A Book Circle

A BOOK CIRCLE Compiled by J. L. Herrera With special thanks to Peter Jones, Penny Parrish, Anita Clarkson, Rose Brown, Marie-France Sagot, Liz Field, Dawn Gregory, Margaret Burkett, Ken Herrera and Santi Mariso Introduction This book began as an overflow of ideas from A Writer’s Calendar and it uses the same format though I’ve reduced the number of names. But as it grew I realised it was not so much the result of recording in reasonably readable form the bits and pieces I’d been saving, chaotically, in exercise-books for years but an excuse to explore areas in which I might not have dared to tread a few years ago. My mother once said she hated receiving criticism but that upon reflection it was always worth having. I agree. But it also means that where once I would have hesitated to criticise anyone, unless they’d been dead for many years, I now feel I have an equal right to weigh into contemporary questions and debates and my thoughts, even if timid rather than profound, have the advantage of coming from a source that is often ignored except in those brief snippets where someone with a camera or a microphone goes out into the street and asks people what they are reading (and if anyone should happen to push a microphone under my nose it would be just my luck to be reading something terribly dull like my bus timetable or last week’s Mercury—). So here are not only more little mouthfuls but also some op-ed style pieces on which to browse. And, in passing, isn’t browse a lovely word? Like a cross between brunch and drowse. For me it suggests a cow moving to and fro in the sunshine, her tongue swiping here a dandelion, there a green mouthful of ‘sugardrip’, then back to a flowering head of milkweed or the bee-sweet clover, till temporarily satiated she folds her knees and sinks to rest and chew her cud. So, Happy Browsing! J. L. Herrera. 1998. 2 A BOOK CIRCLE * * * * * January 1st: J. D. Salinger Maria Edgeworth E. M. Forster * * * * * On the 1st January 1953 a remarkable woman set out on a remarkable pilgrimage, not to a place, but to a people, the American people. Though The Milwaukee Journal dubbed her ‘An Ageless Pilgrim’ and the Los Angeles Times ‘Little Old Lady in Tennies’, she called herself simply Peace Pilgrim. She died on her travels in 1981 when she was believed to be over 80 and had already walked more than 25,000 miles; “She has given us an example of a person who lived in inner peace” her friends wrote, and prepared a little book Peace Pilgrim to celebrate her life. She walked alone, penniless, with only the clothes she had on, along with a comb, a folding toothbrush, a ballpoint pen, copies of her message and letters received from around the world to be replied to. “And all of these years when many of us were increasingly afraid to go out on our streets, she walked the rough ‘dangerous’ parts of cities and slept beside the road, on beaches and in bus stations, when no bed was offered.” She slept in cemeteries, barns, fields, abandoned houses, by the road, under bridges—and in jail, after various arrests for vagrancy. She walked through all the mainland states of the USA, all the provinces of Canada, she went to Alaska and Mexico. Her peace message was underpinned by a simple yet difficult philosophy—“This is the way of peace—overcome evil with good, and falsehood with truth, and hatred with love”—and “Intellectually I touched God many times as truth and emotionally I touched God as love. I touched God as goodness. I touched God as kindness. It came to me that God is a creative force, a motivating power, an over-all intelligence, an ever-present, all pervading spirit—which binds everything in the universe together and gives life to everything. That brought God close. I could not be where God is not. You are within God. God is within you.” And in her little poems ... In days long past, when men were mere barbarians: They chose a man or maybe two, to die As sacrifices to the storm god, Thor. But now that they are civilized and Christian: They choose a million men or two to die As sacrifices to the stern god, War. And ... He said, “Of course I may be wrong, But I wouldn’t be surprised If this were the greatest Christian church That ever man devised. Our organ is the very best Our choir stays on key. Our stained glass windows—priceless Our pulpit—the best you’ll see.” But only the wealthy were welcome there, I heard slanderous gossip galore, 3 And from that pulpit so highly prized The preacher glorified war. “Is there anything more you could want in church?” In pride, he said to me. “Just one thing,” I made reply— “Christianity!” * * * * * In This Quiet Dust William Styron tells how he came to write his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, the story of the man at the heart of a famous slave revolt, and the controversy the book aroused. Though thousands of slaves escaped, revolts were rare. He says “There were three exceptions: a conspiracy by the slave Gabriel Prosser and his followers near Richmond in the year 1800, the plot betrayed; the conspirators hanged; a similar conspiracy in 1822, in Charleston, South Carolina, led by a free Negro named Denmark Vesey, who also was betrayed before he could carry out his plans, and who was executed along with other members of the plot. The last exception, of course, was Nat Turner, and he alone in the entire annals of American slavery—alone among all those ‘many thousand gone’—achieved a kind of triumph.” This was 1831 and “Virginia had been edging close to emancipation, and it seems reasonable to believe that the example of Nat’s rebellion, stampeding many moderates in the legislature into a conviction that the Negroes could not be safely freed, was a decisive factor in the ultimate victory of the pro-slavery forces. Had Virginia, with its enormous prestige among the states, emancipated its slaves, the effect upon our history would be awesome to contemplate. Nat brought cold, paralysing fear to the South, a fear that never departed. If white men had sown the wind with chattel slavery, in Nat Turner they had reaped the whirlwind for white and black alike.” * * * * * In 1831 a young Quaker, Prudence Crandell, decided to start a school in the little town of Canterbury. Daisy Newman in A Procession of Friends writes—“While she was opening the Female Seminary in Connecticut, Nat Turner and nineteen other slaves were being hanged in Virginia, and in Boston William Lloyd Garrison was publishing the first issues of the Liberator, a paper dedicated to the abolition of slavery.” The Liberator was not the first abolitionist paper, that honour probably belonging to the Emancipator, Elihu Embree’s monthly. As the first number of the Liberator appeared “pro-slavery sentiment was at fever pitch. Twenty slaves had murdered their masters in Virginia. More repressive laws were enacted. Georgia offered a reward of five thousand dollars for Garrison’s arrest and conviction. South Carolina asked the Mayor of Boston to “ferret him out” but the Mayor refused to interfere with publication of the Liberator.” These days Garrison is best remembered for his work in running the “Underground Railroad” by which escaping slaves were smuggled north to Canada. At the same time a debate was raging as to what to do with emancipated rather than escaping slaves—should they be returned to Africa, should they be encouraged to stay in America and, if so, what rights if any should they enjoy. Meanwhile Prudence Crandall was approached by a young Black woman, Sarah Harris. She would like the opportunity to get an education so she could teach other Black women. Would Prudence accept her into her genteel school. Prudence said yes. Not only that but she began actively seeking out other potential Black students. There was outrage in town! The town’s selectmen invoked its vagrancy law. Anyone not leaving town when ordered to do so could be “stripped to the waist and whipped”; the first arriving Black 4 student said she would take the whipping rather than leave town—and the selectmen found themselves reluctant to carry out a public whipping on a woman. A Unitarian minister, Mr May, posted a bond for the girl and the 16 others who arrived. The selectmen then managed to get a law through in April 1833, the Connecticut Black Law, which would prevent schools accepting Black students from outside the state. Prudence was then jailed. Her sister Almira kept the school going. But stones and rotten eggs were thrown, the windows broken, shopkeepers refused to supply the school, the doctor refused to come, the well was poisoned and people refused to supply water. Mr Crandall carried buckets of water from his farm outside town to the school. Prudence was tried twice; but the jury failed to agree. The case was referred to the State Supreme Court. Was the Black Law constitutional? Did emancipated slaves enjoy the rights of citizens or not? They evaded the question by refusing to try Prudence on a technicality. The school was then burned down. Prudence had failed. She married a Baptist minister and went to live in Kansas. In 1866 the Connecticut State Legislature “prodded by a group of leading citizens that included Mark Twain” apologised and granted Prudence, now a widow of 84, a pension of $400 a year.

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