From The Innkeepers

My Near-Death Experience or Why the May Blog Was Very Late in Being Posted
(as Told by Our Very Ancient Apple Laptop)

I had been feeling a bit under the weather and not myself. My hard drive was sluggish, my RAM felt totally inadequate, and my disc drive was stuck in a loop. (I know there have not been disc drives in well over a decade, so yes, I am that old.) In computer years, I am filed under ancient history, but have been surviving in a serviceable manner until just recently when I began to limp along from session to session.
It was time to check into the hospital, and I was immediately triaged to the intensive care bench where it was determined that mine was not entirely a hopeless case. 1 week later I emerged feeling better but not 100%. Within an hour of my return to work I had a near fatal attack. Mid -sentence, everything stopped. I was rushed back to intensive care with a malady that was puzzling to my caregiver Jacques. My disc drive groaned and it prevented the rest of me from engaging and turning on. He said I may need an organ transplant but none were available locally, so I went on a waiting list for compatible parts that would not upset my system. So here I am, 2 weeks later and finally able to turn on without making the grunting noises which were the precursor to completely going blank and shutting down. We are grateful for my new lease on life, but do not know how long it will last.

Enough of our computer travails

Pat and I recently had the distinct pleasure of hearing the author Percival Everett speak about his award-winning novel, “James”. The book is loosely based on the tales of Huckleberry Finn, retold from the slave Jim’s point of view. It brought to our attention that from an enslaved person’s vantage point they had to “live under the radar”, pretending that they were oblivious to what was going on around them in the “white man’s world”. To that end they developed “slave talk”, a language they used in front of white people which deliberately reinforced their image of inferiority. Demeaning though it was, this two-tiered speech protected them. Amongst themselves they communicated normally, but they never wanted the “Massah’s” family to know how much they knew and were aware of the goings on in their environment. None of the white people ever realized that Jim taught himself to read and write and that he read many of the philosophical treatises in Judge Thatcher’s library.

One never knows where our next inspiration comes from. For Percival Everett, the first concept of this novel came to him while playing tennis. So that night he reinforced for me the idea that we need to be on the lookout and pay attention to the visitation of inner voices that are sometimes gifted to us. These clearly profound moments can be life-altering.

Reading this book made me think about the roots of racism and how it is incumbent upon us to understand how we got there, and then how we got here from there. It is an uphill climb these days, especially with regressive governments wiping out initiatives for diversity and inclusion across many sectors from education to the corporate world. Rather than banning books, those like Percival Everett’s “James” or Tracy K. Smith’s “To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul” should be on the preferred reading list for our schools and libraries. Instead Mr. Everett told us that he does fear that his novel could make it onto a “banned books” list. But now that it has won the Pulitzer Prize for literature perhaps that would be less likely to happen, or perhaps with greater visibility the opposite might be true.

For me, the most engaging aspect of his writing is how Jim manages to transform himself into “James” by living a role according to white expectations while being clever enough to develop his own form of subversion and resistance. He becomes “James” thereby freeing himself and his family, but as we know his encounters with racism never end.

If you are looking for a great read this month, the novel “James” would be right there at the top of our recommended list. It is enlightening, and as my niece Erin said “It made me fall in love with reading all over again”

We hope that this disjointed Blog was at least informative and somewhat entertaining for you.
Stay tuned, maybe next month’s will be better, or at the very least, it could be on time.
Take care,
Marcia