[Mavis/ John Dillinger Slept Here/ Love Across The Color Line/ Commonwealth of Toil]
Mavis, by Brenda Marshall Ph.D. `90, has many of the hallmarks of a mystery novel: a murder, suspects, detectives. The mysteries at the heart of Mavis, however, are family mysteries: why
one sister remembers her father fondly, another, bitterly; why the sweetest sister had the worst marriage; how yet another sister ends up a murderer. Set in a North Dakota farm-town, the book explores the alliances and attachments, resentments, and regrets of its eponymous heroine, her five sisters, and an assortment of husbands, lovers, and children. Marshall, who lives in Wisconsin, is skilled at drawing the reader into this extended family circle; Mavis has a strong sense of place, well-imagined characters, and moves right along. Mavis, Brenda K. Marshall, Fawcett Cxolumbine, New York, 1996.
Love Across the Color Line is another book about family secrets. The story begins when a black-lace stocking with a packet of letters inside falls out of a ceiling during the renovation of an old house in Northampton. Written in 1907 and1908, the letters were from Alice Hanley, the white, unmarried, and unemployed daughter of Irish immigrants, to Channing Lewis, a black cook who lived in Springfield.
Thanks to the interpretative efforts of historians Kathy Peiss, who teaches history at UMass, and Louis Wilson, we learn as much as can probably be known about the lives and times of this couple. (Reporter Phoebe Rolin Mitchell of the Daily Hampshire Gazette did the initial detective work on the letters, turning up important leads and sources.) While Wilson's essay focuses on Lewis's side of the story, Peiss brings her scholarship to bear on decoding Hanley's letters and life. Decoding is necessary; some of Hanley's sentences are cryptic. Others, though, are very much to the point, as when she asks "Chan" for money to buy a suit, or describes her cleaning efforts, or "oh how lonesome" she is after returning home from visiting him.
In her introduction, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz likens finding the letters to unearthing buried treasure. In forming a portrait of earlier times, she notes, "the historian must write from a record that is often maddeningly incomplete." As a rare and unique source of information about the past, the letters make fascinating reading not only to historians but to anyone who wonders about how people once lived-- especially "across the color line." Themselves almost "maddeningly incomplete," these letters are at the same time all the more poignant and haunting, because many of their secrets remain buried. Love Across the Color Line, The Letters of Alice Hanley to Channing Lewis, Edited by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz and Kathy Peiss, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1996.
Those who most often think of St. Paul as the peaceable home of "A Prairie Home Companion" are in for a shocker in John Dillinger Slept Here by Paul Maccabee `77 (who currently makes his home in the city). On the evidence of this "Crooks' Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul," as the book is subtitled, it would appear that anyone who was anyone in the underworld lived, or at least slept, in St. Paul between 1920 and 1936.
Dillinger reads like a Who's Who of gangsterdom. Ma Barker, Pretty Boy Floyd, Babyface Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly--they're all in there. The brutality, the wanton killing,the murder and mayhem will almost have you rooting for J. Edgar Hoover. At the same time, Maccabee is keen to the comic and ironic aspects of his subject, describing one low-life bank robber, for example, as a "grumpy hanger-on," whose fellow crooks considered him boastful, bad company, "and a poor loser on the golf course."
Maccabee's lively writing style makes the most of the material. Since these crooks make today's gangs and drive-by shooters seem almost tame by comparison, the book is probably best read by dipping in here and there. Reading it straight through could have you looking over your shoulder every time you walk down the street. John Dillinger Slept Here, A Crooks' Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936, Paul Maccabee, Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul, 1995.
COMMONWEALTH OF TOIL
It's often said that Americans have no sense of history, a generalization that seems supported by the current lack of regard for organized labor in this country. Today's workforce takes as givens the eight-hour work day, paid overtime, vacations, lunch hours, coffee breaks -- in short, a whole range of perquisites that a century ago would have seemed the exclusive rights of angels. The Commonwealth of Toil reminds us that none of these givens was given-- each was won by the blood, sweat, and tears of generations of workers and the unions they formed.
Through lucid prose, compelling photographs, and dynamic design, this UMass Press publication graphically recounts the struggles of Massachusetts workers for an end to 13-hour shifts, child labor, and unsafe working conditions. Their names are mostly lost to us, these men, women, and children who made their mark on history as members of the rank and file: Lowell millworkers, Irish bricklayers in Holyoke, African-American whalers sailing out of New Bedford, Filene's salesclerks, and, more recently, Boston University librarians.
A rich and complex social narrative receives an equally rich treatment in this volume. Supplementing a chronological text spanning nearly 200 years are numerous sidebars with excerpts from period speeches, newspaper articles, circulars, Congressional testimony, and books, as well as lyrics of songs such as "Bread and Roses" and "In the Good Old Picket Line." (Their inclusion isn't so surprising given that Tom Juravich, one of the authors, is a musician as well as an associate professor and research director of Labor Relations and Research Center at UMass.)
The shoe workers who couldn't afford decent shoes, the women who couldn't feed their children on their wages, and the immigrants who couldn't advance for being foreign-born fought for basic improvements of the laborer's lot. The Commonwealth of Toil reminds us that they also fought for--and sometimes won--respect, fairness, and equality. The Commonwealth of Toil, Chapters in the History of Massachusetts Workers and Their Unions, Tom Juravich, William F. Hartford, and James R. Green, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1996.[Mavis/ John Dillinger Slept Here/ Love Across The Color Line/ Commonwealth of Toil]
