I knew when I was on my third hour of the introduction that Michelle Alexander was not messing around in The New Jim Crow. Exhaustively researched, this book drops like a megaton bomb into the quiet assumptions we make about ourselves and our "so-called" criminal justice system.
And the shocking thing for me at least, is that I already knew a lot of the pieces presented here. I went to law school. I clerked for two years for the Cook County States Attorney's office and I saw plea after plea go down in the felony trial division. But seeing all the pieces I had seen and experienced put together like this, it was like I had been seeing pieces of a puzzle for over a decade and now finally saw the picture that the pieces made.
And it's not pretty. The puzzle is a horribly crippling and unjust system that perpetuates poverty and violence in communities of color. It's a system that tags people with the word "felon" and then never lets them go. It is a lifelong stigma and legal leash on people who are arrested and convicted many times for doing the same thing other people are doing in the less-policed suburbs of America, or the dorm rooms of our higher learning institutions.
How do we move on from here? How do we dismantle the War on Drugs when so many private interests are now invested in its perpetuation? Because that is the next step. It has to be. Lives have been destroyed. Communities have been destroyed. And for what? So the haves can keep having and the have-nots can foot the bill. Because in the communities of the affluent, these will continue to be "mistakes" and in poor communities, they are crimes.
4/5 Stars.
When it comes to picking an author for Women's History Month, it just makes sense to spend some time with Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. She's phenomenal. Her prose is smooth and if you're not careful will lull you into an odd sense of peace to only be broken by the truths she brings from the characters she brings to life. This short Novella follows brother and sister Frank and Cee Money. Frank has returned from the Korean War with wounds unseen. Having lost his two best friends, one who died right in his arms, Frank is haunted by the things he saw and the things he did during the war. What we would now call PTSD has led him to drink himself into oblivion. He seems to have found sanctuary and peace with Lily out in the Pacific Northwest. But when he receives a letter that his sister Cee "be dead" he knows he has to hurry to save her. Crossing the country has a black man in the 1950s is not easy and Frank is quickly waylaid into a mental institution. His escape and eventual arrival in Atlanta, Georgia is a master class as only Toni Morrison can present in the large and small cruelties of living in Jim Crow, segregated and overtly racist America. In the meantime, we're told that Cee left home as soon as she could, accompanied by a young man who professed love, but really had his eye on her father's car. Abandoned in Atlanta, Cee is determined to make her own life rather than return to the abusive taunts of her step-grandmother. Cee knows she needs a better job to make ends meet, so she applied to be a doctors assistant at a suburban home-office of Dr. Beau. Only, well Dr. Beau shows a little to much interest in his new assistant's anatomy and too little interest in her status as a human being. So this is how Cee becomes ill, only it's never really detailed, it doesn't need to be. One can google medical experiments of black women and find enough historical details to choke the joy from you for the day. This book is as much about Cee as it is about Frank, and their mutual healing after trauma. It's a shame that the brief descriptions offered mention Cee not at all, since her journey is just as moving. In such a short time, Toni Morrison paints a vivid and dense picture of redemptive sibling and self loves.
4/5 Stars.
There's a definite flow to the language of this book that takes a minute to get into, but once you get used to it, the prose of Sing, Unburied, Sing is really beautiful. And the story, oh God, the story. SUS is told from three perspectives: first, JoJo, a 13 year old boy who is trying to learn how to be a man from his grandfather, Pop. But JoJo faces challenges in the form of his barely engaged mother and his incarcerated father. This beautiful boy saves his whole heart for his three year old sister, Kayla. Oh, and his grandmother is dying from stomach cancer. Oh and his uncle, Given, was shot and killed by some racist Good Ole Boy because he shot a deer with an arrow better than this POS used a shotgun. So JoJo and Kayla are dragged by their mother to pick up their father from jail. On their way upstate, they are taken to a meth kitchen and a meth dealer's house, the entire time JoJo having to steal food for him and Kayla, otherwise their mother, Leonie would completely forget. And once they pick up their father, Michael, better decisions are still not made. The story of this family would have been enough on it's own, but Ward attempts to go deeper and further by involving ghosts in this story. Leonie is haunted both literally and figuratively by her dead brother, Given. JoJo meets a ghost in the form of a former prison inmate who was contemporaries with his grandfather. The boy was 13 when he was incarcerated with much older men. But in Mississippi a 13-year-old black boy is seen as an adult, as a threat. And this comes down on JoJo just as hard as it did on the ghost, Richie. And there's no resolution to this issue because this is America. But the journey of the story is well written while heartbreaking for all the failings of the parents and the despair of the grandparents.
4/5 Stars.
