Honey in the *&%@)#! Horn

I must express my deepest and most heartfelt congratulations to H. L. Davis for the accomplishment that is his 1936 Pulitzer-winning novel, Honey in the Horn. It is officially the worst book I've ever read. And I've read a lot of books, so that's really saying something. Congratulations, sir!

Now in November Rain

In the 1930s, six women were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction - more than in any other single decade. (Especially the 1950s when every award went to a man.) Josephine Winslow Johnson was the fourth lady of the decade to take home the prize, in 1935, at the tender age of 24. Now in November was her first novel. It is the tragic story of a middle class family that returns to a long-forgotten farm to attempt to make new a life after the Great Depression has driven them into poverty. It is perfectly written, quietly yet powerfully feminist, and is a beautiful - if sad - story of what it meant to be a Depression-era woman living in poverty.

#16 Lamb in his Bosom

When I first read this book, I was extremely pregnant and confined to my bed. Cean, the main character, is a supreme force of womanhood in every possible sense of the phrase. Reading about this busy and industrious mother-of-many while laying flat on my back made me feel supremely lazy. The level of energy and labor it takes to run a rural household is not for the faint of heart. Despite being a big fan of all the shiny appliances of modern convenience, I was definitely intrigued by the mundane details of her day to day existence. The process of watching a big girl turn into a little woman with a home of her own was fascinating. Imagine a world without Wal-Mart or Target where every piece of your household has to be furnished from scratch and often needs to planned months ahead of time to keep everyone properly clothed and fed. Never mind the tedium of washing clothes by hand; She had to MAKE the clothes too. Most would be crushed by the pressure but her motivation against procrastination was... death.

Sweet Sixteen

In 1934 Caroline Miller became the first Georgian to win the Pulitzer Prize with her novel Lamb in His Bosom. While it's better known than some other early winners, it's not widely known by modern readers. I'm not especially surprised at its relative obscurity, after all, Margaret Mitchell's epic 1937 winner, Gone With the Wind, was destined to outshine many of its counterparts for a long time to come. The Wikipedia entry about Lamb in His Bosom is 65 words long. The entry for Gone With the Wind is 10,665 words!

Set in rural Georgia, the novel tells the story of a poor family eking their living out of the land around them in the two decades leading up to the Civil War. They are modest people, God-fearing, largely uneducated, they don't own slaves (not because of a moral objection, but because they are poor), and they're mostly oblivious to the larger world around them. Their attention is focused on their land, their children, their chores, and their lifelong family drama. I enjoyed this book a lot. You should read it.

#15: The Store

Picture it: America, Post-Civil War. The slaves have been freed, the south has been reconstructed, and freedom is ringing throughout the land. Right? Well, not exactly. Someone with a sense of humor might have titled this book "Now, do you get it?" as  means of completely summing up why slavery only freed the slaves on paper and why the United States absolutely needed The Civil Rights Act to be written and passed. It also gives us 20th century readers a startling look back at what it meant to be a free Black man or woman in the south after the war and some much needed insight on what institutional racism is and how it can completely shape a person's destiny no matter how hard they try to overcome it. It is worth noting that this book provided no heroes or easy solutions and honestly, no hope. In short, it was pretty much exactly the opposite of The Help. (which is a good thing)

Yes, this unassuming little book, The Store by T.S. Stribling did all of that. And it was also a really gripping story.

No Country for Black Men

In 1933 Thomas Sigismund (T.S.) Stribling reluctantly accepted the fifteenth Pulitzer for his novel, The Store. According to the Encyclopedia of Alabama, "Stribling was apparently so unimpressed with the award that he showed it to his wife once and put it in the attic, never to examine it again." Sadly it seems that America has also put Mr. Stribling's novel in the attic. Its fade into obscurity is unfortunate because everyone in the United States - and I mean everyone - ought to read this book.

The Store is the second book in Stribling's Vaiden Trilogy. Set in northern Alabama in 1884, the story deals with Colonel Miltiades Vaiden and his ascent back into the middle class. The South's loss of the Civil War and the subsequent end of slavery cost him his trio of professions as: an overseer on a cotton plantation, an officer in the Confederate Army, and a leader in Ku Klux Klan. (So obviously, he's a *gem* of a guy.) Colonel Milt and his homely wife, Ponny, who he generally holds in contempt and treats with disdain, have fallen on hard times; yet he refuses to accept any personal responsibility for his lowered position, choosing instead to blame others at every turn.

The major action of the novel surrounds Miltiades' dubious decision to steal cotton from his employer, Mr. J. Handback, and the calamitous series of events that follows the theft. Due to a decades-old business transgression of Mr. Handback's against his family, Milt felt entitled to the cotton he stole and the money it brought. He felt it was owed to him. He did not, however, feel compelled to share the spoils with his siblings, who were arguably equally wronged by Handback's past shady dealings. In the same way it was obvious to the reader that Mr. Adams' theft of the glue formula was absolutely wrong in the previous Pulitzer-winner Alice Adams, so too is it obvious that Colonel Milt's appropriation of Mr. J. Handback's cotton is wrong.

Miltiades Vaiden is a terrible person. Here is a list of some of his more reprehensible qualities and actions in The Store:

• He's racist.
• Years ago he raped a black slave woman named Gracie. The regret he feels at the memory of the rape is not due to the fact that he knows that rape is morally wrong, but rather that he degraded himself by sleeping with a black woman. Because...
• ...he's racist.
• He treats his wife, Ponny, terribly. He only married her hoping her father would die and leave his money to her. Which doesn't happen.
• Prior to marrying Ponny he was engaged to another woman, Drusilla, but before ending their engagement he made sure he slept with her first.
• At the end of the book, after Ponny has died in a most pitiful fashion, he marries Drusilla's daughter, Sydna, who is 30 years his junior, despite having once slept with her mother and the fact that his own nephew is terribly in love with her.
• He steals a bunch of cotton from J. Handback and sells it for a sizable sum of money.
• He coerces Gracie (yes, the woman he once raped) into hiding the money for him, without any consideration for the great personal risk she is taking in aiding him in the crime. Why would he give her any consideration? After all, she is black, and a "Vaiden negro," and somehow bound to him because she served his family as a slave back on the plantation WHERE HE RAPED HER. Because...
• ...he is really racist!
• Later, when he is in a tight spot financially due to his own poor money management, he seeks to deprive his black sharecroppers (Gracie again. And her son, Toussaint, who is actually his son, because he raped her!) of their tools so that he can sell them to make some quick cash, knowing full well that losing their equipment will prohibit their ability to harvest their crops, and therefore impoverish them. Which he really doesn't care about, at all.
• Because he is really, really racist.

All of the white people in this novel, with the important exception of one, are unapologetically racist. As bad as Milt is (and clearly, he's pretty bad), there are people who are even worse. Stribling's white characters fall along a continuum of racism, and it is depressing to see how few people are on the right end of that continuum. The lone non-racist, Postmaster Landers, is not a natural born Southerner, but a transplant from the North, his position was a political appointment. He is not well-liked by his white peers in town, but in his interactions with Milt (who is at least civil and respectful to him, if not particularly kind) he serves as a sort of psychic, directly predicting for him events that come to pass or providing him with portentous advice.

Landers is set apart, separated from the other white characters by both his slightly supernatural characteristics, as well as his treatment of the town's black residents, whom he treats with genuine equality of heart and mind, and complete compassion. For much of the novel I felt that Mr. Landers' purpose was to provide contrast as the sole humane white man in a sea of racists, I thought he was a symbol of hope. As he fights for Toussaint's life near the end of the novel, he makes an impassioned plea for assistance to Milt's nephew, Jerry:

This passage strikes me as profoundly true. It's so obvious - we are all human beings. And yet as the novel's closing events transpire it becomes clear that rather than serving as a symbol of hope, Landers is just the opposite. He is a sad indicator of how little hope Stribling saw for white Southerners to progress in their way of thinking about and treating black Americans.

There is a lot to ponder about this story, but the single most important takeaway for me was Stribling's basic conclusion that the American South was, is, and always will be a white man's country. At one point the Governor of Alabama, who is also an attorney, says just that in a courtroom where his white client is being sued by a black man, and he's attempting to have the case dismissed because (sarcasm) how could a black man ever have the law on his side if his complaint is against a white man? His characters repeatedly prove that in the post-war South racism was such a deeply ingrained aspect of white culture that it would require generations and generations of conscious, deliberate effort - both personal and political - to eradicate. He made these conclusions in the 1930s, and sadly in 2013 it is all too evident that we've still got a long way to go.

Stribling addresses many other racial themes in this novel, and his black characters represent a wide range of cultural perspectives. I could dedicate an entire second blog post just to that topic! The idea of hypodescent is extremely important to the plot, and if you've never heard of it now's a good time to look it up, as it's basically the way race is assigned in America.

The next novel on the list is set in rural Georgia before, during and after the Civil War. And no, it's NOT Gone With the Wind, not yet. It's called Lamb in His Bosom, by a woman named Caroline Miller. I've actually already started it and am loving it so far. Fingers crossed it stays that way!

Book #14: The Good Earth

The main character is Chinese, a man, and a farmer.  I'm not a pre-revolutionary Chinese man, so maybe I don't know any better, but nothing about the main character's voice in this book "felt" authentic. The world that Pearl Buck created seemed solid and tactile enough, but so many of her characters lacked flesh and realism. Their plights were real but they seemed like cold pieces of colorful construction paper hastily pasted onto a beautiful oil panting. There were some instances where she did manage to bring the character's culture to life. One was, surprisingly, with foot binding.

The Wealth (and Poverty) of Nations

In 1931, Pearl S. Buck, who would later become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, published the first book of a trilogy. It was called The Good Earth. In 1932 it became the 14th novel to win the Pulitzer Prize. It has retained its popularity better than many other early winners, even making a return to the bestseller list in 2004 when Oprah Winfrey added it to her famous book club.

Settle For Nothing

Thank you to the Pontiac Public Library in Pontiac, Michigan for keeping in its collection a copy of Margaret Ayer Barnes' novel, Years of Grace. Ms. Barnes' novel is the thirteenth novel to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and I loved every single minute that I spent reading all 581 delicate pages of it.

#12: Laughing Boy

No wonder people loved Shirley Temple movies so much. Clearly the best literature of the 1930s was just straight up bleak. I am so ready to read a story about something happy happening to anyone. Even a happy dog would be great at this point. But alas, following in the tradition of really depressing Depression Era books, Laughing Boy steps up to the plate to send us one step closer to just saying "screw life. what's the point!?" This time, our sad and soon to be miserable character is a young man of the Navajo nation who is just starting out his life as a grown man.

What You Don't Know Can't Hurt You

The twelfth book to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is Oliver La Farge's 1930 novel about a traditional Navajo man, Laughing Boy, who falls in love with an American-educated Navajo woman, Slim Girl. Named for its main character, Laughing Boy was the first novel about Native American life to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I enjoy stories about pioneers, Native Americans, and life in the West. Larry McMurtry's epic Lonesome Dove (which received the Pulitzer in 1986) remains my favorite book by an American writer and I first read it more than ten years ago. So I had high hopes for this novel. It did not meet them.

Scarlet Sister Mary # 11

I am always eager to read a book that has previously been banned. Of course there is the rebellious side but there is also an intense curiosity to see just what was the big deal?  Well in that regard, this book certainly did not disappoint. Scarlet Sister Mary is a scandalous story of a woman who dared to not only have sex with whomever she pleased, but she was also brazen enough to proudly bear the children of her affairs and parade them around her community without shame or excuse. It is an awesomely daring story-line for a book published in the late 1920s. Of course the extremely heavy hand of Southern-style Protestantism makes it all better in the end, but that was to be expected.

But onto the historical significance of the book... This book disproves a very controversial sentiment held by many about the existence of "African-American Literature."  To quote a reader from GoodReads.org (speaking about Toni Morrison's Sula):

Scarlet Sister Mary

The eleventh book on our list is 1929's prizewinning Scarlet Sister Mary, by Julia Peterkin. It's the story of a fiercely independent young black woman in the post-slavery coastal south who lives her life outside the moral expectations of her community. She gets pregnant before she gets married, then she marries the wrong man, and after he leaves her she has a bunch of kids with a bunch of different men and never feels too badly about any of it. She has something like nine or ten children, some with men who were one night stands. She's a pretty sexually independent character for the 20's.