SCALES #68: IJsheiligen
Hello!
I finished reading The Bone and Sinew of the Land by Anna-Lisa Cox. Subtitled “America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality”, borrowing it from the library was prompted by the reading I wrote about earlier, where a local history book tended to the anodyne and Kristin Hoganson’s The Heartland opened up other ways of understanding the history of the American Midwest.
I actually read two similar books: both The Bone and Sinew of the Land and Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765-1900 by Stephen Vincent. The latter is a dry scholarly monograph chronicling the history of two African-American communities in rural Indiana, while the former, though still written by an academic, was directed far more toward a popular audience.
Both books present an American history I was more or less ignorant of: the migration of free African Americans into the old Northwest Territories to continue the farming they did in the East or South. The books follow contours in American history that cut against narratives of steady, inexorable advances in liberty and equality: life becoming worse for land-owning free African Americans in the South in the early 1800s after post-Revolutionary idealism faded; the Northwest Territories initially as a region of opportunity for people of color; the region backsliding by the 1850s and becoming increasingly hostile to African Americans through mechanisms such as new state constitutions and the Fugitive Slave Law.
One thing that struck me about The Bone and Sinew of the Land is the work Cox does to convey the human-level experience of the world she writes about. She focuses on a single family in Indiana, the Griers of Gibson County, Indiana, and weaves in a number of set pieces, including a white mob attacking the black community of Cincinnati in 1841, featuring a cameo by a young John Mercer Langston, who reappears later running for public office in Lorain County, Ohio.
But what most stood out to me was Cox’s careful sentence constructions, trying to suggest unrecorded emotional states and daily activities while preserving a distinction between what is and is not part of the historical record. Lots of “must have”, “would have”, “may have”, “surely”, and rhetorical questions. For example, from a passage expanding on what Keziah Grier’s help of enslaved people traveling on the Underground Railroad would have looked like in practice:
“There was not much that Keziah could give to those who were running from bondage. Some food, some comfort, some warmth and directions. She would have to explain that even though they were in a free state, the refugees had to keep walking north. The Griers would have known that in 1815 eight people who had escaped bondage and had been living nearby in Indiana Territory had been denied their freedom when they had pled their case in the Gibson County Courthouse. Even this wilderness north of the Ohio River was too far south to be safe.”
The warmth was provided by knitting warm clothes:
“First the wool had to be washed. It must have looked an impossible task, the raw wool sitting in a massive mound, fluffy and filthy. The pile would have tempted the children, who probably didn’t mind that it was caked with mud, full of burrs and bugs, for it was so soft and bouncy.”
[…]
“Standing there in the half light, her daughter beside her, Keziah must have looked like help. She must have seemed safe. And she would have been.
Despite the danger, despite the risk, she was choosing to help—they all were.
Did a person come slowly out, moving into the light? Hoping for charity, for survival, for freedom? Keziah made her choice once more—they would be met with kindness and comfort.”
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You’re reading SCALES, a newsletter by me, Adam Birdsall, who lives on the very old American frontier, works in the Rubber City, and has thought a lot about particles in the atmosphere. The title is capacious on purpose. You can unsubscribe at any time (link at bottom), forward, subscribe, or reply!
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Reading
Matt Webb: Rethinking conference talks for video calls. Several perceptive observations!
An ill-fated blimp advertising campaign was not enough to get Canada Dry’s Spur cola to catch on.
“Here’s a quick list of ways in which English fails to represent all languages, that is, properties of English that are not broadly shared, even among the world’s widely used languages.”
Listening
…we gather here today [ed: this weekend only!]…
The new Fiona Apple album: for some reason I’m parceling it out like a box of fancy chocolates. I listened to the first song and a half, once, and that’s about all I could handle right now.
“Allstar but every word is in alphabetical order” (Also revealing: “…but the sung notes are sorted by pitch from lowest to highest”)
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Yard news
We’ve just passed out of IJsheiligen, the Ice Saints days of 11 to 15 May, and wouldn’t you know it but there was a cold snap here. (It was also the first frost during IJsheiligen at the Dutch national De Bilt weather station since 1953—translated.)
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Thanks for reading! Hope you are staying well and looking out for those around you,
—Adam