The powerfully told story is the muscle of history. When it is a first-person account, a primary source, the impact is even greater. The history taught during my years in elementary and high school was a bland, boring collection of dates to be memorized and gnarled words of long-ago battles and treaties. It was like being shown a map of France and asked to describe the taste of a croissant.
Our knowledge of Black history is far worse than that. I can never fully appreciate the predicament of the Black person in this country, yesterday or today. But four books I’ve recently read afford a visceral description of what it must have been like, and is currently like, to grow up Black in America. These stories reveal the intelligence, fortitude, and ingenuity of people who not only survived but contributed immensely to civilization. And often, the true story is difficult to hear.
In Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert, as told to Erin I. Kelly (2021), you are with Rembert as he searches for his mother at age eight or nine, only to find her and hear her say dismissively, “What are you doing here?” He describes the night that he came within seconds of being lynched after being slashed and nearly castrated. This is the recurring dream that chases Rembert to his grave.
He learned the art of leatherwork in prison and developed his own style of carving and painting. His works are detailed and three-dimensional. His chain-gang paintings are particularly moving.
“This book is an autobiography of an illiterate man.” So begins All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw by Theodore Rosengarten (1974). Rosengarten was researching the Alabama Sharecroppers Union when he met Shaw, 84, in 1969. “We had come to study a union,” he wrote, “and we had stumbled on a storyteller.” Rosengarten returned in 1971 with a proposal to record Shaw’s life, and Shaw agreed.
The book is a lyrical expression of a life of work beginning at the turn of the century. The Sharecroppers Union was an attempt to unite and unionize white and Black labor, a dangerous idea to the white elite. Shaw’s incarceration was the inevitable result of his involvement. In the end, this is an account of a fearless and courageous man, “a mule farmer in a tractor world.”
Frederick Douglass wrote three versions of his autobiography, and all are must reads for anyone interested in Black history. In David W. Blight’s Frederic Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018), Douglass’s life is fleshed out using sources and “papers never seen by other biographers.” Douglass, enslaved, taught himself to read, which led to severe punishment. In later years, he often revealed his scarred back during speeches as testimony to the cruelty he endured.
“Are ye a slave for life?” two Irish dockworkers asked the young Douglass on the docks in Baltimore. When he said yes, they strongly encouraged the boy to flee north. He did, eventually arriving in New Bedford in 1838. This book details his self-education, his worldly travels, and the power of his oratory. It is a shame that it is now only in imagination that one can hear his words ring. In 1842, Douglass toured with William Lloyd Garrison “as they barnstormed through meetings in six towns on Cape Cod.” We walk in his footsteps.
I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X over 50 years ago, when I was 21, and it had an everlasting effect on me. A lot has happened in those 50 years. The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne (2020) reflects on Malcolm X’s life and assassination. What is striking, again, is incarceration and the ruin of a Black family by institutional forces. More important, however, is his personal struggle and the overcoming of those seemingly insurmountable forces to make an indelible mark on history. And again, it is the power of storytelling that brings home the historical message. It is a great read.
Dennis Cunningham lives in Wellfleet.
