Past, Present, and Future
by Nancy Jane Moore
The three books most on my mind from this year’s reading represent the past, present, and future, but despite the echoes of A Christmas Carol, these aren’t Scrooge’s ghosts but rather ones that haunt, or should haunt, all of us living in the United States.
One of them is historical fiction and does what genre does best in great hands: tells the deeper truth of the past, the part that was papered over and ignored by most of us.
Another is nonfiction, natural history that lays bare the ways the developer mindset has caused us to lose our core connection to nature, even as the almost-wild world still exists in the pockets of our abandoned industrial parks and other odd locales.
And the third is science fiction mixed with a little magic, and provides guideposts for the future, guideposts we’re in dire need of at the moment as the polycrises come crashing down.
Past, present, and future, all of which we need to consider deeply right now.
Representing the Past is James, by Percival Everett. This incredible re-envisioning of the iconic book Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of James, the enslaved Black man who escapes with Huck, has not been overlooked – it won the National Book Award. But until his earlier novel Erasure was made into a movie (American Fiction), Everett was not so widely known.
I stumbled across some of Everett’s short stories more than twenty years ago and was blown away, but even though I knew about him, I had no idea how many books he’d actually written until the last few years when I discovered several of his novels at the wonderful East Bay Booksellers in Oakland.
In James, Everett gives us the whole being of a man working both to be true to himself and to survive, a strong contrast to the stereotypical caricature in Twain’s novel. It should be absurd today that we still need to be shown that enslaved persons were, in fact, human beings and that they took actions large and small to claim that humanity and find pockets of freedom, but the sad truth is that the ugly lies persist despite the intervening years since the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
The truth of James is, of course, well known to most African Americans. This book sets it out boldly at the point where the compromise at the heart of the American experiment exploded.
It is the custom in the United States to gloss over the past. That custom has kept us from ever facing the damage done in our names or changing our relationship to our history or each other.
We need both history and historical fiction that tells the truth. In fact, we need all the truth-telling that is made clearest in fiction. Much of Percival Everett’s other work is surrealistic, though no less truthful at its core; The Trees – which deals with lynching and which I recommended here a couple of years ago – is even more haunting than James.
It occurs to me that I’m making it sound like one should read the book out of duty, which is misleading. This book is funny in places, dark in others, and goes to unexpected places. It’s always a joy to read Everett.
In A Natural History of Empty Lots, Christopher Brown – also known for his dystopic science fiction – shows us both the nature all around us, even in the post-industrial city, and also what we’re doing to it and to ourselves. Most of this book is set in Austin, Texas, where he lives and where he and his wife built a house on property once home to pipelines and related uses.
I have subscribed to Brown’s Field Notes newsletter, from which he developed this book, for several years and found it powerful, a must-read in my email inbox every week, so the book was high on my to-read list when it came out.
I’ve lived in Austin twice in my life, for a total of 17 years. Last spring I traveled there to see the eclipse and was horrified by the ways too much money is transforming it, even as I had thought money had already done so much damage when I left in 2014. So I have some feeling for what Brown is writing about, though I do not know the area with the intimacy that he brings to his explorations.
And that intimacy is a large part of what makes this book worth a slow read. You can follow him as he climbs under barbed wire fences, gets muddy in wetlands, meets the creatures and occasional person who live in almost – but not quite – abandoned spaces, spaces that are vulnerable to the unrelenting development that describes not just Austin, but many parts of our country.
Development plays a large part here. A few paragraphs on the founding of Austin out of Texas history notes that Stephen F. Austin – known to all Texas schoolchildren as the father of Texas since he led the first Anglo settlers (the old 300) into the state in 1823 – “took tremendous joy in the sound of trees coming down to build towns.” Under 300-year-old live oaks – few of which are left due to Austin and the others – Anglo settlers divvied up the cleared land.
If you pay attention to climate-change issues, this book will not assuage your fears. But it will give you new depth and understanding on what the true questions are.
It is in Andrea Hairston’s future set out in Archangels of Funk that I find hope. Recently I was at the annual meeting/holiday party for the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, an organization I have been involved with since it began in 2018, a group with a vision of taking property – not just housing – off the speculative market and running it for the people who live there and use it.
At the party, Executive Director Noni Sessions talked about our being rainbow warriors on the prophetic path, the heart path, and I immediately felt the presence of Hairston’s Cinnamon Jones and the collective of people growing an example of what I’ve taken to calling “islands of coherence” after a quote I saw from Ilya Prigogine: “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”
Quoting Prigogine – who won the Nobel in chemistry but whose work incorporated physics and, obviously, complexity and chaos theory – is appropriate in relation to a work built on hoodoo and physics.
And while Cinnamon Jones is at the heart of this book, it is a story about community holding the world and the truth together. At the beginning of Book II, Hairston has a quote from the biologist and Gaia theorist Lynn Margulis: “Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking.” This story is not about Cinnamon alone, not about one person against the machine.
Make no mistake: this story is set in a messy future, one of gated cities for the wealthy, shit jobs working there for others, and nothing for a lot of refugees from the water wars. If there’s any government left anywhere, it’s not helping anyone.
There’s tech in here along with magic, and a thin line between the two. But the part that feeds my heart is its community, a messy collaboration that makes everything from pizza to theatrical performances and has a place for almost everyone. Of all the books I read this year, this is the one that gives me hope along with the sheer joy of reading it.
I read many other good books this year as well as some very fine newsletters and essays. It seems to me I’m always either reading or looking for something to read. I am always hungry for ideas, particularly in these chaotic times. There are many fine writers out there who produce words that make me think.
At a different time, I might have written about some of those other books or the newsletters, but in these fraught days the echoes of past, present, and future compelled me to focus on the books that made those points most powerfully for me.
The truth about our past and present is vital, but hope and the possibility of even joy in our future is what keeps me going. To quote the song Cinnamon writes for the festival at the heart of Archangels of Funk, “I’ma be my own sun and rise.”
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