Posts Tagged ‘Elaine Ray’

Elaine with another Stanford legend, choreographer Aleta Hayes

This week, one of the most magnificent women ever to grace the Stanford org charts leaves for the harsher climate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she will be a resident fellow. (In fairness, any weather would necessarily be harsher than idyllic Palo Alto’s.)

Elaine Ray was the director of the Stanford News Service when I returned to Stanford as the humanities and arts writer for the university over a decade ago. It was an award-winning and nationally recognized institution, with plaques at the entryway signaling its many honors to all visitors. Elaine, a former Boston Globe journalist, was one reason why it was exemplary.

It was also one of the happiest workplaces I have ever known (and had a Stanford-wide reputation for being so). Elaine was a big reason for that, too. Said News Service staffer Pamela Moreland at one of her farewell parties a fortnight ago:

She is a wonderfully demanding editor who allows you to have your own voice and try new things while still adhering to the stylebook and expectations. She sees the big picture while at the same time, she will sweat every detail that you sweat and then some. She knows things before they happen. She never gave me bad advice.

In preparing for this event, I asked a few people to tell me a few things about Elaine. The superlatives came tumbling down:

Best confidante ever
Most considerate person ever
Kindest
Compassionate
No-nonsense in the best way
Best friend a person could have
Consistent
Best running buddy ever

So why is this remarkable woman leaving? The technical reason is “retirement.” But the real reason is that she’s been admitted to the Iowa Writers Workshop, the preeminent training ground for the nation’s best writers. It’s a creative and surprising way to spend a so-called “retirement.”

Elaine and daughter Zuri Adele, actress of “Good Trouble” fame

I wrote about the inspiring turning point to her story on the Book Haven some time ago, and at the party, former News Service videographer Jack Hubbard gave a shout out to me and the Book Haven for my post, “A writer to watch: Elaine Ray wins prize for her first published fiction.”

That was in January 2017, when I wrote: “one of the most beloved people at Stanford for her generosity and kindness, had emerged in fiction with an utterly new voice. We agree with the judge who called it ‘mercilessly exposed and utterly enigmatic,’ throwing light on a lost world that as foreign to most of us as the Incas.” More:

Her reaction to the $1000 award? “Blown away and humbled. The first piece of fiction I’ve ever gotten published wins an award.” According to one of the judges, Thomas McNeely, author of Ghost Horse: “In fewer than twenty pages, Pidgin sketches a world of its narrator of color’s post-colonial migration, political activism, and imprisonment within the choices offered him by history. At the same time, it’s a narrative that seems shaped by mysteries that transcend and yet throw into sharp relief its political moment, the chief one being the brilliant voice of its narrator, who is at once mercilessly exposed and utterly enigmatic. Elaine Ray is a writer who plays by her own rules, and is a writer to watch.”

You can read the entire post here.

“Elaine gets her chutzpah from her mom, who raised the family after Elaine’s father died when she was 13,” said Lisa Trei, the former social science writer at the News Service. “Elaine knew that her dad had worked in the composing room of the Pittsburg Courier but she didn’t know that he had also written a weekly column for The New York Age focusing on racial injustice. In 2010, quite by chance, Elaine stumbled upon the columns and created a blog about them. The fact that she wrote for Essence and The Boston Globe before she ever knew about her family legacy shows that printer’s ink is in her blood, for sure.”

Godspeed! We look forward to your novel, Ms. Ray.

Provocative author (Photo: Natalie Glatzel)

My friend Elaine Ray has an interesting recent post on Rick Banks‘s  Is Marriage for White People?, a book that, with a title like that, has obviously gotten a lot of attention.  She did a short Q&A with him here.

These days, “black women are about half as likely to be married as their 1950s counterparts,” he writes. “Marriage has also declined among black men, fewer than half of whom are husbands.”

Elaine’s interesting blog, My Father’s Posts, honors the journalism of her father, Ebenezer Ray, who emigrated to the New York from Barbados.  He died when she was 13.  Last month would have marked her parents’ 63rd wedding anniversary.  She describes her parents’ courtship and marriage this way:

I don’t know if my parents had planned to get married anyway or if the pregnancy [with Elaine’s older sister] forced their hand. There also is the possibility that my mother’s father, John Henry Brown, a  piano mover who is said to have been around 6’4″ with a shoe size in the vicinity of a 13 EEE, might have offered a bit of “encouragement.” My dad was 5’4”.

My father was a printer by trade; and though he was quite erudite, I don’t think he had a college degree. My mother, a social worker and teacher, did.  Until my dad’s death, their 19-year marriage seemed sturdy and stable. For most of their life together, before my father took ill, they were able to live on his salary. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, an arrangement my father preferred.

Faced with the same set of circumstances today, would my parents’ marriage have survived?  Would they have even gotten married in the first place?

Her own story is a quick review of some of the social dynamics within the African American communities decades ago.

Banks says he is offering no advice in his book, but he does conclude that black women might find their professional and intellectuals equals in other races.  Hence, the uproar. I guess I don’t quite understand.  Hasn’t interracial marriage been happening for some time now, in both directions?

One excerpt from Elaine’s interview:

ER: What kind of reactions have you gotten from black men to your book?

Ebenezer's daughter (Photo: Photo by Rachael Behrens)

RB: The reactions range from very positive – Kirkus Reviews described the book as “Triumphant”– to very negative. I’ve been called a “racial pimp” who is trying to “profiteer” off black women’s difficulties with “sensationalized bullcrap”  In addition to my “reprehensible title” I have been told that the book “relies on haphazard, shabby research and unsubstantiated theories wrapped in hollow, sophisticated rhetoric to make you give it a good look.” Of course, these comments are all from people who I know for certain haven’t read the book. 
 Those people who have read the book are struck by its candor, insight, and writing. My favorite response is from a New York Times editor who told me it was “unputdownable.”  One of my aims with the book is to promote a national discussion about the obligations of black women to black men.  The issues are complicated and emotionally fraught, and are perhaps best captured in the question of one CNN viewer: Do black women deserve better than what black men have to offer?

Aside from Kirkus, I think the reviewers were black men. Others are supportive, even if they don’t like, as my brother-in-law put it, “giving the white man a hunting license to take the black man’s woman from him.” “Brothers done lost so much,” he said, “now the woman going to be taken away too!”

I bristle a bit that men still talk about women this way,  as if women were objects without agency, to be passed or ceded from one party to another.  I know, I know, he’s only quoting.  Still I bristle.

The nation, and even the world, is still talking about Alan Gribben‘s new edition of Huckleberry Finn, which eliminates the notorious n-word.  The general public seems to be agin’ it — except for educators, who are showing an interest.  Although the conversation is winding down, I expect it will continue  for some time to come.

Ray: Prepare the students

The latest installment comes from Elaine Ray, journalist and cofounder of the Parent Network for Students of Color.   (She is also, by the way, editor of My Father’s Posts, an intriguing exploration of the writings of her Barbados-born father, also a journalist.)  Here it is:

Imagine being a 12 or 13-year-old Asian-American middle school student in our pre-“post racial society.”  You are in a school in which there are only a handful of black students and race is rarely dealt with in a direct or constructive way, though racially tinged adolescent jokes and taunts are common. Now imagine being a black girl in that class watching your Asian friend squirm as he is asked to read passages from Huckleberry Finn aloud to the rest of his mostly white class.

I am the parent of that black girl who came home from 7^th grade that day horrified at her friend’s embarrassment. Of course, my daughter probably felt her own anguish, but it was easier to project her discomfort on to her friend.

When her father and I approached the teacher about that discomfort, the teacher’s best defense was that she didn’t believe in censorship. I tried to explain to the teacher that I was with her on that, but it was not “whether” she taught the novel that I was concerned about, but “how” she prepared her students for what they were being asked to read. I suggested that she review the work of scholars who had devoted their life’s work to exploring effective approaches to teaching the book.

She didn’t seem to get it, but I trust that in the intervening years, she’s gained some experience as a teacher and has a better understanding of the issue. Perhaps she’s reading the current debate.

My argument has always been that the novel should be taught as it is, but that the adult who is responsible for introducing it to students better damn well know what he or she is doing. Not only do these teachers need to understand and have the skills to articulate the context in which the novel was written, they also need to understand who their students are and the racial context of their lives. Internalizing Jim’s humiliation might be far different in a classroom with a critical mass of black students than it would be in a room in which there is only one.

My daughter’s friend likely was no stranger to the N-word, which by then had pervaded popular culture, but he was sophisticated or intuitive enough to understand the difference between the word’s use in a bravado-filled rap song and its use as a tool of derision in the mouth of Huck.

In a Jan. 16, op-ed piece in the New York Times, author Lorrie Moore writes that the novel is best saved for “college — or even graduate school — where it can be put in proper context.”

She argues that at a time when people are asking themselves how to get boys, particularly black American boys, to read, Huckleberry Finn is likely to turn them off.

“The young black American male of today, whose dignity in our public schools is not always preserved or made a priority, does not need at the start of his literary life to be immersed in an even more racist era by reading a celebrated text that exuberantly expresses everything crazy and wicked about that time . . ..” Moore writes.

What impact the 7^th grade experience had on the members of my daughter’s class, I’ll probably never know. But there is no doubt that her teacher’s cavalier approach to the novel made the prospects for an honest discussion about race in America ever more unlikely.

In “Send Huck Finn to College,” Moore also points out that the remedy is not to replace “nigger” with alternative terms like “slave,” since “the latter word is already in the novel and has a different meaning from ‘nigger,’ so that substitution just mucks up the prose — its meaning, its voice, its verisimilitude.”  She writes:

Moore: Teach it in college

“Huckleberry Finn is suited to a college course in which Twain’s obsession with the 19th-century theater of American hucksterism — the wastrel West, the rapscallion South, the economic strays and escapees of a harsh new country — can be discussed in the context of Jim’s particular story (and Huck’s).

An African-American 10th grader, in someone’s near-sighted attempt to get him newly appreciative of novels, does not benefit by being taken back right then to a time when a young white boy slowly realizes, sort of, the humanity of a black man, realizes that that black man is more than chattel even if that black man is also full of illogic and stereotypical superstitions.”

Fishkin: Give teachers tools (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, incidentally, agrees with Elaine.  In an article about the controversy in The Scotsman, she said:  “Huckleberry Finn is a very challenging book to teach, and if teachers are not prepared to engage in the history of racism in America then they probably shouldn’t teach it,” says Fishkin. “But I think a better strategy than bowdlerisation is to give teachers the tools to teach it effectively. For the last three decades I have been involved in doing that.”

(Incidentally, the journalist, Dani Garavelli, wrote about the n-word:  “Indeed, even writing this article presented a dilemma, as it is has long been the editorial policy of Scotland on Sunday that the word be printed with asterisks, one of only three words that fall into that category, the others being two commonly used swear words.”)

Postscript on 1/20:  From Frank Wilson over at Books Inq.:  “Here’s an idea: Start the class by playing some rap tunes in which the dreaded word appears. Then ask if anybody found the use of the word in those songs offensive. Then read a passage from Huck in which the word also appears. Then ask the same question.”

Postscript on 1/21: Over at Bill Peschel‘s blog — “Would Mark Twain have removed n***** from Huck Finn?  Hell, yes“:

“…Twain had a history of censoring his works, even on “Huckleberry Finn.” He was a working writer, supporting his growing family, his big house in Hartford and his investment in an invention that would have revolutionized newspaper typesetting if it had worked. He worked for a living, and he shaped his writing and his opinions accordingly.”

Bill tells the story about how Twain had three people “patrolling the pages of Huck Finn for outrages against public taste.”  It’s here.