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Surviving an American Shameful Act with Dignity and Resilience

6/5/2019

 
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Award-winning iNK author, Andrea Warren writes American history as seen through the eyes of a child who is confronted with problems of historic proportions created by grown ups. Her latest book is Enemy Child: the Story of Norman Mineta, A Boy Imprisoned in a Japanese American Internment Camp During World War II.   On December 7, 1941, the date President Roosevelt called "a day that will live in infamy," the Japanese allies of the Axis Powers bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Thus began American involvement in Word War II. Ten-year-old American boy, Norman Mineta, the youngest of five children, was suddenly confronted with hateful bullying at school.  His classmates accused him of perpetrating this dastardly act because he looked like the enemy.

At first, Norm thought nothing would happen to his family because the Constitution says "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."  But gradually the discriminatory rhetoric and behavior towards Japanese Americans escalated,  quickly culminating in Executive Order 9066 by President Roosevelt that led to the interment of 120,000 West Coast Japanese Americans, without a scintilla of "due process." The rationale, born of fear, was  to make certain that they would not "collude" with the country of their ancestry.   Warren is brilliant in interweaving this history with its impact on a boy who loved baseball and cub scouts and his family of seven, as they were ripped from their comfortable home in San Jose and herded  on to long trains with covered windows.  Their journey took them first to a single barrack's room in the middle of the Santa Anita Race Track until they could be dispatched to permanent barrack accommodations behind barbed wire and armed watch towers in the shadow Heart Mountain, Wyoming-- an austere, isolated landscape of high winds, frigid winters and baking summers. It was three years before they returned home to San Jose.

Norman Mineta survived, and in some ways thrived, during this unjust, punitive period, never losing his love for America.  When he grew up,  he ran for elected offices, first becoming the mayor of San Jose, then a congressman for 20 years.  When he retired from congress he was a cabinet member for both Bill Clinton and George  W. Bush. Through the Boy Scouts, Norm had made friends with Alan Simpson of Cody,Wyoming, during joint scouting activity at the internment camp.   Years later they reconnected when Mineta was in the House of Representatives and Simpson was a Senator.  Their friendship was renewed and together they worked to pass the Civil Liberties Act into law, 43 years after the war had ended. In it, America apologized to for the internment of  Japanese American community  and paid a reparation of $20,000 to each living survivor.  

Enemy Child  is an initiation into a dark period of American History.  As a book for young adults, Warren assumes little or no prior knowledge of these events from the reader.  Thus, as the story of Norman Mineta unfolds, so does its historical background.  It is a powerful, poignant page-turning narrative of an American boy who was treated as a prisoner and reviled as an enemy because of his ancestry.  But it is also a story of patriotism, honor, dignity and resilience from a family of immigrants who never, for one second, was disloyal to our country.  

This book is not just for young Americans but for all of us.  It's another important reason for adults to mine the great literature that awaits in the children's room of the library.  


The Stain of Our Founding Father's Original Sin

17/1/2019

 
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The enslavement of human beings was the major sticking point in the formation of the United States of America after the Revolutionary War that freed the colonies from the tyranny of King George.  The economy of the southern colonies depended on it.  Virginian, George Washington, our esteemed general and first president, was a slave owner.  In the introduction to Carla Killough McClafferty's powerful and insightful book for young adults (actually, any adult no matter how old) Buried Lives: The Enslaved People of George Washington's Mount Vernon,  she tells us "At the age of eleven Washington inherited ten human beings, and he would own people his entire life."  So the continental congress agreed to omit the contradiction that enslavement of people was counter to the American ideal of individual freedom; thus tabling the conversation for later generations in our country's painful work towards "a more perfect union."  

Maybe you'll say to yourself, "Yes, yes, slavery was bad.  I need this book like I need another book about the Holocaust."  I say, yes, you need to read this book. I needed to read this book.  The word "slave" has the pejorative connotation of anonymity.  The term "enslaved person or people" used throughout this book brings in humanity.  Make no mistake--enslavement means that human beings were victimized and pressed into a lifetime of servitude.  Carla McClafferty's meticulous research brings a few of such people to life.

Fifteen-year-old William Lee was purchased by Washington and became his valet or "body servant."  He lived by his master's side, attending his every need at home in Mount Vernon and  throughout the 8 years of warfare.  Many historians believe he is standing dressed in his fine livery behind Washington in the painting by John Trumbull on the  cover of this book.  Even after Washington died and his will freed all his "chattel," William Lee stayed on at Mount Vernon with a pension.

 George and Martha Washington believed that they treated their enslaved people well.  They got them medical attention when they were sick.  They gave some of the house workers days off to attend theatrical entertainment.  They did not break up families if they could help it.  Oney Maria Judge, was a "mulatto," (from the word "mule," a sterile hybrid bred from a horse and a donkey)  who belonged to Martha Washington as part of her inheritance from her first husband when she was widowed, called her "dower" estate.  The inheritance laws stipulated that Martha was not allowed to sell or free her enslaved people.  Oney became Martha Washington's "lady's maid" and traveled with her to the various residences in New York and then Philadelphia after Washington became our first president.  

In Pennsylvania, there was a law called the "Gradual Abolition Act" which allowed enslaved men and women to apply for freedom after living in the state for six months.  Martha Washington was apprised of this law by a friend of her husband so that they could "game" the system by sending an enslaved servant to visit Mount Vernon or another southern state as the six month time limit approached thus resetting the clock back to zero when they returned. Despite being well-dressed and an intimate part of the Washington family, Oney got wind of a plan for her to go to Martha's granddaughter's estate when Martha Washington died.  So one night, as the family sat down to dinner, Oney slipped out the door and disappeared into the busy streets of Philadelphia and onto a ship bound for New Hampshire.   Martha Washington was hurt; couldn't understand why she had been abandoned by a girl she had sheltered.  Despite attempts to catch her and bring her back, Oney Judge established a life and a family as a free woman.  Freedom trumped the security of enslavement.

Ultimately, George Washington came to understand the evils of enslavement.  And McClafferty tells of the outcomes of some of the lives she so beautifully chronicles in this book.  She spent time interviewing some of their descendants, who are proudly reclaiming their family history. 
Enslaved people were buried in unmarked graves at Mount Vernon.  A new project by archaeologists is underway to reveal the site of each grave shaft. They systematically sift the top soil above the identified graves leaving them undisturbed so each occupant can continue to rest in piece as flowers are placed in recognition of a buried life.  

Tears ran down my cheeks as I read of the care and love brought to this space of eternal rest. (Can you believe I'm crying over the work of archaeologists and their volunteers?) The power behind Carla Killough McClafferty's  Buried Lives: The Enslaved People of George Washington's Mount Vernon comes from her dispassionate, sensitive, and respectful rendering of a story of people whose names we know as merchandise on a bill of sale.
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On the Forcible Separation of Children From Parents.

18/6/2018

 
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I chose this photo from Wikimedia Commons public domain, to depict how the news photos show the traumatized children at the Mexican border. I didn't want to use any copyrighted material but you can find it everywhere as children are ripped from the arms of their parents to be incarcerated in "happy-looking shelters."
 Five months after the Berlin Wall  came down in 1990,  I made a trip to East Berlin, with two German friends, to find a story about the wall from the point of view of children.  We put an ad in the East German newspaper to find someone who was willing to step forward and speak to an American children's nonfiction author.  This is the story I heard, as told to me by a 43-year-old woman named Mia:

On Saturday night August 12, 1961, huge rolls of barbed wire were unfurled through the streets that separated East and West Berlin.  By Sunday morning 10,000 men from the people’s police patrolled the border.  Sunday was a quiet day.  Most Berliners, East and West, didn’t know that the border was closing.  Eleven-year-old Mia was asleep in the West Berlin home of her grandparents. Her parents and three sisters had a peaceful day at home in East Berlin.  They didn’t see the posters announcing that the border was about to be closed.

On Monday morning Mia’s mother was stopped at a checkpoint on her way to her job in West Berlin at Siemens, a huge electronic firm.  She was asked if she had relatives in the west.  She told the border guard that her daughter was visiting her parents.  She was told not to go to work but to go and bring her daughter home. 

 When Mia and her mother returned to the checkpoint,  three uniformed men, without warning, grabbed Mia and threw her in a truck with a lot of other children, including babies.    Everyone was crying.  When she looked out the back of the truck, she could see that her mother was also wringing her hands and crying. Mia thought she must have done something really naughty to be kidnapped this way but she also wondered about the babies.  Weren't they too young to do something worthy of being ripped from their families? 

The truck drove about an hour to a town called Potsdam. It had been transformed into a vacation camp with lots of tents and mattresses on the ground.   The children were cared for by young men, called Blue Shirts,  of the Youth organization. One Blue Shirt told Mia “Your parents are fine. They are at home and you are on vacation.  You’ll go home in a few days. It’s a national celebration! The bad capitalists in the West were getting ready to invade the East and take away everything we own and that’s why we had to close the border. Now we are safe.” After a while, Mia and the other children stopped crying and began playing. Mia especially loved the food.

On the fourth day all the children were taken to a building in Potsdam.  Mia watched reunion after reunion as parents came to pick up their children.  Finally, Mia was the last one left. “I’m being punished,” she thought, sadly, “My parents don’t want me.” But the authorities had simply forgotten to notify her parents.  So at nine o’clock that night she was driven home in a beautiful black car.  Her family came running out to greet her. Mia realized that they loved her after all!  

It was years before Mia understood that the children had been kidnapped to keep their families from escaping to the West before the border had been secured.  Families with jobs and relatives in the West were particularly vulnerable. The DDR authorities knew that parents would never leave their children behind.  Of course, Mia's mother lost her job and Mia never saw her grandparents again.  

So you see that wresting children from their parents for political purposes is nothing new. Distributing disgusting, lying propaganda is nothing new. But I never thought this behavior would be perpetrated by my country which  proudly proclaims "we are the land of the free and the home of the brave."





Get a Dose of This!

7/2/2018

 
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The Author’s Note, when you first open Sarah Albee’s Poison: Deadly Deeds, Perilous Professions, and Murderous Medicines, states: “Let’s get one thing straight, right off the bat: this is not a how-to book. It’s a history book. It’s about how people have poisoned one another from ancient times to the present.”
What an intriguing idea! The threat to life, how people die, and how to avoid it is one of the great motivators of literature. Fairy tales, stories of orphans, sagas of disease allow readers to fantasize about their own mortality from a safe distance. History books are full of stories of battles but those involve armies of people. Poison is so, well, personal and individualized. It brings death to life in a way that makes for riveting storytelling. Why not use it as a lens to tell a much bigger story that involves politics, geography, culture, medicine, pollution, and human passions?
Death can be a difficult topic of conversation, especially for children in grades 3 to 7, for which Poison is targeted. But Sarah Albee’s sense of humor and witty writing keeps the reader smiling. Information about specific poisons are summed up in a “Tox Box” that discusses a poison’s source, products, delivery system to the body and its effects on the body in delightfully gruesome detail.
She has dead-on perception about stories that will fascinate kids, which she calls “Freaky Facts:”

“At the court of Louis XIV, enemas were extremely fashionable—they were thought to be good for your complexion and to keep the mind sharp. The king had as many as four enemas a day—sometimes in full view of government officials and advisers. Certain pharmacists specialized in enemas and hung huge, plunger-shaped wooden plaques outside their shops.”
Then there are a whole series “Nice Work if You Can Survive It” of how workers in different professions were poisoned. I didn’t know that hat makers, who breathed in poisonous mercury vapors when making felt, eventually wound up with “tremors, drooling, muscle weakness, tooth loss, memory loss, and extreme irritability…. People called it mad hatter’s disease.” Lewis Carroll knew that when he created the Mad Hatter. The order of anecdotes tells a much larger story of human triumphs and failures through the ages.
Albee’s meticulous research and love of story-telling make Poison a painless romp through history with a strong dose of learning.

     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

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