Outside of Camden, Alabama is a small community called Gee’s Bend. It is isolated from the rest of the world by the Alabama River that snakes south then strikes west only to head back north to its origin. From the sky, the tear drop looks like the state of Alabama is crying.
Ludelphia Bennett has no time to cry. She must get Doc Nelson in Camden to come to her home and save her mother. Ever since little Rose’s birth, her mother has been unresponsive. She has fits of coughing and powerful sweats and chills, but when she gibbers it is to her own dead mother. Ludelphia knows she is out of her mind.
Everyday has the promise of a better momma. Aunt Doshie gives her a steam treatment that clears her throat, but once it is taken away the rattle comes back. The house is getting stale with the smell of sickness, too. No matter what Ludelphia hopes, she still sees her mother’s eyes sinking.
Her last bout of coughing sets Ludelphia into motion. Her mother sprays something on the quilt and her dad identifies it as blood. Aunt Doshie whispers the word pneumonia and Ludelphia runs outside. She cannot stand the sound of her father crying.
Ludelphia is leaving Gee’s Bend for the first time in her life. She will have to cross a river and walk through a town she has never seen to find a doctor she does not know. She is scared but she has her patches of material and needle with thread to comfort her. This will be the best quilt her mother has ever seen – if she lives.
Set in 1932, young adult readers will love the cliff hangers associated with Irene Latham’s first book, Leaving Gee’s Bend. At a library conference in Vicksburg, Latham explained her idea for the book. She was intrigued by the areas rich history of African American Quilting. Once she started researching the material she ran across photographs from the area of that period.
One photograph in particular displays a girl, approximately 10-years-of-age, gazing out a tenant house window. Latham claims she could almost read the newspaper pages used to insulate the open window. Not made of glass but a large piece of ply wood, the window swings in and out like a barn door.
This girl, leaning in profile on the window sill, is dreaming or that is what Latham begans to imagine. It also occurrs to Latham that she can only see the child’s left eye. What might be this child’s life growing up in rural Alabama with one eye? You will have to read Ludelphia’s story to find out.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Leaving Gee’s Bend (copy)
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Moveable Feast
Still reading Pat Conroy's My Reading Life and I am taking my time in the Paris section. Yes, it is taking me an extra long time to read a short memoir, but there is this thing called Christmas that demands I do other things...
I got a new Reference & User Services Quarterly in the mail yesterday. Picking it up this morning, I notice two hot topic articles that had the potential to wake my brain. Well, they did indeed spark some thought, and as I skimmed the next page I read Brad Hooper's name as guest columnist. He works for Booklists and is a great source for new readings!
In Hooper's RUSA article he talks about our love for food and travel writing. In the article he quotes Hemingway as an early understander of combining the two pleasures.
"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."
I love it when different sources of reading seem to tie together! Oh, and check out this website where I got Marc Chagall's Eiffel Tower Serenade.
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Please Help by Voting!
Vote to support the Arts Council!
The Yoknapatawpha Arts Council has been selected as a finalist for a $20,000 award in the 50 States for Good program sponsored by Tom's of Maine. Tom's of Maine receives thousands of submissions for this program. They have selected just 41 groups to consider as finalists. TheYoknapatawpha Arts Council's project to renovate the Powerhouse Community Arts Center is the only organization in Mississippi that was selected.
The program has entered the public support phase and we need your help. We need you to vote for our program on the 50 States for Good website. Voting is active. Follow the links below to vote for the Arts Council. You can vote once a day. Although all the programs that have been selected are worthy we hope you will help bring this support to a program in our community.
Please take time to vote right now. Share this link with your network of people. Then save this link, vote again everyday, and remind your friends to vote everyday.
CLICK HERE TO VOTE
Thank you for your continued support of the arts.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Summer Reading Program 2009
My plan was to read Kid Tea by Elizabeth Ficocelli (2007), but when I arrived Veneda was setting them up with garbage sack smocks and they had exactly 30 minutes to be done with the craft and back at the elementary school!
The book has a great sing-song verse, for example "elbows-green-with-grass day, knees-and-toes-to-match day." On the next page young footballer is in the tub with the lines, "Dunk me in the tub, please, for green kid tea!" The idea that goes along with the book, is have the children make tea with the different colored paints as they rinse between hand prints. Both tubs were pink when we finished! :D
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Library Loot ~ Overdue!
I rushed to the library after the librarian called to tell me my hold was available! Yes, I'm a sucker for art and am having a grand time discovering Mississippi artists!
American Masters of the Mississippi Gulf Coast: George Ohr, Dusti Bonge, Walter Anderson, Richmond Barthe by Patti Carr Black is a catalog for the current exhibit traveling the state of Mississippi until 2010. Just my luck, the closest venue will be Oxford. Why didn't we get this for Northwest?
Check out other Library Loot at A Stripped Armchair.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
Andrew Wyeth (1917 - 2009)
Christina's WorldSomething waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show."
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Threshing Pecans
I finished reading In Praise of Pecans by June Jackson tonight, and I wanted to share a piece of art mentioned in the Afterword. Jackson writes, "Known for representing daily life as she saw it firsthand, [Clementine] Hunter painted scenes of picking cotton, washing clothes, getting married and getting buried. Fortunately for us, she painted a charming picture entitled Threshing Pecans (above on tin cover), portraying an earlier, preindustrial method of coaxing the nuts from the trees to the ground--adults would use long poles to shake the pecans while children climbed up into the trees to help in the process."
I love the little girl hanging upside down in the first tree, and I have to question Ms. Hunter's leaf and pecan full trees. Pecan trees are harvested in the fall/winter after the leaves leave. Sorry about the quality of the photo. I was unable to locate the artwork as a lone piece. One may purchase this pecan filled tin from the Cane River Pecan Company of Louisiana.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Book Clubs Who Listen Not Discuss
Do you ever feel like there is a reason you meet certain people. I was the club’s third choose: the first fell and broke her hip, the second (my boss) had a seminar she had to attend, and both are named Margaret. I joked they were getting the cheap imitation Maggie. Well, anyway, my contact told me she flew her husband’s Cessna 310 upon learning I had a bachelor in aerospace. We told hangar after hangar stories until we were wore out.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Nabokov's Art as Story
Landscape with the Voyage of Jacob 
View of Toledo“By a paradox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North-American countryside had at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused recognition because of those painted oilcloths which were imported from America in the old days to be hung above washstands in Central European nurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bedtime with the rustic green view they depicted—opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the dull white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence or hills of greenish gouache. But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities became stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them. Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional dove-grey cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating stripe of quicksilverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas.” (Lolita p150 Peguin edition)
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Dawg Days of Summer
It was a nasty 101 degrees with a heat index of 107 today. (My little weather gurl (in the sidebar) was probably runnin' around nakeed instead of her usually yellow polka dot bikini! Oh, and today is the anniversary of the release of Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini!) The weather promises to be more the same for the rest of the week. Can you even imagine life without air conditioning in these conditions? We got our first window unit in 1973, praise be.
Thought this would be a good time to post a painting idealizing the historic blues cross(rail)roads of the South, where the Southern Crosses the Dawg.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Art as Story
Art is inspiration on canvas board. That said, I think Edward Hopper’s work can inspire stories. In Hopper’s Nighthawk below, all kinds of plots, conversations, and characterizations come to mind.
