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Backwater Blues: The MississippiFlood of 1927 in the AfricanAmerican Imagination. By RichardM. Mizelle, Jr. (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 2014.Pp. ix–xii + 160, notes, selecteddiscography, index. $25, paper-back)

Research on a region’s social history oftenfocuses on the most salient events with a com-munity’s historical memory. In this respect, the1927 flood holds a prominent place in the col-lective memory ofcommunities locatedalong the MississippiRiver. The rebuiltlevee system and thecontinuing engi-neering projects forflood control are notonly visible re-minders of the floodbut they also serve toelicit both sketchymemories and exten-sive accounts of thecatastrophe. Although only a few elder resi-dents can recount first-hand experiences withthe flood, the verbal legacy of the disaster re-mains vibrant in the storytelling and historicalrecollections of contemporary residents of lowerMississippi River region. Richard Mizelle’s newbook draws from a range of sources to provide atrenchant interpretation of the history of thisflood within African-American memory cultureand historical imagination. He focuses much ofhis work on the legacy of the flood within theMississippi River Delta—which he more accu-

rately terms the “Yazoo-Mississippi River Delta.”Along with his treatment of how the 1927 floodis important within African-American history,Mizelle also uses Delta blues music as a vibrantresource for understanding both the symbolismand the experiences of surviving the cataclysm.

The book begins with a strong and engag-ing study of the historical context for the mas-sive deluge. Mizelle provides a fine balance ofhistorical context and narrative to show the im-portance of this region within African-Ameri-can history, and he outlines how the floodcontrol system was initially constructed andmaintained over time. In these introductorychapters, he makes and develops a strong casefor using scholarship in blues music to augmentthe written record. Crediting Clyde Wood withan approach of “blues epistemology,” Mizelleemphasizes how blues music and its related nar-rative tradition can yield insight into howAfrican-Americans have sought resistance aswell as healing in the face of racial oppression.The author mines dozens of blues songs and var-ious biographies of blues musicians to show howthe experience of surviving the flood not onlyis directly narrated but also symbolically ex-pressed in music. A significant strength of thebook, here, is that he doesn’t simply posit inter-pretations of the lyrics using text-based theo-ries, such as reader-response criticism. Ratherhe uses historically verifiable accounts to con-textualize the musical expression, and he thenunpacks a range of symbolic meanings that hespecifically connects to this history.

Mizelle’s emphasis is the place of the floodwithin the African-American imagination.This approach is important for numerous rea-sons. On an overt level, this approach is essen-tial to writing the history of the flood becausethe flood disproportionately affected the higherblack populations living in the region. In termsof historiography, a unifying interest in African-

Reviews

American historical memory and imaginationalso demonstrates epistemological and ideolog-ical problems with dichotomizing the flood’shistory in terms of an “American history” thatcontrasts to African-American history. Mizelleconvincingly demonstrates why African-Amer-ican experiences are integral for understandingthe region’s history as a whole.

The book’s five chapters are centered on achronology of the flood and its aftermath. Theeconomic and social disparities that existedacross racial lines are clearly and vividly pre-sented through a range of historical sources. It’scommon for residents of the region to have onlysketchy impressions of this history, but the ac-counts of the deprivations, injustice, and vio-lence that occurred in the region are importantchronicles of a painful past. He provides astrong historical treatment of systemic oppres-sion including the convict-leasing system, debtpeonage, and abuses in the levee camps. Thelyrics of songs like “Levee Camp Man Blues”and the better known “Levee Camp Moan” por-tray direct accounts and expressions of the atro-cious conditions in these settlements during theflood. Mizelle strikingly demonstrates that evenseemingly benign acts of charity were used toadvance discriminatory and racist policies. Thechapters on the American Red Cross’s relief ef-forts could be used as textbook examples of in-stitutional racism within a wider politics ofculture that bolstered oppression in the nameof benevolence. The largely neglected historyof these interventions is integral for interpretingthe lyrics of songs like “Red Cross Man.” In histreatment of these lyrics, Mizelle’s analysis elu-cidates the sketchy allusions and often esotericsymbolism in lines such as “Red Cross gives myman, three days a week, sack of Red Cross flour,hunk of old white meat.” His interpretation in-dicates layers of coded meanings show how therelief efforts sustained the status quo of a segre-gated society.

Mizelle saves his treatment of “When theLevee Breaks” for his conclusion. Most readerswill be familiar with this blues song through the

Led Zeppelin cover version; however few listen-ers may directly connect Jimmy Page andRobert Plant’s version with the 1927 flood. But,Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie wrote thesong, recording it in 1929 as a direct commen-tary on the flood. Mizelle doesn’t provide an in-depth treatment of their recording careers, yethis analysis suggests that their song could serveas an anthem for the entire history. He empha-sizes how the song portrays human vulnerabilityin the face of technological failure. The shortand direct lyrics exemplify central elements ofblues aesthetics: “If it keeps on raining, levee’sgoing to break / If it keeps on raining, levee’sgoing to break / And the water gonna come and(you’ll have) no place to stay.” Mizelle also ex-plicates how the deeply polysemic symbolism inthese lyrics is also central to blues aesthetics.The song lyrics’ provocative force becomesclear in the phrase that follows: “Crying won’thelp you, praying won’t do you no good / Cryingwon’t help you, praying won’t do you no good /When the levee breaks, mama, you got tomove.” On the level of historical particularityas well as on the more abstract generalized ar-ticulation of African-American memory cul-ture, Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie’s songevokes the existential predicament of facing thehard reality of life yet somehow finding strengthto endure.

--Gregory Hansen

Johnny Cash FAQ. By C. Eric Ban-ister. (Montclair, NJ: BackbeatBooks, 2014. Pp. vi–xiv + 355, se-lected bibliography, index. $24.99,paperback)

Johnny Cash died in 2003, but his legacy isstronger than ever. In the last year, fans haveseen the opening of Nashville’s Johnny Cash

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Museum, the restoration of Cash’s house inDyess, and the release of a new studio album,Out Among the Stars. C. Eric Banister’s JohnnyCash FAQ will please Cash fans. The book

doesn’t contain “allthat’s left to know”about Cash, buteven the most de-voted fan will learnsomething fromthese pages. Cashwas a musician fornearly fifty years,and he left behindscores of albums,not including themany GreatestHits, Best ofs, and

other collections. Cash’s career leaves a lot formusicologists to write about.

Banister’s work is another entry in musicpublisher Hal Leonard’s FAQ series, which hasfeatured books on music, film, and TV. JohnnyCash FAQ is a musical biography in which earlychapters discuss Cash’s roots in the ArkansasDelta and his musical influences, which rangedfrom Hank Snow to Sister Rosetta Tharpe.Cash got his start in Memphis, and his rise tofame was rapid. Unlike Elvis, Cash was a strongsongwriter, whose best early songs, such as “IWalk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues” hepenned himself. Cash lifted much of the melodyand lyrics for “Folsom Prison Blues,” but thecrucial line, “I shot a man in Reno just to watchhim die,” was his own creation and solidified hisstatus as the godfather of Outlaw Country. EarlyCash songs set the template for his career:trains, prisons, cotton fields, and women ob-sessed him. Sun Records, however, only put outone real album, Johnny Cash with His Hot andBlue Guitar, which mostly consisted of previ-ously released material. Cash’s producer, SamPhillips, however, was only following industrypractice of the time, which focused on singles,not albums.

Cash moved to Columbia in 1958 for artis-

tic reasons. He wanted greater creative control,which included the opportunity to recordgospel songs. In his first two years at Columbia,Cash released an astonishing five albums. Anever-increasing amphetamine habit helped fuelCash’s productivity, but Cash also had a work-ing man’s approach to music. He tirelessly per-formed live shows and churned out albums,even when he wasn’t very inspired. Cash couldalso work quickly. His 1960 album Now, ThereWas a Song!, Banister tells us, was recorded ina mere three hours.

By the mid-1960s, Cash focused on conceptalbums, folk themes, and the cause of NativeAmericans—best typified on his 1964 releaseBitter Tears—not hit singles (“Ring of Fire” wasan exception). Cash was not only the first majorstar to take up the cause of Native Americans,he was also the first to record an album in aprison. The year 1968 proved one of the mostimportant in the singer’s life. His At FolsomPrison record was a blockbuster, he marriedJune Carter, and he kicked (albeit temporarily)his drug habit.

Cash’s 1969 live album At San Quentinsold even better than At Folsom Prison. ButBanister shows that in the 1970s, Cash strug-gled to remain relevant amid rapid changes inthe country music business. The decade startedwell with Cash doing a hit weekly variety TVshow. But when Cash ended the program in1971, his record sales began a long slide. He hadonly one song that hit number one on the coun-try chart in the 1970s, “One Piece at a Time”in 1976. Banister notes how Cash struggled tovary his musical style and try new things,though fans apparently wanted the familiar“boom chicka boom” sound that stamped hisearly Sun records. Cash’s output in the 1970swas more erratic than his earlier work, and hesaw himself being eclipsed by “newer” artistssuch as Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson.

In 1980s, Cash’s career hit its nadir. In1980, Cash fired his longtime bass player Mar-shall Grant; was the victim of a home invasionat his Jamaica mansion; and was nearly killed

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in an ostrich attack (ridiculous had it not beenso serious). Cash also lapsed back into heavydrug use. He floundered commercially and wasdropped by Columbia in 1986. Cash quicklysigned to Mercury Records, but was no moresuccessful there than he had been at Columbia.Cash had success with the country super groupthe Highwaymen. But by the early 1990s, Cashwas considering becoming a regular performerat a theater in Branson, Missouri.

Cash’s failures in the 1980s, however, werenot uncommon for stars of the 1960s. In theReagan years, artists such as Neil Young andBob Dylan could seemingly do little right.Cash’s rebirth at Rick Rubin’s AmericanRecordings label in 1994 provides a terrific end-ing to Cash’s story, whereby an elderly, “hasbeen” country artist reaches new legions of fanswith the help of a young, edgy producer. WithRubin’s help, Cash’s album sales skyrocketed,he won Grammys, and he made records thatnever compromised his artistic integrity.

Banister’s book is a well-written and im-pressively researched musical biography of theMan in Black. His chapters contain numerousfirst-hand testimony by Cash and the musicianshe worked with, all while placing Cash in hisproper historical and musical context. Thebook is factually sound, though there are occa-sional missteps. Banister has Bob Wootton join-ing Cash’s band before Carl Perkins, though theopposite was the case. Cash’s concert at Cum-mins prison in Arkansas took place not in LittleRock, but Grady, a good distance from the cap-ital. And Winthrop Rockefeller, who accompa-nied him, was not the first Republican governorof Arkansas, but the first Republican governorsince Reconstruction. The Arkansas prisonissue, furthermore, never did make it to theU.S. Supreme Court (rather, a federal court inSt. Louis decided on the state penitentiary’sconstitutionality). Banister also misspells whatis perhaps the most misspelled name in countrymusic: David Allan Coe.

I wish the author had been more vigilant indeleting clichés from his prose, and I would

have liked to have seen a more extensive bibli-ography. Quotations are not cited. Thus, readerswill have difficulty determining where theycame from. On the plus side, the index is copi-ous, which will allow readers to use these chap-ters as a valuable reference source.

My criticisms are minor. Banister has writ-ten a stimulating book, which is a worthy addi-tion to the many works on Johnny Cash nowavailable. The Cash literary train shows nosigns of slowing down, and music fans are all thebetter for it.

--Colin Woodward

Staging the Blues: From TentShows to Tourism. By Paige A.McGinley. (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2014. Pp. 304.$24.95, paperback)

On its website, the Delta Blues Museum inClarksdale, Mississippi, celebrates its locale as“the land where blues began.” The slogan is theunattributed title of a film and book by folk-lorist Alan Lomax. In what might best be de-scribed as an act of symbolic annihilation, touse terminology coined by communicationscholar GeorgeGerbner, blueswomen are all butwritten out of blueshistory. In Lomax’s500-plus pagetome, women whofigure prominentlyin Paige McGin-ley’s book, namely,Gertrude “Ma”Rainey and BessieSmith, are scarcelymentioned, and

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then only digressively, dismissively or derogato-rily. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a pioneering artistwho like many blues performers, male and fe-male, excelled in other genres, is presentedmerely as a “zingy” gospel singer. That a woman,Mamie Smith, was the first person to record ablues song warrants no mention at all.

Lomax and his father John spent decadesassembling vast collections of vernacular music,including blues, which today are housed in theLibrary of Congress. In doing so, they perpetu-ated a persistent myth of blues origins that is si-multaneously masculinized, rural and Southern.In much the same way that certain regionalizedevocations are reflexively identified with Ap-palachia or the Ozarks, the museum’s slogan sig-nifies archetypal images of old AfricanAmerican men, or prematurely senescent youngAfrican American men, sitting on muggy, sag-ging porches of sharecroppers’ shacks situatedsomewhere on unpaved back roads in an imag-ined rural South, sing-shouting mournful lyricsand coaxing primitive twelve-bar tunes frombattered acoustic guitars. Blues luminaries likeBig Bill Broonzy, Howlin’ Wolf, John LeeHooker, Robert Johnson, Sonny BoyWilliamson, and Muddy Waters come to mind:invariably masculine evocations of a quintes-sential American art form.

Paige McGinley’s erudite analysis of blueshistory upends prevailing archetypes, yieldingimportant insights about the emergence andevolution of a music genre that is deeply and,perhaps, at least somewhat erroneously embed-ded in the Mississippi Delta mythos. McGinleyexcavates essential aspects of blues history thatthe Lomaxes, and likeminded scholars, omitted,making the opaque transparent.

Two thematic tensions are recurrentthroughout the book: femininity vs. masculinityand theatricality vs. authenticity. McGinleyopens her case in a lengthy introduction andbuilds it in four subsequent chapters, each ofwhich is a synoptic argument. Together, theyconstitute a revisionist history of the blues thatdirectly and powerfully challenges the Lomax

narrative.In the introduction, McGinley declares her

intention to resituate the context of blues ori-gins from the front porch to the footlights. InAlan Lomax’s reckoning, real or authentic bluesresided on Delta farms and migrated to South-ern and, later, Northern cities, where it wastransformed (for instance, electrified) andtransformative, becoming the root source forderivative music genres such as rhythm andblues, and rock and roll. While blues performersmay have refined their stage personas and in-spired imitators who adopted theatrical conven-tions to broaden their appeal for diverseaudiences and satisfy the demands of theaterowners, the “real thing” was what matteredmost to Lomax and other blues purists. ReadingMcGinley, however, one can imagine thatthings to some extent might well have been theother way around, that life imitated art insteadof art imitating life. She argues that authenticblues performance always was, in varying de-grees, theatrical. Blues performances includedthe usual theatrical accouterments, such asbackdrops, costumes and props; and these per-formances often occurred as part of travelingminstrel or Vaudeville shows that toured thecountry, including the rural South, in the earlytwentieth century. Blues performers such as“Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith were versatileentertainers for whom blues singing was but onefacet of their repertoires. McGinley acknowl-edges the difficulty of reconstructing ephemeralstage performances. Her interpretations arelargely dependent on contemporaneous pressreports and promotional materials. However, aglimpse of the ineffable that she may have inmind can be seen in a rare television appear-ance by Ethel Waters. On a 1960s episode ofHollywood Palace Waters performs in charac-ter, notably a dramatic skit rendition of thebluesy “Supper Time” from the 1933 musical AsThousands Cheer and, ostensibly, out of char-acter in a duet with an admiring Diana Ross onHoagy Carmichael’s “Bread and Gravy.” In anycase, Waters’s performance seems very much in

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line with McGinley’s descriptions of Rainey’sand Smith’s performances.

McGinley continues the theme of theatri-cality vs. authenticity in the following chapter,which profiles the performance styles of Raineyand Smith, and adds the tension of femininityvs. masculinity. Both women were formidableand massively popular entertainers for whomblues singing was but one of their varied talents.Lomax barely acknowledges their existence andnever within the pantheon of blues titans, anexclusively male domain. For McGinley, theyare consequential figures in the history of bluesperformance, and illustrative of the entwine-ment of blues and theatre.

In Chapter Two, McGinley shifts attentionto Huddie Ledbetter who is better known by hisstage moniker “Lead Belly.” Ledbetter was dis-covered by John Lomax on a song-hunting ex-pedition to Southern prisons. At the timeLedbetter was a prisoner in the Louisiana StatePenitentiary. After his release, Lomax presentedhim to audiences as an authentic exemplar ofthe blues, but in doing so ironically “staged” hisprotégé in ways that were incongruous withLedbetter’s persona and incompatible with hisperformance sensibilities. In time, this led tothe dissolution of the two men’s relationship;nonetheless, Ledbetter’s capacity for reinven-tion enabled him to enjoy a lengthy genre-span-ning career.

Chapter Three begins with a brief narrativeof the end of Ledbetter’s life and career, and es-tablishes his seminal role as an internationalblues celebrity. This leads to a consideration ofthe staging of blues performances for interna-tional audiences that provides further reinforce-ment for McGinley’s argument about the blues’inherent theatricality; but, otherwise, the chap-ter seems somewhat superfluous. The narrativemainly concerns the historic 1964 Britishbroadcast of The Blues and Gospel Train, arevue of American blues notables, that does notadd much to the arc of the argument, althoughit is an interesting story, engagingly told.

Chapter Four is a fascinating study of blues

tourism that securely binds the argumentativethreads woven throughout the book. It returnsthe reader to Clarksdale and Coahoma County,Mississippi, the site of Bessie Smith’s tragic anduntimely death, and the so-called birthplace ofthe blues. McGinley analyzes the blues tourismindustry as a theatrical endeavor itself thatstages a sanitized, voyeuristic presentation ofblues history, without due consideration for themilieu of economic injustice and racial violencein which blues performers, indigenous and oth-erwise, labored and suffered. And, it, too, is aversion of history in which the contributions ofwomen blues performers continue to be dis-counted.

McGinley has written a commendablestudy of a unique American cultural form thatprovides a much needed corrective to blues his-tory. It is a fine work of scholarship that willhave greater appeal for academic than for casualreaders.

--Greg A. Phelps

Populating the Barrera: SpanishImmigration Efforts in ColonialLouisiana. By Gilbert C. Din.(Lafayette, LA: University ofLouisiana Lafayette Press, 2014.Pp. 177, bibliography, $20.00,paper)

Following the early explorations in NorthAmerica, French, British, and Spanish empiresraced for land grabbing. Policy makers soon un-derstood that a claimed territory that remainsunoccupied could be contested. Unable to pop-ulate its colony, France lost its colonial claim inNorth America at the end of the Great War forthe Empire. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 dividedthe French territory of Louisiana between theBritish and Spanish empires. It signaled the be-

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ginning of a newera for Louisiana’ssettlers west of theMississippi River,under the Spanishrule, that ended atthe turn of the cen-tury. Exploring theSpanish crown’scontrol of thecolony, Populatingthe Barrera, adds toa meager historiog-raphy on this short-

lived chapter of colonial Louisiana’s history.Gilbert Din traces the efforts of the colonialSpanish government officials’ role in shapingthe immigration policies designed to address thecasi-empty colony from 1763 to 1800. Din as-sesses the different colonial administrations’ ef-forts to increase colonial population. He is thefirst scholar to uncover and credit Governor Es-teban Miró for his role in shaping governmentalpolicies on populating the colony. In this work,Din also attempts to correct errors made by ear-lier historians and explain the reasons for theshift of Spain’s policy over time as it endeavoredto attract settlers to Louisiana and West Floridain the late eighteenth century.

The Spanish crown quickly began its effortsin populating the newly acquired territory toenable its colonial control. Din reveals Spain’sefforts to enlarge Louisiana’s inhabitantsthrough the acquisition of Spaniards, Acadians,Canary Islanders, French Canadians, Irishmen,Germans, and even Americans as a crucial partin the colonization of Louisiana. The author ar-gues that the Spanish efforts to increase thescarce population was aimed to create a barrera(barrier) to stop the Anglo-American aggres-sive encroachment on their North Americanpossessions. In that regard, the Spaniards con-sidered Louisiana as a buffer zone between theBritish Colonies (later the United States) andthe more important Kingdom of New Spain(Mexico).

In fact, the colony was more of a costly bur-den to the Spanish Crown in as much as thecolony produced almost nothing in revenue.The colony consumed significant quantities ofmoney to provide gifts to the Natives to main-tain peace in Louisiana. Additionally, for ap-proximately twenty years, the Crown adaptedseveral proposals and spent significant sums ofmoney on the promotion of colonization andretention of Spanish or European Catholic im-migrants. In addition to providing tools, guns,and ammunition, the government allotted theimmigrants full rations for their first year of set-tlement and half rations for the second year.However, Din asserts that these efforts werescarcely productive and by the early 1780s,Spain accepted the impossibility of continuingto subsidize immigration in Louisiana. From1785 to 1791, Governor Esteban Miró shiftedSpain’s immigration policy in an attempt to at-tract more settlers. Din believes that Miró wasthe “hidden inspiration” behind the Spanishpolicy that allowed American Protestants, whowere traditionally excluded, to settle inLouisiana. His successor, the Baron de Caron-delet, shifted the immigration policy again ashe preferred Europeans to Americans. Underhis administration, Carondelet adopted a defen-sive attitude towards the Anglo-Americans,who were no longer encouraged nor assisted ifthey immigrated into the province. Instead, thegovernor’s policy emphasized securing a Euro-pean Catholic population, which he consideredto be best suited to the Spanish rule and monar-chical government. In 1800, Spain was re-moved from the Mississippi Valley as theFrench recaptured their former colony, puttingan end to the Spain’s dilemma over immigra-tion policies in colonial Louisiana.

Populating the Barrera serves as an um-brella that gathers Din’s previously publishedarticles on the subject of Spanish colonialLouisiana. While Din revised and updated hisessays, because the articles were initially de-signed to stand alone, repetition appears inthem occasionally. The articles are not pre-

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sented in a strict chronology for the same rea-son. For instance, chapters one, three, four andsix follow a chronological order as they tracethe shifts in the colonial administrations.Meanwhile, chapters two, five, and seven ex-plore certain aspects of Spain’s immigration ef-forts. His very last article focuses on thehardship endured by the Islenos (Canary Is-landers) in their first settlements in SpanishLouisiana during the second half of the eigh-teenth century.

Din provides a sophisticated and an ex-tremely well-researched analysis as his languageabilities enabled him to be among the firstscholars to conduct a thorough research in sev-eral Spanish archives in Madrid and to accessthe treasures hidden in “Papeles Procedentes dela Isla de Cuba” collection in Archivo Generalde Indias, Seville. Taken separately or as awhole, Gilbert Din’s academic essays providescholars with a deeper understanding of Spanishcolonial ambition in Louisiana. Din also intro-duces a general readership to a wide range ofsubjects including immigration, governmentalpolicies, and race relations in eighteenth cen-tury Louisiana.

--Sonia Toudji

Race Horse Men: How Slavery andFreedom Were Made at the Race-track. By Katherine C. Mooney.(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 2014. Pp. 248, notes,acknowledgements, index. $35,hardcover)

In Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Free-dom Were Made at the Racetrack, KatherineC. Mooney examines race, power, and privilegein nineteenth and early twentieth centuryAmerica through the lens of Thoroughbred

horseracing. For much of that time, Thorough-bred horseracing ranked as one of the most pop-ular spectator sports in the United States.Especially fashionable in the South, the sportreflected the intricacies of the southern socialorder. Atop this hierarchy stood the turfmen,wealthy white planters who owned and bred theThoroughbreds, upon which they wagered theirfortunes and reputations. Their success de-pended largely on African-Americans, knownas the “race horse men,” who cared for,groomed, trained, and raced the horses. Largelythe focus of the book, Mooney describes howthe race horse men, who began as slaves, gainedmuch success and acclaim as freedmen, only tobe banished from the sport by Jim Crow.

African-American race horse men inher-ited their equine knowledge and skills fromtheir African forbearers. By the seventeenthcentury, northern West African tribesmenprided themselves on their horsemanship.Skilled horsemen managed the stables ofYoruban and Hausan kings. Slaves themselves,the horsemen “were valued members of theroyal household, supervisors of large staffs, andintimates ofprinces” (p. 7).Segregated fromthe slaves who per-formed physicalstable work whichpersonified the hu-miliation intrinsicto servitude, theprivileged horse-men used their rid-ing skills to pursueand capture slaveswho attempted es-cape. In effect, thehorseman made African slavery a complicatedand contradictory establishment, in whichknowledgeable and skilled slaves were playedagainst those lacking such abilities to insure thepermanency of human bondage.

Antebellum race horse men replicated the

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world of their African counterparts. Highly val-ued and very expensive, slaves with equestrianexperience enjoyed privileges unfamiliar toother slaves. They lived in separate quarters,they traveled to racetracks, they earned andkept money, they were consulted for theirequine expertise, and they were entrusted withthe maintenance of animals worth several thou-sands of dollars. Skilled jockeys won praise inthe pages of the fledgling sporting press and es-tablished reputations throughout the region.Despite their advantages, the race horse menwere first and foremost slaves, who lived in aworld rooted in intimacy and hierarchy. Pro-vided that the hierarchy remained undisturbed,intimacy across racial lines persisted as long asit remained mutually beneficial to master andslave. However, race horse men who displeasedtheir owners could be sold or expelled to thefields.

In the world of Thoroughbred horseracing,antebellum turfmen saw an efficient slave sys-tem, which could possibly provide the founda-tion of an independent Southern nation. In the1820s and 1830s, horseracing offered the prom-ise of mobility to whites of lesser means, whohoped the purchase of race horses would im-prove their fortunes. In the 1840s and 1850s,Henry Clay’s America System, epitomized byhis Ashland, Kentucky, plantation, suggested anational interdependence supported by per-fectly ordered slavery. In the 1860s, as sectionaltensions made Southern sovereignty seem pos-sibly inevitable, the plantation stable, managedand operated on a hierarchy of slave labor, pro-vided the perfect social model, as long as theturfmen remained in control.

After the Civil War, race horse men expe-rienced the possibilities and limits of emanci-pation. Most of them remained in the jobs theyheld as slaves, sometimes under their formerowners. The turfmen pointed to their loyaltyand respect for social and racial hierarchy to dis-pel white concerns of black freedom. Acceptingthe southern social order, wealthy northernbusinessman, financiers, and industrialists seized

control of horseracing, and built magnificentracetracks in Saratoga, New York, and Mon-mouth, New Jersey. In their search for order,southern and northern turfmen established theAmerican Jockey Club in 1867, which codifiedthe rules of Thoroughbred horseracing, includ-ing one which stipulated that grooms, jockeys,and trainers must receive their employer’s per-mission before switching to a new one. Therule, which undermined free labor, reflected thecontract system that bound factory workers toemployers, thereby nationalizing the intimacyand hierarchy of the southern plantation.

By the 1890s, African-American trainersand jockeys had risen to the top of their profes-sion. Of the fifteen horses contesting the inau-gural Kentucky Derby in 1875, twelve wereridden by black jockeys. The trainer, AnselWilliamson, and jockey, Oliver Lewis, of thewinning horse, Aristides, were African-Ameri-cans. Black jockeys dominated the KentuckyDerby until 1902, when Jimmy Winkfield be-came the last African-American to win therace. Isaac Murphy won the race three times in1884, 1890, and 1892, the most by a singlejockey until 1948. Thoroughbred horseracing’smost successful jockey, Murphy won 628 of1,412 races; his winning ratio of 44% has yet tobe matched. Lionized by sports writers and theAfrican-American press, Murphy and otherblack jockeys became heroes and examples ofsuccess for the black community.

In the late 1890s and early 1900s, northernand southern turfmen systematically removedthe race horse men from Thoroughbredhorseracing. Northern whites, in particular,could not tolerate the success of African-Amer-ican jockeys, since their achievements inspiredand instilled confidence in the expanding pop-ulation of blacks throughout the north. Influ-enced by the Social Darwinian thought ofWilliam Graham Sumner, white supremacistsextended concepts of Thoroughbred breedingto people, developing racial theories groundedin pseudo-science. The turfmen, who ownedthe farms where the race horse men bred,

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trained, managed, and rode the horses, stronglyendorsed the “scientific” racial hierarchy. Cast-ing decades of experience aside, the JockeyClub licensed fewer and fewer black jockeys,declaring them unfit to race. The increasingnumber of white jockeys refused to competeagainst blacks and often intimidated them onand off the track. Within a generation, the racehorse men disappeared from the sport.

“Less an attempt to answer a set of analyti-cal questions about historical cause and effect,”Race Horse Men, Mooney writes, is “a portraitthat seeks to reveal some complex and difficultrealities in the lives of people in the past” (p.3). In achieving so, the book is a solid contri-bution to the history of sport and race in Amer-ica.

--Adam R. Hornbuckle

I Had Rather Die: Rape in theCivil War. By Kim Murphy.(Batesville, VA: Coachlight Press,2014. Pp. vi–vii + 130, notes, bib-liography, index. $14.95, paper-back)

With the publication of MargaretMitchell’s sweeping saga Gone with the Wind,the romantic idealism of the Civil War burstforth in full bloom, all but sweeping aside thetrue horror that was the war between North andSouth. Kim Murphy, in I Had Rather Die,comes forth without bias and promptly breaksdown the dreamlike, idealistic realm that theCivil War has all but been relegated to.

Using meticulous research, Murphy hasscoured through old articles and letters andprison reports from the Civil War to weave to-gether a horrifying documentary that will leaveher readers cringing in repulsion. The subject isone that none before her have addressed so bru-

tally and honestly: rape. Beginning with theearly 1600s when laws against rape first beganto come to the court systems, Murphy takes herreaders through the years to the Civil War, giv-ing account of how violence against women wastaken with such disregard and inconsideration.

The women whose stories are documentedin this book will leave you reeling at the injus-tice of a racially divided time when blackwomen were seen as nothing more than prop-erty and white women, with very few excep-tions, were seen as the bearers of blame for theatrocities committed against them. Murphy fillsthe pages with documented and historical re-ports, setting aside her own feelings on the mat-ter and instead giving her readers a true andaccurate accounting of crimes that were com-mitted but very often ignored and have, eventoday, been largely ignored as an important partof Civil War history.

This book is, at times, difficult to read, andeven Murphy her-self expressed herangst in writing it:“More than once, Iwanted to throwthe manuscript inthe trash. Thewomen’s storiesthat follow are notonly difficult toread, but heart-breaking in manyinstances. When Ithought of givingup, their voiceshaunted me” (p. 5). Yet it is a book that shouldbe read by any and all who wish to know thetrue depths of the Civil War. Murphy goes toplaces that few talk about and even fewer haveheard of.

It is a travesty that so many women sufferedsuch brutal rapes and treatment, that very fewfought for them to find a sense of justice, andthat so many cases have never been docu-mented but left to die with their victims. I Had

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Rather Die brings these women’s stories to life.Murphy, with her research and her straightfor-ward documentation, has done something thatmany of the women of the stories could neverdo: she has brought the horrors enacted againstthem to light and she has given them the voicesthey did not have when they were alive.

Not only bringing light to the atrocitiescommitted by soldiers against women duringthe Civil War, Murphy also brings to the frontthe injustice with which sentencing was carriedout during this time. Women had to prove be-yond doubt that they had done everything pos-sible to fight off their rapists. Over half the mensentenced were black, and they were sentencedto death while the rapists who were white were,more often than not, given lenient punish-ments. Black women were property and as suchwere, the majority of the time, unable to accusetheir attacker(s) and see justice done. Whitewomen, unless they were of wealthy and influ-ential families, were seen as temptresses and ac-complices in the crime. Female children asyoung as ten years were raped, and heads wereturned the other way. “During the Civil Warera, even a ten-year old girl could have beenviewed as partly responsible for tempting men”(p. 129). Often times the crimes were brushedoff as nothing more than propaganda withwhich to terrify women.

I Had Rather Die is compelling and heart-breaking but enlightening and necessary. Mur-phy does not discriminate against race or sex.She provides facts and leaves it to the reader todiscern between justice and injustice. For loversof true history and the ones who want to knowthe parts of history that are often considered tootaboo to speak of, this is one book that comeshighly recommended.

--Brook Biggs

Learning from the Wounded: TheCivil War and the Rise of Ameri-

can Medical Science. ShaunaDevine. (Chapel Hill, NC: Uni-versity of North Carolina Press,2014. Pp. ix–x + 272, appendix,notes, bibliography, index. $31.50,hardcover)

While it is unclear today exactly howmany deaths occurred during the AmericanCivil War, current research points to approxi-mately 750,000 lives of soldiers lost as a directresult of the conflict. When contrasted with thecurrent population in the United States, a lossof 7.5 million lives would have the equivalentimpact today.

More shockingthan the number ofdead is the fact thatroughly two-thirdsof the men losingtheir lives died notfrom injuries suf-fered in combat butrather from disease.Many of these mendied from preventa-ble diseases thatnow appear only inthe United States asmild childhood ill-nesses or in third-world countries due to a lackof effective sanitation. Ranging from measlesand pneumonia to dysentery and typhoid fever,many diseases ravaged units before they everentered combat. Even successfully surviving anencounter with the enemy did not mean thatmen escaped the ravages of illnesses that sweptcamps, especially if one received a wound.

Much of the blame for these diseases andtheir impact on the war effort can be placed onthe officers in charge of medical efforts for thearmy. The prewar medical establishment hadfew regulations and required even less training,allowing many unqualified individuals to prac-

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tice medicine. While field commanders shouldreceive some of the blame for ineffective lead-ership contributing to terrible sanitation con-ditions, untrained and inexperienced doctorsalso negatively impacted the disease rates, es-pecially early in the war.

Shauna Devine’s new work Learning fromthe Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise ofAmerican Medical Science traces how thesedoctors created a new field of medical profes-sionals to handle the overwhelming number ofcases created by the war. Using a variety ofmethods, including autopsies, case studies, andthe collection of specimens, the lessons learnedreached the active surgeons in the field whoquickly put them to good use.

The massive number of battle casualtiesand the large number of patients suffering fromany number of diseases that passed throughnorthern military camps provided doctorsample training and research opportunities.The lessons learned during the war were put togood use and provided a base for post-war med-ical training and research. New treatments forcholera, as well as preventative measures, wereutilized immediately after the end of hostilities,with great effect.

Dispersed through the text are photographsof patients taken during or after their treatmentusing the methods being developed. Not for thefaint of heart, these illustrations graphically dis-play the scope of the injuries that men sufferedin battle when struck by large, slow moving leadprojectiles and the difficulty that surgeons facedwhen treating these wounds. Graphic descrip-tions of medical procedures and the sometimesgruesome outcomes that followed these opera-tions are also included in the text.

The detailed index, extensive notes, andexpansive bibliography all help readers use thework and will prove to be useful to researchers.The only drawback to the title is the lack of in-formation about Confederate medical efforts.While Devine is upfront about the Union focusof this work, hopefully she will continue thework begun here and create a similar title that

details military medicine in the South duringthe war.

An extremely detailed and well-researchedtitle, Learning from the Wounded would be agreat addition to the collection of any historianinterested in the evolution of medical care, es-pecially in a military setting. It would be lessuseful to anyone who has only a casual interestin the Civil War or those researchers who donot focus on Union war efforts.

A welcome addition to the field of CivilWar medical books, Devine’s work will soon bea staple for anyone doing serious research in thefield.

--David Sesser

Yankee Dutchmen Under Fire:Civil War Letters from the 82ndIllinois Infantry. Trans. and ed. byJoseph R. Reinhart. (Kent, OH:Kent State University Press, 2013.Pp. ix–xii + 193, epilogue, notes,bibliographic essay, index. $31.66,hardcover)

With Yankee Dutchmen Under Fire: CivilWar Letters fromthe 82nd Illinois In-fantry, Joseph R.Reihnart adds to hisalready impressivelist of collections ofCivil War missivesfrom German immi-grants fighting forthe Union, givingfurther voice to andinsight into an un-derstudied but sig-nificant element ofthe forces who served the United States during

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its greatest crisis. The book contains a total offifty-nine letters, thirty of which were publishedin newspapers (which Reinhart classifies as“public” letters) and twenty-nine “private” let-ters, most written by five officers in the regi-ment and many of which were translated by theauthor. As can be expected, the “private” letterstend to be more frankly opinionated and offerinsights into the interpersonal dynamics withinthe regiment—which were not, to say the least,harmonious.

The 82nd Illinois was the second unit fromthat state recruited by Col. Friedrich Hecker, aveteran of the German revolutions of 1848–49who had come to America following their fail-ure. Nine of its companies were composed ofGermans (Company I, consisting of Scandina-vian immigrants, joined the regiment later),and one, Company C, was recruited fromChicago’s Jewish community, making the 82nd“one of only two regiments in the entire Unionarmy containing a company of Jews” (p. 2). Theregiment fought at Chancellorsville and Get-tysburg before transferring west to serve in theAtlanta Campaign and in Sherman’s March tothe Sea and fighting in the closing battles in theCarolinas. The 82nd Illinois Infantry, whichhad 850 men when it mustered in, would lose102 men in combat and 60 to disease during thecourse of the war. Only about 30 percent ofthose who mustered in with the regiment in1862 were still there to muster out in 1865, withmany having left service because of sickness orwounds, or by desertion.

The letters reflect the issues that the 82ndfaced as a primarily German outfit that had todeal with the prejudice of nativist Americans,such as an episode in the training camp atCamp Butler, Illinois, when a newly arrived reg-iment confronted Hecker’s troops, its colonelcursing the officer of the day as a “good d—dsaucy dutch son of a b—” before placing the en-tire 82nd under arrest (pp. 31-2). Nor was theregiment immune to internal dissent: a pair ofletters describe a kerfuffle when a German wasappointed second in command of the Scandi-

navian company, which led its captain to writeIllinois Governor Richard Yates for relief, con-tending that it was “necessary for anny [sic] of-ficers in this comp. to [k]now the Scandinavianlanguage because two-thirds can’t speak Englishand hardly none German” (p. 65). Other lettersdeal with cultural issues that were largelyunique to German units, such as a September2, 1862, plea to “Send beer in special trains,much beer, and your name shall be emblazonedin golden letters in the memories of our soldiers,and a Te Deum would ascend to the heavensafter receipt of the barley juice” (pp. 36–37).

Many of the letters describe the battles inwhich the 82nd Illinois fought, including theone at Chancellorsville, Virginia, in which theUnion’s heavily German 11th Corps was sur-prised and driven back by Confederates underGeneral Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.Friedrich P. Kappelmann described the battle-field to his parents: “The wounded were lyingaround everywhere and the dead of both sideswere lying like cut glass [sic], one without ahead, another one with both legs gone, the en-trails were hanging out of another man, still an-other without his arms. The bullets were flyinglike during a hailstorm” (pp. 77–78). EditorReinhart convincingly refutes the accusationsmade after Chancellorsville that the Germansin the 11th Corps were responsible for that bat-tle’s disastrous results, and the butcher’s bill forthe 82nd reflect the regiment’s hard fighting:Hecker’s troops lost 155 men killed, woundedand missing, the second highest regimental lossin their division. As one anonymous soldier ofthe 82nd Illinois wrote in a letter to the IllinoisStaats-Zeitung, “Our regiment conducted itselfwell, better than most others. What we lackedwas only a general” (p. 74).

Rudolph Müller, an officer and close friendand confidant (and future son-in-law) ofHecker, wrote twenty-one of the letters andthey provide windows into the internal dynam-ics of the 82nd Illinois. Müller was frequentlycatty in his remarks about other officers in the82nd in letters he wrote to Hecker after the lat-

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ter had left the regiment. He was particularlydisdainful of the Jewish officers in the 82nd Illi-nois, especially Lt. Col. Edward S. Salmon,whom he called “the Creole from Jerusalem” (p.113) and “the popularity-seeking blister” (p.162); in a letter from Atlanta in 1864 he com-plained “You should see what goes on here—just like a synagogue” (p. 154). Müller doesprovide excellent accounts of the 82nd’s battlesand marches, and gives praise—sometimes be-grudgingly—to his fellow officers when they de-serve it.

Reinhart does a good job of providing con-text for the periods of the war in which the let-ters were written, and his endnotes flesh out thenarrative nicely. He also includes an epiloguein which he tells what happened to the letterwriters later in life, including one man who hada habit of marrying and starting families with-out divorcing his previous wives, which causedmany problems for the latter when they latersought military pensions. My main complaintwith Reinhart’s editing is his frequent and notalways necessary insertion of bracketed correc-tions such as Reb[el] (p. 134) and Art.[illery] (p.135), which are clear in the context of the let-ter in which they appear, and repeating “Chat-tahoochie [Chattahoochee]” three times in twoparagraphs (pp. 144–45). These insertions de-tract significantly from the narrative flow of theletters.

With those few concerns aside, JosephReinhart does a fine job in arranging and inter-preting the letters of German-born soldiers in aregiment that saw action in some of the majorcampaigns in two theaters, and this book is amust-read for both avocational and professionalCivil War historians. I will close by agreeingcompletely with Reinhart’s conclusion to Yan-kee Dutchmen Under Fire: “The dearth of pub-lished information about the motives, opinions,and combat and other experiences of membersof the largest ethnic group in the Union armyis regrettable and deserves much more attentionfrom historians and other scholars. The task willnot be easy. . . . Regardless, the fruits of such ef-

forts would be immeasurable” (p. 202).

--Mark K. Christ

Liberating Language: Sites ofRhetorical Education in Nine-teenth-Century Black America. ByShirley Wilson Logan. (Carbon-dale: Southern Illinois University,2008. Pp. xi + 134, notes, bibliog-raphy, index. $32.68, paperback)

At least once a semester, a graduate studentin either my rhetorical theory or compositiontheory course will ask, “Where are the African-Americans in thehistory of rhetoric?”Because many ofthe textbooks onthe history of rheto-ric either have avery small samplingor a limited consid-eration of the con-tributions torhetoric by African-Americans, I oftenpoint out resourcesthat can help “fill inthe gaps” in the history of American rhetoric. Inow have a new valuable resource for my stu-dents.

Liberating Language: Sites of RhetoricalEducation in Nineteenth-Century Black Amer-ica by Shirley Wilson Logan is that new re-source. Dr. Logan’s study presents an overviewof “the rhetorical activities that African Amer-icans pursued across the nineteenth century . .. how people learned rhetoric as they lived theirlives” (p. 132). Logan seeks to answer the ques-tion, “Where did nineteenth-century blackrhetors learn to speak so effectively?” In order

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to answer that question, she explores rhetoricaleducation outside the classroom, and showshow the constraints imposed by racial discrim-ination and segregation actually created oppor-tunities for blacks to learn the art of rhetoric asan effective communication, social, and politi-cal tool.

Professor Logan first explores what sheterms “free floating” literacies—sites of rhetor-ical education utilized by black Union soldierson the battlefield, in the lessons of the pulpit,and in the industrial workplace. These exam-ples help to illustrate how scholars must con-sider nontraditional educational spaces tobetter understand how people gain literacy andrhetorical skills. In the second section of thebook, Logan traces the role of self-education forAfrican-Americans in the nineteenth century.Logan effectively analyzes the implications forrhetorical education found in the diaries of suchrhetors as Charlotte Forten Grimké, Ida B.Wells, and Charles W. Chesnutt to illustratehow a desire for self-improvement and broaderracial empowerment contributed to rhetoricaltraining. Logan then continues her examina-tion by exploring the roles that literary societiesand the Black Press played in the education ofblack rhetors.

What makes Liberating Language so engag-ing is Logan’s reliance on the words and expe-riences of many of the great black rhetors of thetime as primary sources. Not only do her exam-ples help to support her argument about thevalue of rhetorical education, but reading theworks of these individuals brings the power andskill of their rhetoric to life for the modernreader.

Liberating Language is a well-researched,engaging, and exciting look at a part of rhetor-ical history that has not gotten the attention itdeserves. This book will find appreciative audi-ences in many corners of academia and with thegeneral reading public. Logan’s work enhancesour understanding of history by uncovering hid-den notions of literacy while also placing theseactivities within the context of the prevailing

rhetorical theories of the era. It clearly showshow even though black rhetors were separatedfrom their white counterparts, they were alsovery aware of the history and developments ofrhetoric during their time. For rhetoricians andscholars of rhetorical theory and history, Loganhas given us a text that adds richness and diver-sity to the study of nineteenth century westernrhetoric. It is a welcome addition and a com-plement to any discussion of the western rhetor-ical tradition. Logan’s text is also an excellentstarting point for further research into the edu-cational systems of the time and also into im-portant figures, rhetors and rhetorical works ofAfrican-Americans during an important periodin our nation’s history.

Lastly, even though Logan’s work is con-cerned with rhetorical education of the past, Icould not help but to see implications and ap-plications for the present and future of blackrhetorical education and literacy. In her con-clusion Logan writes: “the most effective rhetor-ical education seemed to occur in sites whenthe exigence created a heightened need to com-municate, when there was collective effortamong a broad range of people, and when therewas an element of pleasure and gratification inthe process” (p. 134). Present-day scholars ofrhetoric and composition must remember thatliteracy is defined in many ways, including non-academic and nontraditional forms. Our stu-dents come to us with valuable literacies andrhetorical skills they have developed in theirhomes, in their communities, in their work, andin their play. The academy doesn’t have exclu-sive rights as a site of rhetorical education. Lib-erating Language reminds us of that fact andencourages the idea of freeing ourselves to bringthose other literacies and rhetorics into theclassroom. It is a book I enjoyed reading andone I will enjoy introducing to my students ofrhetoric and composition.

--Earnest L. Cox

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Educating The New SouthernWoman: Speech, Writing, andRace at the Public Women’s Col-leges, 1884–1945. By David Goldand Catherine L. Hobbs. (Carbon-dale, IL: Southern Illinois Univer-sity Press, 2014). Pp. 188,bibliography and index. $40.00,paper)

In Educating The New Southern Woman:Speech, Writing, and Race at the PublicWomen’s Colleges, 1884-1945, David Gold andCatherine L.Hobbs’s archival his-tory project portraysa detailed, rich, andcomplex narrative ofsouthern women’seducation duringthe post-Civil Warera through the con-clusion of WWII.While previousscholarship has fo-cused on northernwomen’s higher edu-cation in America, Gold and Hobbs’s decisionto investigate southern women’s education ex-pands contemporary understandings of femaleeducation “while avoiding the romanticism,presentism, and simple binaries that sometimescharacterize representations of the South” (p.13).

The book focuses on eight southern publiccolleges originally founded for white women:Alabama College for Women (now Universityof Montevallo), Florida State College forWomen (now Florida State University), Geor-gia State College for Women (now GeorgiaCollege and State University), Mississippi StateCollege for Women (now Mississippi University

for Women), North Carolina College forWomen (now the University of North Carolinaat Greensboro), Oklahoma College for Women(now the University of Science and Arts ofOklahoma), Texas State College for Women(now Texas Woman’s University), andWinthrop College (now Winthrop University).To be noted, today, all eight colleges have be-come co-educational.

During the period of 1884-1945, these eightschools serve as an enlightening and historicallyimportant institutional artifact illuminatinglarger national trends, “including the shift froman agrarian society to an industrial one; theland-grant impetus and the democratization ofeducation,” to name a few (p. 3). These trendsprovide additional insight into the moderniza-tion of the South and its negotiations amongsta “socially diverse constituency” (p. 3). Eachchapter in the book highlights the shifting his-tories southern education grappled withthroughout the South’s economic, social, andpolitical evolution.

Chapter one articulates the impetus forsouthern states establishing public women’s col-leges. All eight southern colleges shared explicitintentions “to train [female] students for bothdomestic and professional spheres” and werefounded to serve women of modest economicmeans, an important distinction from private,expensive, and often-elite northern all-femaleinstitutions (p. 22). Gold and Hobbs note therhetorical strategies of faculty and administra-tors at these colleges who continually negoti-ated between “the [liberal] purposes ofeducation and the proper public and profes-sional roles of women,” the latter of which werefrequently upheld by legislators, parents andpopulaces (p. 27). With these tensions appar-ent, the authors find that “southern publicwomen’s colleges both made use of and reactedagainst traditional tropes of femininity as theynegotiated a place for themselves and their stu-dents in the emerging new South” (p. 8).

Both chapters two and three focus on theexplicit educational instruction women re-

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ceived at these eight southern colleges. The roleof writing instruction is examined in chaptertwo. While teaching traditional notions of writ-ing, such as correctness in expression, instruc-tors also advocated “a social view of writing,”encouraging public and contemporary forms ofwriting (p. 36). Chapter three examines orator-ical education and elocutionary rhetorics. Sim-ilar to instructor encouragement to pursuesocial aspects of writing, instruction in publicspeaking “helped women learn to present them-selves in public and became a solid foundationfor graduates who entered careers or engaged incivic activities requiring public speech” (p. 9).Interestingly, Gold and Hobbs note the rhetor-ical evolution of public speaking. While spokenrhetoric was traditionally viewed as a male skill,especially in the era of Aristotle, the focus onelocution at southern women’s public institu-tions shifted assumptions of rhetoric’s use andbegan to associate public speaking as a morefeminine skill.

Chapter four examines the professionaltraining women received at these southern col-leges as well as the ways rhetoric and writing in-fluenced women’s career decisions. Writing andspeaking were traits important not just forpreparing future teachers, but rhetorical skillswere also necessary for success in home eco-nomics and business. Many southern women re-ceiving degrees in home economics went on towork as extension agents creating and distrib-uting information on products for farmers.These southern colleges and their vocationalmissions continued to impact women’s profes-sionalization during this era.

Chapter five addresses the role, or rather,the absence of a racial presence at these col-leges. The authors stress a historical under-standing of the absence of race at theseinstitutions, reminding the reader “theseschools . . . were [originally] established as bothseparatist and segregated institutions for whitewomen” (p. 10). And while there is evidence ofthese female students adopting a “Lost Cause”rhetoric, Gold and Hobbs’s analysis of their

writing reveals a level of complexity to attitudesof race at these colleges. To be sure, student at-titudes towards race did not remain stagnant (p.124). While their writing reveals a level of ro-manticism in an antebellum past and the priv-ileges of a plantation lifestyle, evidence in theirwriting also points to a layer of critique againstsuch romanticism, particularly pointing to thelack of economic, political and social mobilityfor women during such times. The authors arequick to assert that such evidence does noterode the racism that clearly did exist at thesecolleges. Most important is that this chaptercalls on future scholarship to further complicatethe relationship between race and female edu-cation, pushing for “a more complicated pictureof white women’s education history than hasbeen previously acknowledged” (p. 131).

As the book concludes, Gold and Hobbs re-flect on the legacy of the public women’s col-leges. In their reflection, the authors findparticular connections between the role of ad-ministrators and their potential impact on therole of rhetorical education at institutions. Pon-dering the significance of administrative workand rhetorical studies, Gold and Hobbs leavethe reader with a series of questions, found onpages 139–40. It is by ending with these ques-tions that readers are left to continue futurescholarship on the intersections of rhetoric,archival history, and education.

--Maria Novotny

Muzzled Oxen: Reaping Cottonand Sowing Hope in 1920sArkansas. By Genevieve GrantSadler. (Little Rock: Butler CenterBooks, 2014, Pp. 358. $23.95, pa-perback)

A compilation of letters written by

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Genevieve Grant Sadler and edited for publi-cation by her son Gareth Wayne Sadler, thiswork offers a vision of Arkansas rural life from1920 to 1927. Genevieve Sadler, a Californiagirl, married Wayne Sadler whose family haddeep roots in the rich soil of Arkansas’s cotton-growing river bottoms. The Sadler family hadmoved to Santa Cruz, California, in the early1900s leaving their farmlands in Arkansas tothe oversight of several tenant farming families.In 1920, fearing the property was being neg-lected, the Sadler family made a six week auto-mobile journey back to Arkansas. Wayne,Genevieve, their two young sons (Jimmy andDonnie), Wayne’s mother (Nancy Sadler) andhis brother (Henry) were returning to resume arural farming life at Sadler’s Bend near thebanks of the Petit Jean River in northwesternConway County, a life for which Genevieveand her two sons had almost no knowledge.

For the next seven years as she struggled tomeet her life’s new challenges, Sadler’s numer-ous letters written to her mother in Californiachronicled her experiences, views, and reac-tions to rural life in 1920s Arkansas. As such,these letters offer a useful but somewhat subjec-tive “outsider’s” view of a wide range of the re-alities of the meager existence of tenant farmersand sharecroppers and an equally subjectiveportrait of the lives of landowners and those liv-ing in nearby towns. All of this makes for a fas-cinating read, but lacks the contextual basis andthoroughness of understanding to render thiswork a suitable analytical, historical study.Nonetheless, if the reader accepts its monotoneview and its rather one-sided understanding ofits subject, this work offers powerful insights.

Sadler’s letters reveal her initial shock asshe encountered Southern rural culture. First,she was amazed by the close connection peoplehad to their family heritage and their venera-tion of past generations. Then, she was trulycaught off guard by the lack of cleanliness andthe constancy of dust and dirt in the towns, thehouses of rural residents, and with the people.Her shock continued as she first met the family

farm’s overseerand his wife andviewed theirhome. Shabby,rundown, poorlyoutfitted with lit-tle furniture, andsurrounded byvarious discardedbits and pieces ofyard trash, Sadlerstruggled to main-tain a polite pos-turing whileseeking privatelyto understand why people lived in these condi-tions. Referring to herself as a “rebellious,homesick woman, my eyes seeing little good inanything around me,” Sadler was “surprised tofind that I was beginning to feel eager . . . evenwilling to put my shoulder to the wheel in help-ing Wayne to have a good trial at his heart’s de-sire, farming here in Dixie”(p. 73). She cleanedand refurbished their small house, planted alarge garden, canned food for winter use, readto and taught her sons, and began to visit withother women seeking to understand their livesand how they coped with crushing poverty andits ramifications.

Even as Sadler began to settle into her newlife, the book continued to register her horrifiedreactions to the poor diet of the tenant farmers,their lack of proper medical care, their birthingand death practices, the dreadful state of theircountry schools, and their relationship to theirmules, horses, and farm stock. Her writings alsospeak of the lives of African-Americans, coun-try church socials, camp meetings, singings, andeveryone’s omnipresent interest in and concernover the price of cotton and weather condi-tions.

The descriptions of the individuals she ob-served are perhaps the most thoroughly honestportions of the work, especially her firsthandview of 1920s rural tenant farmers. “They werethin and sunken-eyed . . . looked tired, and they

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were tired, showing a lassitude in their everymovement. When they walked they slouched.. . . Even their drawling voices, so slow and easy,were also the outcome of general debility” (p.350). Sadler continued, saying that she wastired of “the expressionless faces, the twistedmouths turned down at the corners, indicatinga seeming soul-sadness that enveloped bothmind and body” (p. 351). This work also offerssignificant insights into the lives of poor ruralwomen during the 1920s, and the careful readeris able to discern some of the reasons for thegender disparity that was particularly prevalentin rural areas. “I saw Lidy Cowder standingthere in the door with seven children in sight.All the children looked half-starved. . . . Lidyseemed like an old woman now. Her hair hungin strings around her face. Her clothes were tornand her feet were still bare. . . . Yes, Lidy hadlived, to have another baby each year” (p. 354).

The only part of this work that seems un-necessary appears in the first chapter and detailsthe Sadler family’s month long stay on Mt.Nebo near the town of Dardanelle immediatelyafter they arrived in Arkansas. While offeringan insight into Genevieve Sadler’s unrealisticunderstanding of her new location and a few in-teresting perspectives on Mt. Nebo social life in1920, this chapter has nothing to do with theSadler’s rural farming experiences. The bookwould have been stronger and organizationallymore tightly developed had this long portion inthe first chapter been omitted.

While presenting a useful, earnestly writtenfirst-hand vision of 1920s Arkansas rural life,this book is incomplete and un-objective, as thetitle itself indicates, as it compares poor farm la-borers to muzzled oxen. Although it begs for ad-ditional factual information to counterbalanceits romanticized view of a highly complex,multi-layered subject, nonetheless this book of-fers the general reader a highly comprehensiblework capable of rendering great enjoyment.

--Mildred Diane Gleason

Swift to Wrath: Lynching in theGlobal Historical Context. Ed. byWilliam D. Carrigan and Christo-pher Waldrep. (Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press,2013. Pp. 236, contributors, index.$39.50, cloth)

On January 26, 1921, tenant farmer HenryLowery was brutally murdered on a plantationin rural Mississippi County, Arkansas, havingbeen chained to a log and slowly, sadisticallyroasted in front of a crowd of about 500 people,including his wife and children. Reports on thelynching circulated widely in the United States,not surprising given the attempt by many inCongress to pass an anti-lynching bill, but theLowery lynching was also covered by newspa-pers as far away as Japan—and this at a timewhen news distribution was more challengingthan at present and when there was no shortageof comparable cases of violence in the after-math of the Great War. However, as the con-tributors to Swift to Wrath reveal, there werereasons aplenty for the world to take an interestin American lynching.

First off, there have been analogues toAmer i c an - s t y l e“rough justice”across the globe andthrough the ages.The first half ofSwift to Wrath ex-amines “lynching”as manifest outsidethe United States,starting with theancient Near East,where, according toScott Morschauser,xenophobia and vi-olence were closely

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related and where “retribution for a crime bythe injured individuals or groups rather than bythe state was sometimes sanctioned” (pp. 25–26). Brian P. Levack tackles the persecution ofsuspected witches from the sixteenth century tothe present day, finding that anti-witch vio-lence, “just like the lynching of African Amer-icans, has been inspired by the perceived threatrepresented by subordinate and marginalizedsegments of the population” (p. 64). William D.Carrigan and Clive Webb explore the manyreasons that lynching declined in New Mexico,particular the role of official complaints fromthe Mexican government, while Joël Micheland Rachel Monaghan explore analogues tolynching in France and Northern Ireland, re-spectively. In each contribution, the authors arecareful to avoid one of the pitfalls discussed inthe introduction: “Using the word lynching todescribe mob violence can obscure historicalcontext, even imply that neither time not ge-ography matters by suggesting that there is auniversal human behavior that can be objec-tively understood outside time and space” (p.7).

The second half of this volume examineshow American lynching, especially its most vir-ulent anti-black manifestations, was interpretedby an international audience. First, RobertZecker sifts through Slovak-language newspa-pers and finds that reports of lynching wereoften presented to immigrants with little sym-pathy for the victims, for “these accounts in-variably characterized black self-defense itselfas illegitimate” (p. 143). British public debateson lynching, as revealed by Sarah L. Silkey,ranged from an abhorrence of mob violencethat allowed the British to cast themselves asmore morally and culturally sophisticated, to aromantic view of the American West and itsneed for swift justice; moreover, the Tory Party,during the early 1800s, “cultivated middle-classanxieties about the potential spread of Ameri-can lawlessness to England in an attempt torally opposition to further proposed Britishdemocratic reforms” (p. 164). Fumiko Sakashita

uses the January 25, 1942, lynching of CleoWright in Sikeston, Missouri, as a launchingpad for her broader investigation of both howthe Japanese used American lynching as a prop-aganda tool and how African-Americans’ viewsof Japan developed before and during WorldWar II; most notably, Japan “intentionally em-ployed racial themes particularly targetingAfrican Americans to justify Japan’s war to lib-erate the colored races from Western colonial-ism. Nothing served this purpose better thanlynching” (pp. 195–96). Closing out the vol-ume is Meredith L. Roman’s chapter on the So-viet uses of lynching, illustrating how, beforethe rise of Nazi Germany, anti-black violencein America was viewed as the most defining fea-ture of Western capitalism.

For many readers, the first half of Swift toWrath might seem to struggle a bit with its at-tempt to present analogues to lynching fromother places and time—the comparisons neverseem quite apt, occasionally bleeding over intothe realms of feuds, vendettas, or terrorism. (Ofcourse, lynching could entail all three ofthose—and was certainly a form of terrorism.)But this may be a function of the rhetoricalpower of the word “lynching” and the images itautomatically calls to mind. Jens Meierhenrich,in Genocide: A Reader (2014), called uponscholars to study forms of violence related togenocide so as to have a better sense of thebroader spectrum of atrocity, in part to be ableto evaluate ostensibly marginal cases in a moreinformed manner, and scholars of lynchingmight likewise take such advice and work to un-derstand lynching not as a defined category buta spectrum of violence. In this respect, the firsthalf of the book functions quite well, thoughthe second part probably proves more relevantto the Mississippi Delta region—after all, therewas a significant Slovak community in PrairieCounty, Arkansas, and Kenneth Barnes pub-lished an article in the Autumn 2010 issue ofthe Arkansas Historical Quarterly on the sub-ject of black Arkansans seeking inspirationfrom Japan before World War II. That said,

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both halves of Swift to Wrath work to expandthe context in which we consider Americanracialized violence. How might our own percep-tions change if we understand these mobs act-ing on a global stage and within the broadercontext of human history?

--Guy Lancaster

Trouble in Goshen: Plain Folk,Roosevelt, Jesus, and Marx in theGreat Depression South. By FredC. Smith. (Jackson, MS: Univer-sity Press of Mississippi, 2014. Pp.vii–xi + 146, notes, bibliography,index, $60, hardcover)

The impalpable sustenance of me from allthings, at all hours of the day; . . .

The similitudes of the past, and those of thefuture

The glories strung like beads on my smallestsights and hearings—on the walk in the

Street, and the passage over the river;The current rushing so swiftly, and swim-ming with me far away;

The others that are to follow me, the tiesbetween me and them;

The certainty of others—the life, love,sight, hearing of others

Walt Whitman, an excerpt from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Whitman’s poem about the individual aug-mented by the crowd, his imagination of howthe past shapes and connects us to the presentand future—and, tellingly, all set on an elemen-tal river—has always expressed for me the corereason to study history. Clinical study of historywill not lead to avoiding mistakes in quite theway George Santayana famously quipped. But

if one pays careful, cultivated attention, explor-ing the past in richness of context might attuneus to our need for others and for our places, anddo so in ways that might help us sense or limnrupture, and thereby situate us to face the futuretogether, in strength, and with emotional bondsrenewed.

Reading Fred C. Smith’s Trouble inGoshen: Plain Folk, Roosevelt, Jesus, and Marxin the Great Depression South made me thinkof “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” because Smith’semotional connection to the “plain folk” of theMississippi Delta is manifested on each andevery page, just as Whitman’s was on display solong ago. Smith’s textured and detailed book,written largely from sifting through the paper-trail gumbo that are public-records archives pre-served fromAmerica’s bureau-cratic expansion inthe 1930s, will notallow the reader tolose sight of the im-portance of reestab-lishing human,affective connec-tion with the peo-ple of the Deltawhose names wehave never knownbut who are as ele-mental to our very selves as the river itself hasbeen. Professor Smith might well say that thepossibility of those in our region of the nationreplenishing our moral community dependsupon breathing life back into these threads ofhistorical connection. If so, I would agree.

“Goshen,” of course, is an Old Testamentreference to a fertile swath of the Nile Delta re-served for Joseph’s people by God, where thechosen Israelites could ride out the famine yearsafflicting Egypt protected from poverty.Goshen, then, is an apt metaphor for the cen-tral subjects of Smith’s history, which are threeplanned communities conceived and developedto help the struggling chosen of our own Delta

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persist in the midst of the famine-like Great De-pression. The fact that the Tupelo Homesteadsin Tupelo, Mississippi, the Dyess Colony ineastern Arkansas, and the Delta CooperativeFarm of Bolivar County, Mississippi, did notwork like the original Goshen evidently diddoes not lessen the impact of the metaphor, forSmith’s goal is not to stretch that metaphor tocontortion but to help us recapture the sense ofperil then facing our chosen people and to ap-preciate the sense of promise these three socialexperiments held for those who had lost almosteverything but their dignity.

The thesis of Trouble in Goshen is thatthrough the Depression, and as the plain folk(an admittedly elusive term to define both withrespect to class and to race) encountered Roo-sevelt, clung to Jesus, or were introduced toMarx, these common women and men becameakin to the heroic, maintaining their diminish-ing social status and self-respect even as theirGoshens collapsed in the bureaucratic infight-ing born so often of scarce resources capturedby venal politicians. The operative motifthroughout is that figures like Harold Ickes,Secretary of the Interior, or Carl E. Bailey, Gov-ernor of Arkansas, or the Christian Socialistswho resisted necessary critiques of Americanexceptionalism—wittingly or not—under-mined the democratic actions and blunted thecommon-sense voices of the plain folk who de-served better than they got and who shouldhave been given more control over their livesand livelihoods. Tragedy there was, but thehuman spirit overcame.

There is not space here to recount the de-tails that are the backbone of this fine, yeoman’swork of history. Comparing and contrasting twostate-planned communities (Tupelo and Dyess),and one undertaken as a modern socialist ex-periment (Delta Cooperative Farm), must nothave been easy because the structure of theproject introduces a rather vast thematic array.But, given the book’s thesis and motifs, if twowishes about Smith’s book could be granted me,they would be first, that greater appreciation be

given to the implications that derived directlyfrom the seriousness of the global crisis in a ma-turing capitalist order that was the Depression.For instance, even the leaders whose actionscan and should be criticized were working in sit-uations that were dire and very likely inexpress-ibly constrained the concern they could affordto give to these Delta Goshens (a point that isparticularly pointed toward Smith’s reading ofHarold Ickes, who was a remarkable figure inAmerican history). Second, I would have likedto have gotten to know better the plain folkwho are the reason for this history, but thevoices of these men and women sometimes getdrowned out in the details and disagreementsin Smith’s history, even as they once did in theirhistorical moment. Clearly, introducing thisparticular irony is not Smith’s intention, andthe state of the archives combined with scarceacademic resources, in all likelihood, make a so-cial-historical wish-list like I offer here enor-mously difficult. But, as we move toward thefuture, let me just observe that the social historyof the Delta region is a fascinating subject andworth additional study.

That said, Trouble in Goshen remains aspirited defense of the dignity and place of com-mon women and men in our lives, cultures, andhistories. Any reader who is interested in mak-ing a connection to the rhythms of life in thisrich and tragic region of the South will not justbenefit from this book, they might find theyneed it or, perhaps, come to see in this historya similitude that might contribute to the impal-pable sustenance of their own historicized selvesand communities.

--Scott Lien

In Remembrance of Emmett Till:Regional Stories and Media Re-sponses to the Black FreedomStruggle. By Darryl Mace. (Lexing-

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ton, KY: University Press of Ken-tucky, 2014. Pp. ix–xi + 152, acknowledgements, notes, bibliog-raphy, index. $40, cloth)

In the summer of 1955, fourteen-year-oldEmmett Till left his Chicago home to stay withhis great-uncle, Moses Wright, in LefloreCounty, Mississippi. He knew little of the worldhe had entered, a place synonymous with JimCrow segregation and white supremacy. WhenTill stepped inside the Bryant family store onan August day and, according to most accounts,whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, helikely had no idea of the fateful consequencesof his actions. Three days later, Roy Bryant,J.W. Milam, and possibly others, kidnapped Em-mett Till, took him to a remote plantation, andbrutally beat him, ultimately shooting him inthe back of the head. On August 31, 1955, afisherman saw feet edging out of the waters ofthe Tallahatchie River and notified SheriffH.C. Strider. Local authorities attempted tobury the body in an unmarked grave, but Till’smother, Mamie Till-Mobley, intervened, insist-ing that the child’s body be returned to Chicagofor a proper burial. Over the ensuing weekswhat might have been a local story brewed intoa national debate over civil rights and the con-ditions for blacks living in Mississippi. Beforelong, Emmett Till had become to many Amer-icans a martyr in the cause of racial justice. Dar-ryl Mace’s book In Remembrance of EmmettTill: Regional Stories and Media Responses tothe Black Freedom Struggle argues that thoseliving outside the South “took pride in the factthey were not from the state and looked on withvoyeuristic fascination” (p. 5). Meanwhile,many Mississippians decried the media spotlightplaced on the state as another example of out-side agitation.

Mace depicts 1950s Mississippi as a caul-dron of racial tension, as “the South onsteroids,” and as a “grotesque relic of racism,poverty, ruralism, and violence” (p. 5). Focusing

on the media response to the Till case—fromthe first reports of the murder, to its aftermatha half-century later—Mace reinforces the ideathat Till’s murderwas unique in theannals of Americanlynching, and thatit accordinglyshook the nation’sconscience. Tillwas simply tooyoung, too north-ern, to be ignoredas so many othervictims had been.While acknowledg-ing that Americansdid not draw their opinions on Till’s deathsolely from media coverage, this book effec-tively demonstrates that the media primed thepublic with a particular narrative, emphasizingcertain details while excluding others. For in-stance, national reports, especially those ap-pearing in prominent black newspapers like theChicago Defender, stressed the savagery of thekilling. Local papers throughout Mississippi,though, tended to prime their readers with sto-ries and editorials that typically portrayed Till’smurder as a local matter wildly exaggerated bya national media compliant to the agenda of in-terest groups like the NAACP and, to a lesserextent, the Urban League. Such bifurcated cov-erage occurred throughout the civil rightsmovement, yet in the Till case, at every level,the media sustained public interest and shapedthe discourse surrounding it.

The Chicago Tribune played a key role inarousing sympathy by focusing on Till-Mobley’semotional and often provocative calls to action.“Someone is going to pay for this,” she intoned,“the entire state of Mississippi is going to pay”(p. 27). Other newspapers, with other agendasto pursue, tamped down such statements,choosing the phrase should pay over is going topay. As Mace suggests, these were not minordiscrepancies, but rather evidence that the

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media subtly, consistently framed the story invaried ways. Major newspapers like the Wash-ington Post and the Richmond Times-Dispatchpropped up half-truths and occasionally out-right lies. In one dubious instance, SheriffStrider tried to cast doubt about the entire affairby claiming that Till’s body “looked more likethat of a grown man instead of a young boy” (p.38). The Charlotte Observer took such state-ments as fact, noting in an editorial that the“whole thing looks like a deal made up by the[NAACP]” (p. 38). In the South, only theblack press, led by papers such as the AtlantaDaily World, consistently condemned not onlylocal figures in the Till case but also the broadersouthern culture and the “mentality of the peo-ple who run the state” of Mississippi (p. 39).

As many scholars have noted, the trial ofBryant and Milam was a farce. Mace’s work,however, adds great depth to our understandingof the case by demonstrating how media por-trayals subtly shaped the public’s perceptions.Carolyn Bryant’s testimony illustrates this ten-dency, as journalists worked either to support orto mitigate her statements. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted that “[Till] allegedly climaxed hisvisit with a wolf-whistle at the slender, attrac-tive brunette” (p. 87). According to Mace, theauthors and editors of such accounts deliber-ately chose words such as climaxed in an effortto sexualize the events at the grocery store, re-inforcing negative stereotypes of black males asdangerous predators, no matter the age.

After four days of trial, and just one hour ofdeliberation, the jury returned a not guilty ver-dict in the Till murder case. Closing his bookwith how Emmett Till’s story was reshaped andremembered over subsequent years, Mace showsthat as the civil rights movement gained furthertraction in the mid-1960s, the national printmedia gradually, though never entirely, beganto side with the view of those who sought toright the wrongs of the Jim Crow South. Gal-vanized by their outrage at Till’s murder, Amer-icans mobilized to work toward achievingprecisely that goal. An important contribution

to civil rights scholarship that combines histor-ical research with media studies, In Remem-brance of Emmett Till represents a landmarkaccount of one of the defining moments inAmerica’s tortured past.

--Brenton E. Riffel

Hydrocarbon Hucksters: LessonsFrom Louisiana on Oil, Politics,and Environmental Justice. ByErnest Zebrowski and Mariah Ze-browski Leach. (Jackson, MS: Uni-versity Press of Mississippi, 2014.Pp. ix–xiii + 184, source notes, fur-ther reading, index. $31.50, hard-cover)

Anyone who has spent appreciable time inLouisiana is awareof the state’s manypositive character-istics. It is a placewhere the goodtimes roll—wherethousands oftourists come eachyear especially toNew Orleans forMardi Gras or forone of the manysporting events orconferences whichmake the Big Easy their destination. For thosemerely visiting Bourbon Street in the FrenchQuarter, the experience is exhilarating and notat all like life in the remainder of the state.Drive a few miles from New Orleans and thesigns of the pervasive presence of the oil andpetrochemical industries is everywhere. In Hy-drocarbon Hucksters, Ernest Zebrowski, a for-

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mer physics professor, and Mariah ZebrowskiLeach, an environmental lawyer, chronicle theunseemly story of how Louisiana became infat-uated with oil money at the start of the twenti-eth century and has never looked back in spiteof the staggering environmental consequencesof continued drilling and unfulfilled dreams ofa better tomorrow.

In Hydrocarbon Hucksters, the authors areleft wondering, why, after all of the failed prom-ises from the oil industry over the course ofdecades, has nothing changed? Initially, the dis-covery of oil in Louisiana was viewed as a get-rich-quick plan in a state which remained miredin rural poverty. Over the years, oil companieshave been permitted to drill across the state andbeyond its shoreline into the Gulf of Mexico.Enormous quantities of crude oil have been ex-tracted, yet Louisiana remains at the bottom ofpractically every quality of life measure.Decades of drilling have generated untold sumsof money, but that capital does not stay inLouisiana. The vast share of the wealth linesthe pockets of a few oil executives while a pit-tance remains in the state. Despite a mountainof evidence to the contrary, Louisiana politi-cians continue to push the idea that the oil andpetro-chemical industries have a major eco-nomic impact on the state—that without them,the state’s financial house would collapse. Ze-browski and Leach have dissected every facet ofthis argument, only to find that at its greatestextent the oil industry employs about three per-cent of the state’s eligible work force (p. 120).If the returns are far lower than believed andthe consequences of unchecked drilling and re-fining so detrimental, then why do Louisianapoliticians fight so rabidly in defense of big oil?The not too surprising, yet tragically disap-pointing, answer is money. Party affiliation isless important in Louisiana than fidelity to oil,but there is clearly an ever-expanding conser-vative Republican majority in the state. At thetime this book was written, Democrat MaryLandrieu still held one of Louisiana’s US Senateseats and received a critical review from the au-

thors for her pro-oil voting record. When thisreview was penned, Landrieu had just recentlylost a tough 2014 Senate race to RepublicanBill Cassidy, in part, because she was allegedlynot doing enough to encourage congressionalaction on the Keystone Pipeline.

For those who remain abreast of environ-mental issues, much of what is discussed in Hy-drocarbon Hucksters is familiar territory. It is asad story that has been chronicled in numerousarticles and books but rarely put together ascomprehensively as here. The deleterious envi-ronmental consequences of unchecked drillinghave left permanent scars across oil rich por-tions of the state, while the fallout from the2010 Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill is stillbeing felt by those who make a living fishingalong the Gulf. Of course, big oil spreads itslargesse to politicians across the nation therebyensuring the industry gets a favorable hearingin Washington and in statehouses throughoutthe country. Things are bad on the nationallevel but nothing compared to the wholesalemanipulation of the political process that takesplace on the state level in Louisiana. In the Pel-ican State, according to the authors, a poorlyeducated and deeply provincial populace be-lieves, despite the incredible evidence to thecontrary, that they live in the greatest place onearth. The authors speculate that so manyLouisianans love their home state because sofew of them have ever been anyplace else.While some Louisianans might take issue withthis generalization, it is hard to deny that manyin the state turn a blind eye to the shenanigansgoing on in their backyard and that grindingpoverty and poor education is at the root ofpopular inertia.

In the end, Hydrocarbon Hucksters offersreaders a multi-point plan to make things bet-ter. Despite the inherent wisdom of these pro-posals, its success is predicated onfundamentally changing Louisiana’s politicalculture. Few suggestions are offered on how thistransformation can be achieved. The authorsrightly note that oil is a finite resource that will

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one day be unavailable. For many defenders ofthe oil industry, calls for reform are largely ig-nored precisely because the good times willcome to an end at some point, hopefully in thedistant future. Why redirect attention nowwhile there is still plenty of easy and scarcelyregulated money to be made? Perhaps mostdamning of all is how much Louisiana is respon-sible for its own problems. Oil exists in manylocations in America, but most states recognizethe need to corral an industry that has not al-ways been known for being a good steward ofthe environment. In Louisiana, politicians andthe people who vote for them have created apolitical system in which the mere act of ques-tioning the oil industry is tantamount to heresy.If Hydrocarbon Hucksters were distributed toall registered voters in the state it is hard toimagine how things could remain the same.That they will likely never come across thebook is symptomatic of the enormous problemsthat confront Louisiana.

--Keith M. Finley

Ricky. By J. Boyett (New York:Saltimbanque Books, 2014. Pp.112. $12.95, paperback)

I first came to Boyett’s work with his previ-ous Little Rock novel, Brothel, the not-too-salacious, thoroughly Arkansas story of a trio ofyoung women who decide to start a house of illrepute and the tribulations they experience be-cause of it. Boyett struck me with his humor andlack of fear when it came to writing, remindingme of John Fergus Ryan with touches of CharlesPortis. He avoided the obvious clichés and ex-pectations and went for more realistic, humancharacters and actions; instead of writing char-acters as laughingstocks or Southern grotesques,he created vibrant, interesting characters. So Icame to his new novella, Ricky, hoping for

more of the same. I wasn’t disappointed. Rickyis a much darker story. It follows the titularcharacter who has just been released fromprison. He was in for armed robbery, and wasactually the only survivor of his gang. There’s astory there I won’t spoil, but that quagmire ofguilt and shame is quickly subsumed by morepressing matters. Ricky doesn’t really have any-where to be or anything to do. He goes to visithis sister, who he was very close to. Ricky isdrifting, and his sister is his only real lifeline.Even when he was in prison, she kept him goingby sending him letters and giving him mentalterritory to dwell in outside of the cell. Nowthat he’s out everything has changed. Hismother has even lost weight and seemingly got-ten her life together. All the places he used togo have changed, and the people he used toknow are either dead or gone, or are painful re-minders of the life he has missed out on.

But almost immediately after he’s released,his sister is brutally murdered, which overshad-ows every other concern in his life. Now, hismother doesn’t really want anything else to dowith him, and Ricky feels that he has to trackdown the person responsible. Boyett againavoids the obvious clichés the story could havedevolved into—Ricky isn’t harassed by the po-lice, for example. In fact, he’s mostly ignored bythem, which makes him feel even more alien-ated.

The book is a character study of an alien-ated, out-of-step young man existing in a limi-nal state. Something Boyett does very well iscapture Ricky’smental state—fromthe fugue over hissister’s death to hisattempts to recon-nect with otherhuman beings.Ricky isn’t a hero,or even an anti-hero, in many re-gards. He’s simplysomeone who has

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been manipulated by events and ended up in acertain place, without really taking responsibil-ity. Now, through the search for his sister’skiller, he has an opportunity to redeem himself.But at its heart, the significance of his sister’smurder is even more troubling for Ricky; shewas his one, true, connection to his old life.Now that she’s gone, what will he do? How willhe live?

Ricky is a powerful meditation on alien-ation, on learning how to live, and on becom-ing. When many people think of Southerncharacters, they think of farmers or preachers,the kind of elite of Southern society, but it isthe outsiders who truly populate Southern cul-ture. Outsiders, loners, and rebels are especiallythe stuff of Arkansas writing. Ricky is one ofthese outsiders, and Boyett has crafted a pow-erful portrait of a life that most of us simplyhaven’t seen.

--C. L. Bledsoe

Prosperity. By B. J. Leggett. (Liv-ingston, AL: Livingston Press,2014. Pp. 212. $18.95, paper)

Prosperity, B. J. Leggett’s excellent secondnovel, finds the author taking a familiargenre—the literary detective novel—into deepand unexpectedterritory. Fans ofthe genre will findfamiliar elementsall in their rightfulplaces: the ex-copwith a checkeredpast, the beautifulwoman who knowsmore than she istelling, the menac-ing small-townSouthern sheriff

operating far above the law. Leggett breathesgenuine life into the Appalachian town of Pros-perity, Tennessee, and its inhabitants. Therichly observed setting, characters, and thecompelling murder mystery at the novel’s centershould alone be enough to keep a reader turningthe pages. It is the story-within-the-story, how-ever, that elevates the novel beyond mere for-mula and convention. The central plot arc inProsperity is as much about finding meaning inthe act of storytelling as it is about the revela-tion of a murder.

The narrator and protagonist of the novelis Lt. Robert O’Brian, a Knoxville police officer.The novel opens with O’Brian’s retirement, os-tensibly due to a gunshot wound he receivedduring a drug bust. Although he has amiable re-lations with his fellow officers, particularly hishard-cursing partner, Eddie, it quickly becomesclear that O’Brian is somehow out of sync withthe rest of his department. They call himShake, short for Shakespeare, due to his havingpublished a successful thriller. He relocates toProsperity, his childhood home, in part to in-vestigate the murder of a childhood friend atthe behest of this friend’s beautiful sister, and inpart to begin work on a second book. We learnthat O’Brian left Prosperity under a dark cloudmany years previously, implicated in the acci-dental death of a man named Billy Ratliffe. AsO’Brian remarks at the end of the first chapter,“when a man gives you three reasons . . . noneof them is the real reason” (p. 7). It is this pro-liferation of motive, not just of the suspectedkillers but of O’Brian’s own troubled interest inthe tale itself, that propels the plot forward.O’Brian wants many things in the course of thenovel. He wants the love of his murderedfriend’s beautiful sister; he wants to make goodin the town which exiled him for his troubledpast; he wants the respect of a former Englishteacher to whom he dedicated his first noveland has yet to receive a response. More thanany of this, he wants to get the story right—tounderstand what it all means. Much of thepleasure in the novel derives from watching as

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Lt. O’Brian tries, and often fails, to get his storystraight.

Fans of B. J. Leggett’s first novel, PlayingOut the String (Livingston Press, 2004), willrecognize this playful, self-referential narrativestrategy straight off. Playing Out the String isalso at heart a mystery, albeit a mystery withouta murder. The protagonist of that novel is a uni-versity professor accused of exposing himself toa graduate student in a remote corner of the col-lege library. The narrators of both novels be-lieve, erroneously, that they can acquitthemselves if they can somehow twist the storyjust right. Both narrators make specific refer-ence to Nietzschean duality, and the problemof how our poor, fragmented selves can hope tomake art with anything akin to a unified effect.The story is always shifting just out of reach; thehope is that we can continue to tell the tale, toget the right details in the right order, at leastuntil the other shoe drops and all is againthrown into chaos.

Sophisticated narrative strategies aside, thequality of the language throughout Prosperity isconsistently high. Though Lt. O’Brian may bea hack at the novel’s outset—his best-sellingthriller is humorously retitled Body Parts by hisNew York agent—by the end his power of ob-servation is clear and striking. Characters thatbegin as genre-familiar stereotypes quickly sliptheir moorings through vivid description andmemorable dialogue exchanges. At one pointO’Brian re-envisions his past through the frag-mented lens of a dream: “You’d think you wouldsee from the start that it’s a dream, so faded andbadly lit, with people you know changing intoone another, but it fools you every time, so thatwhen you wake you will thank God that youdon’t have an exam in a course you’ve neg-lected to attend for an entire term . . . and can’tfind the room and walk through empty hall-ways, opening doors onto deserted classroomsand read on a blackboard Bobby O’Brian killedthe Rat Man” (p. 117). It is the chief achieve-ment of the novel that O’Brian’s ruminationson the seductive power of storytelling continu-

ally make us forget that there is a murderer,maybe several murderers, at large in the town.Prosperity is highly recommended to fans of theliterary detective novel, and to readers of seri-ous fiction everywhere.

--Mark D. Baumgartner

Presences. Caroline Collins.(Madison, WI: Parallel Press,2014. Pp. 46. $12, paper)

Presences is a collection of poetry that pri-marily deals with Native American identity andexplores specific his-torical events andpeople, all set withinthe Mississippi Delta.The author, CarolineCollins, is a Univer-sity of Arkansasalumna and professorof English at AndrewCollege, located inCuthbert, Georgia.Presences is a volumeof poetry that dealswith time and placesand is separated into two appropriately-namedsegments titled; “Buried History” and “Pres-ences.” The subject matter of most of the poemsdeals largely with the forgotten and unseen anduses borrowed and created memory to explorethese themes.

The poem “Crossing,” an historic and ro-mantic revisioning of the Black Hawk War,adds a humanistic quality to a criminally-for-gotten historic event. Many, if not most of thepoems found within this collection revolvearound Sauk-leader, Black Hawk, whomCollins seems to revere. The final stanza of thepoem titled “Hunger,” a poem dedicated toBlack Hawk, states:

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Deep within my words lie the ancestorsThat Tenswakawa knew: rigid jawand dug-in heels, weapons leveled, voicesrising. The grudges carried to the grave.The hunger that nothing can glut.

Collins has the ability to take historic detailsand give them the treatment of a revisionist togive these historical events a human element.“Crossing,” is a poem that is structured aroundcorrespondences between specific historicalpersonalities, such as Thomas Forsyth, WilliamClark, George Atkinson, and George Catlin.The poetic exchange invokes a sense of empa-thy in the reader for Native Americans and theatrocities committed against them. At times,the poems can be vague and broad, which seemsfitting for poetry that deals with a numberlesscommunity we have an unclear and incompre-hensive knowledge of.

Collins’s writing is carried by a poetic voicethat strikes simultaneously as being sincere, aswell as authentic. Geographic beauty is ex-pressed along with an historically-accurate plot,which seems to be bitterly recalled through grit-ted teeth. In “Questions from the Living in theCity of the Dead,” a poem which exhibits aspeaker representing an abjected communityquestioning the virtues of independence:

What is the price of resistance?misery and defeat

What is the price of obedience?misery

What may be gained by patient endurance?the fate of Quashquamethe lot of Shabbonathe wealth of Keokuk

The poems contained within Presences are con-nected by an over-arching theme of exploita-tion, a theme which is beautifully encapsulatedwithin the poem “In Praise of Opulence,”which explores not only the exploitation of acommunity of people, but also of the Earth:

With the nuts and bolts of Manifest Des-tiny,

with the practice of giving the natives lessfor more, with the railroads that tore the

earthand drove away the buffalo, on the groundthat absorbed what was left of Black Hawkafter they’d melted him down to the bones. . .

With Collins’s diction and simplistic narra-tive, her poetry has an element of accessibilityand rich, emotional depth. Presences is craftedexclusively in free-verse, which seems an appro-priate choice given the emotional range of thepoetry found within the volume. While nothaving a form to frame her poetry, Collins hasa mastery over her own style and poetic voicethat has a constant presence throughout thebook. It would be an easy task to come across apoem from Collins shuffled together with otherpoems from various authors and still have theability to pin-point her writing by identifyingher distinctive voice.

Presences is for poetry lovers who enjoy el-ements of historicism in their verses. Bottomlessemotional depth, historical accuracy, painfullysincere thoughts, and poetic richness are allcontained within this wonderful collection ofpoems. Collins is a poet of considerable talent,it will be exciting to see what she will come outwith next.

--Stephen Turner

You Don’t Know Me. By JamesNolan. (Lafayette, LA: Universityof Louisiana at Lafayette Press,2014. Pp. 296. $20.00, paper)

This luminous collection is comprised often new stories, found in Part One, “Inside theCourtyard,” and ten selected from Nolan’s pre-vious collection, Perpetual Care (JeffersonPress, 2009), found in Part Two, which I re-viewed in this journal (40.1). Since I have dis-cussed the older stories in some detail already, Ishall concentrate on the ten new ones in this

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review. All of themare set in New Or-leans, a city Nolanknows as well asanyone alive, I sus-pect, as a fifth-gen-eration inhabitant.Nolan is one of themost entertainingand skilful shortstory writers work-ing in this countrytoday. Andrei Co-drescu has said ofhim, “If Flannery O’ Connor had been a badboy living in the French Quarter, she’d havebeen James Nolan.” Well, maybe. Nolan doesnot have O’ Connor’s theological concerns, buthe shares her wit and her interest in eccentricsand unimaginable, dark fates.

“It seems that I specialize in crackpots,” saysKirby, the narrator of “Latins on the Loose” (p.91), but this could be said equally of JamesNolan himself. Most of the stories have quirkynarrators or protagonists whose foibles get themor others into trouble. In “Reconcile” for exam-ple, Zola is a Katrina survivor of ambivalentgender who has retained nothing of her formerlife but her adored cat, Boom-Boom, which sherather trustingly leaves in the care of neighbors,who do their very best to look after the animal,with hilarious results reminiscent of a TrumanCapote story. Then there is Roberta, the pistol-packing lady of a certain age who enjoys a littlepot while babysitting the daughter of her crack-head nephew, and handles two menacing deal-ers with comical élan. If this sounds like purefarce, in fact it is not; funny as the stories are,they have depth too. The characters are com-plex and convincing, and Nolan is always nudg-ing the reader to think about what life must belike in shoes very different from our own. Hischaracters, many of whom are feisty elderlywomen, have moments of insight and wisdom,which they impart with gritty wit. Roberta ad-monishes her loser nephew after he has just told

her glibly that he loves her: “Go study that messin the living-room if you want to know whatlove is made of. A bunch of hot wires jumbledtogether with shards of light and hard, hardchoices” (pp. 46-47).

The high comedy continues in “The WholeShebang,” in which Justin, an adjunct philoso-phy professor at Tulane who has done his dis-sertation on Nietzsche, finds that a libidinousand vengeful Canadian (and ex-wife of a col-league) is taking an unhealthy interest in him.Should he appease her? He makes a series of dis-astrous choices, or rather, a series of disasters be-falls him. “No, he had to admit that he wasn’tthe victorious one, but the passive one, an in-nocent bystander to the crime of his life” (p.68)—like most of us, Nolan might have added.The irony is that Justin, who longs for the lifeof academic security,—precisely the one thatNietzsche would have despised—has to learn inthe hardest possible way the cost of freedom.

If humor is the prevailing tone, it is thehumor of a Breughel, bursting with life and yettinged with vulgarity, with sadness, despair andeven tragedy. In “Overpass” Mr. Claude is anelderly man who plans to bomb the overpassthat is blighting his neighbourhood, little real-izing what the consequences of his terrorismwill be for himself. Similarly in “Abide withMe,” a story with two cleverly interwoven plotsabout confidence tricksters who prey on theelderly, the scheming turns out not to be merelymischievous but murderous and sinister.

Not every story is comic. Some are seriousand moving, like the triad of stories whosetheme is the troubled relationship between par-ent and adult offspring. The minor masterpiece“Hard Freeze” is about a concert pianist ofmixed race who performs in New Orleans, thecity his father grew up in. Despite the interna-tional acclaim he enjoys, Émile still longs onlyfor one thing—the approval of his dead father,who never showed his son his love. “The EmptyThrone,” though more farcical in tone, sharesthe same theme. Wally, a failure who is miser-able because of his lover’s infidelities, accepts

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the role of king of the Krewe of Mirth at MardiGras, a part procured for him by his wealthyparents; he is desperate for their approbation—so desperate that he deceives them, knowingthat their pride in him can last only minutes,giving the story at its finale a tragicomic air.

Another touching story is “Mary Sorrows,”whose narrator is a pregnant teenage girl. Sheconsiders her mother, a Honduran woman whoworks as a secretary, a failure, a ridiculous per-son, and only understands who she really iswhen she happens to see her mother performingas a flamenco dancer in a little club:

It’s mom all right, she says, but at the sametime it’s not her, like some sneaky spirit hasdescended into her body, twisting it intofierce angles. Every movement is sharp,glinting like a knife. . . . Her body curls intoa crescent moon, then whips around andshe stomps . . . as if she’s daring to place herfoot down on the earth for the first time. . .. She lands, then marches forward, yankingbloody daggers out of her heart and hurlingthem at the audience (p. 49).

Witnessing her mother’s transformation, under-standing the dignity and the strength she pos-sesses, against all odds, gives the young Deloresthe courage to make a very tough decision.

I quote from this story at some length notonly because the passage moved me almost totears, but also because it typifies Nolan’s atti-tude to his characters. He may poke fun atthem, reminding the reader of all the absurdways in which we behave too, and yet it is clearthat he has deep compassion for them, flawsand all. Like a beneficent god, he loves themand forgives them their trespasses. And like agod, too, somehow he confers dignity on theirsuffering. He transforms them into heroes.

If John Kennedy Toole and Walker Percywere the iconic New Orleans novelists of thelate twentieth century, James Nolan deserves tobe considered the voice of the city for our evenmore troubled century. You Don’t Know Me isa collection that demands to be read.

--Garry Craig Powell

Visitations. By John Bensko.(Tampa: University of TampaPress, 2014. Pp. 72, notes, ac-knowledgements, about the author,about the book. $14, paperback)

John Bensko’s latest book of poetry, Visita-tions, is not a collection one can read throughquickly. Each poem encapsulates its own voice,and within that voice, its own history. This col-lection is one that a reader should take slowly,allowing each poem to digest completely beforemoving on to the next. It truly allows visita-tions into the past and into the author’s con-templations.

Many of the poems, including “Hatch” and“Snow Day,” use images from nature to invokea self-reflection of the author, which in turncauses the reader to ponder the same reflec-tions. The images of robins feeding their youngin “Hatch” present a perfect allegory to whathumans require for sustainability in their ownlives.

Other poems, such as “Niagra: Winter1878” and “Henry Wirz, November 1865,” sug-gest by their titles certain events from the past.Bensko establishes a nostalgic feel within thesehistorically-orientedpoems, but also pres-ents subjects rele-vant to any period oftime; for instance,he questions com-passion, religion, thesoul, and the self. Byjuxtaposing histori-cal antiquity withtimeless inquisitive-ness, Bensko eradi-cates the lines of

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time to show that human emotion and thoughtare nonlinear and not era-specific.

Bensko’s poetic style is not consistentthroughout. His arrangements range fromstanziac form, to couplets, to various free forms.The style works for most of the poems, but insome cases, the lack of form detracts from thepotency of the poem. For instance, “MississippiBoil and Snag” begins with end stops relevantto the language; but about halfway through thepoem, the end stops begin to seem random. Itfeels as though the author lost patience with thewriting of this poem and, so, left it raw and un-finished. If he were aiming to make his readersfeel as fluctuating as the Mississippi itself, thenhe has completed his goal. However, it doesmake the reader stop and stutter over lines suchas: “Those words someone desperate on a bridge/ above you would say, contemplating the illu-sory / marriage beneath your surface. Go away,I might / tell you” (p. 49). Here, the punctua-tion and line breaks make the lines difficult tocomprehend as there are a multitude of stops inso short a space. The style is not reflective ofthe Mississippi, since the long and windy riverhardly makes one think of multiple stops andjags. This style appears in most of Bensko’s cou-plet-style poems, including “To the Ocean.”This poem at first reads like the waves of theocean themselves, but then, like in “MississippiBoil and Snag,” the lines become chopped andinconsistent. This style, though difficult to readthrough, gives the poems the very alliterationof the poetic subjects themselves. The rhythmicpace of “To the Ocean” becomes choppy andslurred, like literal ocean waves along the shore.Overall, whether done intentionally or not,Bensko has written poems which require mul-tiple readings in order to see the validity of thisform choice.

The golden gem of this collection is nodoubt “Ectoplasm.” Bensko placed this poem asthe first in the collection, knocking his readeroff her feet from the start and leaving her want-ing to read more. His organization of poems intosections, “The Spirit,” “The Landscape,” and

“The Stop Before Night,” gives the broad topicshis poems fall under as well as good stoppingplaces for reflection.

Bensko also took special care to make hiscollection aesthetically pleasing. He includesthe reasoning for his type choice in the “Aboutthe Book” section at the end. The font, AdobeCaslon Pro, is adapted from “the English fontsby William Caslon that were first cast in the1720s” and were used in “the first printings ofthe Declaration of Independence and the Con-stitution” (p. 69). Readers should read the“About the Book” section first in order to real-ize the significance and overall cohesiveness ofhistorical ambiance throughout the collection.

The poetry collection Visitations is an ex-cellent companion to any outdoor adventure oreven on the back patio on a summer evening.His seasonal poems offer enough imagery anddetail that they can be read any time of year. Heperfectly captures the chill of winter and theheat of summer in their respective poems, al-lowing the reader to shiver or swelter whenreading regardless of her actual surroundings.Bensko’s poetry captures various ranges ofhuman self-interrogations as well as emotionsand passions. He has produced another success-ful collection that can be enjoyed by anyone.

--Leslie R. Malland

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