Clap When You Land was my favorite book of 2020. No! Maybe my favorite book ever. Elizabeth Acevedo knocked Louisa May Alcott off her throne and became my favorite author after this book. By page 12, I was ugly-crying. I continued crying until the very end when I was cheering through my tears when the strength and boldness of Dominican women united (I may or may not have been PMSing while reading this).
Background
In November of 2001, a plane headed to the Dominican Republic crashed. Some 200+ people in the sky and five on the ground perished. Once investigators confirmed it wasn’t another terrorist attack like September, the tragedy faded from the memory of most Americans. But American Airlines flight 587 rocked the New York Dominican community. Everyone in the Dominican in NYC knew someone personally affected by this tragedy. The author, a poet by trade and part of that community, imagined this story and wrote this prose-in-verse fiction about the story that could have been someone’s on board.
I heard Acevedo perform her poem “Hair” years ago. I didn’t realize she was the same poet until I did some post-novel author exploration. Based on our shared relationship to hair politics and her uncanny expression, I already loved Elizabeth Azevedo’s use of words before I picked up her novel. Check out her talk at Summit on Inequality and Opportunity.
The author, Elizabeth Acevedo, got her MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland, a BA in Performing Arts at George Washington University, and taught 8th grade English in PG county. She realized her students were unmoved by books they couldn’t relate to. She considered buying more diverse books but then decided to start writing them, and I’m so glad she did.
Summary
Each chapter of Clap When You Land alternates perspectives from two teenage girls— one from New York, one from the island — who learn their family’s secret when a plane crashes. The death of a parent alters the lives of their children in all cases; the stakes are higher for some than others. The main characters navigate through some pretty heavy situations for young girls to deal with. Clap When You Land is the story of blended families, sisterhood, motherhood, class strife, forgiveness, family, and belonging. What is done in the dark comes out in the light. As this novel reveals, the light is often through births and deaths. The book takes us through a journey of grief, loss, and mourning but also through gains, love, and celebration.
Oh, and there are mentions of LGBTQ experiences. People like knowing that ahead of time for whatever reason, even though it doesn’t play a significant role in the book.
Why I Loved It
Keeping it real, I picked this book to read during Latin American History and Heritage Month because the cover art was stunning. Yes, I select books by the cover, and this time it paid off — the book was just as stunning on the inside as it is on the outside.
It’s warm. Touching. Emotional. Clap When You Land used the most beautiful assemblage of words for depictions of the Caribbean setting. The descriptions of the traditional cuisine introduced me to a delicious traditional Dominican dish and inspired me to cook it. New York Dominican culture and the cultures of the African- Diaspora also found the spotlight in this novel. The way the plot unfolded at the right pace — the way the author wove themes and symbolism throughout was just perfect. The writing style was on point…I just love how the author thinks.
There was a heroic moment where all the women, and their ancestors, show up for each other. They are each the heroes. I can see my mom in the character. Myself. Every woman I know in the characters. I think that’s what usually makes me attached to a book— when I can see myself in it.
James Baldwin once explained how writing can change the world by saying, “The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” This book expanded my understanding of the world. It changed how I see flawed men, families, forgiveness, tragedies in the news, people who grow up in challenging conditions, and the conditions that some women have to support themselves. I look forward to some studio grasping ahold of this story and turning this moving tale into a movie. It was so good!
I just finished The Other Black Girl last night. With a chapter left to read I was prepared to write a review on how I didn’t really like it. I was seriously ready to question ʙᴏᴏᴋ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴏɴᴛʜ’ꜱ judgment on making this a top 5 book. But there was a plot twist I didn’t see coming.
One of my reading pet peeves is when books carry on with extraneous details that don’t move the story along. GET TO IT! I yell at the author in my head. They seemed to talk about hair and hair supplies in ad nauseam. At one point, I started thinking of all the lengthy descriptions that could be deleted to make the text shorter. I WAS WRONG! The details that I thought were negligible came together at the end and were pivotal to it all. And that’s the point. The characters thought the details were insignificant too & didn’t predict the surprise ending.
Storyline to The Other Black Girl
Anyway, Nella is the only Black person at a prestigious NYC publishing firm, Wagner. As a result, she’s isolated and lives with daily microaggressions. And, of course, she’s powerless to say anything, lest her collegues labele her an Angry Black Woman — the professional kiss of death! So, when Hazel shows up at Wagner, Nella is excited to not be the only one anymore. But that’s also when the creepy notes appear: “LEAVE WAGNER. NOW!”
Oh! And it discusses how much Boston sucks due to its insidious hostility toward Black people. It goes in on Boston the same way I would write about the city. The author knows her setting. This contrasts with the book, “ɪᴛ ᴇɴᴅꜱ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴜꜱ” by Colleen Hoover took place in Boson but, with all the characters being white, glossed over Boston’s noted racism.
I’ve read other reviews that criticized the lack of realism. I have to remind readers —it’s non-fiction! Did you also criticize the book about a centipede and a little boy floating in a giant peach? But I thought the most obvious pieces of fantasy were the parts that made you think — The parts that people have said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if…”
Overall Assessment…
The Other Black Girl is a hot suspense with “Get Out” vibes. This book is a must-read among Black women’s book clubs. I’d love to hear the discussions. A first-time author wrote this novel, so don’t expect a masterpiece. I like the plot. I think the author could have polished the way she told the story. But it did leave me wondering if I were in the main character’s position, which path would I choose?
Definitely read this book with your girlfriends and discuss. I’d like to hear what you have to say in the comments!
The DFW has an impressive literary scene & I love it. While bookstore hopping I started picking up local stories. Black Like Me, written by a white journalist from a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth, was one of the books.
I first learned of this book back in the day from an episode of Boy Meets World when the boys decide to dress like a woman for an article called “Chick Like Me” after reading Black Like Me in class. It wasn’t until visiting the DFW and having a chat with a local colleague that I learned the author was from Mansfield, Texas.
The author, John Howard Griffin, goes to a dermatologist to get a methoxsalen prescription (a vitiligo medication) and a sun lamp to darken his skin. He spends six weeks at the end of 1959 as a Black man traveling through New Orleans, Hattiesburg, Biloxi, Mobile, Montgomery, Auburn, and Atlanta for research purposes. He also visits Tuskegee, Spellman, and Dillard Universities (when they were still colleges). The submissions were originally articles for a newspaper. The title of this project comes from the final line of Langston Hugh’s Dream Variation “Night coming tenderly, Back like me.”
Last two lines of Dream Variations, “Night coming tenderly, Black like me.
Questions Without Answers
Honestly, I began reading Black Like Me with prejudice & opposition to its development methodology. I started by asking, why?
Why did a white man need to go through such efforts to change his skin tone just so he could understand what it was like to be black in America?
He didn’t need to change his skin color to observe a white shopkeeper’s friendly disposition toward him turn cold and hostile when waiting on a Black person. He could see the “No coloreds” signs and the “Whites Only” signs as a white man. He didn’t have to darken his skin to ask himself how far away the closest Black bathroom was, water fountain, etc.
Additionally, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man was written in 1912. Nella Larsen wrote Passing in 1929. Richard Wright published Native Son in 1940. James Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain had been available since 1953. We already had stories of World War II heroes surviving Nazis only to be lynched in their service dress through The South. The Montgomery Bus Boycott had triggered a Supreme Court Ruling by several years before this project. The Little Rock Nine made national news when President Eisenhower had to send in federal troops to escort Black kids to school in 1957. Carolyn Bennet already called for Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till’s lynching in 1955…just four years before this little project. That’s a strong indicator of Black Life in America.
Why weren’t these stories enough? Why did a white man want to contribute to this discourse? What did he have to offer that hadn’t been offered by countless Black people for the past three centuries already? Why did he want inclusion?
The author never explained why he felt he needed to leave Texas for this experience. There’s a dearth of Civil Rights narratives coming out of Texas. He missed an opportunity to change that. Instead, he seemed to do what EVERY region outside “the deep south” do — point their fingers and say “See, segregation and discrimination and racism is a Alabama-Mississippi-Louisiana thing. We DoN’t HaVe ThOsE pRoBlEmS hErE.”
By the way, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Ft Worth on Oct. 22, 1959 — Two weeks before the “Black Like Me” project began. MLK, Jr. had to stay with a local family because there wasn’t a hotel for Black people in the entire state of Texas. The first Black hotel in Texas opened in Wichita Falls the day after MLK arrived. Black Airmen stationed at Sheppard AFB needed a hotel. But there’s no mention of either of these events in the book. There’s an environment ripe for this project within his region. Was the author oblivious to what was going on in his backyard?
I kept looking for the answers but never got the answers.
The author had questions of his own. “If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South what adjustments would he have to make?”
The author does point out the inability to get authentic answers just by asking or interviewing Black people. As demonstrated in Kathryn Stockett’s, The Help, terrorism scared most Black people into silence. Black people (like W.E.B DuBois & Booker T.Washington) so delicately wrote the accounts of Black life to avoid violent responses. Griffin Observes:
“The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned that if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him.”
(Black Like Me p. 7)
and later:
“They did not know that the Negro long ago learned he must tell them what they want to hear, not what is.”
(Black Like Me p. 123).
I think of the many instances this phenomenon still goes on in communications about race.
Even with the author’s disguise, the authenticity is jeopardized. Namely, because Griffin’s behaviors were not those of an adult man who grew up Black. That was what struck me most when he decided to go hitch-hiking from Mobile to Montgomery. As a Black man. At night. In 1959.
Notable Events in Griffin’s Research
The most WTF moments for me came during a stint while Griffin spent time hitch-hiking through Mississippi and Alabama. White men would not give him a lift during the day because they didn’t want to be seen with him. But at night he never had trouble getting a ride with over a dozen white men.
With all the stories I’ve heard from my family in Alabama, getting in cars, at night, with white men is not one of them. I asked around. This is not something my southern Black friends have heard in their family’s oral histories either. A more common was to travel by jumping on a freight train. My dad and uncles have told stories of this. This was also the case with the famed 1931 Scottsboro Boys.
The crudeness and audacity of the conversations during these car rides revealed a fixation on the sex lives of Black people. The fixation is not completely foreign to the perverted curiosities of today.
One married civic leader with children bragged about r@ping all the Black girls who worked for him. When the author got silent, the politician threatened to kill him and feed him to alligators (a well-known practice). One young driver was bold enough to ask to see the author’s penis. Again, the author went silent. Trying to release the awkward tension, the driver assures the author he wasn’t “going to do anything” to him and adds, “I’m not queer or anything.” As if being straight absolves him from the audacity! He continues, “I’ve just never seen a Negro penis before.” Like, wtf do you need to? How does seeing one impact your life?
Which are the exact two sentences I used a few years ago when a group of white, female Air Force officers defended their entitlement to violate Black women’s bodily autonomy by touching their hair. They used the same, “Well maybe I’ve never touched a Black girl’s hair before.” Like, why do you need to? How is touching a black woman’s hair going to impact your life’s purpose? There are quite a few places I’ve never put my fingers on a white woman, and I am happy to go my entire life without the experience. I suppose not much has changed from 1959 to 2018 regarding bodily entitlement.
The author would have never been privy to the conversations he had while hitch-hiking had he not been in Black skin. However, had he been raised as a Black person, he likely would have never chosen this travel option in the first place.
Black Like Me in Montgomery
The author gives a vague overview of general attitudes in Montgomery but doesn’t give specific reasons why it was his least favorite city. He cites how rude the white church ladies were when they saw him coming out of church. He ends up tapping out of his Black-facade and turning white again for the duration of his Montgomery stay. The privilege to take a break from being Black when being Black for 4 weeks gets overwhelming, triggered major side-eye from me.
I think of my grandmother who survived 30 years as a Black woman in Alabama before relocating to Kentucky for reprieve (consider the hostilities she endured if Kentucky was a reprieve to Alabama). I think of my father who didn’t get to tap out of being Black in Alabama for years as a child. What a freakin’ whimp, I reacted to the author.
Missed Opportunities in Black Like Me
Anyway, the author speaks of the shift from the welcoming embrace he experienced from Black people when they thought he was Black to the hesitancy and coldness he receives from them when he’s returned to whiteness.
He mentions the “hate stares” he gets from Black people when he goes strolling in their neighborhoods as a white man in Montgomery. White men have no reason to go into Black neighborhoods. They don’t have jobs there. They don’t have friends there. They don’t have shops there. I can’t help but conclude that the stares he got were not of hate, but of anxiety. He never acknowledges that his presence brought legitimate threats of violence.
On his hitch-hiking journey from Mobile to Montgomery, the author mentions that he came to expect sexual impropriety from the drivers who picked him up because it happened EVERY SINGLE TIME. This was only a short weekend of experiences for Griffin. After all that he went through as a Black man — to the point that he needed to turn white to get a break from it, the Black people were responding to the same traumas. Except their trauma was a lifetime’s worth. Not a few days.
It is no wonder that a young Black teen on the street would come to expect violence and hostility seeing a white man approach him after a lifetime of violent experiences. But the author doesn’t quite make that connection for readers when he sees the youth brace himself.
Instead, he writes about the way the races regard each other as a two-way street. However, responding to racism is not the same as racism. Responding to violence is not violence. It’s self-defense. It makes me wonder if that understanding escaped the author.
Other Shortcomings of Black Like Me
Let John H. Griffin tell it, life as an African-American in 1959 was nothing but strife, indignity, and navigating around white people. He left Texas looking for racism. I am not suggesting that his instances were not as evident as he wrote them, however, I think we’re also reading evidence of a Baader-Meinhof effect or “the yellow car phenomenon.” When you are looking for a yellow car you notice them more. When people become aware of something, they see it more frequently. He left Texas looking for racism and that is what he found. He went out of his way to put himself in situations to find it.
Clifton Taulbert published his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored in 1989. That book takes place in Mississippi during the same time Griffin was doing his journalism project. In his memoir, Taulbert showcases that even during perilous times, Black people experienced so much love within their tight-knit community. This community was lacking in Griffin’s research. He experienced some kindness when Black strangers welcomed him into their homes. But Griffin did not expand on this warmth and community in the way Taulbert did. Griffin didn’t even consider building community or focusing on the community of Black people in the different locations. His focus was on racism and he dubbed that focus “Negro Life.” There’s a lot more to being Black in America than the racist responses to Blackness. In fact, if he had community, he would never have been in some of those situations.
The Author’s Notable Observations
While I do think Griffin misses opportunities to bridge the gap of noticeable insights, he does highlight the threat of violence that was present for everyone in the Jim Crow South. The threat of white supremacist violence controlled the behavior of white people as well.
In his epilogue he explains, “Any white man who advocated justice in those days could be ruined by his white neighbors … Certainly, many who had a sense of justice did not dare show it for fear of reprisals. So no one was free…Heaped on top of the economic reprisals and the dangers of physical reprisal were perhaps the most damaging reprisal of all – the deliberate character assassination.”
(Black Like Me p. 164).
I did wonder if, while waxing philosophically in his reflections about the environment dictating the habits of people rather than racial pathology, he actually said these things to the white people in his audience at the time. Or did he acquiesce and allow their ignorance to continue?
Photographs from the John Griffins second tour of NOLA
Conclusions
As predicted, Griffin’s white neighbors responded to his newspaper column with death threats and lynching effigies. A mob of white men beat him and left him for dead after publication. It took Griffin five months to recover from the assault. His parents, wife, and kids fled to Mexico due to the violence.
What I haven’t read is how Black people received this work. I’m more interested in what Griffin’s Black contemporaries thought of his work. I’m curious to know Malcolm X’s thoughts on this project. Malcolm was an avid book nerd who was about 35-years-old at the time of publication. I wonder what Black college students thought about the work (which might not be too difficult to find by poking around the newspaper archives of HBCUs…will revisit this inquiry later). According to Smithsonian Magazine, Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture) said, “is an excellent book—for whites.’ Griffin agreed; he eventually curtailed his lecturing on the book, finding it “absurd for a white man to presume to speak for black people when they have superlative voices of their own.” This is why I wonder why it took so long for him to figure this out.
I can’t say I’m super impressed. I don’t think it added anything unique to the Civil Rights/ Jim Crow narratives. Again, Black people already said everything he said. Overall, Black Like Me is an important read to spark conversations. I don’t think teachers without the intellectual range should touch this book, although I think it could be an insightful educational tool if done right.
