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SUMMARY:Book Shelves\: Martin Luther and Martin Luther King
DESCRIPTION:We have thousands of books in our house. Many are in my downstairs office\, a book-lined green room with a fireplace and filing cabinets on our first floor looking out onto our very busy center city street\, Blair Boulevard.           \n               We also have six floor-to-near-ceiling bookcases in our kitchen\, a small glass front lawyer’s book case in our sitting room\, and four more floor to near-ceiling bookcases in our daughter’s bedroom. In the last few years towers of books\, from shin high to breast high\, organized both topically and structurally\, have begun to appear in corners\, under furniture\, and on furniture.\n  We did not expect to resort to towers. Nine years ago\, just before we moved into this house\, we built a 16-foot-long\, nine-foot-tall case in our upstairs hall and turned it into our library. Or rather Manuel Zeitlan\, the architect who renovated Al and Tipper Gore’s home\, walked through and gifted us with its proportions with waves of his hand\, and a songwriter friend-of-a-friend built and painted it.\n  In 2000 there was space in the newly painted shelves for the odd framed photograph and child made clay object. A few years later all the shelves were full with books and we had begun judiciously double shelving. After that the towers began. Our upstairs library is stuffed full.\n                  The collection is largely focused on the antebellum African American Experience. Its core is a selection of histories\: Bounded Lives\, Bounded Places Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans 1769-1803 by Kimberly S. Hanger\; or Black Southerners 1619-1869 by John B. Boles\; or Major Butler’s Legacy Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family by Malcolm Bell\, Jr.. These are the kinds of books we have a lot of in our hall library. We also have novels\, primarily English and American novels published before 1950. And we have a small collection of books telling us\, or purporting to tell us\, how to do things\: buy a house\, roof\, paint\, garden\, collect or repair an old book\; write a movie\, short story\, or novel. There's even a tiny collection of fabulous southern murder mysteries. There would be more murder mysteries but I give most of those away after reading—except for the coziest and the most racially interesting. But mainly we have a lot of southern history in the hall. And the digressions are telling.\n    The first book I acquired that is apart of this collection is my Luther’s Small Catechism. As a young girl in Detroit\, Michigan attending the segregated all black St. Phillip’s Lutheran school in the mid-sixties\, I dutifully memorized from this book after graduating from a brown-covered\, stapled-together booklet that we called My Little Memory Book .\n  Luther’s Small Cathechism poses questions\, presents very precise answers\, and then fully quotes the Bible verse from which any particular answer is drawn. Questions\, answers\, and evidence is a very different gestalt than questions and answers. Because Martin Luther was generous enough to cite his sources I was able\, on many occasions\, to come to my own very different conclusions. Luther’s Small Cathechism taught me to ask questions and to find my own answers.\n  One of the first big questions I ever asked was about my two Martins\, the Martins I heard so much talk about when I was in the first years of elementary school\: Martin Luther and Martin Luther King.\n  I asked myself why it was half my world only knew about Martin Luther King and half my world only knew about Martin Luther. In segregated Detroit in the midsixties there wasn’t anybody to tell me that Martin Luther King was named for Martin Luther.\n  The first book my husband acquired that’s in our library is his sixth grade copy of The Great Gatsby. A central fact about Gatsby is the mystery of his origins—which brings me to our two rocking chairs.\n               Our hall library is a clean\, well lit\, space. Light floods in from a window that is as wide as the hall and almost as tall. There are Oriental rug runners on the rosewood floors. There are more family portraits. There’s a Teddy Bear collection that was very helpful integrating a stepfather into a zealously femme\, tight knit and dynamic  mother-daughter duo-- and there are two cherrywood rocking chairs.\n              In 1998 a tornado blew through The Hermitage\, home of President Andrew Jackson\, knocking down over a thousand trees. In the aftermath it was decided to turn the fallen trees into chairs and cradles\, into bowls and ink pens-- to accept the unexpected lumber as a kind of gift. My husband gave me two of the rocking chairs Christmas of 1999. Sometimes when I settle into either of the rockers the cherrywood taunts me with a question\: Is husband David a descendent of Andrew Jackson?\n  Andrew Jackson owned a slave who is my husband’s ancestor. This woman and her children are among the very\, very few slaves Jackson ever had baptized. Ewing family oral history suggests there was something intimate in the relationship between this lady and the future President.\n               The same Christmas David gave me the rocking chairs\, I gave him a manuscript of The Wind Done Gone all tied of in ribbons. What I really wanted to give him was his family history all tied up in ribbons. \n               One of the books in this photograph is Slave Testimony. It is intriguing to live in an era in which the dead are beginning to speak through the blood of their descendents providing silent witness to the most intimate\, very often undocumented\, and often secret alliances. If ever David decides he wants to know more about his relation to Jackson beyond whispers and circumstantial evidence I trust the good people of the Ladies Hermitage Historical Foundation will help him get hold of a strand of Jackson’s hair. And I hope\, if and when the times comes that David decides to compare his DNA to Andrew’s he swabs his cheek or pricks his finger\, in our Hermitage cherrywood chairs. Until then I will be wondering where we will find walls for the shelves of all the books waiting to be written.\n
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CATEGORIES:african-american-history,hermitage,martin-luther-king,slave-testimony
CLASS:PUBLIC
SEQUENCE:22
DTSTAMP:20100123T110328
CREATED;TZID=US-Central:20090722T173832
LAST-MODIFIED;TZID=US-Central:20090823T175800
DTSTART;TZID=US-Central:20090722T172100
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