March is National Reading Month, and before the month skates by, here are the three books I’ve read this year as a recommendation. I’m averaging one book a month for 2024, the book I just finished being my favorite—The Warmth of Other Suns/The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (see my previous post for how I came across this masterpiece). If you know me, you know my love for historical fiction has been running deep over the years. But nix the fiction; this is just historical, the most epically written history lesson I know I will ever read. It was so impactful that it had me simultaneously and very intently interviewing my parents because, in June of 1963, my dad left Selma, Alabama, in his gray 1956 Oldsmobile 98 and drove to Detroit, Michigan, as one of the six million black citizens of the Great Migration looking for “better” as he told me. My dad was born in Selma, the very city that set the stage with those early departures of the Migration in 1916. In the early seventies, my mom would tail him from Georgia, her sisters preceding her.
Reading about Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Dr. Robert Foster had me invested because my parents were literally cosigning with their own life experiences. According to my dad, my grandfather Earl was a sharecropper, and seven (or so) other families lived on the land with them. My dad still remembers the names—Keith Ranch, who “owned the land,” and Henry Lacker, “the overseer,”—emphasizing that my grandfather, no matter how hard the family worked, never came out on top and was always indebted to Mr. Ranch (according to Mr. Ranche’s receipts, of course).
My mom shared with me her trick of picking cotton early in the morning while the dew was on the bud (so the water could pick up some of the work by adding to the poundage) almost simultaneously as I read it on the pages of this book. When I told her how I found it devastatingly poetic for Ms. Wilkerson to acknowledge that Ida Mae “could not afford a dress made out of the cotton that ruled her days but instead wore a pieced-together outfit from flour sacks that she boiled for hours until the flour company’s name finally faded away,” my mom chuckled at the recall and in so many words replied, “same.” I could go on and on about The Warmth of Other Suns, but in summary, it’s a masterful history lesson and a definite recommendation for reading month. This book has made me cherish my parents even more for their tenacity. It has also made me realize I’m personally not that far removed from some of the dark parts of black—my history. It pushes me to honor my parents (and all of my ancestors) by doing what they did, diligently working, and seeking out a better life.
“The blood that runs through my veins, my brain, my heart. …The gallons and gallons of heritage…”
But if you want to dive into a historical fiction novel, The Paris Daughter by Kristin Harmel is a great read. It is a story set against the backdrop of WWII and is beautifully written with heart-wrenching themes of motherhood and friendship (and war.)
The part that had me like—WHET?—was the real-life Allied bombing raids on which the book was based. Did you know that during WWII, the Germans controlled a factory in one of the Paris suburbs, and in 1942, an Allied bombing raid to destroy the factory dropped over 500 bombs, but fewer than half fell in the target area, killing over three hundred civilians and injuring over three hundred more? Thirteen months and one day after that bombing, the Allies came again–the U.S. Air Force–and dropped 650 bombs, and only 41% hit the target. This meant, again, errant bombs affecting hundreds more civilians and innocent families—like the family in this book, simply going about the day as usual. This was another captivating history lesson for me.
One Blood by Denene Millner was the first book I read this year. It is a multigenerational story, following three women laced with insightful perspectives of the Jim Crow South, Black motherhood, and The Great Migration (which I hadn’t realized would be a forthcoming obsession for me). My only gripe with One Blood was that I felt left hanging on the fate of one of the characters I had become invested in (I wanted to know the rest of her story), but there are no spoiler alerts here.
And that’s all I have for book recommendations so far! March is also Women’s History Month; women wrote all these beautiful books, so there’s also that.
Reading can change your life.
People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.
-Malcolm X
The blood of generations that found its way into your veins. It is golden. All of that blood….
-Mari Chiles
