NAOMI CAMPBELL AND CADBURY CHOCOLATE

I’ve been thinking about race and racism lately, especially as they relate to something playwright David Mamet once said: “Race, like sex, is a subject on which it is near impossible to tell the truth."

Last week, Supermodel Naomi Campbell was ready to sue Cadbury in the U.K. for its ad comparing her to a bar of chocolate. (Actually, comparing a bar of chocolate to her.) “Insulting and hurtful,” she said. Now the firm has officially apologized and removed the ad from circulation. Campbell has accepted the apology.

Was she right to feel insulted or overreacting? Black people themselves use the names of foods and spices to refer to their varying shades of color—ginger, cinnamon, café au lait—and chocolate. But what members of a group say about themselves and what they’re willing to let others say about them are, of course, two different things.

It’s all in the context. One summer day in the early 60s I was in a delicatessen in the all-white, working-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, where I then lived. Four or five black men who’d been repairing the nearby el came in to buy their lunch. They were tall and broad-shouldered, their skin glistening from heat and hard work. Laughing and joking, they seemed to fill up the narrow store. Daughter #1, who was about three at the time and had probably never seen an African-American up close before, gazed at the men towering above her and cried out with absolute joy, “Oh, look at all the chocolate people!”

No offense meant, none taken.

For some whites in that same neighborhood, however, the fear of black people moving in was so great that when a homeowner had the temerity to put a House For Sale sign in his window, thus circumventing the redlining practices that real estate brokers employed to keep blacks out, a few of my neighbors banded together to burn a cross in his front yard. I overheard one man say, “We don’t want any chocolate puddings around here,” the venom in his voice so palpable, I felt physically sick.

I’m pretty sure that, unlike that man, no one at Cadbury—probably an all-white firm—intended to offend. But neither can any of them claim the innocence of a chocolate-loving three-year-old. Campbell says that more diversity on company boards is needed to prevent this kind of insensitivity, and of course she’s right. More awareness and empathy among the whites on the board would go a long way too. In my opinion, saying, “It was not our intention that this campaign should offend Naomi, her family or anybody else and we are sincerely sorry that it has done so” is not enough. They should have known better and they should take steps to ensure that in the future they do.

So, “Race, like sex, is a subject on which it is near impossible to tell the truth." Agree? Or not?

I’d like to attempt an honest dialogue on the subject and invite anyone with the same aim to join in.

SUMMER JACKSON: GROWN UP

Waiting for me when I returned from Washington last week was a UPS package  containing a copy of a brand-new picture book—Summer Jackson: Grown Up by Teresa E. Harris. Twenty years ago, when D and I were living in New Orleans, we drove to Disney World to meet up with his family—including his sister and her two little girls, Tania and Teresa. When Teresa discovered I was a writer, she told me she was going to be a writer too when she grew up. And so she is. When D and I reunited recently after 14 years apart, I found out that his niece was eagerly awaiting the publication of her first book. Of course I couldn’t wait to read it, and it’s a stunner.

Seven-year-old Summer Jackson (love the name) is tired of being a child and doing childish things. So she dons a blazer and heels, writes to-do lists, and generally behaves like an up-and-coming young professional. But when she starts collecting cash payments from her fellow students for her consulting work, her parents feel the need to step in. They gently try to dissuade her, but Summer stands firm. Only when Mom and Dad demonstrate the pleasures of childhood by swinging, sliding, and dancing in the backyard does Summer relent—a bit.

Some of the story’s charm lies in what it doesn’t say. No husbands and babies in Summer’s vision of adulthood. This girl want a career!  And I love the sly poke the story takes at today’s busy, two-career parents. Letting out one’s inner child, it suggests, provides a good tonic for hard-working professionals of any age and is lots more fun when the whole family joins in.

Summer Jackson: Grown Up by Teresa E. Harris. Illustrated by AG Ford. A Katherine Tegen Book. HarperCollins, 2011.

OF RAPTURES, POETS, AND STOWAWAYS

I’m heading to Washington, DC, next week for the International Biographers Conference. It’s on May 21, the same day as the Rapture. In some cities this could be dangerous. Traffic accidents, for example, as the elect, the saved, the true Christians are suddenly wafted into the blue. But near Congress? I’ll probably be pretty safe. I’ll keep you posted.

A big name for such a little girl. Note the baby pug. 

I’ve written several biographies for young people, and now I’m working on a proposal for one about poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, tentatively titled A Girl Named Vincent.


Why did such a sweet little girl get a boy's name?

Millay’s mother had an adventurous young brother named Charles Buzzell, who was making his way around the world. On January 31, 1892, he got himself accidentally locked into the hold of a cotton freighter in New Orleans. Ten days later, when the ship arrived in New York, Charles was discovered, nearly dead from lack of food and water, and rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where doctors managed to pull him through.

St. Vincent’s in 1900. The hospital closed in 2010.

According to Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty, Charles later admitted he’d been drunk, fallen asleep on some hay bales, and hadn’t heard the hatches close and lock. Accounts of his ordeal appeared in newspapers all over the country, but his nine-months-pregnant sister, who lived in Rockland, Maine, didn’t hear about the near tragedy and its happy outcome until February 15. A week later she went into labor, and, on Washington’s Birthday, February 22, to the sound of pealing bells, gave birth to the baby girl she named for the hospital that saved her brother’s life.

Charles quickly made hay of his mishap among the hay bales, appearing at the Bowery’s Globe Museum in New York to relate his “Awful Experiences.”

PRE-BOOMERS AND MUSIC

Forty-something years ago I was visiting my mother with my kids. My 20-year-old brother came home from Queens College with a copy of a new Beatles album under his arm—Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He was thrilled, ecstatic. I was puzzled. I listened to the lyrics. Of course, I’d heard the Beatles before. But these lyrics, they didn’t make sense. They were like poetry. I knew poetry. I was an English major after all. But poetry didn’t belong in popular songs. Popular music was “Maybelline” and “She’ll have fun, fun, fun till her Daddy takes her T-bird away.” You loved it, danced to it in high school, but once you graduated, you moved on to classical music or jazz or Broadway show tunes. Didn’t my kid brother know that? Was he stupid? No. He was a boomer.

Genuine hippie boomer

MOTHER'S DAY ADDENDUM

And here we are, me and the four lovely daughters, some 30 years ago.

A POEM FOR MY DAUGHTERS

Today's my youngest daughter's birthday. Tomorrow is Mother's Day. Hence this poem.

Triolet for Four Daughters

since that rough passage past my bones

awash in pain  swathed delight

dearest daughters known/misknown

since that rough passage past my bones

rivers surging over stones

whose darkest patches flash with light

since that rough passage past my bones

washed from pain  subdued delight

                                      Joan Kane Nichols

For you poetry buffs out there, a triolet is a one-stanza poem of eight lines, rhyming abaaabab. The fourth and seventh lines are the same as the first, and the eighth line is the same as the second. As you can see, I've taken some liberties with the form.

GREAT-GRANDPA WAS A UNION MAN

Growing up, I had little pride in the Irish-Catholic culture I was born into. In my harsh adolescent judgment, Irish-Catholics were bigoted stick-in-the-muds. Many of my friends were red-diaper babies or at least came from radical, rabble-rousing, union-loving families. Now that was something to be proud of! 


Last week my cousin, Pat, who’s been doing a terrific amount of research into the Kane family background, sent me a newspaper clipping from the Brooklyn Eagle of July 25, 1867.  Under the headline THE LABOR MOVEMENT, the subhead reads: 
Meeting of Plasterers—Reports from the National Convention--The Eight Hour System, Strikes, etc.


It seems the 120 members of the Operative Plasterer’s Society of Brooklyn held a special meeting at 22 Court Street that evening to hear from the delegates they’d sent to the union’s National Convention. The delegate chosen to report was my great-grandfather, Andrew Kane.


Plastering is an ancient trade and plasterers’ unions have a long history, as far back as medieval Irish craft unions. Local unions formed in the United States as early as the 1830s. By the time of the Civil War, these locals were eager to join forces and form an organization that could standardize rules and regulations—including wages and working conditions. Hence the national convention. 

Delegates from 14 eastern cities (Brooklyn was a separate city in those days)—from Portland to Chicago to Washington, DC—traveled to Baltimore to attend. They represented 2077 journeyman plasterers, who earned from $3.50 to $4.50 for a six-day workweek. The various locals had staged numerous strikes the previous year, some more successful than others. Great Grandpa was able to report that the Convention had praised the Brooklyn local for being the only one that managed to obtain an eight-hour workday for all six days, not just Saturdays. He was also able to report that during the election of the convention’s officers, Andrew Kane was elected Treasurer. Way to go, Great-Grandpa!


Additional tidbits from that day’s Brooklyn Eagle:
Under “Miscellaneous Items”
A lady in Hungerford, England, was frightened to death by a cow.


From “Man as an Article of Food”
It was formerly supposed that the relish with which certain savage tribes ate their enemies arose from the gratification of the passion of revenge. Within the last few years, however, it has been clearly shown that some of the barbarian man-eaters are really fond of human flesh for its own sake. . . .  your Fejee Islander, now, thinks the greatest praise he can bestow upon any edible is to say “that it is as tender as a man.” The Feejeans have plenty of provisions, but they consider “long pig”—their pleasant name for human flesh—much finer than pork, beef, or mutton.
Who knew?


Note on my Edgar predictions of last week. Once again a perfect score: 0