Black Lives Matter By Miriam R. Kramer Calls for racial justice fired up the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement after police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of his Black suspect, George Floyd, murdering him by ignoring his pleas for air as Floyd gasped for nine minutes and 29 seconds on May 25, 2020. A Black teenager named Darnella Frazier filmed Chauvin as he calmly tortured Floyd to death in front of bystanders. To many this incident represented an innate racism in the way police as authoritarian figures can presume that Black people are guilty and treat them as subhuman individuals with no fear that they themselves will be brought to justice. African Americans have encountered this ingrained racism forever, but video cameras are now bringing to life extreme police practices for all to see. When a jury convicted Derek Chauvin of murder on April 20, 2021, it was a rare moment of accountability for the police in the face of the systemic prejudice that exists in many police departments. To understand some of the history that has perpetuated this violence, please peruse the column I published in September 2019 on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Nickel Boys. His brief, brilliant book is worth reading to understand better how authority figures like Derek Chauvin have abused their power. We still have much history to overcome in America to achieve racial parity. Yet with this watershed moment of Derek Chauvin’s accountability, we are perhaps a step closer to implementing real reform, the reform of police departments and other institutions that perpetuate racial violence. The Nickel Boys Two years ago Whitehead authored The Underground Railroad, a retelling of history in which the passage north for African-American slaves was a real railroad. In plumbing our racial history, he created a…
Delta Ghosts Miriam R. Kramer Jesmyn Ward’s complex National Book award winner, Sing, Unburied, Sing, lends itself to an alternative form of book review. She pens a tale that offers the reader rich treasures of myth, symbol, and folklore while building its story. Its plainspoken cast of characters, bedeviled by love and suffering, stumble along paths built on the shaky bedrock of racist history. Woven with gorgeous, often painful images, Ward’s narrative takes circuitous routes to reach her novel’s ambiguous conclusions. Ward’s tale focuses on a sensitive biracial boy, JoJo, who has grown up in the Mississippi Gulf Coast swamp hamlet of Bois Sauvage with his sister, (Kayla) Michaela. His Black drug-addled mother, Leonie, yearns for his White father, Michael, in prison for cooking crystal meth. She ignores her children while working a low-level job and taking drugs. His upright and loving maternal grandfather, Pop, wrongfully imprisoned in Mississippi’s Parchman prison as a younger man, teaches him how to take care of livestock and a homestead. His spiritual but practical grandmother, Mam, infused with Voodoo and Catholic ritual, takes care of him and his sister at home, mixing up folk remedies for pain and sickness from her gardens and woods. When Michael’s sentence is up, Leonie and a friend take the children to pick him up at Parchman prison in Faulkner-fecund Mississippi, far away from the Gulf Coast. Her mother, Mam, is dying of cancer, and Leonie leaves Pop there to take care of her. JoJo becomes his sister Kayla’s primary caretaker on the trip as he is at home, protecting her from her neglectful, conflicted mother. This road trip awaken demons in Leonie and her son. Leonie sees her love Michael as her only sun, the compass of her life, even though his White cousin shot her Black brother…
The Girl Before, The Girl After By Miriam Kramer Every month I hopscotch across diverse genres to find the books I review. I gravitate towards psychological thrillers, preferably set in the United Kingdom or Ireland with a dark, chilly edge. J.P. Delaney’s The Girl Before fit that bill, so I dove into it recently on a rainy night. Buzzfeed culture writer Scaachi Koul’s One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter also attracted me because I crave sarcastic, funny essays of any kind, particularly if they enrich my perspectives on contemporary pop culture. In The Girl Before, two troubled women speak of looking for London lodging after personal trauma. Emma, the one before, has been robbed in the flat she shares with her boyfriend Simon. Years later, Jane is recovering from bearing a stillborn baby. Both are looking for a fresh start somewhere else to lick their wounds. Edward Monkford, a prize-winning architect, is offering his minimalist London masterpiece for the price of a moderate apartment to a handpicked tenant. Applicants for One Folgate Street must pass a test and an interview to live in an exquisitely calibrated home with pale stone walls, a Buddhist-inspired garden, high ceilings, and iconic modern furnishings. In this house technology works with physical design to create atmosphere and mood with temperature, light, and even water temperature tuned to a tenant’s rhythms. When chosen, both Emma and her boyfriend in the past and Jane in the present must decide whether to pay a personal price on top of the low rent. In taking the architect’s psychometric test, they must address statements such as “Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life” or “When I’m working on something, I can’t relax until…