"Now, it may not have come under his observation . . ."

Fresh from our Easter weekend with a solemn then joyous sunrise service observing death and resurrection, I came across this reference to a site, Neglected Voices created and maintained by Professor Peggy Cooper Davis of the New York University School of Law, that has collected the biographies and some of the speeches of sixteen African Americans serving in Congress during Reconstruction. I draw attention to this site for a couple of reasons. There is of course just the seasonality - we are at the start of spring, the time of renewal and resurrection. Faulty as it was and as many missteps as were taken, that decade after the Civil War was similarly an era in which we as a country attempted to restart our national effort to hold ourselves true to the fundamental principles gifted to us from the Age of Enlightenment.

More pertinently, while our focus at Through the Magic Door is on creating an environment where children will develop the love of and habit of enthusiastic reading, we also seek to bring attention to overlooked stories and tales from years gone by that are likely to grab children's attention. While these speeches were not intended as speeches to children, they are fresh and accessible to them and touch on issues that are very real in a way that sometimes seems to get lost in text books.

Another reason for drawing attention to these gentlemen and their speeches is continuity of issues over the years and generations. Seven score years and six generations along, Richard Cain's (Republican Representative from South Carolina 1873-75 and 1877-79) words are eerily contemporary.

Spare us our liberties; give us peace; give us a chance to live; give us an honest chance in the race of life; place no obstruction in our way; oppress us not; give us an equal chance; and we ask no more of the American people.

Representative Cain sounds as if he would be right at home at any Tea Party rally.

Yet a further reason is the articulateness of the speeches, at least those that I have read - there are many available at the site. The clarity of thought, logic, and argument would put the overwhelming majority of the members of the current Congress to shame.

Then there are the nitty-gritty realities that so often and easily get air-brushed from history. Here is Richard Cain again, this time in a speech in support of the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 contesting a point raised by one of the other legislators:

Sir, the gentleman states that in the State of North Carolina the colored people enjoy all their rights as far as the highways are concerned; that in the hotels, and in the railroad cars, and in the various public places of resort, they have all the rights and all the immunities accorded to any other class of citizens of the United States. Now, it may not have come under his observation, but it has under mine, that such really is not the case; and the reason why I know and feel it more than he does is because my face is painted black and his is painted white. We who have the color--I may say the objectionable color--know and feel all this. A few days ago, in passing from South Carolina to this city, I entered a place of public resort where hungry men are fed, but I did no dare--I could not without trouble--sit down to the table. I could not sit down at Wilmington or at Weldon without entering into a contest, which I did not desire to do. My colleague, the gentleman who so eloquently spoke on this subject the other day, [Mr. ELLIOTT,] a few months ago entered a restaurant at Wilmington and sat down to be served, and while there a gentleman stepped up to him and said, "You cannot eat here." All the other gentlemen upon the railroad as passengers were eating there; he had only twenty minutes, and was compelled to leave the restaurant or have a fight for it. He showed fight, however, and got his dinner; but he has never been back there since. Coming here last week I felt we did not desire to draw revolvers and present the bold front of warriors, and therefore we ordered our dinners to be brought into the cars, but even there we found the existence of this feeling; for, although we had paid a dollar a piece for our meals, to be brought by the servants into the cars, still there was objection on the part of the railroad people to our eating our meals in the cars, because they said we were putting on airs. They refused us in the restaurant, and then did not desire that we should eat our meals in the cars, although we paid for them. Yet this was in the noble State of North Carolina.

And then there are the complexities. We want out history to be clean and clear and it is not. The entry for Robert C. DeLarge describes him as "Born in Aiken, South Carolina, the son of a slave-holding free black tailor and a mother of Haitian ancestry." It is so easy to overlook how different the world was.

Finally, there is the simple power of their words. They told stories and made arguments that still ring clear and true today. There is a concreteness to their experiences and the tales they tell that too easily goes missing in dry history texts. These speeches, and the issues they raise and seek to address, are easily accessible to a middle schooler.

These men lived in momentous times, sometimes did momentous things and sometimes were all too frail and human in their weaknesses. But looking at their brief biographies and reading their words, it is hard not to connect with them these many years later.

Authorities, however heavily furred and gowned . . .

From Virginia Woolf's essay, How Should One Read a Book?

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions - there we have none.

Thinking requires raw material

From Aidan Chambers' Booktalk: Occasional Writing on Literature and Children. I think he is right. Reflection and consideration are intensely individual in nature but the broader process of thinking is an unconciously collaborative one. We all stand on the shoulders of those that have gone before; our thoughts both advantaged from the prospect but also hostage as well.

Like every other creative activity, thinking requires raw material. I don't know about you, but I find I can never get enough raw material of my own. I take most of what I need from other people. On my own I am just not enough - in experience or knowledge or imaginative capacity or language. To put it another way round: thinking isn't really a self-contained, individual activity at all. It is a shared process. We are all members of the human think-tank.

Someone hit on the notion of making it into a toboggan

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

Her tale is full of marvellously improbable family stories that are distinctly a product of England and its empire.

Arthur, the next eldest, was grey-eyed and rather more dashing; a magnificently well-made man, with a long-jawed throwaway charm; though certainly brave he was not conspicuously affectionate and only intermittently mild. He had just come back with his regiment from the West Indies, where, beset by yellow fever, they had died in great numbers. He himself was so desperately ill that his companions, not knowing about the Slessor constitution, had made his coffin and engraved his name on it and marched some miles in the hot sun to dig his grave. He brought the coffin home to substantiate this tale, and because it is one of those few things that cannot fail to come in useful. In fact he had no need of it for another sixty years. It hung about in the stables, getting underfoot, until someone hit on the notion of making it into a toboggan.

Snail soup

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

Napier offers an interesting observation on her Victorian forebears. Her tolerance is a welcome tonic to the censoriousness that often overtakes contemporary commentators, swathed in the luxury of overwhelming opportunity and abundance, when looking back on times where everyone, rich and poor, were never more than a few days or weeks away from hunger and abandonment.

Looked back upon from a more humane and less rigorous age, the well-to-do Victorians leave an impression of a strange acquiescence in the miseries about them. John Henry took in the works of Charles Dickens in monthly parts, as they came out, and delighted in them; he cannot therefore have been ignorant of the appalling conditions in which most of his countrymen lived. Although country people were never so neglected, underfed, or ill-treated as in the towns, there must have been plenty of misery and poverty around him. There was in fact a widow in Abbotsworthy who brought up a family of nine children entirely upon vegetables and snail soup. That he denied himself to help poor people was as true of him as of many another sincere country parson. But rich and poor had existed throughout recorded time; and to believe that things which seemed as much a part of the natural order as night and day could ever be radically altered, required a leap of the imagination for which very few people who were not themselves poor had the necessary spiritual agility. He did what he could for his immediate neighbors and prayed for the rest; living as most people do, within the ethic of his day, which was sterner and more self-disciplined than ours but less awakened and less imaginative.

All the perils of a jungle at night

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

This is a wonderful passage capturing a child's perspective of things as well as a recollection of a world now virtually vanished. Living as a young child in England in the mid-1960's, I was priviliged to see some of the last vestiges of these types of homes.

The love-hate relationship between the English and the animal world was never more passionately displayed than in Edwardian houses. One could hardly cross a drawing-room floor without falling over the snarling head of a lion's skin, or a polar bearskin stretched out upon it. The hideous archaic profiles of rhinoceroses leant out of walls, over the Zanzibar chests in the outer halls. Hollowed-out feet of elephants containing potted palms were dotted about halls where the garishness of Turkey carpets alternated with the smoother surfaces of Persian rugs. Inkstands were made from the hooves of favorite hunters or chargers, doors were kept open by the stuffed feet of eland. Behind the shut doors of smokingrooms, whence the smell of cigar smoke drifted richly out, would be stags' heads, wild buffalo horns jutting out of hollow skulls, the heads of black panthers with gleaming yellow glass eyes. Tiger skins hung on landings; their huge teeth menaced one on one's way to bed. No billiard room was innocent of stuffed white owls, stuffed badgers, plaster salmon; even sometimes a stuffed albatross, enormous and yellowing, regarded one malignly out of its beady eye. Horrendous recreated pike lurked in the pantry passages; in the dusk they seemed as big as sharks. In the hall of my grandmother's house near Barnstaple there was a stuffed bear, upright, holding in his paws a brass tray for the reception of visiting cards. By daytime he was friendly, almost cosy, could be nearly thought of as a pet. At twilight he became menacing, in the dark he threatened terrifyingly. To cross a hall on one's way to bed was to encounter, close to, all the perils of a jungle at night.

Knowing They Know That You Know

Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know by Patricia Cohen in the March 31, 2010 New York Times. A summary of discussions that have been going on in science journals for the past few years but accentuating the interest on the part of English professors in putting the field of literature onto something of a more objective basis. What is the basis for our success as a cooperative and collaborative species? What are the aspects of communication that allow us to be effective? What is the balance between memory and imagination? All interesting questions that this article touches on lightly.