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Book Review: The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
Tommy is a hustler just taking care of himself and his dad in 1920s Harlem when an old white man invites him to play at his private shindig in his home.
Summary:
Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father’s head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.
A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?
Review:
The Lovecraft universe is a fascinating example of an author creating a world that then becomes the playground for a lot of other people’s imaginations. Legally! Beyond a story being technically set in a Lovecraft universe with Lovecraft characters, though, there’s an entire genre of speculative horror that sprung out of it called cosmic horror. Think Eldritch Gods. Secret societies. Tentacles.
I love cosmic horror. (I even have published a cosmic horror short story.) The thing is, though, most cosmic horror fans have a complex relationship with the genre because of Lovecraft’s blatant racism and xenophobia. So a lot of modern authors, fans of the universe itself but not the person, are writing their own cosmic horror stories that turn Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia on its head. Enter The Ballad of Black Tom.
The author of this novella is a Black man who decided to take one of Lovecraft’s most xenophobic short stories (“The Horror at Red Hook“) and reapproach it from the perspective of a minor secondary character – Black Tom. Tommy lives in 1920s Harlem with a dad who’s a talented musician while he himself is not. He is, however, able to convince white folks outside of Harlem that he’s a talented musician and so he goes there to hustle them. He also has a variety of other side hustles including procuring magical items for people.
The first thing that struck me about this book was how it put a minoritized Lovecraft character front and center. I also noticed how Tommy doesn’t go by the name “Black Tom.” That comes later and, even when it does, Tommy is claiming the name from a place of power.
Part of the terror that Lovecraft’s characters often feel is that of potentially losing their place of privilege. Tommy is living in a blatantly racist society where he can’t even take a train too far out of his neighborhood without someone questioning or harassing him. Instead, what he has to lose is his community in Harlem. Something it takes him a while to figure out. Some of what tears that away from him is the cosmic horror. But some of that is the day-to-day horror of being Black man in 1920s Harlem. (Warning for police brutality in this book).
This novella hits all the notes a reader might want in a cosmic horror – existential dread, elder gods, a little blood, cult rituals. But it does it without the cringe-inducing racist asides. I found it easier to empathize with Tommy than I had with a main character in a cosmic horror in a while. Of course he wants the elder gods to come tear things up. Of course he does. What I wasn’t expecting was the note of…what have I done?…at the end or that I would agree with that too.
I will say, I didn’t enjoy was when the perspective shifted to that of the police officer. I would have preferred remaining in Tommy’s perspective throughout. There was also a hint that a song Tommy’s dad taught him would come back up in a meaningful way, and it didn’t. Perhaps I missed it.
Overall, this is a wonderful entry into the Lovecraft universe that gives voice to a character Lovecraft had maligned, written from an own voices perspective.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 149 pages – novella
Source: Library
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Book Review: Peace Child by Don Richardson
Part history of the 20th century for the Sawi people of New Guinea, part personal memoir by the first missionary to live with them.
Summary:
In 1962, Don and Carol Richardson risked their lives to share the gospel with the Sawi people of New Guinea. Peace Child tells their unforgettable story of living among these headhunters and cannibals, who valued treachery through fattening victims with friendship before the slaughter. God gave Don and Carol the key to the Sawi hearts via a redemptive analogy from their own mythology. The “peace child” became the secret to unlocking a value system that had existed through generations. This analogy became a stepping-stone by which the gospel came into the Sawi culture and started both a spiritual and a social revolution from within. With an epilogue updating how the gospel has impacted the Sawi people, this missionary classic will inspire a new generation of readers who need to hear this remarkable story and the lessons it teaches us about communicating Christ in a meaningful way to those around us.
Review:
There’s a lot of controversy about modern mission work. Not to mention the known atrocities committed by missionaries in the US, Canada, and other places in historic times. I support Indigenous peoples and condemn the horrific means used by these supposed “missionaries.” (I personally do not consider these people to be true believers bringing the gospel but rather colonizers acting on behalf of a nation. For example, Jesus loved children and yet these people murdered them.) So I approached this book with quite a bit of trepidation. Yet slowly over the course of it, I came to see the picture of a very different type of mission work.
Unlike many missionary memoirs, the perspective of the first third of the book is actually that of a historical account of approximately one year in the life of the Sawi before the missionaries arrived. It immerses you into the world of New Guinea and also gives a neutral depiction of the cannibalism as it existed at that point in time. Because Sawi culture honored duplicitousness and treachery, the different villages were quite isolated and small. Betrayal with the end result being death and, yes, cannibalized, was a real consistent threat. There was a Sawi saying about honoring this treachery – “fatten with friendship for the slaughter.” Starting the book from the Sawi perspective sets the expectation that this book is really about the Sawi, not Don and his wife Carol.
Something Don makes clear early on is that other cultures were encroaching on the Sawi. They were not going to continue to be left untouched for long due to the political situation in New Guinea. Essentially, the people with the hands-off approach were departing. It was clear the ones incoming were going to go into the jungles themselves but also allow hunters, prospectors, etc… in. Don’s belief was that the first people the Sawi encountered shouldn’t be out to exploit them for anything but rather should be there to help them in as many ways as possible, not solely with the gospel but also to adjust to their world shifting more dramatically than it had in generations. Don and his wife brought medical care and information on how the outside world that was coming into contact with them would work. A story that particularly struck me was how Don and Carol taught Sawi how to be shopkeepers. You might, like me, think at first, oh no, he’s destroying their hunter/gather society with money. But when he explained his reasoning, I was humbled at how forward-thinking and selfless it was.
Educating Papuans without training some of them to be shopkeepers invites non-Papuans to come in and take control fo the supply and pricing of manufactured goods. As non-Papuans enrich themselves, they eventually gain ownership of land bequeathed to Papuans by their ancestors. Papuans thus tend to end up as exploitable cheap labor or, worse yet, as beggars foraging on garbage cast off by non-Papuans. Hoping to spare our Sawi friends such a fat, we trained some of them to be, yes, shopkeepers! Shopkeepers who charge prices lower than non-Papuans care to compete with! Shopkeepers who see no need to sell their land because their shops are doing quite well, thank you!
location 3632
Beyond helping the Sawi to prepare for meeting the world, Don’s perspective on mission work is essentially that the culture you are visiting already has inbuilt messaging from God about Jesus. You just have to find what it is to help them see it, since they haven’t heard the message before. In the case of the Sawi, that is the cultural tradition of the peace child. I won’t go into the details of how the peace child works in Sawi culture. I think that is most impactful by actually reading the book. What is interesting to me to note, however, is how his method of missions doesn’t supplant the culture or force another culture upon it. It rather takes an aspect of the culture that already exists and builds upon it. Now, all cultures have good and bad aspects. Essentially what Don does is he tries to help enhance what is good within the culture and tamp down what is only hurting the people. The Sawi inability to trust anyone because of treachery being so upheld as a positive trait is an easy to understand example of this. Once the Sawi understanding of a peace child was uplifted higher instead and became more achievable for anyone, then the Sawi were able to start trusting each other and uniting so that they might remain that way when facing the world. I frankly found myself wishing someone could come help my own culture in such a way to help us be better, more communal, versions of ourselves!
I was also surprised by how things turn out. Ultimately, the mission group withdraws from the Sawi villages, not in defeat, but because they feel the Sawi are ready to stand on their own within the extended world they now find themselves in. Updates on the Sawi indicate they are still doing well and have even sent their own missionaries to another Indigenous group, the Sumo, further inland. This article also talks about the fact that Don use the Indonesian characters to write down Sawi and translate the New Testament. This means that when the Sawi were newly required to go to government schools and learn Indonesian they could also automatically read Sawi, helping to preserve the language.
Overall, this is a very engaging and informative read about one Indigenous nation encountering the larger world in the 20th century. It also gave me a new appreciation for how mission work can be done ethically. While I understand that some may disagree and say there is no such thing as ethical mission work, I think how Don and his wife Carol helped the Sawi maintain control of their land and literacy in their own language is a strong counterpoint.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 256 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Library
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Book Review: Daniel Boone’s Own Story & The Adventures of Daniel Boone by Daniel Boone and Francis L. Hawks
This book presents Daniel Boone’s summary of his adventures in the late 1700s and early 1800s plus a biography of his life first published in 1844.
Summary:
Daniel Boone blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap. Thousands followed, settling in Boonesborough, Kentucky, to form one of the first English-speaking communities west of the Appalachians. This two-part tale of the legendary frontiersman’s life begins with a brief profile by Boone himself, covering his exploits in the Kentucky wilderness from 1769 to 1784. The second part chronicles Boone’s life from cradle to grave, with exciting accounts of his capture and adoption by the Shawnee and his service as a militiaman during the Revolutionary War.
Review:
Growing up, I’d heard the legends of Daniel Boone and saw a few episodes of the (wildly historically inaccurate) tv show. I was raised with the mainstream US belief that westward expansion and colonization was great. It wasn’t until I was in college that I started to really learn about the true history of colonization. So I wasn’t too surprised when I read these period accounts to find that things were not the glowing hero account I’d heard. Not even when you take what happened at face value from the mouth of the man who lived it or from the biography that came shortly after his death.
Let’s start with what was true. Daniel Boone was, by all accounts, a talented hunter. He didn’t like to have many people around him, so he was constantly on the lookout for land that appeared to him to be empty (more on that later). He was taken captive by the Shawnee and adopted by them, living with them for two years before escaping. He was a critical tipping point person in the settlement (and stealing) of Kentucky by white Americans.
Here’s what stuck out to me when reading these accounts, though, with my twenty-first century eye. Daniel Boone and the other settlers considered Kentucky to be open space and fair game. However, even the early 1800s biographer pointed out that this land was being used as hunting grounds by multiple different Indigenous nations. So even folks of the time realized that the land was in use, just not in the same way as how white people would use it. When I dug into this more, though, I found this fascinating article about the idea of Kentucky being a “dark and bloody ground” aka land that was being fought over and contested by Indigenous nations with no one really living on it the way European settlers viewed living on land, as a myth propagated to be able to view the land as “free game” to then sell to settlers without even the pretense of a treaty with or purchasing from the Indigenous folks.
Reader should be aware that these period pieces use multiple slurs to refer to Indigenous peoples. Beyond the slurs, there’s this odd depiction of Indigenous peoples. On the one hand, they’re depicted as backwards and not very bright. But on the other hand they’re depicted as terrifying enemies difficult to overcome.
It’s interesting to me how both authors consistently view white folks as superior and more “civilized,” in spite of telling stories that make it look very much the contrary. For example, there’s a scene in which an Indigenous group of warriors takes a bunch of white women captive. They are in a boat and they line the women around the edges of the boat. The narrator says that they did such a thing to ensure safe passage for themselves, assuming the white men would never fire on the white women. But the white men do, and the narrator defends this, saying it’s better for the white women to be dead than to be held captive by the Indigenous people. This statement is extra confusing as we had just seen earlier in the book that Daniel Boone was taken captive and then adopted and treated as one of the tribe. Now, of course, not all captives were adopted. Some were murdered and, yes, some were tortured. (How captives were treated varied wildly.) But the point remains that the men fired on their own women and considered that to be a “civilized” act.
As it is women’s history month, I wanted to draw out some information on Daniel Boone’s wife, Rebecca. He brought her out to Kentucky, and on the trip there, one of their children is killed by Indigenous folks defending their land. (Because it WAS their land.) Then later her daughter is kidnapped. (Daniel retrieves her.) Ultimately, six of their ten children died early deaths, largely in the war between the Indigenous and the settlers. We also can’t forget when Daniel was captured and adopted. He was gone for so long that Rebecca gave up hope and went home to North Carolina, only to have Daniel show up, back from what she thought was the dead, and bring her back to the frontier. I can’t imagine living my life that way. I realize she had her own agency, and we must acknowledge the complicity of white women in the theft of the land. But I do wonder what it must have felt like to give birth to ten children, only to have six of them die in the bloody battle for land. Did she think it was worth it? What made her go back with Daniel when he showed up after being missing for two years? These are things we’ll never know because women’s stories simply were not recorded for us.
I would not call this a fun or easy read. It was an informative one. There’s a lot of value in reading firsthand accounts of history. Of course we’ll never get the whole truth from any one such account. But it is informative into how people in that time period thought and behaved. How they perceived it then and how we perceive it now.
Recommended to those with an interest in primary resources from the colonization of the US.
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3 out of 5 stars
Length: 128 pages – short nonfiction
Source: Gift
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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