Fairy Tale by Stephen King

 

I have been a fan of Stephen King and his books for about fifty years, beginning with Carrie. He does horror and dark fantasy so very well. He spends a lot of time on character development and backstories, setting the stage for what is to come. Many people are turned off by this because they feel he goes on too long before getting to the “meat” of the story.

Fairy Tale is a story about loyalty, friendship, and love. The hero, a 17-year-old boy named Charlie Reade, has to leave home and go to a very different, dangerous place to save the aging dog he loves. He suffers and goes through life-threatening events as he not only saves his dog, Radar but strives to save an oppressed people from the ruling evil. There are a lot of references and comparisons to fairy tales, particularly to Rumpelstiltskin.

In his backstory, I learned that Charlie grew up with issues similar to mine. His mother was killed in a freak accident, and, in his grief, his father turned to alcohol. As a child, Charlie took on the family hero role. He cared for his father and took on adult responsibilities while still a child. Dealing with a parent’s alcoholism and grown-up responsibilities affects a child deeply. While Charlie outwardly was kind and helpful, resentful anger burned inside and he and a friend committed deplorable acts.

Eventually, Charlie’s father joined Alcoholics Anonymous, for which Charlie was eternally grateful and made a spiritual pledge. It was with this pledge in mind that Charlie volunteered to help a cranky elderly neighbor who’d fallen off a ladder and broken his leg. The neighbor, Mr. Bowditch, had an elderly lovable dog named Radar that the old man loved dearly. Charlie fell in love with Radar as well.

Once the relationship between Charlie and Mr. Bowditch developed into a friendship, weird events began to happen. Stephen King was leading me toward the meat of the story. Mr. Bowditch had a locked shed, and Charlie began to notice strange scratching noises coming from it. When Charlie asked Bowditch about it, the old man became irritable and refused to answer.

With time, as the friendship solidified, Mr. Bowditch began to confide some of his secrets to Charlie. As his health declined, so did Radar’s. As he was dying, Mr. Bowditch left a tape explaining all the details of the shed, which contained a portal to an alternate world. It was there that Charlie could save Radar from dying of old age. With that, Charlie’s long journey and trials began.

 

Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth. I don’t remember when I learned the meaning of it, but it hasn’t been long. I think that’s shameful I never learned about it in school. In fact, during my entire 12-year experience, we never got past the War of 1812, although Robber Barons (1890s) sounds a tad familiar from ancient American history twelfth grade.

Slavery is our nasty sin no one wants to talk about. We fought a civil war over it. President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The news spread quickly enough in most states and the Thirteenth Amendment, basically ending slavery in the US, came into being earlier in 1865.

News traveled slower than molasses in Texas. On June 19, 1865, some Union soldiers came to Galveston, TX as a part of the Reconstruction. In Galveston, TX, they discovered Black people who were still enslaved! So, the commanding officer broke the news to everyone that they were free and had been for two years. Naturally, the newly freed enslaved celebrated.

When did I learn this? I’m embarrassed to say it’s only been in the last few years, ever since the controversy began over the book 1619. I read it and, in many places, my hair about stood on end and I felt like I was going to throw up. Yes, I felt uncomfortable. I also wished I’d learned about Juneteenth earlier.

I read Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison.

I wanted to read other books, too. I wanted to learn what I hadn’t in school.

I read:

Across That Bridge, by former Congressman John Lewis

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

A Way Out Of No Way by Sen. Raphael Warnock

The Hate U Bring by Angie Thomas

Punch Me to the Gods by Brian Broome

Didn’t Nobody Give A Shit About Carlotta by James Hannaham

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

These are books related not just to the Black experience but also to the experiences of marginalized, mistreated groups.

I mentioned that as a kid and teen, most of what I learned about what went on in history was from reading books.

I learned about Jim Crow and racial discrimination from To Kill A Mockingbird

I learned about ongoing racial discrimination from In the Heat of the Night and a boatload of other books.

I learned about Christian missionaries wiping out the native Hawaiian population from Hawaii by the ideas and diseases they brought. From the same book, I learned about Japanese Americans interred in concentration camps.

I learned about the slaughter and decimation of the Native tribes from Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

I learned about the Holocaust from Exodus

I wish I’d learned these things in school. As I read, there was no guidance. There was no teacher to help explain more of the history and the whys of it all. There was no one with whom I could share my shock and grief that these horrible things really happened.

Especially when you are a child (and I mean right through the teenage years), learning historical facts as awful as these are “discomforting” and that is ever so true. But feeling uncomfortable can be a good thing in the right hands of a teacher. These are events in our history and to learn them doesn’t mean we have to feel uncomfortable or guilty. It just means that we admit the wrong and take responsibility for it. In that way, we don’t keep repeating the wrong.

I am still learning more historical moments I didn’t know before, and I have to say I was today old when I learned it. I can live with the discomfort. I wish half the country would say the same.

 

This Book Triggered Me

 I saw Meredith, Alone by Claire Alexander on display as I walked into the library. I was drawn not only to the interesting title but to the cat looking out the window with Meredith.  I looked at the back cover and read that it was “sweet”, “touching”, “funny”, “charming”, and “hopeful.” Just the ticket for me because I’d just read a sad book.

After I got home, I took a look at the inside cover and felt some concern. It mentioned the positive things in Meredith’s life but then said she was also suffering “treacherous memories of an unstable childhood.” Oh, dear, I thought. Me too. I decided to read the book anyway.

The book is sweet in many places. It has uplifting scenes of hope. It does have its charm. It touched me in a way I didn’t expect, triggering memories. I didn’t find it very funny at all.

From the very first page, I recognized why Meredith was alone. Anxiety and depression is prevalent on my dad’s side of the family; my mother suffered from an undiagnosed mood disorder.  I remember answering my phone just before my marriage to Rich.

One of my cousins was on the phone. Her voice was barely audible and husky. “I’m so sorry I can’t come to your wedding,” she whispered to me. “I can’t leave my apartment.”  She added she hadn’t left her apartment in over 5 years. I assured her that it was OK. I understood and wasn’t offended. She was grateful.

I didn’t know she had agoraphobia. I did know that I had panic attack disorder and so I did very much understand the need to avoid things that provoked anxiety.  About a year or so after our wedding, my cousin said proudly that she’d walked down to the corner grocer. I was delighted. She added, somewhat shamefacedly, that she was only able to get there by carrying a cane. It wasn’t for her protection she assured me. It was like her security blanket.  I didn’t care. The point was she could leave her apartment again.

So, Meredith and her older sister Fiona grew up in an unstable environment. Their dad left when they were very small. Their mother seemed to be uncaring and neglectful; perhaps she had a mood disorder similar to my mother’s. She would be a kind mom one moment and a violent or verbally cruel witch the next. That surely triggered me.

This is what really got me: how did the author know so well about these symptoms and issues? I wondered if she was disguising herself as Meredith. I can’t really tell from the articles and biographies I’ve read about her.  She is so spot-on about what it’s like to have these mental illnesses and yet still function.

Trauma can cause or exacerbate depression and anxiety. Meredith had one other trauma that I didn’t experience, and I thought it might be why she was too anxious to leave her home and I don’t give it a second thought. In spite of what I experienced as a child, I never became as reclusive and afraid to leave home as my cousin did.

The hopeful ideas in the book were that having a mental illness doesn’t and shouldn’t define you. The other idea is you can always get better.

I went back and forth between giving Meredith, Alone three stars (because it hit me so hard) or four stars because Claire Alexander made it all so real. I finally decided not to punish the book for triggering me.

I recommend this book with the caveat that it could trigger memories in the reader.

The Attic Child

 The rest of my writings for the American Cancer Society's write 30 minutes a day in May were offline. I worked on the memoir I've been writing.

I just finished a really good book but it's not for everyone. It can be gut-wrenching.

The cover of The Attic Child by Lola Jaye caught my eye, a profile of an African child wearing a clawed necklace. I read the inside jacket and was intrigued. What an emotionally riveting story it was!  My gut was twisted with anger in some places, my heart felt like it might break in others, and yet I was also filled with hope and joy.

The story is about two children imprisoned in the same attic but decades apart.

The first child, 9-year-old Dikembe, was born in the Congo and had a loving family. Unfortunately, the Congo was occupied by Belgians, and, under the leadership of King Leopold, they were burning villages and committing acts of atrocity. Dikembe’s father was killed by Belgian soldiers. To save her youngest son, the boy’s mother sent him away with a British explorer circa 1901.

Dikembe believed his situation was temporary and that he would soon return to the Congo. Meanwhile, his benefactor, Sir Richard Babbington, treated him as a son. Sir Richard clothed, fed, and educated the boy, and Dikembe lived a life of luxury. However, there were drawbacks. The first was that Babbington changed Dikembe’s name to Celestine. As Dikembe slowly began to realize this might not be a temporary situation, there were other troubling signs about Sir Richard. The man drank like a fish, and he seemed to develop an emotional dependence on Dikembe/Celestine.

Everything changed when Sir Richard suddenly passed away. The will was read, and the house went to Sir Richard’s relatives, the Mayhews. As nothing was specified (then) about Dikembe/Celestine, the Mayhews decided to keep him as a servant. Now, instead of being a pampered son, the boy found himself an overworked servant. Worse, Agatha Mayhew evicted him from his bedroom and locked him in the attic. The attic was bare of anything other than a few trunks and a blanket. The windows were boarded so there was no light. There was no bed and no toilet. It became a barbaric prison.

In the 1960s, Lowra was a happy child with loving parents. They often visited Spain on vacations, and Lowra believed it was because her mother was of Spanish descent. When she was still young, her mother died. She and her father made the best of it and were happy. They were very wealthy, and she was a pampered little girl. Her tutor was Nina, and it was a shock when her father married Nina. Her father mysteriously disappeared while on his honeymoon with Nina.

Nina returned alone and took custody of the grieving Lowra. They didn’t get along very well, and Nina’s moods were unbalanced. One day, Nina was so angry that she dragged Lowra into the attic and locked her in. Until she was 15, Nina only allowed Lowra out for visits with social workers and her grandmother. Nina bullied and abused Lowra so that the child would either say nothing or say she was fine.  She finally managed to escape when she was 15 and was placed in a shelter.

All of this is emotionally wrenching. Both children suffered intolerable abuse and somehow survived after they escaped. The road to healing was long and hard. It began when Lowra visited a museum and saw pictures of Dikembe/Celestine forced to pose with his benefactor Sir Richard. With the help of a historian, Lowra set to work trying to track down the unnamed boy.

In spite of the barbaric way the children were treated, there is still love and hope throughout their lives after their escape.

In the afterword, the author wrote about the inspiration for the book. It is based on a real picture of a child with despairing eyes she saw in a museum exhibit. The picture stayed with her even as she wrote other stories. During the pandemic, she said that the child’s voice demanded to be heard and she wrote this story.

It's a painful read but the author tells Dikembe’s story in a way that is so engrossing, I could hardly bear to put it down and go about my day or to sleep. There is one non-explicit incident of child sexual abuse. In addition to the awful abuse, the story also covers racial and class issues. I thought it was an excellent book and will look for others by this author.