Black Soldiers in World War II

The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, depicted above, is located on the bank of the Mississippi river on the campus of the University of Minnesota. It's an impressive piece of architecture by Frank Gehry.

On a brief visit there last week, I was impressed by their collection of works from New Deal art programs, and especially by a painting, "Wheels of Victory" painted in 1944 by American painter Philip Evergood (1901-1973).

The documentation accompanying the painting says "Created in the waning days of World War II, Evergood's painting at first may seem a celebration of American industry." However, the documentation continues, the painting seems "more melancholy than victorious," because it may be making a reference to the labor disputes about African Americans: could they join the railroad union and hold non-menial jobs? "Is the soldier here to remind viewers that African-Americans contributed to America's victory in war overseas but were not allowed to hold good jobs on the railroads at home?"

The white men in the painting do look pretty complacent to me, with their "pocket watches and church papers."

The documentation refers to the black soldier as looking on "despondently." To quote the National Geographic summary of the Black experience in World War II:

"African-American soldiers and civilians fought a two-front battle during World War II. There was the enemy overseas, and also the battle against prejudice at home."

Perhaps this is the subject of this impressive and maybe subversive painting.

Despite the formation of the famous unit of Tuskegee Airmen, most Black soldiers were given only duties like janitorial and kitchen services. "Black soldiers were generally restricted from combat," the article points out. However, "the realities of war would soon blur the lines of race. One major breakthrough came during the Battle of the Bulge, in late 1944.... General Dwight D. Eisenhower, faced with Hitler's advancing army on the Western Front, temporarily desegregated the army, calling for urgent assistance on the front lines. More than 2,000 black soldiers volunteered to fight."

When the black soliders returned home, mostly to homes in the South, they faced a return to the segregated lives and horrendous maltreatment that they had known before the war. Truman desegregated the military, and thus ended open discrimination in job assignments, in 1948, but the Civil Rights struggle  had only begun.

My book club selection for November is The Grace of Silence by Michele Norris of NPR -- a book with a focus on exactly the same topic: the unjust treatment of returning Black soldiers. In this memoir, she concentrates on the experiences of her father. He returned from service to his native Birmingham, Alabama, where Black citizens were still experiencing the worst of the humiliating and dehumanizing features of segregation and racial hatred.

In trying to understand her father after his death, Norris unearthed a part of her family history that no one had ever mentioned and that no one wanted to talk about after more than 60 years. Shortly after his return to Birmingham, he had been shot by a policeman, spent a night in jail (as she said, this was an incredibly dangerous place for a young Black veteran), and had paid a high fine which used up family funds that could have been better used to invest in business. She felt that the experience had been powerful -- too powerful to discuss.

Norris described the struggle of Black veterans to register to vote in Birmingham soon after the war, and the decision of her father and some of his brothers to move north, and his purchase of a  home in a white neighborhood. She was born in Minneapolis (not that far from the museum where I saw the painting), and her own experiences, which are briefly discussed in her memoir, are quite different from those of her father.

I've recently seen a lot of connections to the topic of Blacks in World War II and their experience when coming home. Earlier this month, my book club read Mudbound, which includes a fictionalized (and I would say, sensationalized) account of a returning Black Southern veteran. Also, not long ago at the Civil Rights exhibit in the Henry Ford museum, I saw the restored bus where Rosa Parks performed her famous historic refusal to sit in back. The connection of this to the struggle of veterans to the struggle for Civil Rights is interesting -- as the National Geographic article says "Not only had the war opened a new window of opportunity for blacks, a number of the civil rights leaders of the 1950s and '60s, including Medger Evers, had been trained in the Army, where they acquired leadership and organizational experience."

The Children’s Book by A.S.Byatt

The real center of The Children’s Book is life at the end of the Victorian era – which sounds like too big a topic for a novel, but somehow Byatt pulls it off. She talks about how family life at the end of the 19^th century was special with an independent life for children in an upper class family, who were often numerous and left to themselves to wander in the woods or explore the country-house environment where they were being raised. She makes up five families, with many children, in which to explore her idea.

The world of children and families in the late Victorian era is a powerful topic. The contrast between wealth and poverty and the contrast between the rights and possibilities for men and women in Victorian society affects each of the families in the story.  Every character struggles with his or her social and gender-caused position and its limits. Several characters rise in status, especially Olive and Violet, a coal miner's daughters, but privileged members of the upper middle class as adults. Olive is the matriarch of the novel’s most central family and a successful author, and her sister Violet is the quiet unmarried aunt (but things are not quite as they seem).

As they mature, the children of the five families develop a variety of literary, social, artistic, and political consciousness. They are influenced directly and indirectly by famous people who lived then – the Fabians, suffragists, anarchists, socialists, even Emma Goldman, cultural leaders like Rudyard Kipling, G.B.Shaw, and William Morris. The characters attend lectures in London, Cambridge, Oxford; join real socialists and other activists, and travel to witness conditions in other countries. They put on plays – especially Shakespeare plays – which seem to them iconic, and whose organization gives them experience of various sorts. (Also, it’s a typical thing for that era’s family to do.)

The novel is full of real places and things, all made very vivid. The father of one of the major families is a department head at the emerging Victoria and Albert Museum in London – the museum is both physically and conceptually central. A number of the characters gather for a visit to the Paris World’s Fair, where they see Loie Fuller dance among other things. The women in the novel dress up for dances and theatrical performances – the descriptions of gowns and hats are lush and indulgent.

A counter topic to family and social life is the life of artists. There are at least three characters who have enormous creative gifts: Benedict Fludd a very troubled and eccentric ceramicist; his apprentice Phillip Warren, born very poor and lower class but driven to create from his childhood; and already-mentioned Olive Wellwood, a writer of  fantastic tales encompassing the title’s “Children’s Book.”

The beauty of ceramic vessels – shape, color of glaze, decorative elements, workmanship – and the details of the potter's craft are described with love and attention to visual and tactile detail. Byatt makes a great effort in explaining the many challenges in creating a pot on the wheel, mixing a glaze, loading a kiln, and firing the contents. The characters appreciate the beauty of pots and are aware of the history of earlier ceramicists.

The process of writing – creating imaginary worlds, myth and fiction, setting up characters, choosing words – and the effect of writing on an audience are another fundamental theme. Olive’s tales begin as specific gifts to each of her children, in some cases with a problematic effect. They continue to become a way that she earns a living for the family – which also causes a variety of problems for herself and her complicated relationship with her husband.

Several of the characters struggle with understanding their identity, which is often vexed by the complex relationships of their parents and those who seem to be their parents. Some of the most mistreated characters develop stong identities anyway; some of the most loved fail. Byatt manages to subsume the identity question in other themes, mentioning often the emerging medical specialty of psychoanalysis and creating at least two very troubled suicides who don’t get any help in this respect.

The narrator often steps back and describes historic events and their social consequences. Nothing is explicit, but no reader could be unaware of the coming fate of the families whose youth are contemporaries, as often mentioned, of Rupert Brooke. He is often present at meetings or informal events that the fictitious characters also attend – we know what that portends. Byatt is aware that her readers must be thinking of the First World War and what it will do to her characters, and she’s ruthless in her final chapters, when it happens.

I loved this book. I was amazed that with so many characters and so much going on, Byatt always kept me on top of the family place of each character as he or she was mentioned. The graphic horrors of the Great War were kept at bay by the long history of the characters and their aspirations; the inevitablilty was handled wonderfully. 

Decluttering for no special reason

Our old sideboard gave us good service, but it was time for it to go: we bought a new one with a big hutch a few years ago, and shoved it into a corner. Last weekend, I cleared all the stuff out of it (some is visible on top in the photo, waiting for my new plastic box for attic storage of holiday items).

I shopped it around to friends -- no takers. Today, the PTO thrift shop, which is a combined fund-raiser for all the PTOs in town, set the truck for it. They also took a box of glassware and other items that didn't make the cut to be rescued. The tablecloths that were in the middle drawer replaced photo albums in the newer sideboard, while the albums found a home in my desk upstairs, which was also new last year. A couple of bottles of cognac and liqueur are now in the pantry.

Everything seems to start a cascade of rearrangements and give-aways, but somehow it's done.



Our garage has accommodated our unused ancient windsurfers since we gave up our lakeside cottage in 1999. Maybe I shouldn't admit that. This stuff is so obsolete no one wants it.

As of this afternoon, the windsurfers are gone. I hired a trash hauler to come during the same time-window as the PTO truck, so we only had to wait once. The windsurfers' sails were occupying space in the basement -- they are now also gone. The old porch railings (leaning against the garage wall at left) are gone. A lot of unwieldy styrofoam is gone. Two old counter tops are gone -- we never found a way to use them. Len was delighted because the old paint cans are also gone from the basement. The trash hauler/truck driver says "I'm stronger than you think," and that's really true; he carried away some really heavy stuff.

Here's the truck. Besides being strong, the driver can miraculously back into a driveway as narrow as ours:



The sails on their way into the trash truck (paint cans visible to the left) --




Oh! This feels good! Stuff has such a way of insinuating itself into one's life. Decluttering is great.

Old Cars

The Old Car Festival at Greenfield Village provides a chance to see the amazing labors of many old-car hobbyists. Some preserve old cars in their original condition; others restore the cars to shiny newness. Some dress up in the apparel of the same vintage of the cars, starting around the turn of the 20th century, and going just past 1930, I think. Some collect old equipment, such as fire trucks or camping vehicles and gear for old-style camping. I wrote on my food blog about the collector who displayed a cooking box that fit onto a Model T exhaust manifold. Quite a show!

Encounters with Philosophy in Novels

Frankly, I am not very interested in philosophy. It's too abstract for me. I can't even bear the philosophy blog in the New York Times, (The Stone: "a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless") which I think is intended optimistically for those who are as challenged as I am by abstractions.

However, by some chance and a library visit, I recently read several novels with philosophy integrated more or less into the narrative. In the most simple-minded view, each of these novels explores a philosophical problem through both the actions and the conversations of the characters. I was very interested in how the authors handled abstract ideas and integrated them into the plots, and in the similarities between these highly different novels.

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley (published 1939) is concerned with the finality of death and by extension what the idea of death does to those who obsess about it. The book includes both satirical and semi-serious themes, so it's a bit hard to discuss. One central character is a Los Angeles real estate millionaire (that's a lot of money in 1939), who despite ownership of a highly profitable Forest-Lawn-type cemetery is terrified by death. Using his vast wealth, he hires a scientist to find him a cure for mortality, and also hires a typical English scholar to go over some papers he's obtained that might record an earlier attempt at immortality. In addition to these men, there's a beautiful 22 year old bimbo (not called that) who tries to make him feel young while enjoying the luxury he offers her. It's a very male book.

The scholar, the scientist, and another convenient scholar in the neighborhood have endless discussions about philosophy of death. Alas, the conversations are not satire. I found it tempting to skip the philosophy and just enjoy the comic parts. Sometimes Huxley takes the scholars more seriously than other times; unfortunately not a single one of the characters is in my opinion at all sympathetic. This is a flaw in the book if you ask me.

Before philosophic discussions bored me to death, I felt that the plot took off, so I read the whole thing without flagging. At the end the scientist and the rich man travel to England where World War II is breaking out, though I couldn't figure out its relevance. Philosophical discussions are abandoned as they find that the centuries-prior experimentation with a cure for aging had made two people immortal; however, it also turned them into a sort of apes. So what they searched wasn't in fact exactly what they wanted -- except the foolish rich man, who is sent-up one more time by saying the ape-like existence didn't look that bad. The ending makes the philosophy seem even more tacked-on than it did during the novel.

Conclusion: this particular novel is not very successful as a philosophic platform.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (2011) focuses on scientists searching in the Amazon for a drug that will make women fertile for their entire lives. They are studying a tribe whose tree-bark-eating habits have this effect. The scientists have a lab in the jungle and are experimenting with turning the bark into a marketable drug for the pharmaceutical company that pays their way. The central character visits the lab (with great difficulty) because she is searching for a colleague who has died; the plot centers around how she learns from her experience -- to put it bluntly and oversimplify.

Patchett incorporates a number of philosophic ideas into the novel, but rather than conversations, these ideas come up as the characters' moral dilemmas. The scientists in the jungle constantly have to deal with questions about the value of what they do, and about their responsibility for interactions with the tribe they are living with. Should they introduce Western medical treatments and antibiotics when their hosts are ill or injured? Should they communicate other Western ideas? Share their canned and processed food? Learn the local languages? Each dilemma comes out of a carefully-presented situation, and the characters have strong ideas on what is ethical and moral.

Finally, the characters have to face the most fundamental question: would it even be ethical to enable women to bear children all their lives? The way this dilemma arises is the most adroitly written part of the book. Again, what they are looking for doesn't quite turn out to be what they really want. These are highly sympathetic and beautifully realized characters, and the plot is complex. I wouldn't have skipped a word.

Conclusion: this novel beautifully embodies ideas and what I would call philosophy along with character development and suspenseful events. Especially wonderfully, it contains one extremely well-presented and memorable character, an elderly woman doctor who is leading the jungle experimental station.

He, She, and It by Marge Piercy (1992) is science fiction set in 2059, in a post-nuclear distopian world. The scientists in this world are computer and robotics experts who have created a golem; that is, a machine that can think, feel, and possibly act with free will, and who successfully mimics humans physically, mentally, and emotionally. The main story of the novel is about the creation and development of this creature, his role in the characters' struggle with their enemies, and about the terrible world that has emerged from human errors of the past.

The events of 2059 are interspersed with the story of the original Golem of Prague, told with wonderful imagined details by one of the characters in the book. Plot and characters in both story lines are developed in a way I find compelling, though I don't feel like writing a summary here.

In my view, the increasing parallelism between the two golem stories as they unfold is one of the most enjoyable features of the book. Both stories end up asking the same question, a moral question embodied in both: is it right to make a creature that is aware of itself yet created to serve its creators? The interrelated stories also ask about the dangers of such a creature to its creators. And again, as in the other books, the modern scientists/medieval kabbalists got what they were striving for, but learned that it was not truly what they wanted.

Conclusion: like State of Wonder, plot and characters in this novel beautifully embody the ideas and questions that it explores. I'm impressed by the successful embedding of the older tale in the sci-fi like future story.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (2012) isn't so much about any philosophical ideas as about late adolescents who drop the names of modern philosophers. It's beyond pretentious. Maybe there could be a book about name-dropping that doesn't suffer from too much name-dropping, but this isn't it. Eugenides constantly seems to be trying to demonstrate his bona-fides as a knowledgeable reader of deconstruction, not just writing a novel. I've only read around 100 pages and I'm fed up.

Would I like it better if the adolescent characters discussed (or even thought about) the ideas in their college philosophy classes? Doubtful. Am I just unable to cope with a book about young people? Well, I do like Jane Austen a lot. And the Harry Potter books. And even sort of liked The Hunger Games. And many others. In fact, I really liked Eugenides' earlier book, Middlesex, about a very young central character. I'm not guilty of wanting everyone to be old.

I can't believe the number of people I've read of or talked to who have started but not finished this book, and I might have joined them. It's really, alas, a tedious read, and I can't make myself care if the characters want something or not, much less to find out if they get it as in the other books. If I go back to reading the book, I will append something here.

African World Festival, Detroit

Our new African Mask: A "Sickness Mask"from the Congo

This afternoon we walked around the sales booths for the African World Festival, sponsored by the Detroit Museum of African American History. The festival will present a number of events tomorrow, but we just happened to be there today. We went to Detroit to see an exhibit of five Spanish paintings by Velazquez, Picasso, Dali, ElGreco, and Goya at the Detroit Institute of Arts across the street.

The festival was quiet, but very colorful. I'm sure it will become much more crowded as the weekend progresses, and I'm glad we were there at a calm time.








Several of the many booths offered a wide selection of African masks and other traditional wood carvings, both antique and modern. We bought our new mask from Billo Berete of Newark, N.J. -- below, Len in the booth:





There were many other masks in this booth, including two more Sickness Masks, as shown above. As I understand it, sickness masks are characterized by asymmetry, contrasting colors on opposite sides of the face or double faces, and sometimes by anguished looks. The mask at left in the middle was an extremely wonderful piece, made not only of wood but also mud, seeds, and cloth. It's probably more authentic than the one we bought, but it was too vivid for my taste. It made me anxious!

For more information on Sickness Masks, including images, see the second half of my July, 2009, post "Why do I like African Masks?"

Mona Lisa Suddenly Appears in Google+

Today's Mona Lisa -- a leaf carved with her image. See this:
 YouTube: Did You Know :Leaf Carving China Slide Show

New Mona Lisa Objects

My collection grows rather slowly these days, but here are a few new items. The cards were for my birthday recently, as was also the promotion for a picture framing shop in Vermont. The mona lisa mints are from the Santa Barbara art museum, where I also bought another object but I'm still working on an effective photo of it.

Mountains

The Tetons impress me more than any other mountains I have seen. The wide meadows and reflecting lakes at the foot of the mountain range provide scenic views of power and beauty.


Grand Teton mountain lit by the first rays of the rising sun. It's the tallest of the peaks, so the sunlight reaches it first.


More early morning sunlight on the mountains.


The Tetons and Jackson Lake, seen from Signal Hill. This is high above the plain with panoramic views of the horizon in all directions. The road winds around Signal Hill several times as you ascend. The last part is a bit hair-raising, as it goes across a little spine. I don't know what signals they used when they chose the name, but obviously now, there's a huge cell-phone tower near the top.


View across Jenny Lake. After stopping at this viewpoint, we drove to the visitor center and took a boat across the lake to a hiking trail.


From the hiking trail, we saw the mountains from a number of perspectives, one more beautiful than the next!


View from a turnout along the road.


We also enjoyed our view of the California coastal mountains from our Santa Barbara apartment. This shows our deck.


Santa Barbara view at sunset.

Columnar Basalt at Yellowstone

Yellowstone is full of volcanic features, including this columnar basalt at Sheepeater Cliff (named for Shoshone Indians who raised bighorn sheep and who sometimes used this area). The columns formed during the cataclysmic volcanic activity of around half a million years ago, which created many of the distinctive features of the park. Yellowstone has several such basalt formations.



Marmots live among the columns:



Columnar basalt is extremely fascinating -- we saw perhaps the most spectacular example a couple of years ago at the Giant's Causeway in Ireland, where the tops of the columns form what appears to be a tiled pavement made by giants:

Geysers

The main event at Yellowstone is geyser eruptions. Old Faithful is of course best known, as it's large and has a schedule almost like clockwork. We watched 5 eruptions in the three days we were in the park, the last being at sunset as we returned from a walk around the Old Faithful Geyser Basin. The setting sun was turning the steam clouds a beautiful shade of pink.




Old Faithful attracts a crowd at almost every eruption; private cars, group vehicles, and tour buses pour into the parking lot shortly before the expected moment. I found it interesting that the famously predictable schedule has slowly changed during the approximately 100 years  of the park's existence. Now 90 minutes, in the early days it was closer to an hour between eruptions.

The Old Faithful Geyser Basin is the largest grouping of geysers in the world. Some erupt from little pools; others have formed cones or irregular shapes as a result of the accumulated mineral deposits. The basin also includes a number of springs and pools, a boiling pool with steam bubbles seething at the surface, and beautiful surrounding woods and streams.

Across the river and the fields, the historic Old Faithful Inn, which opened in 1904, has become a feature of the landscape as well. (We stayed there, but weren't really that happy about it, as our room was neither historic nor well-maintained -- it was in a mid-20th-century cheap addition. Peeling paint and rotten plaster? No chairs to sit on? Please! But I digress. Our other night near Old Faithful was at Snow Lodge, which met all our expectations, and lived up to our experiences in other historic buildings in national parks.)


Old Faithful Inn from the Geyser Basin





Geysers vary enormously, from tiny ones (as above) up to the erratic Steamboat Geyser with a steam jet as high as 380 feet. Steamboat, around 30 minutes drive from Old Faithful in the Norris Geyser Basin, was active for a few years beginning in around 2000: its last big eruption was in May, 2005. When we walked there, it was emitting a small but still impressive series of steam puffs.


Steamboat Geyser as we saw it.

I found that each thermal basin has its own interesting look and characteristics. Norris, which is larger and has the thermal features more spread out, seemed especially barren. The high acidity of the springs that well up, erupt, and bubble through the landscape kill trees and plants. Within the basin, however, I noticed one small patch of grassy vegetation covered with steamy condensation that glistened in the sunlight. I didn't succeed in capturing its fairy-land-like look in a photo.

Yellowstone Hotsprings

Yellowstone Park's thermal activities are the best-known and most popular features of its vast landscape. Who would not be curious to see the gigantic, rare and violent eruption of Steamboat Geyser? The cataclysmic earthquakes that have happened once or twice in recent history fascinate everyone, despite the obvious dangers of actually being caught in one.

The punctual eruptions of Old Faithful are tamer, with crowded bleacher seats in front of the National Park Information Center as everyone waits for the steam and hot water to begin to spout. The dozens of smaller but equally extraordinary geysers in the nearby geyser field require around a 90 minute walk along carefully designed boardwalks. I know the timing, because Old Faithful was just erupting when we began our walk, and we saw it go off again as we were returning.

Hot springs, boiling pools, colorful heat-tolerant algae, accretions of limestone from hard water gushing out of the ground, and many other thermal features are abundant throughout the park. At the end of Yellowstone Lake, there's even a geyser just under the surface of the water, and many just beside the shore. Scrubby wildflowers and grasses grow right in the running hot water, and elk and other animals graze near steaming pools. It's all fascinating.

If you want a geology lesson, I'm afraid you won't get it here, though I learned a great deal in 3 days of exploring various hot spring and geyser basins and reading the useful labels and explanations supplied by the Park Service.

The following hot spring photos I've selected just because I like the way they look.


Fishing Cone: the underwater geyser near Yellowstone Lake

















Mammouth Hot Springs Limestone Formations

Tomorrow: the geysers.