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Sep
28
The Bare Necessities—Joyce Hinnefeld (STRANGER HERE BELOW)
2010 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which writers and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of the books they love.
Joyce Hinnefeld is the author of Stranger Here Below, a novel about “the travails of women in the struggle to stay connected to one another across every boundary during one of the most difficult eras of the American experience—1908–1968.”
A charge to write about “the best books I’ve ever read” or “the books that have been most important to me” absolutely paralyzes me, so I’m grateful for the freedom to define my list of “Bare Necessities” here as “some books that were important to me during the many years of writing and rewriting the book that eventually became Stranger Here Below.”
That makes me feel like I can start typing.
It’s dated now, its scholarship has been supplanted by more recent and more nuanced interpretations of the Civil War and its aftermath, but I still believe that every American should read C. Vann Woodward’s second revised edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow. First published in 1955 and revised and reissued in 1966, this is a book that will break your heart, for a number of reasons. First (at least if you’re my age or older), for all it will teach you that you didn’t learn in school (“Um, Reconstruction? Weren’t there people called Carpetbaggers who took advantage of the poor, defeated South?”). And more than this: for the tragic missed opportunities—for interracial understanding and for unity among all poor and working people—the book recounts. Reading this book made me feel an even greater urgency about telling the story of what happened at Berea College in the first half of the twentieth century in Stranger Here Below.
And once I decided on that, much as I didn’t want to do this, I admitted that I’d have to learn more about lynchings in the United States. Not because any happened at Berea; to my knowledge none did—but as my research revealed, they did happen in Kentucky, as in many other states, more than we’d like to ponder probably. So way back in the year 2000 (to give you some idea of how long Stranger Here Below was in progress), I went to see a profoundly disturbing exhibition, called “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America” at the New York Historical Society. Included in this exhibition were a private collection of postcards—depicting photographs of public lynchings. That sort of tells you all you need to know: People went to see these horrid events, and then they sent postcards to their loved ones to share the spectacle. It’s hard to describe what it’s like to see these images and read the messages written on the cards. They’ve been collected in a book by the same name, edited by James Allen, collector of the postcards and co-curator of the original exhibition, and including essays by Leon F. Litwack and Hilton Als. This is not a book to read for pleasure, obviously. But like The Strange Career of Jim Crow, it offers crucial—though painful—knowledge for anyone who wants to be genuinely educated about our nation’s history.
Okay, enough sadness for now; on to reading for pleasure, which I also do! For years I owned a signed copy of Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, but for some reason I didn’t get around to reading it for a long time. I love Wendell Berry; I think he’s brilliant and prophetic. But sometimes his writing about place and environment and the ways in which we’re mindlessly ravaging both can fill me with despair (I read a lot of things that fill me with despair, as I guess you’re gathering by now). But oh, this novel! It’s a quiet, beautiful rumination by one Jayber Crow, a thoughtful Kentucky barber who witnesses much of the twentieth century from the Ohio River town where he settles as a young man. You will fall in love with Jayber if you read this book, and you will wish you lived as quiet and simple a life as he does, even with its attendant sorrows.
Like others who’ve written about their favorite books here, I can’t go on without citing Toni Morrison. What would we do if she hadn’t written all those wonderful, gorgeous, painful books? Well, as others have said, I could pick any of them, but for this list I’ll choose Sula. I wanted Stranger Here Below to treat many themes—race and religion among the big ones—but one underlying current that matters much to me is women’s sexual desire, and what’s done with that very threatening thing, in the realms of race and religion, for instance. No one records women’s desires like Toni Morrison; reading Sula makes me want to try to be half as brave as she is in going down that fierce and winding road.
And for something very different, another novel, one I reread now and then: W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. This book was like a long drink of cool water when I first read it, probably ten years ago or so. A long drink of cool water after the hot and bothered years of doing graduate work in English, and wondering if I’d ever find an authentic and meaningful way to write fiction—a meaningful way and a meaningful voice—after absorbing so much theory and thinking so much about the realistic novel’s inability to escape its cultural moment. Sebald’s work just explodes every notion about genre, but in the quietest of ways. The Emigrants reads like memoir, an account of the lives of several Germans who are living in exile—but not really. Even the book’s use of mysterious images and photographs feels quiet, even reticent. It’s hard to describe, but deeply satisfying to read.
Finally, a book I’ve now taught several times, in a college writing course called “Writing and/as Activism”: James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I relish Agee’s unbridled writing in this account of his and Evans’ stay with several poor sharecropper families in rural Alabama in 1936, and I think we owe much of the rich documentary tradition that has developed in the U.S. to this book. Agee’s text is a reckless, beautiful mess; Walker Evans’ photographs balance it with somber repose. I always think my students will resist reading this book, but they routinely fall in love with the young man’s rage and sorrow fueling Agee’s fervid prose. The clear, pure love he feels for the people he writes about is, I think, what many writers feel for the people they come to know, be those people fictional or real. To find a language for that love is a writer’s deep solace.
Joyce Hinnefeld’s Stranger Here Below is out today from Unbridled Books.
View other Bare Necessities annotated reading lists.
Related posts:
- Tough Love: Four YA Novels That Aren’t Afraid of the Truth (The Bare Necessities—A.S. King)
- The Bare Necessities—David Bajo (PANOPTICON)
- The Bare Necessities—Peter Geye (SAFE FROM THE SEA)
- The Bare Necessities: Julie Klam’s “Desert Island” Dog Books
- The Bare Necessities—Sandra Brannan (IN THE BELLY OF JONAH)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by jenn northington, Brooks Sigler, AaronsBooks, AaronsBooks, Rebecca Schinsky and others. Rebecca Schinsky said: SULA and THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW among Joyce Hinnefeld's influential reads: http://bit.ly/ajgQ2f [...]