South Carolina Books

`Seizing the New Day' is a wonderful book about enslaved southerners of Charleston, South Carolina freeing themselves. They are 'seizing the new day,' no gifts are discussed here. They are a somewhat surly group, quick to anger, but careful to keep long term goals in mind. They are still a surly group at the book's end, but they have made a lot of progress.

The focus is very narrow, but richly detailed. We only follow the events in Charleston. Who lived next to whom? What church did they go to? What school did they attend? Who did they marry?

This is a story of the `Civil War.' Told from the street level of Charleston between 1850 and 1870, it twists the `accepted story' presented by Hollywood. I'm used to the Civil War starting with the shelling of Fort Sumter and ending with Lee's surrender at Appomattox. This version of the `Civil War' starts with the Nat Turner rebellion and ends with the 15th amendment. Instead of the great establishment leaders like Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, this war is fought by people that won't abide with bondage. It is a war between slave owners and those they seek to dominate.

There is no talk of a Northern Army `freeing' people, the most prominent army unit mentioned is the 21st United States Colored Troops. The mayor of Charleston surrendered the city to them on February 18, 1865.

The book is organized into 7 chapters. The first two and last are narrative, the war story. Chapters 3 through 6 develop sub themes regarding how the winners of the war (remember, the Mayor surrendered to colored troops) went about establishing economic, educational and community institutions for `the New Day.'

The book is careful to bolster its case by retelling hundreds of stories pulled from contemporary sources; autobiographies, newspapers, government documents, etc. Anyone writing a civil war film script would find this book a welcome source of authentic street scenes.

Despite the bold title, the notion of `seizing liberty' is rather hidden in the multitude of individual stories recounted here. It's easy to read the book as a colorful recap of many small and disconnected efforts. I suspect this reflects the author's desire to maintain academic respectability. The story about Lee and Grant is, after all, the accepted version.

Separate Journeys: Short Stories By Contemporary Indian Women is an anthology of fifteen short stories all by female East Indian authors. The tales are surprisingly diverse, offering a wide variety of regional, linguistic, and class-based perspectives. Edited by the director of Katha, and organization dedicated to storytelling and preserving the role of story-sharing in human culture, Separate Journeys is a remarkable composite literary glimpse into the human psyche.

Too much of a good thing can be just as bad as too much of a bad thing. "The Seven Deadly Virtues And Other Lively Essays" is a compilation of essays, autobiographical in nature. Author Lynn Bloom warns of the seven deadly virtues throughout her life - duty, rationality, conformity, efficiency, order, economy, and punctuality - and that the overuse of any of them can sometimes lead to many of the problems normally associated with the seven deadly sins. Full of wit and wisdom, "The Seven Deadly Virtues" is an entertaining read indeed to anyone aspiring to be a writer or teacher, and especially for anyone who fears they may be trying a bit too hard.

This book is perfect for anyone interested in their Irish roots, it is a definitive look at the Irish in Charleston.

reviews:
Between Home and History

BY CRAIG BRANDHORST
Free Times Issue #21.16 :: 04/16/2008

Ed Madden got home last Thursday at 3 a.m.

The USC English professor, activist and poet had a perfectly legitimate reason to be out so late, of course -- namely the mini-tour he had been on to promote his debut poetry collection, Signals, published last month by USC Press. In less than a week, Madden gave readings in Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma before wrapping up in Newport, Ark., where he conducted a writers' workshop for high school students at his alma mater.

According to emails from the road and subsequent comments made during a conversation at Flinn Hall, where Madden serves as associate director of Women's Studies, it was a gratifying trip. And tired as he claimed to be as he unlocked his third-floor office, fresh from a lengthy meeting across campus and toting a 3 p.m. bag lunch, he appeared no worse for the wear -- even as he mentioned another workshop he was scheduled to lead that evening.

"It's not typical," he assures me regarding his recently hectic schedule.

Maybe not, but there's no denying Madden's energy, which will have to sustain him through an upcoming home stand highlighted by events at Hunter-Gatherer (book launch party, 6-8 p.m. on Sunday), ifART (art show and reading on April 23 from 7 to 9 p.m.) and the S.C. Center for the Book (reading on April 29 at noon).

Winner of the third annual South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and judged this year by poet-playwright Afaa Weaver, Signals is a deceptively slim collection of deceptively spare poems, most written in couplets and tercets. And while certain motifs lend the collection an undeniable arc, and Madden's fascination with regional flora positions many of the poems within an obvious literary tradition, the poet himself defies quick categorization.

"I know one reviewer has already called me a nature poet," Madden says, "and I suppose there's some accuracy in that. But I'm more interested in how we remember, how our personal and cultural histories are part of how we see the world around us."
In Madden's case, these "personal and cultural histories" owe largely to the contemporary gay experience, though he also refers to the neglected histories of civil rights activists and long-dead slaves. Meanwhile, "the world around us" is essentially the American South. Signals does include poems set elsewhere (in "Flaneur," for example, two lovers hunt pottery and cuff links in a Paris flea market), but it is the rural Arkansas of Madden's childhood that lends the book its heart, and the political history of his adopted South Carolina that provides its retractable edge.

While local readers may be interested in Madden's swipes at Strom Thurmond ("Here, or the White Boy on the Bus") and the Confederate flag ("Confederates"), however, the poet is at his best in smaller moments.
"As an openly gay man, I know all too well that the personal is political," Madden explains. "Intimate relationships, friendships, domestic ritual, any of these may be political when who you are and how you love is a concern of the state."


This is nowhere more apparent than in the poem "Signals," in which the speaker and an unnamed companion stand outside Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan's Island, contemplating not the battlements, or even the loaded historical significance of Fort Sumter -- the "distant ruin" across the water -- but everything else that informs the moment. The poem's final three stanzas:

In the parking lot, we smell the marsh beyond us,
And the sweetness of the tea olive nearby.

A bare tree suddenly blossoms in blackbird --
Strange fruit shining in the morning sun.

A sulfur butterfly blows across the lawn.

The poem still addresses history, and its images are rich with political possibility, especially in context, but the immediate effect is a subtle one. Madden wants us to imagine the metaphorical possibilities of place, it seems, and from these to glimpse something otherwise unimaginable.

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Madden's work reveals Southern roots
Marjory Wentworth
Charleston :: Post and Courier :: Sunday, March 23, 2008

For the past three springs, the University of South Carolina Press has published a book of poems by the winner of the S.C. Poetry Book Prize. Previous winners are Ray McManus for "Driving Through the Country Before You Are Born" and Susan Meyers' award-winning book "Keep and Give Away." This year's winner is USC associate professor of English Ed Madden. "Signals" is Ed's first book-length collection.
Madden is a Southerner by birth, and he also was educated in the region. Like all of our great Southern writers, his poems are rooted in history, culture and landscape. A handful of the poems are set in Europe, but they still fit well into the overall structure. Almost every poem in the collection has a place name in the title. The imagery is so accomplished that the poems are like vivid snapshots in a photo album. Most of the poems are written in couplets, and this pattern creates a lyric unity that is enormously satisfying.
Objects are described in an almost sacred manner with an attention to detail that heightens our focus. It feels as though you are looking through a zoom lens, but everything is examined through this poet's eyes. Man-made objects literally take on the attributes of natural objects. In a poem called "Flaneur," which describes walking through a Paris flea market with his lover, Madden describes "a pearlescent jar in the afternoon sun,/the base blue, the crystalline glaze like ice,/like prisms in the hot August light."
"Signals" is essentially a beautiful collection of nature poems. Whether the poem is set in his native Arkansas, the South Carolina Lowcountry, or somewhere between, there is a reverence for place and the plants and animals that inhabit there. The book's title poem is about Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island, where Ed had a poetry residency a few years ago. Written much like a haiku, it is filled with immediate images and all the sights and sounds filling the air. It is fascinating to note that in this poem set at a fort, there are birds, trees, butterflies, the omnipresent sea, but only a brief mention of the smallest actual element of the fort: its flags. Its history is subtly buried in the description of what is found there, but nature transcends the passage of time and dominates.
Marjory Wentworth is South Carolina's poet laureate.

This book was one I could not put down. Every chapter kept you in suspense.

I grew up white in the Jim Crow South. I did not understand the violence against blacks and whites alike. My kin and their friends spent more energy and money trying to keep the blacks under, quite often depriving themselves and familes of education, recreation, jobs, etc. I also did not appreciate the manner in which the law intimidated (although I saw it regularly) primarily blacks and sometimes whites. My education was the usual truncated, incomplete set of lies about how my world had come to pass (and the Civil War was still very relevant as was white power indoctrination). Race was a primary consideration in everything, always first having fear of blacks.

Ms. Hadden has laid out how 250-300 years of fear of their own slaves conditioned many generations of whites of all classess to use violence routinely and casually, against blacks and then one another. The beneficent slave owner was a total lie. The story of arms in America and our high murder rates cannot be fully told without reference to the slave patrols and their successors, and into this century where we have a mindless lack of control over a population which has more than one gun for each person. The colossal, monumental political and social, not to mention moral, cowardice and religious collaboration of the South, and the North with an evil system is largely beyond comprehension without works like this one. What do whites today owe blacks? A total respite from their now inbread fears stemming from 300 years of violent, socially approved and state-enforced discriminatory practices, some still blatantly even today. And what are we to make of rates of incarcertationl, particularly black, today, if not an extension of bias and violence from another age.

Until America comes to terms with the lies called history which have concealed just how vicious their ancestors were and the horrors they perpetrated, we do not deserve racial peace. Again, I remember the stark, raging hatred of blacks on the part of people I was supposed to hold in high regard -- family and friends. And, always, the fear, always self-manufactured. And then, after centuries of these expectations, whites just cannot understand why some blacks would respond in self destructive manners, thereby fulfilling the false prophecies. And why blacks do not trust whites or police - 300 years of terror.

Ms. Hadden, thank you for helping to drive back darkness and let the light into a festering and immoral situation.

This book traces the development of shallops along the Atlantic seaboard and Chesapeake Bay from open work boats suitable for a number of uses to fully decked vessels employed in the offshore fisheries of New England or for freighting service on the Delaware River. The book is illustrated with sketches of the various types of sloops and shallops afloat as well as line plans showing the development of hull forms.

This book provides not only an easy to read, step-by-step way to start your own business; but, the authors have included many place to write notes so you can keep your focus on starting your business, as well as all of the numbers and forms you would need to ensure you get your business started as quickly and painlessly as possible. One of the sections I especially enjoyed was the appendix in the back with the telephone numbers and addresses of all of the parties you need to contact with spaces for notes on when you contacted them, who you spoke with, what you talked about, etc. If you are considering starting your own business in South Carolina, you can do it without this book, but I would not recommend it. Oasis Press has simplified the process tremendously.

SNOWBIRD GRAVY AND DISHPAN PIE: Mountain People Recall, by Patsy Moore Ginns, 209 pages, illustrated by J.L. Osborne Jr., North Carolina

Unlike the model dour New Englander, Southern mountain folk love to tell stories, and the ones born around the end of the 19th century were very much aware that they had started out in one era and lived into another one, very different. This was my grandparents' generation, and they liked to tell about the old days.
In the 1970s and early '80s, Patsy Ginns, a teacher, collected stories from around 20 men and women who had grown up in western North Carolina. The oldest was born in 1979, the youngest in the 1920s.

For me, reading "Snowbird Gravy and Dishpan Pie" was like being a little kid at family reunions again. Ginns' old folks were way more country than my family was, but their world view was about the same as I remember: church, long walks, few money, haints and spirits, play parties, neighborliness, occasional hard feelings and violence.

As Stanley Hicks, one of the more talkative sources, says, "It was hard to get a nickel."

Ginns breaks up the recollections by category: school, community, work etc. So the longest entry is about three pages. Some entries, when the people fell into the easy, loping mountain style of talking, she has typeset as if it were free verse, which it almost is.

To me the most interesting personality is Ray Hicks, apparently Stanley's younger brother. The Hicks boys were a handful, when young, but Ray got religion -- which he explains at confusing length -- and became a preacher. Not, as slowly becomes apparent, a very uptight one.

"Snowbird Gravy and Dishpan Pie" is also full of bits of lore about living in the Southern mountains, many of them mostly forgotten in daily life, only preserved here and in books like Foxfire. Some of the lore here is more obscure than even the obscurest of the Foxfire collections, which came from a generation later.

The volume is liberally illustrated with evocative pen-and-ink drawings of rustic scenes by J.L. Osborne Jr. Charming to look at but not so charming to live in, these vistas were everywhere when I was growing up. It's hard to find them nowadays, and if you do, like as not there's a big highway down the middle, or a warehouse on the horizon.