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Africa, Love
By John Hatch
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Africa—in a Mississippi Swamp?
Drive down Highway 61 from Memphis,
Tennessee, into Mississippi, through 70 miles of mostly cotton
fields into the town of Clarksdale. As you cross the Sunflower
River bridge on the highway, there is a road sign reading
"new Africa Road." Turn parallel to the river and
drive a mile or two, then, at the cotton gin of a late-come
plantation, turn right to remain on the New Africa road, and you
will enter Africa. This is
Africa, Love
country,
locale of the exciting new historical novel from
2ndsight-books.com.
Back when Mississippi north of Vicksburg was
covered by the Great Mississippi Swamp,
Africa, Love
details the heat and human passion that transforms a wilderness
camp into an enduring community in a lost chapter of American
history.
Rose and Cicero first pioneered the
wilderness and built their dream world inside, only to have
those connected to them by blood and circumstance move into the
swamp and tumble into each other like so many grains of sand on
the bank of a bayou, a generational flood that challenges the
old ways.
This lost world is vividly imagined in all of
its love, sex, infidelity, courage, and undying loyalty to
family as they stand against rampaging flood waters and the
world outside to fight off railroad land speculators and build a
church to mark their good fortune. |
Africa, Mississippi
Africa's first settlers were runaway slaves.
They made camp inside the Great Mississippi Swamp off on the
west bank of the Sunflower River. Africa shows up on some old US
Army Corps of engineer maps because the Sunflower was the only
way to move crops, and for a time after the Civil War, the Corps
of Engineers had to dredge it for freight traffic. At least
until what became the Illinois central Railroad was built in the
late 1880s.
For former Chicago and Bay-area attorney,
John Hatch, Africa was a page from an unopened book. Hatch was
born in the nearby town of Clarksdale. In the early 40s, he
spent long stretches as a toddler at the home of his
grandparents in what was by then called New Africa. half a
lifetime later, he heard about the older community called Africa
from his Aunt Rose. he would spend the next twenty years
researching and writing about the swamp community called Africa.
Out of that work comes the new historical novel,
Africa, Love.
The Great Mississippi Swamp
Four million acres of swamp land were
wrestled from the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations by 1835, same
time as development of a cotton gin and a steam boat that could
carry freight against fierce Mississippi River current. The
value of slaves to farm that rich swamp land doubled.
But only the fringes of the Great Mississippi
Swamp were farmed, where trees had been cut to fire steam boats
and along bayous that provided transport in and out. Fever,
so-called vagrant Indians, white outlaws, and wild Negroes were
the risk to those who dared enter the swamp. There are no census
records of the place, but the logic of living apart within the
sanctuary of the north Mississippi swamp was simple. Like the
people called maroons elsewhere in the Americas, these men and
women simply chose to live their life apart. the Africans among
them had no faith in finding a better life among white people in
the North. The Great Mississippi Swamp was a place where the
Underground railroad made no stop.
Africa
In the 1830s a rail line was built from
Memphis to Vicksburg to link up with New Orleans. Africa was
already located between the Sunflower River on the east and the
new rail line on the west. the railroad sold land to pay for the
building of its right of way, and settlements were built along
the right-of-way, including the black town of Mound Bayou.
Cutting timber and selling it back to the railroad allowed the
new owners to pay for the land. This was just before the Federal
government erected levees that prevented the Mississippi River
from flooding and renewing the swamp whose tree walls prevented
the Mississippi River from flooding and renewing the swamp whose
tree walls provided sanctuary for settlements of African
Americans, some of whom had chosen years before to live more
hidden than the residents of Mound bayou. Unlike population
began to outgrow its shrinking sanctuary.
With the 1890s, as the railroad sold
off more land, including land in the fringes of Africa to the
east, new residents swelled what had already grown beyond a
wilderness camp. The trail along the northern boundary of Africa
was settled and became a show place for large well-maintained
homes. This became the New Africa Road. Though some inhabitants
of the older community of Africa continued to make moonshine
liquor in less accessible areas, New Africa's gleaming,
enterprise-eager new residents soon began to eclipse the older
community, and to attract the unwelcome attention of land
speculators and Klansmen.
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| Africa, Love
Africa, Love, available from
2ndsightbooks.com, is the most recent installment of
Hatch's New Africa Chronicles. As for Africa, Love in
local bookstores. Wholesale by baker & Taylor, Koen,
Book People. Individual books can also be purchased at
some local bookstores or a 2nssightbooks,com online.
Volume One of the New Africa Chronicles,
Mississippi
Swamp , is also available.
2ndsightbooks.com is a coop press
located in California. PO Box 52 77, Berkeley, CA 94705.
PR contact : 520--528-0946. Retail sales toll-free at
866-455-8209. I received
Mississippi
Swamp yesterday and cannot put it down. Fantastic!
We usually don't do fiction, but because Mississippi
Swamp is of such historical import, I'd like to
consider it for our Anthology.—Audrey Peterson, Editor, American
Legacy Magazine
Counter(s) the
misconceptions of slavery and attempt(s) to set the
record straight.—Chicago Tribune
(July 4, 2001 |
 |
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Africa, Love!
. . . powerful and
compelling . . .—Allen B. Ballard, Where I'm
Bound
John Hatch's "New Africa Chronicles" is an
ambitious and necessary enterprise of creative
remembering to minimize the damage of cultural amnesia.
Mississippi Swamp sketched the determination and passion
of some Africans in Mississippi to found "maroon
spaces" and to resist enslaving temptations during
and after Reconstruction.
Africa, Love continues
that story, focusing in finer detail on characters and
the dynamics of change in late nineteenth-century
Mississippi culture. hatch, like Julie Dash in Daughters
of the Dust, immerses readers in the deep structures of
African American and Southern histories.—Jerry
W. Ward, Jr., Dillard University
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John Hatch Explains "The Origin of the
Chronicles"
Twenty
years ago, my Aunt Rose insisted that if I wanted to be a real
writer I should write about New Africa, located a few miles
outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi, where I was born. She
mentioned a 'road war.' As Rose told it, white men grading a
logging road were ambushed by people who considered the wooded
area to be their sanctuary.
To
that point in my life, Mississippi represented stereotypes and
bad memories, for which reason I had always refused to write
about the South, but it was a Christmas party and Rose was
animated. Maybe a short story set in New Africa.
When
I traveled to Mississippi, I encountered other seniors who added
a number of stories about a time of logging, gunfights with
white people and a wilderness community called Africa. Growing
up, all I had ever seen were endless cotton fields. Apparently,
this Africa had been one of the last remnants of the Great
Mississippi Swamp, also a new concept.
Thinking by this time, why not a novel about some
baaad negroes who refused to be made victim, I searched out
Federal Writer's Project oral history, archival newspapers and
books in Delta libraries. They introduced me to a swamp that
covered all of what became the Delta. A map of the Sunflower
River from the Army Corps of Engineers showed me Africa. . . .
The
first white settlers in what would become the Delta farmed land
cleared for steamboat fuel. After slave imports were banned,
slaves were bought in trade and often stolen to work the new
land. To ease the labor crunch, Irishmen were contracted (often
Shanghaied) to build levees to protect the new farms.
I
reread Saunders Redding and Lerone Bennet, then visited
Mississippi's Department of Archives in Jackson. Hold-over
Confederates attempting to wield power in the Mississippi
Theater of War seized my attention. General Ord was the
commander until Lincoln was assassinated. President Johnson
replaced him with a general from Tennessee. . . . And
back grounding all of this was the swamp. From the first slaves
in the Carolinas abandoned when Native Americans ran European
settlers off, black men and women made inaccessible swamp,
mountains and desert home. History has largely ignored them.
They were maroons, a name applied to indigenous peoples and
slaves from Africa who sought wilderness sanctuary all over the
Americas. Maroons walked away to build new lives, as did the
earliest settlers of Africa.
In my
own lifetime, I had refused to write about Mississippi because
the fiction I had read didn't seem worth adding to. Especially,
I couldn't make human sense of the murky time of Reconstruction.
There are so few stories in the public consciousness about what
actually happened in the day-to-day lives of black people or of
our elected representatives. Growing up I had absorbed
stereotypes and shadow footnotes to a history written by white
people in which war and commerce rendered even ordinary white
folks irrelevant.
A
friend in Chicago did a thesis describing settlement of the
black town of Mound Bayou some few miles southwest of Africa by
ex-slaves off of plantations owned by Joseph and Jefferson
Davis. To her work I added much of what I could glean of my
grandfather's generation who had lived in New Africa, the
farming community that grew out of Africa. Thus,
came into being, my New Africa Chronicles. They recount how
self-reliant African-Americans carved Africa out of The Great
Mississippi Swamp in order to remain both free and as happy as
humanly possible. Five novels in all, the story began with
Mississippi Swamp. The latest is Africa,
Love.
John Hatch was born in Clarksdale,
Mississippi, in 1941, migrated up the mainline to Chicago in the
early Fifties, and now lives in Berkeley, CA with his companion,
Jennifer Ways. In 1980, John heard his Aunt Rose describe a
gun fight in the farming area Rose and Hatch's mother grew up in
known as New Africa, Mississippi. That tale began a twenty year
historical fiction project that became "The New Africa
Chronicles". Africa, Love is volume three. A Harvard Law School graduate, Hatch
practiced law in Chicago from 1966 through 1975. He successfully
managed a Chicago City Council election and formed an Illinois
not-for-profit corporation to sponsor the Black Panther Party
Breakfast For Children Program. With other Bay Area artists in
1991, he organized and performed in Artists For Peace during the
Iraqi campaign.
In late 1975, Hatch moved to California. His
"Episode From An Ancient Script" was produced at San
Francisco's Western Addition Cultural Center in 1979. From the
mid-Eighties on, Hatch gradually withdrew from law practice and
threw himself into researching and writing his epic historical
fiction set in what would this century be called New Africa, MS. The first novel, Mississippi Swamp,
was published in 2001. Poems, "St. Gorbachev and Other
Missionary Positions," appeared in 1991. Poetry and short
stories written by John Hatch have appeared in the magazines,
Genetic Dancer and Cenizas.
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 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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