They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

"Maybe it's just the whole damn world is like Central Casting. They got it all rigged before you ever show up." 

Numerous books were released during the Great Depression, but no book struck more of a cultural chord or contained a decade's worth of human resilience during economic and social disparity better than John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Even if you haven't read it (*coughs and looks away*), you know something about it, as the title alone has almost become synonymous for the era of hardship it represents within its pages. Just Google "The Great Depression", and its at the top of the results. A teacher you once had probably assigned it in class. It no doubt resides on a bunch of required read-before-you're-casket-ready reading lists. It's a book that is just impossible to ignore.

Now, no disrespect to Steinbeck, but Grapes wasn't the only book to explore one of America's most harrowing hours. Okay, maybe these books weren't out there winning Pulitzer Prizes, but they did exist. Coming up blank? Let me steer you over to a neglected corner, where you'll see cussing and fussing for attention Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, the anti-Grapes...the anti-everything, really.

Horses was released in 1935, in the thick of the Great Depression, and it's with no surprise that it ended up faring better with French existentialists such as Simone de Beauvoir (who dubbed it the first "American existentialist novel"), and Albert Camus (who'd seven years later would pen a similar sketch of human doom with The Stranger). Americans wanted hope and relief and sympathetic characters they could relate to --- not someone extolling pessimism and framing them as farm animals being led to the slaughter. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? doesn't offer a mustard seed of faith, or even a 'this too shall pass' reassuring pat on the shoulder. This lean, mean novella instead sneers at the migrant farming sojourn of the Joad brood as it ensnares its disparate youths Robert Syverton and Gloria Beatty in a thorny fate, all while lifting a soiled middle finger towards the sweet apple pie of Americana optimism and prosperity.

A Girl Grows Up In Brooklyn

"I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this."

Black girlhood has never been written with such poetic potency.

Even though I grew up in a suburban South Texas neighborhood during the 1990s and went to predominately White schools, I understood this story fully. Reading this book was like re-entering my childhood, just this time I got to view it from a distance, finding myself appreciating the sometimes arduous, often awkward journey that was growing up Girl.

It is true that we all experience growing pains and angst. We all at some points of our lives vie to belong somewhere and find “our people”. We all have felt the flutter of first love. We all begin to see our elders live confusing, convoluted lives, and hope to God we don’t turn out like them in the end. We have all become aware of our maturing bodies, wondering where our unique beauty lies within the images we see on TV screens. We all have friendships that are fleeting, sometimes one-sided, but shape us beyond the time frame. And we will at some point, by some strange osmosis, have these friendships come back to us, just that a new script will be in tow.

No matter the gender or the race, we all come of age in similar ways, but Another Brooklyn pinpoints a unique adolescent. The announcement is right in the title. This is 'another Brooklyn', a Brooklyn removed from the Irish immigrant experience of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, and more specifically, a city, a time era, and a racial community removed from Betty Smith’s classic A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. I don’t know if this was Jacqueline Woodson's intent --- I’m just taking a stab in the dark --- but while reading echoes of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn sound, with Another Brooklyn's narrator August sharing the same lonely, but fiercely determined spirit as Francine Nolan. Still, I feel, Woodson is also making a point to say that Brooklyn is too often defined through a White lens, when the city holds so many more conversations and stories outside of that limited focus.

Union Street

Who wants to read a book about working class women and girls who live in squalor in the back avenues of an industrial city north east of London?

Well, I do.

See, my hand is raised?

Still I'm not everybody.

Hollywood couldn't handle what British author Pat Barker was trying to convey in the pages of this book because in 1990 they released it as a sweet romance story called Stanley & Iris, starring Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro. In the film Fonda and De Niro play two working class individuals who are at a standstill in their lives, with Fonda's character later on teaching De Niro’s how to read and write, the two of them falling in love during the process. I admit, it's an excellent film, and one of my favorite romance stories, Fonda is fun to watch and De Niro pulls out one of his best performances in it --- but the film isn't Baker's 1982 debut Union Street. Fonda's Iris King, the cake factory, a pregnant teen, and a man who can't read are the only elements that have any sort of association to this book, and these elements are still sprinkled with sugar crystals on it when they made it to screen.

Book publishers couldn't handle what realism Barker had written as she had a difficult time trying to find a publisher for the book. Nobody wanted to give Union Street the time of day because it isn't a pretty book. It just isn't a book that goes down easy. It's a book about worn-out, hard-working women and young girls, but it's not in the Norma Rae-rah-rah spirit, or wraps itself in warm camaraderie like Gloria Naylor's classic Women of Brewster Place. Baker wrote a book that is a stark and unsettling contrast to the usual working-class woman narrative.