Nonfiction November Week 3: Expertise

Three ways to join in this week! You can either share three or more books on a single topic that you have read and can recommend (be the expert), you can put the call out for good nonfiction on a specific topic that you have been dying to read (ask the expert), or you can create your own list of books on a topic that you’d like to read (become the expert).

This prompt took me down a few rabbit holes (in a good way) and forced me to take a good objective look at what I’ve been reading in terms of POC-related authors, topics and titles. To that end, I’ve collected many of the POC titles that I’ve read and reviewed on my blog over the past few years, certainly not as a method of boasting or as positioning me as any sort of expert, but more as a reference for others who may also be interested in digging a little deeper into this subject. 

I’m also rather hoping that others may also have lists of related titles that they might want to share… There’s always room for more books on the TBR, don’t you agree? 

Enjoy!

COMPLETED AFRICAN-AMERICAN RELATED NF TITLES (from last couple of years): 

• Africa – DK EyeWitness Books
• Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” – Zora Neale Hurston
• Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History – Vashti Harrison. (Also where I heard mention of Rebecca Crumpler [see below for details].) 
• Shade: Pete Souza on Obama – Pete Souza
• Black is the Body – Emily Barnard (essays)
• A Book on Medical Discourses in Two Parts – Rebecca Lee Crumpler. (Crumpler was one of the first female AfAm physicians in the country. Fascinating.)
• Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? – Beverly Daniel Tatum (post possibly to come)
• Becoming – Michelle Obama
• At Her Majesty’s Request: An African Princess in Victorian England – Walter Dean Myers
• Negroland: A Memoir – Margo Jefferson
• Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness – Tracy Kidder
• Obama: The Historic Journey – NYT
• Born a Crime – Trevor Noah
• Mixed: Anthology – Chandra Prassad (ed.) – short stories about being mixed-race
• The Harlem Hellfighters – Max Brooks (graphic novel)
• Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High – Melba Padillo Beals
• Roots – Alex Haley 
• Great Speeches by African-Americans – James Daley (ed.) 
• Dreams from my Father – Barack Obama
• Black Women of the Old West – William Loren Katz
• Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present – Harriet Washington
• We Should all Be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Going Home to Nicodermus – Daniel Chu and Bill Shaw
• March Volumes 1-3 – John Lewis (graphic novel)
• Men of Niagara – W.E.B. Du Bois
• Malcom X: A Graphic Biography – Andrew Heifer and DuBurker
• 12 Years a Slave – Solomon Northrup
• The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – Frederick Douglass
• Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves – Adam Hochschild
• The Negro Motorist Green Book – Victor Hugo Green
• Pandora’s Daughters: The Secret History of Independent Women – Jane Robinson (includes quite a few African-American women role models)
• Elvis Presley, Reluctant Rebel: His Life and Our Times – Glen Jeansomme, David Luhrssen and Dan Sololivic. (Elvis was very influenced by African-American music and culture.) 
• Black Like Me – John Howard Griffin (1960)
• Celia, a Slave – Melton McLaurin
• The Education of a WASP – Lois Mark Stalvey (post to come)
• BlacKKKlansman – Ron Stallworth

AFRICAN NF:

• Kaffir Boy – Mark Mathabane (about one man who escapes South Africa’s apartheid)
• The Bite of the Mango – Mariato Karama/Susan McClelland
• The Boy who Harnessed the Wind – William Kambwanba        
• Saturday is for Funerals – Unity Dow and Max Essex
• Monique and the Mango Rains – Kris Holloway

(Now, I know this is NF November, but sometimes I think that fiction reads can really complement some NF reading so here are some recommendations that you might try…) 

COMPLETED AFRICAN-AMERICAN FICTION:

• Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin 
• Kindred – Octavia E. Butler
• The Parable of the Sower – Octavia E. Butler
• What Looks like Crazy on an Ordinary Day – Pearl Cleage
• A Raisin in the Sun – Lorraine Hansberry (play)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
• Lucy – Jamaica Kinkaid
• Annie Dunn – Jamaica Kinkaid
• See, Now, Then – Jamaica Kinkaid
• Passing – Nella Last
• Praisesong for the Widow – Paule Marshall
• Merle and Other Stories – Paule Marshall
• Brown Girl, Brownstones – Paule Marshall
• Daughters – Paule Marshall
• The Chosen Place, the Chosen People – Paule Marshall 
• Drinking Coffee Elsewhere – Z.Z. Packer (short stories)
• Beloved – Toni Morrison
• Sula – Toni Morrison
• Jazz – Toni Morrison
• The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison 
• Bailey’s Café – Gloria Naylor
• Mama Day – Gloria Naylor 
• The Women of Brewster Place – Gloria Naylor
• The Hate U Give – Angela Thomas (YA)
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker 
• Brown Girl Dreaming – Jacqueline Woodson (YA)
• Native Son – Richard Wright          
• Like One of the Family – Alice Childress
• The New Moon’s Arms – Nalo Hopkinson (spec fiction)
• Mojo: Conjure Stories – Nalo Hopkinson (ed.)
• Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience – Chandra Prasad (ed.)
• Friday Black: Short Stories – Nana Kwame Adjej-Brenyah
• Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
• Girl, Woman, Other – Bernadine Evaristo
• Mr. Loverman – Bernadine Evaristo

COMPLETED AFRICA FICTION:

• Aya Volumes 1-3 – Marguerit Abouet and Clementin Oubrerie
• Blackass – A. Igoni Barrett 
• Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga          
• Homecoming – Yaa Gyazi 
• Americanah– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• So Long a Letter – Mariama Ba
• Sozaboy – Ken Saro-Wiwa
• Cutting for Stone – Abraham Verghese
• Little Bee – Chris Cleave (concerns Africa)
• The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears – Dinaw Megestu (Ethiopian immigrants in US)

TBR AFRICAN-AMERICAN NON-FICTION:

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – Michelle Alexander
• Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the new First Lady – Barbara A. Seals Nevergold and Peggy Brooks-Bertram (eds)
• The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color in a New Millennium – Kathy Russell-Cole
• Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America  – Charisse Jones
• The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America – Nicholas Lemann
• Human Cargo – Matthew Crampton
• Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press – James McGrath Morris
• We Gon Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation – Jeff Chang
• In the Land of Jim Crow – Ray Sprigle (1949 – earlier version of “Black Like Me”)
• Writing from the Underground Railway – William Still (ed.) 

TBR AFRICAN (AND OTHER COUNTRIES’) NON-FICTION:

• They Poured Fire on Us: The Story of Three Lost Boys from the Sudan – Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak (with Judy A. Bernstein)
• Mother Country: Britain’s Black Community on the Home Front 1939-1945 – Stephen Bourne
• My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face his Country, his Tribe and his Conscience – Rian Malan
• A Walk around the West Indies – Hunter Davies 
• Mr. Loverman – Bernardine Evaristo
• White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism – Robin DiAngelo

FOR FUTURE READING:

• From my blog: Summer Reading List: The African-American Experience.
• I also feature Black History Month on the blog each year in February (if you’re looking for more ideas). Here’s the 2020 kickoff post for Black History Month.
• LitHub has a great list of more African titles here.
• A really good article on reparations in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• A thoughtful article on white privilege: White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
• Ten Books to Read About Race instead of Asking a Person of Color to Explain Things to You – Sadia Trombetter (Bustle – 03/20/18). 

For the other nonfiction November posts, check out these:

• NF November Week 1: The NF Reading so far…
• NF November Week 2: NF/F Pairing
• NF November Week 3: Expertise
• NF November Week 4: NF Favorites

Many thanks to the hosts:

• Katie at Doing Dewey
• Julz at JulzReads
• Rennie at What’s Nonfiction
• Sarah at Sarah’s Book Shelves
• Leann of Shelf Aware

A Book on Medical Discourses in Two Parts – Rebecca Crumpler, M.D. (1883)

“My chief desire in presenting this book is to impress upon somebody’s mind the possibilities of prevention.”

Traveling around the web, as one does, I came across an interesting nugget of American history when I met Rebecca Lee Crumpler who was the first African-American female physician in the U.S. when she graduated from the New England Female Medical College in 1860. (She was also the college’s only African-American graduate.)

Consider this statistic: there were only 54,543 physicians in the whole of the country in 1860. Only 300 of those physicians were women and Crumpler was the only African-American female physician. (And, in fact, as late as 1920, there were still only 65 African-American female docs in the entire country. I wonder what the stats are now…

(ETA: Only 4 percent of practicing physicians in 2016 are African-American, most graduating from HBSUs. Only 2 percent of nation’s physicians are female African-Americans. Female physicians now make up 34 percent of the whole physician population, but are still underpaid compared with men (64 cents for every dollar a man earns). Overall population of US (now) is 15 percent black (2013, US Census Bureau).)

Back to Crumpler: Crumpler was a remarkable woman and this is thought to be the very first medical text by any African-American author.

Imagine the U.S. as the country as it was then when Crumpler was getting her medical education as a “doctress” (as the title says). How very courageous and determined she was:

• 1860 – Crumpler graduates from the medical college as a “doctress”.
• 1863: US Emancipation Proclamation (meant that slaves were now free in the Southern/Confederate States).
• 1865 – US 13^th Amendment ended slavery in all states. Establishment of Freedman Bureau (agency to help millions of black slaves and poor whites in the South after Civil War.) (Actually, Crumpler and her hub moved to Virginia to work for the bureau and “more than 30,000 colored” after the war.)
• 1868 – 14^th Amendment secured American citizenship for African-Americans.
• 1870 – 15^th Amendment secured voting rights for African-Americans (on paper)

But obvs slavery still happening. (Look at Barracoon by Zora Neal Hurston (2018) which covers the life of Oluale Kossula who arrived in the U.S. from West Africa where he had been captured as part of the slave trade in 1860, same year as Crumpler is attending her first year at the medical college.)

Rebecca Lee Crumpler, doctress.

So, absolutely loads to think about with this nonfiction read, and that’s not even getting to the actual contents just yet!

Since this book is more of a how-to manual for the healthcare of people (not just African-Americans although they may well have been the main (and only audience for this text), I’ve put together a few notes on her healthcare guidance during this late Victorian period in case you’re curious. (Crumpler was also more than likely to only have been allowed access to care for the African-American populations as well…)

It’s in a bullet list since that seemed the easiest way to present such disparate info:

Baby health advice (under 5s):

One of the main baby healthcare advice chapters is titled this: Necessity of Agreeable and Soothing Surroundings. It’s meant to be in reference to infants but it certainly works for me as well. 🙂

“All loud talking or laughing should be strictly prohibited. To insure this, no sly jokes should be indulged in by anyone present; for by so doing convulsions of an alarming nature may be brought on. “  (Chapter 5)

If the baby has a rattling or wheezing noise in its throat, Mrs. Crumpler recommends using a real feather (that has been wetted to tamp the down) to tickle the back of the tongue to make the child cough or gag… Don’t give the baby “soot tea”, by any means.

Saffron tea is really crocus tea?  And was popular for baby’s poop problems?

Don’t give infants a “little weak toddy” to “bring up wind and make them sleep”. It can cause intoxication and then a “fearful attack of purging”. Plus it may “inculcate a desire for tippling in many of our weak-minded youth”.

Later on: watch out if giving your baby any alcohol: it “tends to stunt the intellect and dwarf the stature of the youth of our land…”  

And no oysters for the young one: they are “most dangerous”. A broiled lamb chop of beef would be fine to give the baby though, as support for the diet of mother’s milk though. (They help to prevent “cholera of infants at the breast, especially in our crowded cities”.)

And too much soda (i.e. in making breads) makes your baby bald.

And don’t overfeed or do the “coarse habit of ‘stuffing’ babes, to avoid frequent feeding of them” – the habit needs to “vanish like dew before the noonday sun” …

Children who eat candy are also at risk of developing “dwarfed statures”… but kids will also be troubled with worms at the same time (due to the candy).

If your child is teething, “the greater mischief is done to the whole nervous system by the unnatural but ancient custom of pressing and rubbing gums – it is possible to trace the cause of insanity to this pernicious custom”

Teething and not wearing shoes in puddles are believed to be a combo that directly cause lung fever (another name for pneumonia) in infants. If your child does get pneumonia, the best treatment is “patient watchfulness, pure air and absolute quiet”.

Apparently, babies have always been tough to get to sleep. “Many children screamed with fright at the noise created to get them to sleep”… What were the family doing to make the kids scream when they’re trying to get them to go to sleep? The mind boggles…

Once you do have your child sleeping, don’t let your baby sleep too long in soiled clothes: it can cause “soft bones, enlarged joints, inverted feet, flattened back-heads, sickening sores, dropsy, blindness or numerous ills”…

If you are a family of “moderate means” and you are not able to keep more than one fire going in your house during the cold season, taking a baby from a hot room to a colder one can cause frequent and severe colds… So, try to live with all your rooms on the same floor in your tenement to avoid (or mitigate) this problem and help the heat (from your one fire) spread throughout the house more evenly…

If your baby does has a lot of snot in his/her nose, try to unstop it with goose oil on a feather. But – be gentle. If you’re not careful, you can break the baby’s nose and that causes cancer. (What?)

Reading for kids is also dangerous:
“Can you not cut short the certain destruction that awaits your sons and daughters, through the influence of impressions gained by the constant perusal of fictitious, and in many cases, corrupt library books?”

For a breast-feeding mother:

If the mother’s nipple [for breastfeeding] is not prominent for the baby to suck, “a friendly adult or child could soon draw out the nipple by sucking so that the babe can get hold…” !!

(Just try not to do this when one’s mouth is full of snuff as it can cause other health problems (including “instant death”) for el bebe who breastfeeds immediately after this.)

If a new mom is waiting for her milk to “drop”, watch out: “diarrhea, convulsion, or even insanity may be brought on through the means of any excitement whatever” unless you’re careful… Diarrhea is also caused by “emptiness” in a baby (or a baby being hungry).

Don’t drink a glass of iced water when your baby is breastfeeding or this could happen: “the babe was seized with rigid convulsions and dropped from the breast” while the mother became “almost helpless with fright”…  But some quick-thinking from Mrs. Crumpler with a tub of hot water and some mustard managed to save the day… Phew.

Do try to avoid cholera if you can:

There was a whole chapter on the issue of child/infant starvation – it must have been a huge problem for the many poor families… Plus, failure-to-thrive (or malnourishment) was also seen as an early symptom of cholera in children (and cholera was one of the largest causes of infant mortality in those days)…

Cholera could also be caused by the mothers adding in a mixed or meat and veg diet too early after the birth of a child. (Poor mothers! They get blamed for everything!)

Cholera also increases the risk of having a “hair worm” which had been noticed to “infest the throat of some patients”. (Woah. What is that “hair worm” thing?)

And what is the cause of infantile cholera? No one really knows at that time, but Mrs. Crumpler swears that it’s not contagious but does offer this nugget: if you’re in a crowded space in the middle of a cholera epidemic, it’s best to leave if you can. Poverty, “wretchedness” and crime spread cholera.

And who’s responsible for all this?…

Places a heavy blame on mothers to “make a little sacrifice for the sake of equipping the mind” and look after their children better… Also, the child studying too hard can endanger your child’s health.

Mothers should learn more about health and prevention of illness, and get this: Crumpler, unsurprisingly, is pro-women’s vote. (But this wouldn’t happen until 1965!)

(But she does earnestly wish that mothers would try harder to not give their children to the alms houses… “Our women work hard, seemingly…” ooh. Them’s fighting words.)

Crumpler also strikes a critical note when she reports that women “appear to shrink from any responsibilities demanding patience and sacrifice”… Yikes.

She also blames the declining mortality in the “colored population of Boston” on “neglect to guard against the changes of the weather.’’

Advice for women’s health in general:

Exercising during your period will cause you to go barren, have ovarian inflammation, dropsy or consumption. (Periods also called “bringing on the turns”).

Monthly cramps are caused (and worsened by) having cold and/or wet feet (or even when sweeping the floor). Interestingly, another household task (sewing at a treadle sewing machine) also causes vaginal ulcers (mainly from getting frustrated with the machine itself). (This, although very serious stuff, cracked me up at the time since I remember frustrations when I was learning to use my mum’s treadle sewing machine. Not sure about the vaginal ulcers but definitely caused me some strife!)

“Poverty, with chastity, is an enviable condition.”

Menopause is worsened by drinking ice-water (which, in fact, could cause paralysis) and helped by “securing cheerful exercise for the mind, with an abundance of outdoor scenery”… Drinking more water just prolongs the hot flashes.

(But how best to control the size of your family (i.e. birth control)?: Mrs. Crumpler recommends that “if these little ones are given in quick succession, it is just as well to have and get through with it. Many are the women who have borne a dozen or more children into the world, and afterwards filled positions of trust and nobility…” Huh.

Colds are typically caused by northeast and easterly winds…

Beware of sudden changes in air, food or medicines (especially those that contract or depress muscles): “may cause suffocation and death at any moment.”

Tumors of all kinds are caused by fish, eggs, oysters, pork, gaseous vegetables, and anything that depresses or excites the mind. Also, gas and “loaded bowels”. Anointing the entire body with goose oil should help.

Brain fever was caused by “some irregularity, over-work or undue excitement” and effective treatment includes shaving your head sitting in a cool dark room and keeping wet cool material wrapped around your neck.

Fascinating stuff!