For the Readers' Wishlist

5 Books to Close Out 2021

Black Under

Ashanti Anderson, Black Lawrence Press

For much of my life, I didn’t feel like I really “got” poetry. I wanted people to put their ideas in orderly sentences— show off, sure, but within the rules. This past spring, I took a short online poetry class during a spasm of particularly twitchy isolation boredom. While the poems I produced were, at best, middling (the most nearly good were about loquats and St. Mary of Egypt), the exercise was good for me. I started seeing how poetry worked, like someone had taken out the gears and put them back in front of me. I’m thankful I had this experience before I found Ashanti Anderson’s award-winning chapbook Black Under. It’s a short collection, but it punches way above its weight. By turns punny (“my too-weak notice”) and sledgehammer-effective (“i would tie my own throat in a bow if only our oppressors would lick these flames”), Anderson’s poetry deals with Blackness and the suffering it can be subject to, but her lines will hit you wherever you live, like this title: “Sister, Pick Which Battle to Win When You Choose to Lose the War.” Anyone creative will be envy-stricken and inspired by this little book. blacklawrencepress.com.

Friendship and Devotion, or Three Months in Louisiana

Camille LeBrun, translated by E. Joe Johnson and Robin Anita White, University Press of Mississippi

Camille LeBrun was one of the several pen names of Pauline Guyot, a music and language teacher and prolific writer in nineteenth-century Paris. Though she published widely in her lifetime, LeBrun is poorly remembered today, haven largely fallen out of print and rarely seeing translations. Much of her work was for children, or what we now call “young adults,” and generally had an explicitly moral lesson (the current volume includes permission to publish from the Bishop of Quimper). If I had been a French teenager in 1849, I would have loved Friendship and Devotion. The story follows two teenage orphan girls, both beautiful, kind, and rich, one lazy, as they return to Louisiana to claim their inheritances after having been educated in Paris. Because LeBrun knows how to get a story going, they arrive during a yellow fever outbreak, and the adventures continue apace. The talk is a little preachy—there’s significant mention of the sins of pride and sloth, and one minor character actually dies of moral cowardice—but it’s also an adventure, replete with descriptions of the exotic foods, plants, animals, and customs LeBrun heavily researched. For a book from its era, it’s more racially sensible than most, if by no means ideal: LeBrun correctly identifies racism as a sin, and several Black characters win their interactions with whites, whether the contest is manners or arson. The heavy footnotes reveal the translators’ pleasure in their work; they are delighted, for example, that LeBrun used the then-common Louisiana French term kongo for a water moccasin. Often, I place the books I review into little free libraries so they can go out into the world and do good, but I’m keeping this one.

The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You: Stories

Maurice Carlos Ruffin, One World

The last party I went to before you-know-what was at Maurice Ruffin’s house. (He didn’t invite me, I tagged along, but he was a very gracious host.) Had I known then what I know now, I would have found a chance to rifle through his office and try to sneak out with a manuscript. Ruffin’s show-off strength in this collection is his command of voice, shifting from the heavily-accented internal monologue of a poor teenage sex worker to the prim, orderly self-justification of a highly educated thief. The result is an almost kaleidoscopic array of compelling character studies and slices of life: you may never have been a transgender teenager intent on being photographed on a horse, but if you read this book, you’ll be much closer to understanding how you’d act if you were. This is also the first fiction I’ve read to address the pandemic matter-of-factly, as a background to the lives of the characters: yes, we have on face shields, now help me get on this damn horse. The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You hangs together well as a collection, too; longer pieces are interspersed with page-or-two textual amuse-bouches that at their best hit as hard as their longer neighbors. Fiction readers especially compelled by strong voice will eat this one right up.

Dark and Shallow Lies

Ginny Myers Sain, Razorbill

Even if I hadn’t enjoyed this book— which I did—the author would deserve credit for one of the best elevator pitches in recent memory: La Cachette, population 106 if they find her alive, is a fictional rural Louisiana town with the highest per capita population of mind readers in the world. “Her” is the missing Elora, best friend of narrator Grey, who returns from Arkansas to this village of psychic shops on stilts to join the search. One of the town’s few daughters without clairvoyance, she will have to investigate the old-fashioned way. Grey provides a wry and thoughtful point-of-view, with her internal monologue providing a light salt of humor that makes the fantasy more relatable. (Maybe once, at the dawn of time, there was a teenager who was never a smartass, but we live in a world without such wonders.) As an added treat, Sain includes an alligator named Willie Nelson, and a dachshund named Sweet-n’-Low. Give this book to someone who needs an escape.

Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood

Fatima Shaik, The Historic New Orleans Collection

With a fiction writer’s verve for detail and a historian’s gusto for the whole story, Fatima Shaik presents a meaty and very readable history of a mutual aid association that thrived among New Orleans’ Black Creole population from before the Civil War until Shaik’s own childhood. While the presence and influence of free people of color in New Orleans has long been acknowledged, Shaik points out that segregated access to archives meant that generations of would-be Black historians couldn’t access the materials that would allow their descendants to research their stories. One of these stories, that of Economy Hall, survives in records long held by Shaik’s father, himself a scholar who pursued a doctorate during summers in Canada to avoid racism at home. Shaik’s childhood infatuation with the records, written in French on fancy paper she would secretly stroke, blossomed into an adult writer’s urge to present what they held to a wider audience. As a novelist, Shaik understands how to move action forward, while keeping her writing grounded in fact; she has the knack for building characters out of archival documents that marks the successful writer of popular history. History buffs will adore it.