Lucy Honeychurch Emerson

Helena Bonham Carter 1985

Lucy, the heroine of E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View [1908], grows up at Windy Corner in the Surrey hills in southeast England, a house impertinent, and inevitable, built by her father. According to Mr. Beebe, a local curate, she has dark hair and an undeveloped face, but she plays the piano wonderfully. “If Miss Honeychurch ever undertakes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her,” he says.

Lucy is sent by her mother to Italy, to broaden her outlook, with her cousin Charlotte for a chaperone. In Florence they are disappointed to find their room in the Pensione Bertolini has no view, but the Emersons, a father and son, offer to exchange. Though the English residents of the pensione are nervous about each other’s status, they decide that, at least in Italy, they will do. Except for the Emersons, who are free thinkers and of the rising working class. Mr. Emerson, in particular, says exactly what he thinks.

One day Lucy sets off with another resident to buy reproductions. When she is abandoned, however, an altercation in the Piazza Signorini results in a man’s death. Lucy faints and is lifted into the arms of George Emerson. She is embarrassed, but George makes her sit by the river until she is calmer. She begs him not to tell anyone how silly she has been, but George feels a profound connection with her.

Another day, most of the residents set off into the hills in two carriages. Lucy’s cousin talks to her friend and Lucy, in poor Italian, begs their driver to help her find the curate. Instead the driver shows her to a field of violets at the edge of a promontory. George stands there and he kisses Lucy, but as he does so, they hear Charlotte above calling for Lucy. Lucy and Charlotte swear each other  to secrecy and Charlotte reprimands George. In the morning they leave for Rome.

In Rome, Lucy meets Cecil, a rich, well-connected young man. Cecil asks Lucy to marry him. Twice she refuses him, but when they get back to England, to Windy Corner, she accepts. Her mother doesn’t like Cecil and neither does her brother Freddie, but they fall back on the sort of platitudes which allow everyone to participate in an engagement. Even Mr. Beebe, who thinks it a bad idea, participates in the merriment. “They pulled themselves together. Their hypocrisy had every possibility of coming true.”

Cecil cynically offers a vacant villa next to the church to the Emersons to rent. Lucy is inwardly horrified and rehearses the bow she will make to George, “bowing across the rubbish that cumbers the world.” But it doesn’t matter if she is getting married, she thinks. When he hears Lucy is in the neighborhood, George decides it is fate that brings them together.

When Mr. Beebe and Freddie call on the Emersons, Freddie asks whether they would like to go for a bathe, as the “sacred pool” in the woods has enough water in it because of the rain. Even Lucy used to bathe there when younger. George, Freddie and even Mr. Beebe frolic naked in the pool when along come Lucy, her mother and Cecil! 

Another day, Freddie asks George to play tennis. Cecil will not make up a fourth for doubles, but rather stalks about reading a bad novel out loud. Lucy realizes it is by one of their Italian friends. In it a boy kisses a girl in a field of violets. Charlotte has told! Everyone behaves badly. Cecil is supercilious, winces whenever Lucy speaks. When he goes back to retrieve the book, George kisses Lucy again!

Charlotte is asked to Windy Corner and Lucy confronts her. Charlotte thinks Lucy must tell her fiancé about George, in case he finds out from some other source. Lucy feels she is in a muddle. She tells George he must not come back to Windy Corner. George remonstrates: “ You don’t mean you are going to marry that man? He daren’t let a woman decide. You listen to his voice and not your own. I love you. I cannot live without you. Love and youth matter, intellectually.” But Lucy does not relent and George leaves.

The scales have fallen from Lucy’s eyes, however. She tells Cecil she cannot marry him. “I won’t be protected. I won’t be stifled. People are more glorious than art and books and music.” Cecil takes it well. “It is true. I am the sort who can’t know anyone intimately. It is a revelation. I won’t forget your insight.”

Lucy decides she must go away. When friends plan to go to Greece she decides to go with them. She says to herself, I must go to Greece because I don’t love George. But everyone else is mystified. Her mother is upset. When the women go in to church in the rain, Lucy stops at the rectory, drawn by the fire. And here she finds old Mr. Emerson, the plain-speaking father of George. He tells her George wasn’t baptized and when he got typhoid at 12, his mother thought it retribution. She died but George didn’t. “We are going back to London,” he says. “George doesn’t want to live.”

When Mr. Beebe comes in he tells Mr. Emerson that Lucy will not go to Greece with Cecil. “My dear, you are in a muddle!” he says. “You love George. You must marry or your life will be wasted!” Lucy cries. “I have misled myself and everyone else,” she says. “We fight for more than love, or pleasure,” says Mr. Emerson. “Truth counts.”

Lucy and George go back to Florence, to the Pensione Bertolini and kiss in the room with the view. Lucy fears she has alienated her family. Freddie calls their marriage an elopement. “If we act the truth, the people we love will return to us, won’t they?” Lucy asks, hopefully.

Anyone might think that for a middle-class, well-off girl to get down to the truth of her real feelings isn’t much of a mountain. But given the mores and values of the stilted social world, I believe it is. E. M. Forster has put his own life-blood into this story: his socialist views, insights gained from all his travels and his love of flesh and blood people. It is a dramatic demonstration of how we come to clarity in the midst of chaotic life.

In an appendix attached to some editions of the book, Forster suggests that Lucy and George are happy and that they have three children. A conscientious objector in the First World War, George fights in the Second. The house where Lucy lives in London is destroyed by bombs. Forster cannot decide where George and Lucy then settle.

Jacaranda Leven

Eve Babitz

Jacaranda grew up at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Her father was a musician who worked for  20th Century Fox and her mother was an artist. She and her sister spent all their time in the ocean, and had tar on the bottoms of their feet. “She looked as if she’d washed up on the shore, a piece of driftwood with blonde seaweed caught at one end.”

Jacaranda, the protagonist of Eve Babitz’ novel, Sex and Rage [1979], paints surfboards, buying an old Plymouth with the money. Her “sentimental education” begins when she moves to West Hollywood at 19 to live with Coleman. She immerses herself in the rock and roll scene of musicians, artists, models. “It was like an open city, a port at the crossroads of all directions.” But after five years, she is tired of living in a place with the blinds down during the day, tired of rock and roll. “I think I’ll move back to the beach.”

In Maui she runs into Gilbert Wood, surfing during a hurricane. Gilbert introduces Jacaranda to Max, who is curious about the affair between Jacaranda and Gilbert. He is homosexual, but once Max notices Jacaranda, “the only truth was Max’s truth.” He was tall with bright golden hair and blue eyes. “Every move was like spring water, clear and salt-free.” She had never met a man who was passionate about elegance.

Max invites Jacaranda to one of the parties he gives in a penthouse apartment. Everything is perfect, including his rich friends. For a while Jacaranda goes to all of Max’s parties, but then Max’s attention turns poisonous. Jacaranda drinks too much, becomes boring. One day Max steps back from a painting Jacaranda is doing and asks, “Is that the blue you’re using?” Jacaranda stops painting. Even Gilbert tells her he doesn’t hang around Max any more. “Too dangerous.”

Meanwhile, Jacaranda begins writing. A piece of hers is accepted by a major magazine and she is paid for it. Max’s friends tell her, “Don’t write, darling. It’s not nice.” But in a cafe, Jacaranda is handed a card by a New York agent who wants to represent her. She also runs into her old friend Shelby, whom she has known since she was 14. He is still surfing, a master of balance, “wicked and more coyote-looking than ever.” He had been hers from the beginning.

Every Monday at 7 am, Janet, the New York agent, calls Jacaranda to ask how her book is going. Jacaranda fears she cannot write a whole book. She has always known she wouldn’t be successful. “She is much too LA to be taken seriously.” She is frightened of the way people have begun to treat her, of the money she makes. She would rather have kept her fly-on-the-wall anonymity.

“But real pain only came to Jacaranda when she thought about Max … she only sometimes heard the sound of Max laughing.” Max and his friends have decamped to New York. 

After almost a year of phone calls from Janet, Jacaranda pastes all of her pieces together into a book, titles it and sends it off to New York. Janet hands the book to the best editor at the best publishing company in town, who makes a smooth, perfect book out of Jacaranda’s harem, scarum stories. From then on, Janet’s phone calls insist that Jacaranda come to New York. She must meet people.

But these requests throw Jacaranda into a tizzy. She has been drinking too much, is getting fat. New York is too public, there’s no ocean and Max is there. She is growing dependent on Shelby, but treats him badly in her growing anxiety. She resolves to wreck an upcoming party by inviting an old flame who broke the heart of the host.

At the party, Sunrise Honey, blonde and gorgeous, is knocked down by her boyfriend. “I told you not to dance,” he yells. Jacaranda feels terrible. It is all her fault. The next day Jacaranda convinces Sunrise Honey to run away with her to Mexico. They only get as far as La Jolla, but there, together, they solve their problems. The sky is very blue and they walk on the beach. Sunrise Honey calls her mother, who sends her money enough to become independent. Jacaranda buys a round-trip ticket to New York.

Two days before she leaves, Jacaranda stops drinking, which isn’t as hard as stopping smoking, she finds. New York is beautiful in the spring. Jacaranda stays with her friend Winnie and walks around the city, anthropomorphizing everything. She is alternately euphoric and emotional. Visiting her editor Walter, the last gentlemen publisher, she finds him in jeans and a plaid shirt. She tells him she is terrified. He smiles at her, very young.

Janet, by contrast, is worldly-wise, a paragon of cosmetic beauty, but a dear friend. Between Walter and Janet, at lunch at the Russian Tea Room, Jacaranda feels safe. New York is madly beautiful, full of all the treasures on earth. On the newsstands, Gilbert Wood’s face, a newly-minted film star, shines up.

By the end of the week, Jacaranda has begun to look ten years younger and has to buy new slacks as the ones she brought are falling off. Janet takes her to Elaine’s, along with Winnie. Jacaranda’s senses are awry and vibrant. “She could smell Max.”

At 2 am, Gilbert Wood calls and asks her to come to the Plaza Hotel. She and Winnie walk over. The Plaza is enchanted, but there, opening the door, is Max. Max felt like home, he was a tango partner Jacaranda couldn’t escape. But “she couldn’t afford Max. She couldn’t afford that much truth. If she ever caught him, he would stop being Max.” 

When Gilbert Wood comes in, Winnie clasps her hands to her breast. Gilbert kisses Jacaranda, bites her neck. Max juggles three oranges. Another friend comes and whisks Winnie and Max off to his party. Gilbert and Jacaranda talk of the perfect parties Max used to give. She is pleased someone besides her had noticed that something from Max still glowed in the dark. “For him it was art,” says Gilbert. “For me it was love.”

Before she leaves for Los Angeles and home (where Shelby will pick her up), Jacaranda goes to her godmother Sonia’s apartment. Sonia is 90 and lives off Central Park. She had always sat Jacaranda down and said, you must tell me everything. “The reason she had remembered details, kept track of people, fixed things in her mind, was all to keep Sonia thrilled. Sonia listened with rapt silence.” Knowing a woman like Sonia, watching her have a good time, “left you with the feeling of having experienced truly great art.”

At the airport, Jacaranda thinks, “tomorrow she would be out on her board in the ocean. She had always been lucky. She had seen the worst of the old world seductions. Here she still was. She’d lived to tell the tale.”

When I knew I would be moving to Los Angeles, I looked around for local writers and discovered Babitz. Reading her, you find that all of her work is semi-autobiographical. Unlike some writers, who look only for apocalyptic disaster in the city and see it as a wasteland, Babitz, is sunny, casual, meandering and unpretentious. “It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in LA, to choose it and be happy here,” she said. Babitz died December 17, 2021. “Her sentences split trees,” said Ethlie Ann Vare, in memoriam. “She scared powerful people, and it kept her work from getting the recognition it deserved in her time.” 

Anya Raneva

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Anya is a character in The Orchard [published 2022], by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry. Though her story is told in the first person and it happens to her, Anya tells it as if she were a part of something greater, part of a family, a generation, or a country.

Anya lives with her parents, who are aero-space engineers, and her grandmother, at the edge of Moscow. She and her best friend, Milka, are inseparable, going to school together, sharing homework and plans. Milka is thin, always famished, but very smart and possessed of a fearless honesty which Anya envies. Milka lives with her mother and stepfather. Anya’s mother thinks her hunger is from the lovelessness in her household.

In summer, Milka spends all three months with Anya’s family at their dacha near Moscow, a modest summer home set in an apple orchard. Everyone enjoys the long summer days, gathers mushrooms and herbs and helps preserve apples to liven up their winter diets. Victory day in May is celebrated with a barbecue with the neighbors.

Though loving, Anya’s parents never stop arguing about their country. Her father feels Russia saved the world from Nazi fascists in World War II, but her mother feels they aren’t free, that their lives are controlled by their government. Grandmother survived the Leningrad blockade. She doesn’t argue, “courage and sadness tucked into the folds of her face.” 

Anya and Milka are 14 in 1982 when Brezhnev dies. They want to travel, enjoy life. They smoke and explore their bodies, playing a Queen tape over and over, “We are the champions, and we’ll keep on fighting to the end.”

When Andropov dies in 1984, Anya’s father feels that it is the end of an era. He is frightened for his daughter. Anya and Milka invite two boys into their close friendship. Lopatin is of peasant stock, attractive but not smart. Trifonov is a bookworm, of noble blood, but asthmatic. “If the iron curtain collapses, we’ll be blinded by the light,” they think. “But the world will see our disabilities.” “Maybe the world has its own disabilities.” “Our country is the only thing we will love and hate forever,” says Milka.

The four friends stick together when they take a class trip to the Crimea, visiting Chekhov’s home and Yalta where peace was concluded in 1945. It is sunny and warm. Milka is sleeping with Lopatin, and Anya with Trifonov by this time. At night they bring cherries and wine to the beach, swimming naked out to a rock and looking out at the infinite sky and stars beyond.

Every day the news sounds worse that year, but at New Years there is still enough for a celebration at Anya’s house, with duck, potato salad, caviar, chocolate, mandarins, champagne and presents. Anya is infinitely happy, in love with life. In March, Gorbachev comes to power. Everyone worries, but they teeter on the cusp of happiness. Anya’s class prepares to present Hamlet with Milka playing the lead role.

At Easter, at the dacha, the four start a fire to keep warm, but Trifonov sees that Lopatin is burning the pages of a book. “The country is like this orchard. Your ancestors were dutiful revolutionaries, but they walked on corpses,” he says. Lopatin responds, “Your people pretty much fucked up this country and then tried to blame mine. But it’s over. We’ll build a new country, plant a new orchard.” They fight and Trifonov ends up in the hospital.

Later that spring, Milka asks Anya to punch her in the stomach. She is pregnant by her stepfather and hopes to miscarry. Anya is horrified, at first refuses, and then pummels Milka. She goes home, but Milka calls her, asking Anya to come and bury the dead baby. Anya does this, taking the baby out to the dacha and burying it under an apple tree. Then she hears that Hamlet cannot continue, as Milka is dead. Anya is in shock. She cannot tell anyone what really happened, cannot betray her friend. She goes to the funeral. Both Lopatin and Trifonov speak, but Anya does not emerge from her depression for months.

At last Anya matriculates into the Institute of Foreign Languages. She loses herself in the study of literature. She goes to the United States as an exchange student, meets a contractor named Mike, and marries him in a small country wedding in Virginia in 1991. Though she talks to her parents constantly by phone, she does not return to Russia for 19 years.

When she does finally go back, she finds things much the same. Her grandmother has died and her parents are retired, though her father goes to an outdoor market every day to sell what he can. Everything is shabby and run down, the stores full of luxury goods, but the prices are so high, her family cannot afford them. They refuse the money Anya tries to give them. A developer wants to put a resort where their dacha and orchard are. A meeting of all the neighbors is called and they refuse to sell. Anya finds that Lopatin is associated with the developer. He tells them it is a good deal. “The developer always gets what he wants.”

Anya goes to Milka’s house, trying to find out how she died. She tells Milka’s stepfather Milka died because of him, but he insists it was Anya’s fault. “She bled to death,” he finally says. “We couldn’t save her.” No one wanted to say what had really happened.

At New Year’s, Anya’s family again plans a family celebration. Lopatin arrives in a Father Frost costume. When Anya suggests they call Trifonov, Lopatin is startled to find that she doesn’t know he died protesting in the coup in 1991. Anya accuses her parents of hiding the news from her and leaves with Lopatin. They go out to the dacha.

“What is it like to live in the United States?” Lopatin asks. “Like I have no legs. I can’t find my footing. It’s familiar and foreign at the same time.” She tells Lopatin about her husband, about what happened to Milka. Lopatin has never married, has Milka’s name tattooed on his arm. “Trifonov waited for the moment he could prove himself a hero. He was reciting from Chekhov when the tank mowed him down. We are the survivors, the champions of the world.” Anya finds that “no amount of truth could change us, but the little that we knew felt like everything.”

The dacha and cherry orchard are sold and Anya’s mother and father come to Virginia for a visit. They lay out and plant an orchard with Anya’s husband, language being no barrier. Anya finds the rootstock often comes from Russia.

The intimacy with which Anya’s story is told, full of sensuous detail and human truth, allows us to fully enter the world she describes. Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry wanted to tell the story of her Generation Perestroika, which uncovered truths and then had their hope betrayed. The story is full of her own nostalgia as an emigrant, longing for a home to which she cannot return. I hear the depths and breadth in her voice which we have come to expect from the great country of Russia. 

Emma Rauschenbach Jung

Emma Rauschenbach was born in a lovely house in Switzerland on the Rhine into a family of well-off manufacturers in 1882. Quiet and studious, Emma would have liked to go to university and study natural history, but this wasn’t permitted to women of her class. She broke off a conventional engagement when Carl Jung, an impoverished Swiss doctor, began courting her. 

Jung was handsome, extroverted and intense. He told Emma about his patients, gave her books to read and encouraged her studies. Finally, after rejecting him once, and under the influence of her mother who knew Jung’s family, Emma accepted him. They were married in 1903 and had a honeymoon in Paris and London before taking up residence in Zurich.

Jung worked at the Bergholzli Clinic which was becoming renowned for its innovative treatment of the mentally ill. The staff and their families lived on the site, where Jung researched word associations as well as listened deeply to patients. Patients worked in the gardens and did domestic work, dined with the staff and participated in social events. Emma, living in this hot-house atmosphere, helped with research and reports and learned a lot. Her first two daughters were born while the family lived at the clinic.

Jung was especially popular with women patients. His second personality, introverted and insecure, responded positively to them. In particular, a Russian patient, Sabina Spielrein, sought his attention. Her dementia was cured by Jung, but that was not the end of her infatuation. Emma was hurt by the rumors. She asked for a divorce, which she knew Jung did not want. Instead, she and Jung began to plan a house of their own.

During this time, the couple visited Sigmund Freud in Vienna several times. Freud was very taken with Jung and hoped he would become his heir in psychiatry. The two of them traveled to America together to lecture. But Jung could not agree with Freud on the roots of psychosis and this fractured their relationship. Emma wrote to Freud, fearing the pair could not agree, but then backed off when she felt she had made a fool of herself.

By 1909 the new house in Kusnacht was ready. Jung resigned from the Bergholzli Clinic and took up private practice. Emma became more of a partner at this time, running the household, making appointments and having three more children by the time she was 32. Jung was impetuous, unrestrained and constantly driven by his complexes to travel and work. Emma was quiet, steady, stepping in for Jung when he traveled and providing the normal home life Jung depended upon.

The years before World War I were difficult for the Jungs. A definitive break with with Freud led Jung to go deep into his own unconscious. He was helped in this by another patient, Toni Wolff, who became a fixture at the Jung house for many years to come. Jung began his Red Book and colleagues felt he was “dicing with madness,” though they admired his courage in doing so. He shared his psychic experiences with both Emma and Toni, a woman with forbidding, mystic eyes, who seemed to be all spirit. Emma felt jealous and disassociated, going about looking elegant, but with head bowed. The children didn’t like Toni, but Emma did not allow them to be uncivil to her.

Jung told Emma she must find her own way, stop relying on him and the children, individuate. She began an analysis with a colleague. When American friends built a place for a Psychological Club in Zurich in 1916, Emma became its president. She steered the group when it had money problems and sometimes lectured. When she began to work with patients of her own, Emma was simple and direct, helping others to find their own way, as she had.

Emma also continued her life long interest in the legend of the Holy Grail, beginning a book on it which was eventually published. It represented the quest of “every individual for psychic health and wholeness, who, by asking the right questions, could free themselves from the dark forces of the unconscious.” [Labyrinths: Emma Jung, her Marriage to Carl, and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis by Catrine Clay, 2016]

By the mid 1930’s Jung seemed to be less attached to Toni Wolff. He was building his tower at Bollingen and interested in alchemy. He and Emma traveled to America, London, and Glastonbury for Emma’s study of the Grail legends. When World War II began, the family moved up into the Alps, but returned when it was deemed safe. Jung had a heart attack in 1944. Emma never left his side. They had learned from each other and depended upon each other all their lives.

At the house in Kusnacht, Emma reigned, modest and strong; aristocratic in a positive way. There were now 19 grandchildren rambling around. Emma was always available, respected and loved. In 1955 she became ill with cancer and died in November. Jung was 80 and very broken up, though he lived another five years.

Emma’s life long struggle was to live beside a powerful, charismatic man who attracted many people to him and his all-consuming work. Observers felt she had gone through a “spectacular transformation” during her marriage. Carl Jung’s strength came through her, but he was always encouraging of her work and the role she played as well. I read the biography by Catrin Clay noted above, but there have also been others. It is easy to believe, as it was said, that her presence was a gift to all she met.

Melba Pattillo Beals

Melba Beals grew up in a middle class black suburb of Little Rock. She had a room of her own where she kept stuffed animals, listened to Nat “King” Cole and Johnny Mathis, and wrote in the diary her Grandmother gave her to make her complaints to God. She was afraid of white people, but also wanted to ride on the merry-go-round in the park, which was forbidden.

Born in December, 1941, Melba lived with her mother, who was a teacher, her grandmother, and brother. Her parents had divorced when she was seven. Melba hated seeing how frightened her parents seemed to be of whites. When the family visited relatives in Cincinnati, she was thrilled by how simple relations between whites and blacks seemed, and wanted to move there. But she had volunteered to be among those ready to integrate Little Rock’s big Central High School. The day arrived sooner than she expected, though Orval Faubus, Arkansas’ governor was dead set against it. 

Integration began in September, 1957, and as Melba’s grandmother said, “all Hades broke loose.” The day school opened, such a hateful mob gathered at the school that Melba and her mother barely escaped. For the next few days she and the other eight black students waited at the NAACP office studying by themselves. Eisenhower co-opted the Arkansas National Guard which Faubus had used to prevent students from coming to school, and sent in the 101st Airborne Division of the army to protect the students. 

On September 23, 1957, the nine students went to school. Melba was 15, a junior. She was terrified. Her grandmother told her, “You are a warrior. God’s warriors don’t cry. You pull yourself together and recite the 23rd Psalm.” In classes Melba was the only black. She was called names, kicked, spit upon and slapped. Between classes, at least at the beginning, her guard Danny protected her, following her with a rifle and bayonet.

In addition to the hatred Melba faced at school, she lost her old friends, who felt she was too “fancy” for them. The phone at their house never stopped ringing, with people giving their opinions. Some nights Grandma India sat up with her rifle across her lap. Weekends were more normal with Melba going to church with her family.

As the weeks went on, Melba was harassed at every turn. “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t goin’ to integrate,” students shouted. The teachers didn’t seem to have any control over the situation. Gym class was horrific. She was scalded in the shower, her clothes stolen. When acid was doused in her eyes, Danny washed them out with water, saving them. Danny too told Melba she must become a warrior and taught her ways to protect herself. By November the 101st Airborne was gone. The Arkansas guards watched, but did nothing.

By the end of January, when Melba told her grandmother she wished she were dead, her grandmother gave her Gandhi to read. “Fighting back is never a solution,” she said. “Anger brings defeat. Change the rules of the game. Thank your tormentors.” Melba did achieve some peace with this strategy, but the abuse didn’t stop. Once when an angry group came toward her, a white kid, Link, told her to take his car. He called her at night and prepared her for what might happen the next day. He pretended to be a segregationist, but he protected Melba as he was able.

As school came to a close, the segregationists were determined to prevent the one senior in the group, Ernie, from graduating. Senior events were canceled. Officials told Melba’s mother her next teaching contract would be canceled if she didn’t take Melba out of high school. But Grandmother India had a remedy for this too. “We’ll go see Bishop Sherman.” That did the trick and Melba’s mother was given a contract.

Finally school was over. Ernie graduated and the “Little Rock Nine” as the group came to be known, traveled to several cities, receiving awards for their courage and meeting people. Melba prepared to go back to school in the fall, but Governor Faubus closed all the high schools in the city!

That year was lonely for Melba. Her grandmother got leukemia and died in October. The following year the NAACP put out a call for families in which students could board and finish school. Melba went to Santa Rosa, California, where she boarded with a Quaker family, George and Carol McCabe. She then continued on to San Francisco State.

Melba married John Beals and had a daughter, Kelli, but was divorced a few years later as she wanted to have a career. She worked as a journalist, getting a master’s in journalism; and then as an educator, with a doctorate. Her first book, Warriors Don’t Cry [published 1994], detailing her year at Central High School, was followed by White Is a State of Mind [published 1999] which discussed Beals’ further coming of age.

I especially loved the descriptions of Melba Beals’ family life in her books, utterly normal in the mid-century modern sense. In the photographs, she and the other teenage girls all wear the crinolines I had to fight for! In the years after high school, Beals embodied all the feminine quandaries of our time. She never stopped using her faith and the grounding words of her Grandmother India to help her through the moral and professional questions which she faced. Becoming a pioneer activist, she lost her original community, but gained much. She continues to live on the west coast.

Irina Ratushinskaya

Irina Ratushinskaya was born in Odessa, then part of the U.S.S.R., in 1954. She graduated in physics and married Igor Gerashchenko, a physicist. They worked for human rights in Kiev, photographing books and signing an appeal on behalf of the dissident physicist Sakharov. Both of them became Christians, though they did not acquire a Bible until 1980. Irina worked as a primary school teacher and her poems were published in samizdat. The two of them were arrested in Moscow at a protest in 1981 and held for ten days.

Irina was again arrested in 1982 and sentenced to seven years for “agitation against the Soviet regime.” While in prison, she smuggled her poetry out to her husband who published it. The poetry celebrated the small good things happening around her, such as frost on the windows. She became one of the most well-known Russian dissidents in her time. She was released early, in 1986, just ahead of the summit between U.S. president Reagan and Gorbachev, the Russian premier. She was 32.

I became aware of Ratushinskaya through my reading of The New York Review of Books, which featured her plight in prison, and then interviewed her in 1987 on her release. I was fascinated that she was close to me in age (nine years younger), and that her trials were going on half a world away from me. In my journal, on 11.12.87, I wrote:  “If I look at houses with lighted windows imagining that behind them ordinary, happy people live, how must it have been for her to look out at the mountains and know that beyond them were her husband and friends.” 

When her book Grey Is the Color of Hope was published in 1988, I learned exactly what her thoughts and experiences in prison were. In it she writes of the friendships she made with the other eleven political prisoners in “the small zone” in a notorious penal colony in Mordovia as they tried to preserve their humanity. They made gloves, tried to plant a few vegetables and, when one of them was sent to the horrifying Shizo isolated, unheated detention, tried to protect each other.

On the day she was released, October 10, 1986, Irina wrote in thanks to those who had kept her name alive:

Believe me, it was often thus:

In solitary cells, on winter nights
A sudden sense of joy and warmth
And a resounding note of love.
And then, unsleeping, I would know
A-huddle by an icy wall:
Someone is thinking of me now,
Petitioning the Lord for me.
My dear ones, thank you all
Who did not falter, who believed in us!
In the most fearful prison hour
We probably would not have passed
Through everything – from end to end,
Our heads held high, unbowed –
Without your valiant hearts
to light our path.

After her release, Ratushinskaya and Gerashchenko lived and worked in Chicago and then in London, where their twin sons were born. They wished to give their sons a Russian education, however, so they began attempts to reclaim their Russian citizenship. They returned to Moscow in 1998. There, Irina continued to write, her books translated into many languages. She died of cancer in 2017.

Nao Yasutani

At 16, Nao Yasutani begins a diary, telling of her life in Japan after she and her family had to leave Sunnyvale, California, because her father, a brilliant programmer, had lost his job. This diary, together with letters written by her great uncle Haruki Yasutani, a kamikazi pilot during World War II, washes up on a beach in British Columbia. Ruth, a writer, finds the packet wrapped in layers of plastic and begins a search to find out whether the diary and Nao are real.

The diary begins by telling us of Nao’s miserable family life in a tiny apartment in Tokyo. Her father can’t find work and her mother finally takes a job to support the family. After her father’s failed suicide, Nao has little faith in him. She misses California, where she lived from age 3 to 14. She can barely speak contemporary Japanese and at school she is first physically bullied and then ostracized with a mock funeral, which is filmed and put on-line. “In my heart, I am American,” she says.

That summer, Nao goes to stay in a mountain monastery northeast of Tokyo with her 104-year-old great grandmother, the nun Jiko. Jiko had been an intellectual and writer and Nao has great respect for the tiny woman. Jiko inquires into Nao’s anger and teaches her to sit zazen. “It can become your superpower,” she says. On the beach below the temple, Jiko encourages Nao to fight with the waves rolling in. She requires Nao to run up and down the steep temple steps every morning. 

All summer, Nao works in the temple kitchen, bathes in the hot springs and listens to her great-grandmother’s wisdom. “Up, down, same thing,” she says. “Not same, but not different.” Once when they are on a walk and Nao sees some scary girl bikers, she tries to hurry Jiko past. But Jiko takes her time and bows to them. The girls return the bow.

At the end of the summer the Obon festival, at which the spirits of the dead burst through the membrane separating them from the living, is celebrated at the temple. In the shrine room, in the dark, Nao believes her father has come, but it is actually her great-uncle Haruki. The man is quite young. He sings a French song and then is gone. Nao looks at a photo of Haruki to make sure and a letter slips out from the frame. It is the official letter of farewell he wrote to his mother, Jiko.

Back in school, Nao studies harder, but the bullying hasn’t stopped. After a particularly bad incident, she cuts off all her hair and goes to school in a hooded sweatshirt. In class she stands up on her desk, makes a loud cry and takes off her hood. She bows to her teacher and to her classmates and leaves.

Nao does not go back to school. At a cos-play coffeeshop, she meets Babette, to whom she speaks freely. Babette sets her up on some “dates” and she begins writing in her diary. Nao has very little hope and, like her father, plans to commit suicide after she has written down the story of her great-grandmother’s life. 

Jiko’s companion calls to tell Nao that Jiko’s last hours are approaching and she should come quickly. Nao takes the train and waits all night for the bus. In the morning her father joins her. Jiko writes a last character, the one for “life.” “For now and for the time being,” she says and dies. Nao and her father know that Jiko was speaking to them. “We must do our part,” says Nao’s father. “We must live.” They assist with the funeral and go home.

At home, Nao’s father begins a program which searches for every reference of a person’s name on-line and expunges it. He wants to clean up the cyber bullying of his daughter. Nao learns that her father was fired for raising the issue of conscience and wondering if he could build it into the game controllers he was working on, which were being purchased by the U.S. military. She also learns that her great uncle Haruki flew his plane into the ocean rather than aiming at an American ship.

Nao takes her equivalency exams and qualifies for an international school in Montreal, where she studies French. She remains determined to write down Jiko Yasutani’s story.

Nao’s story is confirmed by Ruth’s correspondence with an old friend of Nao’s father in Sunnyvale. In parallel with Nao’s story, we learn much about Ruth’s life on a remote island off British Columbia with her husband Oliver and their friends. Ruth gets so deep into Nao’s story she feels she has participated in it and Oliver tells her about quantum mechanics theories which possibly support this.

Much of Nao’s story is earthy and raunchy, the underside of being an adolescent girl in Japan. It is hard to read, but this part of the book is redeemed by the equally true stories of life in the temple with her “old Jiko.” We have the feeling that Nao is being absolutely honest about what she sees and feels, courageous in and of itself. We do not see her overcome her almost universally bad experiences in Japan, except through one defiant act. Later, we discover that she makes her way to Canada and a better life.

Learning of the anti-war lineage of her family makes Nao very proud. Ruth Ozeki tells her story in A Tale for the Time Being [published 2013], a rich evocation of both Japan and British Columbia. She puts together accurate science, everyday detail and characters with so much reality you feel you know them. Writing this open to actual, difficult life continually takes you by surprise.