3201 Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia

http://tinyurl.com/y5kbe7yv

James Branch Cabell lived in a large house on Richmond's Monument Avenue from 1925 until his death in 1958.

>1 Crypto-Willobie: Thank you. That article and the letters were well worth reading. Born, raised, and having lived my entire life in California, I (and we) can be somewhat slow. I don't tend to parse common names much, but half way through the letters, I suddenly felt I needed to snatch the Joe Lee Davis book off the shelf to see where he was born (Lexington, Kentucky).

My mother and 5 of her 6 sisters were born in Little Rock. I grew up hearing some very strange things coming out of the mouths of my family, Grandparents and Great-grandparents. As a kid, I did not see any racial problems around me, not realizing I lived in a Sunset town, with no black residents at all until about 1970. I learned that from my California born father when I came home from elementary school when that day's main lesson had been that Marian Anderson, "the greatest singer of the 20th century!" had performed "right here in Escondido." My father's response to my talking about this was "Did they tell you that they made her perform in the afternoon and then escorted her out of town."

In a strange coincidence, the very first black person that I met and talked to was Cleavon Little. While he was an undergraduate at San Diego State in 1964, he was invited to come perform at our church where he did some comic skits, recitations of James Weldon Johnson, and a dramatic reading of "That Dreadful Hour," a piece on the the assassination of JFK, written by another SDS undergraduate, Shirley Gissendanner, later a local community pillar. He picked 6 year old me out of the audience to assist him for one skit. I thought he was marvelous. Decades later I learned that our family friend who invited him to Escondido had been fired from his job, partly for that, but more so because he had Cleavon over to his house for dinner afterwards.

Little known fact. San Diego County was the center of the Ante-Bellum California movement for the southern portion of the state to break off from the northern, and reenter the Union as a slave state. We were going to be rich!

That's quite a tale.
Thinking about it all make me hang my head and sigh...

That was a good read. It wasn't until the mention of Rep John Lewis giving a speech that I noticed the article was from June 2019, I'd assumed it was published recently.

June 2019 seems pretty recent to me...

re: dscottn’s interesting tales

I grew up and now live in a mostly white rural county in the Pacific Northwest. At least half the population consists of Finnish and Scandinavian extracted folks. I am ‘all’ Finn.

So, not many darker skinned people around here. Yet, one of my first friends, as a pre-school child, was a girl my age who was half Makah. When I was about ten, my parents hosted two missionaries in my house, a Pacific Islander with a wondrous name, and a Georgian man named James Slade, tall, strong, very black — and he figured out my father fairly quickly. It was Christmastime, and on the kitchen table lay Brazil nuts and nutcrackers, a seasonal treat. Mr. Slade picked up a nut, held it in display, and asked my father, “What’s this?” My father immediately responded, “Why, that’s a nih,” interrupting his answer just as was the joke in Blazing Saddles a few years later, though in this case the reference was a tad more innocent, “— toes.” Mr. Slade laughed and laughed.

These days, black people show up on the census. A woman from South Africa ran as a Republican for state office from our district, but was defeated by the white Democrat. Race did not appear to be an issue. The local church has developed a new tradition, adopting children from Ethiopia. The kids are cute and smart and seem happy. And I have a semi-retired acquaintance who says his friends warned him not to move here, “because of all the racism.” He was worried, but settled in any way. He now says this is the most welcoming, least racist place he has ever lived. He is writing a book on the subject.

You see, we do not have a cultural history of bad conflict, so our community has not carried on bad traditions as if out of inertia.

That success is probably not replicable elsewhere so easily.

>6 wirkman: not carried on bad traditions as if out of inertia

That legacy is one of the most pernicious aspects of systemic racism. We're finding out (here in Chicago and northern suburbs), that it's almost impossible not to perpetuate even when consciously striving to undo such a system. The traditions are woven deep and it's the classic problem of pushing on one part of the balloon merely moving the problem to another part.

>6 wirkman: Thank you. Personally, I had been thinking about reviving discussion of Menippean Satire and Anatomy. Any excuse to bring up Thomas Love Peacock and Rabelais.

I also have the hypothesis that somehow the Norns have handed me the Francis Marion Crawford set intended for you; a set that I saved when forced to abandon books in an emergency, instead of Flaubert and Balzac, whom I thought I would be able to replace more easily.

My Arkansas-Dutch mother married an Icelander, a Vatnsdaller with a Family Saga. He died in his 20s, when my older (half)sisters were 2 and 4. As the one non-recently Scandinavian in the family, with books around about Iceland and Norse history, I grew up as the most interested in Baltic history and literature. My sisters have a much better grasp of the Vatnsdal family movement through Canada and some of the northmost states. I'm the one the one chasing down the Kalevala and Fornaldur Sagas. I blame Tolkien for a good bit of that obsession.

So far 2021 continues with me sinking in family health issues, but relatively optimistic. I am so happy to see a few similar minds back to talk about books and a life with books.