident that nearly killed him. King is obviously not entirely comfortable with the memoir side of the project, which he freely admits, but he still has an interesting and great by-the-bootstraps story. He's rich now but he wasn't always and his drive and work ethic are impressive. The writing guide part of this is less interesting, though I generally enjoy the exercise and agree with him on many things. He may be too much of a Strunk & White partisan for my taste. That little book is hugely entertaining but it's full of gaps and I don't always agree with its style judgments. See Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage for the real stuff. In terms of memoir, I like King's loyalty to his roots—all of them, from the horror and science fiction genres to working-class Maine. And I love his dedication to wide-ranging and eclectic reading. My favorite part of this book might be the recent reading list of novels and other books he offers that takes up several pages at the end. It has room for Peter Abrahams, Richard Bausch, Joseph Conrad, Kent Haruf, Annie Proulx, and scores more. I also appreciate his devotion to his wife, especially when he credits her and not writing for bringing him back from the accident. It just feels honest. You surely know where you are on Stephen King—don't we all, at this point (and also J.K. Rowling)? This is an essential stop if you like him and worth a look even if you know you don't. As always, my preconceptions betray me. I'm surprised to see a certified master of horror who appears to be such a model of emotional health. Edgar Allan Poe better fits my own sense of the role—disreputable, in ill health, dead early, like that. In many ways somehow Stephen King is the Bruce Springsteen of horror fiction—vastly talented, vastly generous, and, yes, a certain model of virtuous mental health. I'm actually not sure where I am on King as a writer at the moment. I used to think he was underrated, now I tend to think he's overrated. I stalled completely on his Dark Tower series of eight books after the first, and I notice his stuff rarely improves on second readings. That's the case for me even here. I read this and liked it a lot when it was newer, but reading again for this write-up I wasn't nearly as dazzled. Its best features were the comforts of shared worldviews, which in a way is enough in a memoir.

In case it's not at the library.

I Will Find You (2016)

The idea for this book, which probably counts as a memoir, is so intriguing that it never occurred to me how much I would dread reading it until it was sitting in my stack waiting for me. Joanna Connors was raped in Cleveland in 1984, shortly after she moved there for a job at the Cleveland Plain-Dealer newspaper. The rapist was caught in days, convicted, and imprisoned within the year. Nearly 20 years later, Connors decides to find and confront her attacker. The title reflects this mission as well as the words he used to attempt to intimidate her into not reporting the crime. What she finds almost immediately is a dead man. He died in prison in 2000. Nonetheless, partly for the sake of what she needs personally, and later because the newspaper is interested in the story, she pursues the story, finding out about his family and friends and looking them up, and visiting the places he lived, including the many prisons where he landed. What she finds is a nightmare of a life, the cycles of abuse spelled out as clearly as they can be. In many ways, he's as much a victim as he made her, the anonymous man of the system, lost in the machinery—not just the victim of a failing society in general terms, but more specifically of a monster father and then more abusive figures, almost certainly in prison. As Connors tells it, she hates what happened to her, but never managed the levels of hate reached by those around her. Her husband, for example, supported by her mother, looked into paying to have the attacker killed, a circumstance that actually had the effect of making the experience worse for Connors. In the end, years after the attacker's death, Connors and the man's grieving older sister seem to be the only ones left on the planet aware he even existed. Connors tracks him down all the way to his pitiful anonymous grave. "Well, Dave," she says, standing over it. "Charlene and I are the only ones who really thought about you after you died." This book, this quest, somehow feels really important for this moment. It's a tough one to get to, but well worth it.

In case it's not at the library.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)

Dave Eggers's specialty might be setting up shop in the gray areas of literature and then living there as if he were a natural. Maybe he is. His first book is a reasonably straightforward memoir, written and published in his late 20s. That's pretty young for a memoir, but Eggers already had a daunting life story to tell—both his parents died of cancer in the same year, when he was 21 and his youngest brother Toph was 8. Dave, Toph, and their sister Beth (with help from the eldest of the four siblings, Bill) moved to California and raised Toph while attempting to carry on their own young adult lives. But it probably wasn't the harrowing story that made Eggers and his book so popular in 2000. That likely had more to do with a natural talent for telling a story, filtered through a Gen X sensibility. In fact, it might be fair to call this a classic of Gen X literature, along with anything you'd care to name by Douglas Coupland, author of the term. Ironical self-consciousness is a primary feature confronting the reader. It starts with the title. Then there are elaborate instructions for how to read the book, along with sections of the book that were taken out presented with no context. Then it's on to the Acknowledgments, another lengthy section riffing on its own self-awareness and abusing book structure tics, e.g., "The author would like to acknowledge that he does not look good in red." After nearly a hundred pages, the text proper of the memoir finally begins. Two things enable Eggers to get away with all this, at least as much as he does. He doesn't always. But he is a good writer and his story has a sobering gravity that keeps it compelling. Both elements are necessary but in the end I'm more impressed with his writing. He is somehow warm and generous even as he is cold and calculating, willing to test his sincerity in the crucible of your skepticism as much as it takes. Perhaps because he is literally the first to doubt his own sincerity. He is a weird combination of genuinely modest and raging egotist. I was sad to hear his troubles did not end with those recounted in the book. A year or two after it was published his sister killed herself. He hasn't written much about his family since. The book does not live up to the title, of course, but it's good enough to pal around with the idea.

In case it's not at the library.

Up From Slavery (1901)

Booker T. Washington is an interesting American historical figure all the way around and his memoir is a good place to get the basic points. For the full context, as a conservative business leader in the South, you have to dig a little more, and it's complicated. Washington's personal ethos appeared to genuinely hew close to bedrock conservative American puritanism, certainly in terms of traits like work ethic and thrift. What he accomplished in his lifetime with Tuskegee University remains plain amazing. For crying out loud, he built a kiln to make the bricks to raise the buildings while they farmed the rest of the land. There is something at once inspiring and exhausting about this story. Why did it have to be that hard? Washington is an obvious source for the so-called Jackie Robinson rules as we understand and still live by them now—as an African American you always have to be better and you can never get mad or even complain. Washington was born into slavery and raised in a world where he would never get a break. He had to be grateful for even the smallest concession—a loan, say, which could be easily obtained by most white men—and he had to be silent on racism. He's still mostly silent about it here. He is quick to criticize members of "my race" and slow to condemn whites. So among other things Up From Slavery is a look into the strange ways of the South in the transition period from Reconstruction to Jim Crow. Washington is amazed, on his first visit to the North, that he can stay in a hotel where whites stay. It's poignantly sad in those terms. The facts of the shabby treatment of former slaves are mostly left out, and it seems like a strange absence now. Yet who can fail to be impressed with what Washington did? He built a kiln to make the bricks to raise the buildings for a university campus while he farmed the rest of the land for food. Like the best memoirs his book is a pleasure to read, with rambling anecdotes and lots of insight, some of which seems to me now harsher than necessary. But then he accomplished all that he did. Still, Up From Slavery has strange gaps, not just on racism. I got the feeling we're not getting the whole story on everything with his three marriages, for example. But it's great on Tuskegee, and an affecting landmark of where race relations were in America, 40 years on from Fort Sumter.

In case it's not at the library.

His Promised Land (1886)

John P. Parker's slave narrative was never actually published until 1996, but editor and historian Stuart Seely Sprague makes a thorough and painstaking job of it. Parker was a freed slave as of 1845, at the age of 18, who worked out of Ripley, Ohio, "running off" Kentucky slaves by way of the Underground Railroad. Twenty years after the Civil War the reporter Frank M. Gregg tracked him down and interviewed him. Gregg's interest was primarily in verifying the factual basis for the Eliza scene in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which involves a young woman escaping with her baby across the melting ice of the late-winter Ohio River. Slaveholders and other Southerners took an interest in debunking it as implausible, but Gregg wanted to prove it. Parker died in 1900. His narrative had to go unpublished in his lifetime because of the danger the story represented to himself and family, both legally and personally. It's harder to say why it went unpublished for nearly a century after his death, but the reasons are not hard to guess: lack of interest as African-American liberation was replaced by Jim Crow laws and Confederacy memorials. Still, Parker may be the single most heroic figure in all these slave narratives, smart, brave, and committed to freedom. "Freedom" has become a dangerously inapproximate word these days, but in Parker's case it's pretty clear: "freedom" means freedom from enslavement. As always, the details of the context—notably the high value of slaves—contributes to understanding the difficulty of ending it once it had become an institution. As always, there is the mystery of seeing Americans accept it so readily, often aiding the slaveholders rather than the slaves. Parker's story is fragmented because of the way it made it into print. Some sections are simply missing. But it also contains some of the most exciting scenes in slave literature, with anecdotes of amazing adventures. They are too short and there are not enough of them, but they will do. Parker earns his bona fides and then some here as a genuine American hero. He did not have to stay in Ripley and help runaway slaves. As a shrewd and successful businessman, with several patents to his name for metalworking inventions, he could have stayed in Ripley and let the runaways see to themselves. But he did not. Partly out of hatred for slavery and slaveholders, partly for the thrill of what it involved, he spent his nights for years on exceedingly dangerous work. We still need more like him.

In case it's not at the library.

Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green (1864)

The last slave narrative in the Library of America collection feels a little like an addendum. At 50 pages, it's on the short side, telling tales of a persistent escape artist and trickster character. J.D. Green's story brings us chronologically nearly to the end of the Civil War, which began with the secession of South Carolina in 1860. The narrative proper seemed a little carelessly edited, though that's probably from the original, with odd and inconsistent spellings, capitalizations, and even typos. It happens with some of the others too but I suspect this one is here more for its own addendums, which are fascinating. The first is a newspaper article from a British publisher about the secession of South Carolina, attempting to understand in real time what it means for slavery and the US. The second is a speech credited to a Georgia statesman, A.H. Stephens, arguing in the Georgia legislature against secession. The picture he paints has many depressing parallels today, with Southerners successfully setting the agenda for the country. Stephens points to how the North had relented on spreading slavery to new territories in the Fugitive Slave Law, which also made the North legally responsible for returning runaway slaves, and he points to the Dred Scott decision too. He lists all the advantages the South has enjoyed, including the original notorious three-fifths provision in the Constitution on slaves for tax accounting purposes, which enabled slaveholders to keep people without rights of any kind who nevertheless contributed to the political power of the owners. Donald Trump may seem unprecedented, but the animus that motivates him and his followers has been in this country since its beginnings. Next up there is a response by Scottish clergy to a statement written by Confederate clergy defending slavery. The Scots condemn slavery in no uncertain terms and even pound the Bible a couple of times, which I found interesting. Their critique of the Confederate argument seemed solid to me, in terms of debunking it, but I also wondered how they responded to the justifications for slavery found in the Bible. Maybe that's Old Testament stuff? I don't mean to minimize Green's story—it's pretty good in its own right, doing the usual work of these narratives laying bare the realities of homegrown American slavery and its legacy of assault, rape, and murder, as well as the casualties of families separated forever.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

One of the interesting side points of slave narratives is parsing the politics behind them. They were intended in part as an element of information campaigns and picked and chose what they did and did not disclose. Much as today's white US population refuses to believe that unwarranted police abuses happen regularly, let alone disproportionately to African Americans, so back then most whites refused to believe in the worst aspects of slavery. Harriet Jacobs, writing originally as Linda Brent, was unusually clear about the abuses suffered by women, whose children if they became pregnant were the property of their masters—and valuable property. The perverse incentives to rape come in many forms, but siring your own crop of slaves for profit has to be one of the more compelling ones. Jacobs also goes into more detail than usual about how slaves were treated and the punishments they endured. In many cases they were murdered, on purpose or by accident, and buried in unmarked graves. Her narrative is also in line with others as the 19th century went along in terms of more and more rejecting white Christianity as hypocritical. She professes her own faith, influenced by her grandmother, who mostly raised her. In the Library of America collection Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the longest and most detailed narratives, and probably the single best one, though they all deserve to be read, of course. But this might be the one to read if it's only going to be one. Another continuing theme is how hard the laws make it to do anything. Slaves were property and couldn't testify in court any more than domesticated animals. Another perverse incentive—a slave can never testify against you. This narrative has many good stories and lots of description of the way slaves lived and got along. It's the best one yet on the impact of the Fugitive Slave Law, a huge setback for abolitionists in 1850. And it has powerful feminist themes. Jacobs is a deeply moral person but makes no apology for becoming pregnant, given her circumstances. Indeed, as much as anything choosing the father was a way to assert herself with her master, who was determined to have her body and soul. The sad and ridiculous way it plays out after his death is only one more example of how depraved slavery was. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of our great books, whose best counterpart might be Anne Frank's diary.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860)

One of the best book titles ever, first. As a slave narrative, it's in the mode of the adventure story, an escape tale almost exclusively. It's almost fun because the plan of William and Ellen Craft is so clever and yet full of deadly risk. It offers the usual view of human beings as property that was so common then and seems so grotesque now. The pervasive acceptance of that in these narratives remains one of their most disturbing elements. But there's less of that here. The plan is that Ellen will pose as a man and William's master, as the two of them travel together. Ellen is a "quadroon" (their word) and can pass for white. She cannot read or write, neither of them can, so they make her appear to have an injured right hand, and she asks others to sign and fill things out for her. Everybody uses the N-word and abolitionists are reviled. Ellen is privy to some unguarded conversations about the slavery question, which was then becoming more and more central in American life. The close calls here are suspenseful, often involving the necessity to show papers for William, which of course they don't have. At one point someone is suspicious because Ellen won't sign something. At another point someone gives her a business card and she makes a decision not to look at it because she might give herself away if it is upside down and she doesn't turn it right. William is the author and he occasionally indulges an impulse to be smug about the people they fool. But I'll give him that—what they did was brave. Going with the idea that many of these slave narratives were shaped toward simple points, the emphasis here is on their intelligence and resourcefulness. They could plan the initial getaway with lots of time to gather information and think it through. But once they were traveling north—a thousand miles is reasonably literal—they had to make their story work with whatever they encountered. And they did. It's a remarkable story. Sad then that they finally realized they still weren't safe in the North, as fugitive slaves, perhaps not even in Canada, and eventually settled in London.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Twelve Years a Slave (1853)

Now a major motion picture—or two, if you count the PBS TV movie from 1984, Solomon Northup's Odyssey, directed by Gordon Parks and starring Avery Brooks (which I haven't seen yet). Let me be clear that I believe every word—if anything, it's the happy ending that's hardest to get past here. It all makes perfect sense when you consider the attitudes that were common in that period of American history. The prices of slaves alone makes apparent how valuable they were in terms of property. So it makes sense that free blacks in the North would be in danger of kidnapping, or even systematic kidnapping rings. It's the same perverse incentive that produces chop shops today. Solomon Northup in that regard is not such an unusual example, he was just unlucky. As with most slave narratives, particularly so close to the Civil War, this also has a political point to make. Northup writes about issues familiar to this genre of activist literature: the cruel treatment and punishments, the specter of white masters out of control beneath a thick crust of rationalization (the Bible says it's OK, it's the law, Africans are obviously inferior, etc.), and of course no legal standing whatsoever. On winning his freedom, after yes 12 years, Northup's first order of business is to return to Washington, D.C., to press charges against his kidnappers. But the laws in D.C. don't grant him the legal status to testify. If you've seen the 2013 movie most of this story will feel familiar. The movie is actually quite faithful to the narrative, though excising some scenes such as the trial in Washington. Northup is plainspoken and explicit about his years as a slave, notably on the punishments. This book was part of the abolitionist movement gaining momentum in the 1850s, published just the year after the iconic Uncle Tom's Cabin (not a slave narrative but well-researched on the realities of American slavery). Twelve Years a Slave was reprinted once after the Civil War, in 1869, and then languished for nearly a century, when renewed interest in African American life and literature restored it to consideration. All of the slave narratives I've read are good, but this is one of the best. Northup's skill at storytelling is exceptional and his story is long, interesting, and horrific. Somehow, his voice is mostly filled more with love and patience, though his rage gets the better of him sometimes. Amazing book.

In case it's not at the library.

Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850)

So far, among the slave narratives I've read, Sojourner Truth may be second only to Frederick Douglass as a significant historical figure. But her narrative is very different from Douglass's and the others. Most of them are first-person straightforward (more or less) recountings of life events. This has no other name connected to it than Truth's, no "with" or "as told to" or anything to indicate who is writing. A cryptic headnote indicates she never saw a proof of the manuscript before it was published. There are many obvious omissions. It's the first slave narrative I've read by a woman and I suspect certain delicacies are the reason for some of the gaps. Besides involving a woman, this one is also different because she was a slave in the North, owned in New York before that state changed its laws in the 1820s. At first I thought the focus was again going to be on the tragedy of families torn apart. After the New York laws change, Truth sues her former master for custody of her son, a landmark case. She also became an abolitionist and Christian preacher, taking her wonderfully evocative name in her 40s (she lived most of her life as Isabella "Bell" Baumfree). As the 19th century went along, more and more of these narratives served a kind of propaganda purpose. It's perhaps more obvious here because it's handled so clumsily. Then her story is followed by a densely worded 15-page appendix—with a byline, Theodore D. Wald—that thunders about the evils of slavery, helpfully elucidating some points of Truth's biography, but mostly preaching loudly to the already convinced. Or that's my sense of it anyway. By 1850, when this was published, polarization around the issue was well calcified, and mostly people only talked futilely past each other. I remember when this kind of entrenched division was harder to understand, but we are more and more living it again. In many cases in many ways it seems fair to call the situation a Cold Civil War. Therefore, the appendix has some reflexive interest in seeing the arguments against slavery made when there were still arguments being made for it. If we've truly moved past that, I guess we've seen some progress.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (1849)

Above and beyond being mere chronicles, many of the slave narratives in the collection I've been reading also seem to have greater points, or lessons. I'm sure that has as much to do with why they were published in the 18th and 19th centuries as with being picked for a collection. The earlier narratives, for example, often seemed to go out of their way to lavish praise on Christianity, an attitude that notably soured with the march of time. Henry Bibb, unlike William Brown and Frederick Douglass, considers himself a Christian and has no great problem with it. His problem is with how difficult slavery makes it to live a moral life. All Bibb wants is freedom for himself and his family. He runs away repeatedly and then is captured when he returns for his wife and daughter. It reads, in fact, much more like an adventure story. Bibb is athletic, cunning, and smart. He escapes, survives on the road and in the woods, and plots to recover his family. Once he makes it all the way to Canada. The brutal split-up of families is another common theme in these narratives. It was done for practical reasons, because families could not always be sold as a unit, but also for vengeful and punitive reasons too. Perhaps the slave owner wants a woman for himself and it is easier with the husband out of the way ("sold down the river"). Bibb is delicate on the matter, but clear. He also has contempt for the whole system—if anything, he has even more experience than we've seen yet so far with slave traders, bounty hunters, and such. I will now issue a mild spoiler alert because the ultimate fate of his wife surprised me. First there is a scene, a final parting, after which, he tells us, he never sees her again. This was the principal shock for me. I had too easily slipped into the rhythms of the adventure story, where things like a primary relationship usually turn out. In that way, Bibb is something of a cunning writer too, able to set up expectations and switch on them. That scene wasn't the end of his efforts to rescue or reunite with her, but those efforts never proved successful. After several years he drifts into abolitionist work, and a few years on from there he finally marries again. There is more on the first wife—no more on the daughter—but it is unbearable. On a certain level it's depressing to see the incrementalism at work so long ago—approaching two centuries in this case. Yes, we're getting there. But even today it feels like we have so far to go. These narratives help us see how far we've come, but it's not far enough.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

The Possessed (2010)

Elif Batuman, raised in New Jersey as a second-generation US daughter of Turkish parents, makes a lot of things sound like fun in her book you wouldn't necessarily think are fun, like learning Russian as an adult in order to study Russian literature. Actually, she doesn't pull any punches there—it sounds really hard. She details her adventures and travels making her way through graduate school. Yes, that's right, graduate school. Her passions are so infectious they transcend the more typically unpleasant hothouse cloisters of academe. She has her eye on the prize always. She loves Don Quixote and Sherlock Holmes—they are critical markers into her fascination with Russian lit. She's skeptical of postmodern literary theory and today's MFA story writers, but she'll use theory in a pinch and her fondest desire is to write a novel, which actually came to fruition—The Idiot, published last year. One interesting and perhaps obvious point she raises is about the camps of division between those who prefer Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoevsky, which I don't think I had thought of as such before but makes perfect sense in a Beatles / Stones sort of way. She declares herself Tolstoyan and has no hesitation. I might be more Dostoevskian—the four sick men of Europe and all that—but I'm less certain. Still, Dostoevsky gets at least as much attention in this story plus the title reference to boot (and then again in her novel, which I don't know). Chekhov gets his too, and Pushkin, Turgenev, practically the whole gang. The subtitle has it about right: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. It's lively and chatty, veering off into memoir territory with a good deal of charm, though it always snaps back to Russian literature again. Batuman is full of provocative ideas, explicating streams of literature, such as the heirs of Don Quixote, conscious and otherwise, and she's read so much it overwhelms me even to think about. It's a great big fun time.

In case it's not at the library.

Narrative of William W. Brown (1847)

This is another of the shorter slave narratives, just over 50 pages with all the hoopla of prefaces, acknowledgments, and introductions. As always, the stamp of some white person or organization is necessary to see the thing into print and generally stand up for its veracity. As the publication dates of these narratives move deeper into the century the sponsoring white is more and more often formally Abolitionist. What a terrible portrait of 19th-century America these narratives give us. In fact, both William Brown, and Frederick Douglass in his narrative, express nothing but contempt for Christianity, at least in its American version. Brown is more willing to toss away the whole thing as evil, quoting Bible passages that are approving of slavery. The Christian hypocrisy is still one of the greatest shames of slavery, after the corruption into sadism. Brown's narrative often focuses on how families were separated and torn apart, sometimes deliberately to control behavior. He reports on how many owners with limited resources would invest in a young woman to breed them for additional property. It's often, though not always, the master providing the seed, of course. So we also come down to this horrific language of slavery: breeding, training, striping. "Striping" is a term I'd never heard before, for whipping and scarring, and now I also know it's in the Bible. One more reason I'm comfortable with the wholesale rejection of American Christianity by these later narratives. Obviously Brown and Douglass are aware of the Christian roots in the Abolitionist movement itself and temper their tones somewhat to accommodate that. But their feelings are unmistakable. William Brown's story is another one of escape—two attempts, actually, as the first one fails when he is incautious in the North. He suffers terribly for this attempt, as it leads to the final break-up of his family when his mother and sister are sold separately into the Deep South, a certain doom. This narrative is set in Missouri, a more recent slavery state than the rest of the South. Brown shows how the geographical position of Missouri enabled it to be a staging area for kidnapping African-Americans from the North into slavery. Brown had good experiences and bad with whites. He took the name of one who was kind to him in Ohio. Before that he was only William, and even that was taken from him by an owner whose nephew of that name came to live with the family who owned him. Of all his indignities and suffering, this is the one that most seems to rankle Brown. It's strange to us only because most of us have never had to face that treatment in such cut-and-dried fashion—the total obliteration of identity at will.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

Another slave narrative that was shorter than I expected—about a hundred printed pages. Frederick Douglass (who is being recognized more and more) escaped from slavery in Maryland when he was about 20, and then lived a long life as an abolitionist leader and statesman. This was written in 1845, when he was in his late 20s. Already his voice is different from the previous narratives in my chronological reading, much more authoritatively intellectual, and also an impatient man of action. Most refreshing for me was his scorn of religion—even specifying all Christianity in North America. His contempt is bracing, and tonic. You feel the rage of a man toward slaveholders, earned through personal experience. And, as seems common with many who survived to write, his experience is mild compared to many. For a long time, as a boy, Douglass was able to escape the brutality of lashings and beatings, but not always. One interesting insight he has is the transformation of a couple who had never owned slaves and then inherited some. As always, it's striking how casually slaves are treated explicitly as property. Some of the dehumanizing treatment, such as the separation of family members, seemed aimed at exactly that—dehumanizing them to make them better workers. Douglass's arguments are interesting, reminiscent of anti-torture arguments people make now, about how the dehumanization occurs on both sides, on the torturer as well as the tortured, on the slaveholder as much as the slave. It's probably true but it's hard to understand because it's counterintuitive. So Douglass describes the couple who inherit slaves as originally kind and decent who gradually become monsters of their household. Spanking children is still defended today, so it's not hard to imagine how people rationalized abusing slaves. It was doubtless for the good of the slaves and all that. I think this narrative has to be particularly taken as coming with an agenda, but I also suspect there's little exaggeration. Again, simple facts such as the inability of slaves to testify as witnesses in legal proceedings—precluded from it by law—give the game away. Why would you have a statute like that? And more importantly, can you imagine the power that would give you over another person? What actually surprises me most in these narratives (after the bald facts of slavery itself) are the numbers of decent white people who actually have the courage to act. The majorities in the 19th century who went along with slavery look more like the sad victims of human psychology we see today believing every word of Fox News. Treating slaves as reasonably valuable property, say the value of a car today, is exactly what made the problem so intractable for white majorities over and over again. Not to mention the racism, of course. This is one of the best ones I've read yet.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831)

I was surprised by how short this is—less than 20 pages, after all the attestations, certifications, and such. But then I realized I had it confused with the 1967 novel by William Styron, which I don't know. The incidents related here are certainly ripe for novelization (and a reportedly abysmal movie too just a year or two ago): 55 white men, women, and children slaughtered. Turner's dead-eyed confession is a compressed list of activities that took place on August 21 and 22, 1831. There's a sense Turner feels justified by a higher power, which he discusses as well. But much of it goes like this: "Having murdered Mrs. Waller and ten children, we started for Mr. William Williams' —having killed him and two little boys that were there; while engaged in this, Mrs. Williams fled and got some distance from the house, but she was pursued, overtaken, and compelled to get up behind one of the company, who brought her back, and after showing her the mangled body of her lifeless husband, she was told to get down and lay by his side, where she was shot dead." It's no exaggeration to call it a brutal massacre. It holds the record for numbers of victims in a slave rebellion. Interestingly, there weren't that many slave rebellions in 19th-century North America, as the Southern system was highly effective at controlling them. The savagery of this massacre, the rage it speaks to behind it, says at least as much about that system as any presumption of natural animal savagery among the slaves, which of course was the explanation given at the time. Most Roy Moore voters today doubtless still agree with that, but try to imagine how you would feel, enslaved. Inevitably, there are also questions about the motives of the lawyer who recorded Turner's confessions, a local attorney and white man named Thomas R. Gray. This text has to be taken as only a narrow window into the mind of the rebels. Gray includes Turner's spiritual beliefs as expressed, for example, but it's certainly possible he just made them and all of it up. It doesn't finally matter that much. We learn a great deal about the details of the massacre itself. It's the rage behind the incidents that's most palpable, whoever is relating the details. It took place in Southampton County, Virginia, which among other things suggests that the options for running away were limited. The slaves were very far from any place they could consider safe. The massacre appears more to be an act of righteous retribution—kill as many white people as they could before they were run to ground. And that sounds like about the way it went down. The results were as to be expected: 56 slaves executed for the deaths of 55 white people, and hundreds more lynched or violently abused. Slavery to continue for decades.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)