James Baldwin told her, "You must continue to write. It is imperative." And She Did.

In the Country of Women by Susan Straight
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Susan Straight’s daughter Delphine projected photographs for her Mother’s reading and talk at BAMPFA for A Country of Women, describing multi-generational and multi-racial family journeys to the Southern California community Straight has lived in for more than 40 years. They are real people written in real language, so blunt her 1980’s (bimbo) classmate from Smith College asks her “Why do you keep writing about all these working class people?”

Straight says, “…I thought: What the hell is working class? Work or welfare—those two were the only conditions of life back home …a paycheck job… or ‘You under the table, man?”…cash-only economy.” Her grim, wordless, hard-scrabble Colorado mountain father; the mother who wanted “a brick house… (but) Even more…to make enough money to escape poverty.”

Straight says flat-out, “It took constant vigilance not to be raped,” and she and her girlfriends “went to Planned Parenthood the week I was sixteen…afraid of the same thing…We didn’t want to have to marry our rapists.” She was lucky. “I ran so many times,” and she had her writing and her books.
The mostly African-American Carter-Sims family she marries into is a marvel and cornerstone of struggle, work, dignity and love. The neighborhood is classic multi-cultural California WAY East of Malibu, Monterey or Marin. She resurrects a feeling of “kin” and connection built of memory, effort, sharing and survival by the end of the book any i-pad toting yuppie-techie-millennial or wastrel hippie should envy. I certainly do. It sounds like the stories my grandparents told and hid from me.

The lives and photos are epic as well as bruising. Tulsa, Tennessee, Ontario, Mississippi, all to Riverside, CA; the Cherokee, Nigerian, Swiss and Haitian – the house, the driveway, the hair-braiding, the boom-box belting Al Green; the Granada, Country Squire, El Camino, the Bronco. Three of “Daisy’s girls” sitting at a club table circa early 1960 smiling gently into the camera, but with wise eyes; miniskirts, eyebrow pencil, lipstick, bouffant hair.

We are really, really DIVERSE, people; already, NOW. AND “It is the companionable line of our knees in the folding chairs that comforts us. We have one another.”

And for the young men – “what you have to know. Two of you can ride in the car. Three is a gang. One of y’all has to get in another car. Don’t fool around. No standing out in the yard at a party. Don’t be getting gas late at night. Don’t be speeding drinking laughing singing rapping walking. Don’t.” The funerals of fourteen-year-olds.

“Friends of Adeline” statement in the February 20 edition of BTx requests readers to “Support the Adeline community” in the Berkeley sweep of both homelessness and gentrification. Reunifying the nation and advocating for disadvantaged residents screams injustice both here and globally, but their local message is clear: “Development of the Adeline neighborhood must reverse the displacement of African Americans and the severe housing crisis facing low-income, working-class, and unhoused people.”

Let’s just get REALLY “real” and tell each other stories of our lives so we UNDERSTAND why we think and act and live the way we do, OK?
 
There is no question in my mind about STOP RAPE NOW nor is there about BLACK LIVES MATTER. Or about RICH WHITE OLD FOUL-TEMPERED MISOGYNIST DICKHEADS blaming Asians for the pandemic, either, even though they sound a whole lot like my Grampa sometimes, and look like the pictures of his grandfathers.

Joyce Carol Oates says about Country, “an ancestral chronicle, a personal odyssey, and a love letter to the author’s three adult daughters,” and so much more. Joyous love and survival, bathed in bitter truths. WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. If this sounds like a Nurse Rant or a Mom Rant, it’s because IT IS. “We are true California. True America,” Straight says. THIS IS TRUE!

Quit fighting, people. Quit denying ourselves and who we really are. In way too many ways, the 99% are all one. And they are us, grown rich and fat and scared and old. If we don’t help each other now, we all go down. When Harriet Tubman has her vision, she hears, “Fear is your enemy. Trust in God.” She led hundreds to freedom.

Let’s just get REALLY “real” and tell each other stories of our lives so we UNDERSTAND why we think and act and live the way we do, OK?

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