Book Club For One - The Warmth of Other Suns

A few days ago I started reading The Warmth of Other Suns.  I want to process the ideas in this book, and with my usual speed of reading this may or may not happen. In order to slow myself down, and retain information longer (fingers crossed), I'm going to have a book club for one - for me, by me, and only me.  I haven't worked out details or set guidelines for myself, but one thing I will do is as I read, anything that strikes me I will stop and write about why and any connections/thoughts it brings up.  I'll make up anything else as I go along.

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pg 7 -  "He passed the shotgun houses perched on cinder blocks and hurtled over the railroad tracks away from where...the roads were not dirt ditches anymore but suddenly level and paved."  This sentence is describing a man leaving his home in Louisiana, setting out for the great unknown that is anywhere other than the South to him. He is leaving and it is 1953.**

Fast forward. It is 2012-2013. I am living in Selma Alabama, working as a Community Garden Director. Breaner, one of the middle school girls I work with, doesn't have a ride to get to me, so on the first day of work I go get her. I leave the house where I and five other Americorps volunteers live and drive through town. I haven't been here long.  Everything is still new and exciting, harsh and surreal, beautiful and tragic; many contradictions wrapped up in one city with so much history. I pass through downtown Selma looking like it is straight out of the 1950s - brick buildings, barbershops, churches on every corner, everything tidy and well kept. Mansions line the road ways, live oaks draped in Spanish moss hiding and revealing bits and pieces of luxury. Just a few blocks, through a small commercial area, and quite literally I pass over the tracks.

Downtown Selma*

one example of a mansion*

Life changes.  The roads turn to dirt, more buildings are vacant and dilapidated, and things don't look so picturesque anymore, just blocks away from mansions. Breaner gave me directions to her house and as I turn down the narrow, rutted dirt road I wonder if I am lost. Finally after some trees and a few abandoned buildings, I see a row of little houses each set atop a foundation of four cinder blocks, some with no doors, some with people and dogs hanging around them. Selma does not get as cold as my frozen home state in the North, but it does get cold; one time it snowed here though that was a miraculous day, nothing ordinary.  How do these people stay warm, I wonder. 

Deja Vu for him and me*

Right by or before the tracks*

The minivan creeps forward slowly as I simultaneously try to figure out how I will know which house is Breaner's and not hit anyone. I make out a few faces of children I recognize, they mill around the sides of the car and nearby.  I pull to a stop at the nearest house, hoping Breaner is going to appear and I can get the heck out of here.  People notice me, look over to see what I am doing, waiting on me as I wait on them to do something.  Not for the first or the last time, I feel conspicuous in my whiteness and don't know if that is good, bad, ugly or worse.  I put the car in park and get out. As I round the minivan, Breaner opens the screen door, shouts back at someone inside the house, and lets the door slam shut behind her as she jumps to the ground and runs over. I go back around and get in the driver's seat as Breaner gets in the passenger seat.

I end up taking Breaner and most of the children gathered around the minivan, expectant faces flickering between smiles to show their acceptability and scowls if they don't get to come. Breaner says they are all her friends, she told them she got to go help and get food, so they wanted to come, too. We go to a notorious underpass and picked up trash, scoping it out as a potential garden site. I feed them all snacks and juice boxes. Later, I drive them back. They pile out of the car, extra snacks in hand and seem to instantly disappear back to their homes, the lengthening shadows of the trees behind the houses, to who knows where.


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**Robert Joseph Pershing Foster (the man in the book) saw the same things, only 59 years earlier. When he left from the South, silently and secretly, he didn't know if the state of affairs would get better, or worse. I wonder if he or the many others who left ever thought they might stay the same.

*As I was looking for pictures of Selma and the major economic discrepancy lived out there, it was not easy to find pictures of the "wrong side of the tracks." Obviously any town wants to present itself in the best light, so I understand why I saw mostly pictures of historic homes, the downtown, and of historic civil rights moments. Because if one of the birthplaces of the civil rights movement still looked the same and the circumstances of the people it was fighting to improve hadn't changed much...what would it all mean?