Reading Log: Reconstruction, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Daf Yomi
Last week I started observing Shabbat; I did this for a number of reasons, but one of them is that having my computer and phone closed allows me to read far more.
Today, that was borne out, as I read a fair deal of Foner's Reconstruction and got back to the Autobiography of Malcolm X for the first time in months. I started out the day by reading Reconstruction for about an hour, then spent most of the rest of the day going betweeen the Autobiography and the piano, and finished off with some more Foner (with a break for lunch, during which my dad read the story of Samson when it became clear that my younger brother who has spent the last month or more singing and playing on the violin Plain White T's "Hey There Delilah" was unfamiliar with the name's significance).
In Reconstruction, I read the changes that were brought to newly freed black communities, both imposed from the outside and created from within. Among the major themes of the reading, from both last night and today, were the division between black people who were free before the Civil War ("free blacks") and those who were freed by it or who freed themselves during it ("freedmen") and the jubilation of the freedmen.
Last night and this morning, I read about the new plantation system imposed by Union Generals as they marched into and took over the South. Though the South Carolina Sea Islands were strongly focused on in my US History Class, they were far less representative than the Mississippi plantation belt, where General Nathaniel P. Banks set up a system forcing freedmen to work on plantations, but for wages. A lot of white Republicans like Banks (who also wanted to be President, and was courting the support of powerful white Louisians), both in the North and the South, were dedicated to not only Unionism but Emancipation, but were still deeply racist, and though they didn't support slavery, they were willing to support systems that were still deeply racist.
Foner underlines that the changes implemented by Banks and others like him were designed as temporary war measures, not permanent blueprints for a decade and a half-long period of reform. Things that have come to be thought of as major historical trends or actions having originally been created in and for specific circumstances are something I've started to notice when reading history. It seems to happen a lot. He also firmly takes the position that William T. Sherman was a military commander making a military decision out of short-term military interest, not a great liberator seeking to elevate the black American.
One thing this book is making me appreciate is the extent to which the Fifteenth Amendment was a huge step from the 13th Amendment, not just a natural corollary of it. Many were the white people to whom the issue of suffrage and slavery were disconnected issues, and it was mostly white people who held sway in passing that amendment.
The natural connection between slavery and suffrage was far clearer to black people, particular freedmen, to whom "freedom" meant not only the absence of slavery but the ability to participate as fully in society as any white person of the same gender and class. Thus, 1863 (and especially 1865, when the 13th Amendment was ratified) left a lot white people feeling that their work was done and a lot of black people feeling that it was just begun.
Interestingly, a lot of black people did not feel that what was needed was a vast program of positive efforts to help black people by the federal government (affirmative action, as it were). To be sure, some did, and the history of Reconstruction as I understand it suggests not only that such programs should have been implemented but that they were not implemented nearly enough ("40 acres and a mule" much?), but a strong segment of black people just wanted to be able to be independent, farm their own land, and participate as free people in a free market. Regardless of its merits, the free labor ideology was incredibly intertwined with Republicanism, and it was not just greedy capitalists who saw the free market as the best thing for society.
There is no part of American history (and perhaps all history), at least that I know of, that induces such joy as reading accounts of newly emancipated black people. The joy is, of course, somewhat dampered by the knowledge that many of those black people would soon find themselves forced back onto the plantation, in a system that, while certainly not slavery, was designed to be as much like it as possible.
Still, it is impossible for me to read the accounts without breaking out into a huge grin. I think if I become a historian I will specialize in Jewish history, but I could see myself studying American history if only for that pleasure. Foner devotes a lot of time to such accounts, but the one that stood out most to me, which I bookmarked, was:
In the summer of 1865, Charleston saw fredmen occupying "some of the best residencies," and promenading on King Street "arrayed in silks and satins of all the colors of the rainbow," while black schoolchildren sang "'John Brown's Body' within ear-shot of Calhoun's tomb."
Foner, 79
Everything about that is just so happymaking.
I started off reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X by rereading the "Detroit Red" chapter, which recounts the beginning Little's (as was his name at the time) time in Harlem and his garnering a reputation for himself in various hustles. I read through his ascent and how his life spun further and further into drugs and into escalating crimes until he had to flee Harlem to go back to Boston, where he formed a burglary ring that eventually got him arrested — and just in the nick of time, as he had carelessly exposed himself to a friend of the husband of his longtime white girlfriend, whom he calls "Sophia."
I read about how, after he spent a few years in a normal prison, his sister Ella managed to get him into a progressive, rehabilitation-focused prison, where he began the voracious reading habit that made him one of the greatest American thinkers and orators of the Twentieth Century despite his eighth-grade education. And, of course, while he was in prison, his family was converted into Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, and they converted him as well. I read right up to his release from prison, ending exactly halfway through the book (excepting Alex Haley's epilogue) and on the sentence:
And anytime I got a chance to exchange words with a black brother in stripes, I'd say, "My man! You ever heard about somebody named Elijah Muhammad?"
X and Haley, 180
I had a few reactions to the autobiography. One was being impressed with X. The man, with very little education or other advantages, rose to become probably the second-most prominent figure of the Civil Rights Movement (the first-most prominent being the son of an NAACP leader with a PhD in theology). He did this with a sheer force of will (evident in his Harlem days, even if he seems somewhat ashamed of how it was put to use) and intellectual hunger that seems to belong more in a novel than a nonfiction autobiography.
Another was being struck by his various bigotries, most notably his sexism. I finally figured out today what his way of speaking about women reminds me of: Holden Caulfield. I think this is mostly because X speaks with a world-weary matter-of-factness that Holden pretends to.
Also astonishing is how much happened in X's life. By the time he went to prison, he was twenty. I knew he was young, but that nearly shocked me. It also puts into perspective who he was when he was voraciously reading in prison: an experienced hustler, but also the age of a college student.
Finally, I caught up a bit on Daf Yomi, reading two dafs (pages of Talmud). I think I will read another before bed because, as I have previously mentioned, I am very behind. Mostly, I am thinking about the potential implications of throwing things from the second story of one building to another, more than ten handbreadths above the ground. Also, about how grateful I am to live inside an eruv.