#473 Raymond’s Run- Toni Cade Bambara

#473 Raymond’s Run- Toni Cade Bambara

It’s May Day and Hazel Elizabeth Deborah Parker, the pride of 151^st street, is ready to win another race, she is the fastest runner in the neighborhood, except her father (don’t tell anybody).

She is a tough girl, with a bit of a chip on her shoulder. “I’m ready to fight, cause like I said I don’t feature a whole lot of chit-chat, I much prefer to just knock you down right from the jump and save everybody a lotta precious time.”

Besides running, her other purpose in life is to take care of her bigger brother, Raymond who is a little slow. On race day, Raymond not only watches his sister win, but races along side the track, wanting to be just like her. She see’s this with pride and realizes where her priorities should be.

Rating: 7-6-7-6 Total= 26

#447 October Brown- Maxine Clair

#447 October Brown- Maxine Clair

Rattlebone is a fictional black community just north of Kansans City created by Maxine Clair for this collection. Written to represent the Midwest black lives of the 1950’s, it’ll be interesting to compare it to the Toure’s The Portable Promised Land I started yesterday that represents a fictional black community in the big city. 

October Brown was a teacher in Rattlebone. Her story starts with a fit she had in public as a child when her father attacked her mother. The fit was so crazed that it left her with a mark on her cheek, a devil’s kiss, and a reputation that frightened and intrigued her new students.

“We imagined that a woman surrounded by such lore would have to have a bad temper, a flash fire that could drive her from her desk to yours in a single movement, dislodge you by your measly shoulders, plant you hard on the hardwood floor, tell you in growling underbreaths of wrath to stand up straight…”

It was a big year for Irene, not only because her new teacher wasn’t anywhere nearly as bad as she thought, but because she was about to become a big sister to a new baby brother. Things change quickly though, and change can turn quickly to chaos.

Notable Passage: “Intuition is the guardian of childhood.”

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total=30

# 329 I Clench My Hands Into Fists and They Look Like Someone Else’s- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

# 329 I Clench My Hands Into Fists and They Look Like Someone Else’s- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

Homero and Ximena are siblings. They are Mexican teenagers stuck in New York City awaiting word from their parents. If there is a theme running through this collection, it is kids from a wealthy family fleeing the violence of Mexico City. They worry about the fate of their Grandfather and what the future holds for their family.

The whole story is written in dialogue, which makes it a challenge to figure out the context and setting, but it’s a fun challenge, kind of like a puzzle. The conversations run from normal brother-sister talk to the shadow looming over their whole sketchy situation. Being uprooted from their homes and separated from their parents, sometimes the best things to talk about are the normal things.

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29

#188 Easter Night- Anton Chekhov

#188 Easter Night- Anton Chekhov

Yesterday’s author Mavis Gallant’s simple advive to new authors was to “Read Chekhov.”  Here, as well as many of his stories, we see the brilliance of that advice. This is such a delicate and touching story, balancing joy-sorrow, life-death, light-dark, past-present, gentry-impoverished. A Gentlemen crosses the river to get to an Easter service. The ferryman is a novice who is grieving the loss of a brother, a brother skilled at writing outlaw religious texts known as Akathists.

 “There should be softness, gentleness, and tenderness in every little line, so that there’s not a single coarse, harsh, or unsuitable word. It has to be written so that the one who is praying will rejoice and weep in his heart, but shake and be in awe in his mind.”

Like the poetry of Walt Whitman, or the music of Charles Ives, Chekhov strives to capture humanity at its most pure moments, not lofty, or quaint, sarcastic, or judgmental, but truthful and lovingly. The following passage I found to be a perfect capture of a common shared public experience . He has tapped into the emotion of such a scene with a genuine eye.

Notable Passage: “One would have liked to see this restlessness and sleeplessness in all of nature, beginning with the night’s darkness and ending with the slabs, the graveyard crosses, and the trees, under which people bustle about. But nowhere did the excitement and restlessness tell so strongly as in the church. At the entrance an irrepressible struggle went on between ebb and flow. Some went in, others came out and soon went back again, to stand for a little while and then move again. People shuttle from place to place, loiter, and seem to be looking for something. The wave starts at the entrance and passes through the whole church, even disturbing the front rows where the solid and weighty people stand. To concentrate on prayer is out of the question. There are no prayers, but there is a sort of massive childishly instinctive joy that is only seeking an excuse to burst and pour itself out in some sort of movement, be it only an unabashed swaying and jostling.”

Rating: 10-8-8-9 Total= 35