The need now is not to SIT for long, even with the compression stocking on. So I can't sit down and read the fine TROUBLED BLOOD which the caregiver actually bought for me. Cheap at any price--long as a volume of my biography of Melville. So it is mealtime reading for a long time, a joy taken only in bites. In 2013 we noticed CUCKOO's CALLING at the Cayucos library. The great now-retired electrician had just installed LED lights. My study was bright, and has kept shining all this time. On 21 June my friend Paul sent his Billy the Kid book off to Northwestern University Press, which loved it and was perfect in all ways to Paul. On that glorious Friday I see this note: "Reading (pseud) Robert Galbraith The Cuckoo's Calling---Cormoran Strike." I raved to the other person here about it, and then checked the Internet. All that was there was what was on the book--way too little about the author. The now-caregiver remembers me saying, "This is not this man's first book." So I wrote down "pseud." On 14 July 2013 the worst spoil-sport in the world exposed J. K. Rowling as the author. "We liked 'him'!" I noted. So today I go up, prop pillows against the wall, and arrange in chronological order as many of the printouts of the RACE book as I can. What it is, is documents involving my re-discovered family, whites starting out in the 1600s living around blacks and Indians and owning some and killing many and being killed (by many red men and some blacks) and revealing an amazing range of feelings about the people they owned (as demonstrated in their wills), and becoming part red as the decades passed and leaving part white people like a black Hackley cousin who died recently, way too soon. Along the way I show that the enterprising Carolinians used the first year of the Revolution to attack the Cherokees, and Jefferson and Madison burned our white intruders out of Alabama two times, that one of the first white families in northern Arkansas mixed so freely with red neighbors over in the Cherokee Nation that a cousin is now a big tribal officer, that many of the dead in the 1860s had never owned a slave and were fighting only a defensive war (although one Costner was a slaveowner, one of the rich men who got NC into the war), that several cousins in North Carolina headed public Peace meetings during the war and others set out to join the Union Army (some massacred at Limestone Cove), that one mid-Atlantic cousin escaped from a Confederate prison at the NC-VA border and made his way north with the help of a network of red stringers, that other cousins died in Yankee prisons including the horrific camp described in TO DIE IN CHICAGO, that a drunken Choctaw chief allied with the Confederates drove many part red cousins out of the Choctaw Nation as "intruders," that a great-grandfather whom I remember was a baby when Confederates hanged his father for being a Union man, that a judge turned upside down, against us, the law that legally race follows mother. The idea is that every document involves some ancestor or some aunt or uncle or cousin. This is basically what any Depression Okie's history of race in the continent would have been, if he or she had not lost all knowledge of family history. There are unbelievably painful things to see in this, where the documents show very plainly that black lives did not matter, and also red lives did not matter, or sometimes white lives. I use fewer documents after 1900, but there are scary things there like in the late 30s a ballplayer cousin abusing a little black boy who became a great sports writer (and remembered) and good things, like a timid suit, a producer, saying to Cousin Kevin (about Whitney Houston) "You do know she's black?"
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