1) more cleaning of my house
2) post on a couple of other blogs
3) give my beloved cat (Hobbes) a bath (he's been rolling in dirt)
4) finish my on-line class that - conservatively - could take me two weeks to finish if I did nothing else
Plus I'm working on a series of websites and other projects.
BUT. . . I have to comment on the recommendation that I gave for summer reading: The Persia Cafe
.I find it to be a, somewhat poetic read, but it's gripping as well. So I'm having trouble attending to other things. I read late into the wee hours of the morning last night and I want to sit down and finish it because it really is so well-written and I have to know: is justice ever served?
The Persia Cafe by Melany Neilson is set in Persia, Mississippi in 1962. Right there you know what it's about: injustice. It's told from the perspective of a young woman who has been raised in a racist town, but can't keep to the expected "code of silence" when a young black man is murdered and the FBI comes to investigate.
You know what really irks me? It's nothing about the book. It's about how I was raised.
I was born in Cleveland. In 1962 I was 11 and I didn't even know there was a civil rights problem. I knew nothing about what blacks were going through, how they were denied access to public libraries, denied voting rights, denied human dignity because I didn't know anyone who was black.
Imagine this: there are maybe 400,000 black people in your city of 876,000, but you never see them. Your parents "shelter" you. They move you to the suburbs. Realtors won't sell blacks homes anywhere, but in the poorest parts of town. Did I know that?
No, but I should have. We should have been marching with Dr. King, but I didn't even know about Dr. King.
So reading this book just makes me shake my head. I mean, I've watched a lot of PBS specials over the years; I've had some conversations; I've come a long way in terms of my education about the black experience. [Pitiful isn't it?]
But I had to educate myself. My parents didn't do it.
In fact, it ticks me off that my parents never talked about it in a way that showed they empathized at all and - maybe I do them an injustice because they are both dead and cannot tell me differently - but I don't think they cared. I don't think it bothered them at all that citizens of their own country were being denied rights they had.
How is that different than what the German people, as a whole, did to the Jews?
People say it was "a different time. . ."
I say: "No."
You know better if you have a working heart and an intact mind. You feel right from wrong no matter what your mind is telling you. You know when you're supporting an immoral status quo by keeping silent.
I guess it eats away at me that my family was a part of that huge white conspiracy to keep blacks from the economic and educational pie. They just went along with it.
Sure, they were worried about putting bread on their own table; yeah they had their own problems. But they still had a choice about what to support in how they thought and talked.
So, in a way, it's shameful for me to read this book, as good as it is, because I was so ignorant for so long about the black experience and such ignorance is just breathtaking.
Worse, my ignorance was part of the status quo described in The Persia Cafe,
because everyone is on one side or the other: part of the problem or part of the solution. And I was part of the problem just by virtue of my ignorance.
But - getting away from that - this is a very good read. John Grisham gave it a glowing review and he was right. Poetry, suspense, plot, characterization - it has it all. Plus it's not fluff. It's about something that matters - about many things that matter in a life. But they are never thrust upon the reader from a sermonizing point of view. There's no lecturing here.
Instead, it's a galloping journey of discovery.
"A haunting story; beautifully written, finely plotted, filled with people who linger long after the last page." -- John Grisham
I agree.
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