Book Review: Woodcraft

Title: Woodcraft

Author: William Gilmore Simms

Date: 1852 (reprinted 1983)

Publisher: New College & University Press

ISBN: 0-8084-0423-7

Length: 537 pages

Illustration: frontispiece drawing signed “Richard Bough”

Quote: “One hundred guineas...Porgy had not, himself, seen such an amount of cash, in one heap, during the last seven years!”

This once popular novel has had three titles, none very satisfactory. The Sword and the Distaff, the 1852 title, may have come closest; it was understood to mean “male and female,” and the story features both kinds of characters, mostly male. Hawks About the Dovecote might be said to reflect Porgy’s view of his struggle to keep his property, but there’s nothing dovelike about him. Woodcraft suggests skills that Porgy, as a fictional member of Marion’s troop in the Revolutionary War, might have demonstrated in the years before this novel, but the novel is mostly about his life on a well cleared plantation. Fair Fat and Forty may have been the best title this not-quite-romance had; that does at least describe the heroine, although she gets little ink in the story.

No publisher would touch Woodcraft if it were a new novel. Woodcraft is more readable than some novels of its vintage, but its interest today is mostly historic. It does, however, hold some interest as a male perspective on contemporary women’s issues.

While fighting in the Revolutionary War, Captain Porgy failed to pay what he owed to his money-grubbing neighbor McKewn. By the time he comes home from the war, McKewn has quietly seized most of Porgy’s slaves. Porgy is not much of a farmer. If his farm can be saved, it will be by the slaves, of whose heroics we hear little.

The novel begins in 1782, with the Widow Eveleigh (we’re never told either of the main characters’ given names) reclaiming legal rights to her slaves and Porgy’s from McKewn. The idea that women need male guardians to protect their financial interests, later to become law, is expounded at length by the foolish Sergeant Millhouse. Eveleigh is Simms’ example of a woman who needs no such thing. She has a son, on whom antifeminists of the day would have argued that she ought to be kept dependent. She is much, much more competent than he. However, when Porgy comes home, he and his former aides in military service, Millhouse and Frampton, are able to come to the rescue as McKewn and his hired goons try to recover the slaves from Eveleigh and her son, by strength of numbers.

In real life, would the slaves have had anything to say about being stolen by McKewn and company, or would they have been chained hand and foot? Chains are not mentioned but the slaves seem unable to move independently. Simms seems to imagine them as all being so thoroughly habituated to slavery that they don’t need to be chained, but will follow whatever sort of person is leading them.

In any case, after Eveleigh has recovered the legal title to the slaves, Porgy rescues them from being stolen by force. Porgy has brought almost nothing back from the war; Eveleigh restocks his plantation with provisions. She also buys his slaves and rents them back to him on favorable terms. Her heart, cackles Millhouse, is aching; even Tom the house slave agrees that she’s making sheep’s eyes at Porgy. There is general agreement that Porgy’s excessive height and rum-barrel figure are considered repulsive, but Eveleigh, who is big enough that she and McKewn agree she could beat McKewn in a fair fight, may be willing to forgive him for shortcomings she apparently shares.

More to the point, Porgy can’t bear the idea of marrying a woman to whom he is financially obligated. The mere fact that marrying Eveleigh would secure his property against McKewn’s claims, or perhaps the fact that Millhouse keeps nagging him about it, puts him off her. His neighbors include another widow, the mother of Frampton’s fiancée. The Widow Griffin is a mousy little thing who has none of Eveleigh’s wit and experience. That, in itself, appeals to Porgy. He is intelligent enough not to share Millhouse’s view that women can’t be competent to provide for themselves, but testosterone-damaged enough to prefer the kind who are. He is attracted to both women, but determined to rebuild his family’s estate by himself, without the help of either, before he proposes to either one. Mrs. Griffin doesn’t get a speaking part but does, toward the end, get kissed.

For readers on the “sword side” of the house, Woodcraft is a fantastic story of a period in American history where an anarchical type could feed legal documents to the deputy sheriff and defy his creditors. Porgy does that, and he’s mildly funny about it—though nowhere near as funny as the fictional characters Charles Watson, introducing Woodcraft in 1983, compared him to, Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Sterne’s Toby, or Stowe’s St Clare. His success, without having to acknowledge Eveleigh’s help so far as marrying her, owes more to time and Simms’ estimate of readers’ patience than to plausibility as a strategy, even in 1782.

For readers on the “distaff side,” Woodcraft is an apology for a particularly idiotic piece of contemporary law. By 1852 women did, in fact, have to share their property with male “guardians,” and Woodcraft is a long way of saying “Yes, we men must admit that some women are competent, but we don’t liiike it when they are.” That Eveleigh’s heroics inspire scant gratitude in Porgy, Millhouse, Frampton, Tom, or even young Arthur Eveleigh, was instructive to Victorian ladies. Rather than being lauded as a real patriot who’s willing to repay her debt to veterans, Eveleigh is taunted about taking an inappropriate personal interest in Porgy.

The slaves...well, if Porgy doesn’t like a prospective wife who can really stand beside him as a friend and partner, you know he wouldn’t tolerate that sort of slave, now would he? Porgy tells Tom to his face that he’ll kill Tom rather than surrender Tom to McKewn; there’s no serious consideration that Tom might want to be free, as in fact, when asked, he knows enough to tell Porgy he doesn’t.

There were, in historical fact, many slaves like Tom. Born in North America, they knew they had no homes in Africa. They were told that they had no chance of making homes for themselves in America, either, except as slaves. In fact free Black people did own homes and earn living in some States, in Canada, or in the western territories, but slaves were not usually told about them. What the slaves saw every day were their own neighborhoods, where the rich White slaveholders held one another’s “property rights” supreme and the poor White class loathed their enslaved competitors. Many of them had little hope, and in fact not much chance, of eating as regularly if free as they did while enslaved. The Uncle Pokealong legend explains some of the slaves who, in 1852, were saying they didn’t want to be free, but in 1872 plenty of slaves who really didn’t see much hope in freedom were still working for token wages on the old plantations.

Porgy is, Simms admits, not much good for anything but combat. He threatens to work on his own farm; we never see him doing it. He dreams of making his farm profitable; we never see him doing that either. (In fact, Watson informs readers, Simms wrote five other novels in which Porgy appeared as a minor character, and those novels supported Simms’ assessment of his antihero. Porgy’s father knew how to make something of a plantation. Porgy lacks his father’s fortitude of character. He’s big and strong enough to intimidate any man he chooses to fight, even at forty-five, but not strong enough to get out and work a field. He defeats McKewn, not by any positive virtue, but by McKewn’s being too mean to live.

Nevertheless, Simms seems to say, slavery-ridden South Carolina was America! People rose or fell by merit or the lack of it! For Porgy and Eveleigh and the other adults there’s little hope; the older generation is represented solely by one old slave; but the teenagers, as represented by the son of the richest family and the “beautiful, innocent” daughter of the trashiest family Porgy knows, will have better lives than any of their parents had, because they deserve them. Simms was romanticist enough to believe in human progress.

Book Review: Rivers of Gold

Title: Redeeming Love

Author: Francine Rivers

Date: 1997

Publisher: Multnomah

ISBN: 1-59052-513-2

Length: 464 pages

Quote: “Angel moved out of his embrace and looked up at the stars. It made her uncomfortable when he started talking about God.”

One of Francine Rivers’ literary inspirations for this historical romance was the odd fact that “Angel,” not a particularly popular given name in the mid-nineteenth century, was a common street name used ironically by prostitutes. In that context it suggested the youngest, prettiest, and/or blondest “white slave” in a house. “Michael” was not a very popular given name at this period, either; names taken from the Old Testament or the keywords in Bible texts, which were popular with the early Puritans, tended to identify people with ultraconservative religious groups in the nineteenth century. Rivers’ character, Michael Hosea, was not brought up in that sort of tradition so his name suggests that he chose it after being disinherited, identifying with a religious group rather than his family, though no such group is named in the text. Anyway, he feels called by God to rescue the most wretched prostitute who ever kept her health in the Gold Rush to San Francisco. Her street name is Angel. Only toward the end of a melodrama worthy of its period, during which Michael offers Angel three or four alternative names that don’t quite fit, will Angel tell him her original given name.

Angel’s pathetic mother “loved” someone else’s husband and was banned from “Christian” society for getting caught—refusing to abort or sell the “by-blow” of their doomed romance. If not quite the period of greatest prejudice against women in legitimate employment (but close), the 1830s were still a period of extreme prejudice against “bad” women, i.e. single mothers. Angel’s mother came to a miserable end with only one friend, a male “guardian” (in the nineteenth century women who weren’t living with their husbands or fathers had to have legal “guardians,” like children) who was “not bright” enough to do more harm to Angel’s mother than she did to herself. This man, whom Angel was taught to call Uncle Rab, apparently believed he was accepting money from a rich “gentleman” who wanted to adopt a daughter.

Oh yeah. Right. He was selling Angel to a sadistic pedophile who, among other things, deliberately set her up for a night with her own father.

In 1850, surely the peak of the French Socialist ideal of strict gender roles, Angel wouldn’t have been considered attractive if she’d been physically or mentally capable of taking care of herself. Though her slavery was not enforced by official law, she was for all practical purposes the slave of her evil guardians, whose street names (all Angel was allowed to know about them) were Duke and Duchess. They weren’t married to each other and didn’t admit being acquainted. Duke trained his little Angel to hate sex until she looked old enough to interest normal men. Escaping from his house, she reached San Francisco and was promptly recruited by Duchess, who promised her twenty percent of her earnings and paid less, in exchange for “protection” by a goon called Magowan. He’s not otherwise characterized as Irish and was probably given the only Irish name in this novel because it seemed more plausible than just calling him “my goon.” It didn’t take Angel long to learn that Magowan’s job description included breaking the bones of any of Duchess’s “girls” who asked for their money.

But, before Magowan started beating Angel up, she’d met Michael, who felt called to pay for time just to tell her that he felt God had called him to offer her marriage as a way of escape from her horrible life. Though Angel turned him down, he was in the neighborhood in time to stop the beating when it started, give Duchess all his money to “buy” Angel, and haul her off to his farm with only a dislocated shoulder, four broken ribs, a cracked collarbone, and a concussion. Understandably, Angel does not bond with him; she stays long enough to learn some housekeeping skills and goes back to San Francisco, paying his hostile brother Paul with a quick, overtly hateful sex act for a lift into town. But San Francisco is still too uncivilized to offer much of a market for housekeepers. Angel goes back to work as a prostitute on slightly better terms. But Michael Hosea still “saw her...as the nameless child who had been broken and was still lost.”

This, apart from the basic fact of its being a credible imitation of a Real Victorian Melodrama, is my main criticism of the book. Romance readers like to feel sorry for a sweet, pathetic “child” who’s been led or pushed into sinning, suffering, and repenting. If you want to shed sympathizing tears over Angel’s emotional reactions to every kind of abuse Rivers can either describe or leave to your imagination, and identify with the friends who help her finish growing up, Redeeming Love will give you opportunities to do that. If you like a big fat romance novel with lots of ups and downs, separations and reconciliations, and the sound of a real local legend about it, Redeeming Love is for you. But Rivers insists that her novel is a remake of the biblical book of Hosea, and it's not.

In the biblical book of Hosea, there’s nothing special about the names of Gomer (“the end,” “complete,” “finished,” a name for what tired parents hope will be the last baby) the daughter of Diblaim (“raisin cakes,” probably his stock in trade) except that they’re the names of working people, not especially religious. Gomer is simply a party animal. Slavery was legal in ancient Israel; most female slaves were domestic drudges, but some probably were prostituted; Gomer, however, sells herself for liquor and luxuries, buys more of those on credit, and becomes enslaved only by running up debts to support her party lifestyle. Scholars often think the names of her children describe her marriage to Hosea. Her first child is called Jezreel, a town name that was sometimes used as a man’s name, translated as “God will scatter (the Canaanites out of this city, making room for the Israelites).” Then she gives birth to Loammi, which was not a normal name but the words for “not my people,” and Loruhamah, which was also not a standard name but the words for “no mercy.” People hearing children introduced as “God will scatter, no mercy, not my people” would have wondered what those names meant. Though Hosea explained with a warning sermon about the sins of his nation, many people still believe that he must also have suspected that at least Loammi and Loruhamah were not his children.

Then Gomer left Hosea, not because she was a slave or because his relatives disapproved of her, but just in pursuit of more of her idea of fun—wine and revelry. She was popular, according to the second chapter of Hosea’s book, “beloved of her friends,” not a pathetic friendless outcast. Her other men were not followers of the One True God or believers in Committed Monogamous Relationships. She and Hosea weren’t rich. Hosea may or may not have realized that his wife’s prostitution was funding their vines and fig trees, maybe even his barley fields, until he realized that the woman was participating in the rituals of the Baal-cult with her other men. It might have been the public shame of her idolatry, rather than the private humiliation of her adultery, that caused him to throw her out. At this period married couples did not necessarily live in one house—rich people might occupy their different properties, while poor people might still be living in separate tents—so it was up to each one to deliver the products of their labor to each other. Thus Hosea records himself telling the children, “Plead with your mother, plead...lest I...set her like a dry land and slay her with thirst.” He tried to sober up his wife simply by cutting off her supply of wine. She left. And it didn’t take her long to drink her way down from self-prostitution to slavery.

And there their personal story ends. Before his listeners or readers got restless, asking “What has this to do with us?”, Hosea moved on to his prophetic messages about public affairs, which were what he was paid to proclaim, write, and publish. He used the apparent failure of his marriage as a metaphor for how God must feel toward straying, sinning believers. The metaphor served him well enough that preachers continued to use it for centuries. Jesus blessed it by identifying Himself as the Bridegroom of Israel. Though many people want to believe that the success of Hosea’s book had something to do with people’s seeing hope illustrated in Hosea’s reconciliation with Gomer, no such scene is included in the book or in any contemporary book. We are eloquently told that he wanted to forgive her as he assured people that God would forgive them, if and when they sought forgiveness. Hosea deserved a happy ending, if ever a man did. But addictions are not cured by romantic love alone, and we can’t be sure that that reconciliation ever happened.

The Bible writers did describe some characters in such ways that we can imagine their sins to be mere reactions to hurt feelings, behavior patterns that love might actually have straightened out. Tamar, whose (strictly limited and actually legal) act of prostitution was blessed with mention in the bloodline of the kings of Israel and thus of Jesus, was one of them; she was clearly motivated not by lust for sex, money, or alcohol but by economic necessity. Shimei, whose treasonous “cursing at” King David was pardoned, might be another one; he might have been motivated by a conservative mind, a loyalty to poor mad King Saul. Zacchaeus, the “little” tax collector who didn’t dare try to find a place in the front of the audience but climbed a tree in order to be able to see Jesus, undoubtedly suffered from shame, guilt, and insecurity. The Samaritan woman at the well, whose name the pious disciples probably never found out, and the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, whose name they probably withheld from the record at her children’s request, are two more characters who are often chosen as examples of people whose sins stem from “hurts” that Jesus could “heal” through love alone.

But our sinful natures are not merely the products of loss or lack of feelings of being loved, much as some people might want to believe they are. They are primarily the products of selfishness, stubbornness, and wilful stupidity. Gomer did not leave Hosea because he didn’t love her, because she thought her other men did, or because she was too badly “hurt” to accept love; she left him because she wanted silver and gold and flagons of wine. She was not a “wounded child”; she was a drug whore. There may be a wounded child within every drug whore, but comforting that “inner child” alone has yet to break the addiction.

That is what inspired Hosea’s declarations of love. Hosea had the ability to buy Gomer, after she’d sold herself enough times that her price had dropped to a level he could afford, and bring her home and stop giving her wine. As a prophet of God he had the ability to forgive her and love her as an example of God’s forgiving love for sinful people. But he could only realize the reconciliation he was offering after Gomer accepted it and chose to change her behavior, and we don’t know whether she ever did. .

Rivers offers her readers that happy ending, but the way she gets to it is a work of sentimental fiction, with little resemblance to Hosea’s book.

For people who like long melodramatic romances—which I don’t, actually, apart from Jane Eyre, Gone with the Wind, and Jubilee—Redeeming Love is the kind of thing they like. There were in fact women who organized missions to help other women in the nineteenth century, and the end of Redeeming Love reads as if it were fictionalized from one of their stories. There’s even a stomach-settling sprinkle of real feminism in Angel’s last trip to San Francisco. I would just like this novel a great deal better if Rivers had left the book of Hosea out of it, and admitted that a true prophet probably understood his own wife’s sins better than Leo Buscaglia could do.

Then there’s the final confrontation with Duke. It won’t satisfy those looking for revenge porn, but it does seem likely to thrill and encourage those looking for hope that they’ll be able to defeat their demons in a thoroughly Christian, nonviolent way. Mere feminism, uninformed by faith, would want to see Angel collect all the money he owes her. I think readers will agree that the triumph Rivers gives her, instead, is worth all the gold in California. 

Book Review: Harriet Tubman

Reclaimed from Associated Content...What Google doesn't like about an award-winning classic biography from Harper Collins, I don't know. I have never liked the kind of face images that fill up all the space with face, cutting out even the sides of the head; it always looks like a caricature.

Title: Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad

Buy it

Buy it

Author: Ann Petry

Publisher: Harper Collins

Date: 1955 (first edition), 1996 (paperback edition reviewed here)

Number of pages :242, plus index

Illustrations: none

Quote: “I never run my train off the track, and I never lost a single passenger.”

Harriet Ross Tubman was one of those people whose true stories are too unlikely to be printed as fiction. Going by the statistical odds, nobody could do what they did. Possibly things have been left out of their stories as we know the stories today. Nevertheless, the impossible thing was done.

Born a slave in Maryland in 1821, the girl Harriet Ross was marked for life by a head injury. It left her witha  scar, a lifelong tendency toward narcolepsy, and apparently an unusual manner of speaking. She was a small, restless, hyperactive girl who preferred jobs usually done by boys or men. When she wore boys' clothes to suit the job, people thought she was a boy. Her intelligence would have been startling even if she hadn't been expected to die from her head injury. In 1840 men were supposed to hate strong, tough-minded women, but John Tubman, a free Black man, chose to marry Harriet although she was a slave who might have been sold away from him.

By this time the slave system was falling apart. In what were then western states, like Tennessee, there were still "wilderness" areas where ex-slaves could disappear in the untracked swamps or forests. Maryland was not one of those areas. An elaborate patrol system had developed to keep slaves from escaping. The country was well settled, over-farmed, populated by a decaying upper class who thought it was their neighborly duty to keep slaves in their places.

Virginia had outlawed all free citizens of African descent, actually banishing such people to places like, well, Maryland, with the express purpose of keeping men like John Tubman from marrying, buying, and emancipating women like Harriet. Maryland tolerated couples like the Tubmans but when Harriet worried about being sold and urged her husband to take her further north, John laughed, threatened to help bring her back to slavery if she tried to escape,, and shamelessly selected his next wife.

Harriet Tubman made her way to Philadelphia. We know the names of some of the abolitionists who helped her. John Tubman was probably more concerned with courting his second wife, presumably convincing her he wouldn't betray her as he'd threatened to do to Harriet, than with tracking Harriet down.

What will never be fully explained is how this unusual, surely conspicuous fugitive slave was able to spend the next twenty years repeatedly sneaking back into Maryland and leading other slaves out. Mostly she rescued members of her extended family, taking them first to Pennsylvania, later to Canada. She was both illiterate and narcoleptic. Something had to have been wrong with her head for her even to think of trying what she did. Well, something was. And she succeeded. Those who whispered about her being a supernatural spirit, perhaps a reincarnation of Moses, trusted that they'd be safe with her even if she collapsed and lay "sleeping" for hours while they were being pursued. Somehow they always were.

By the time the Civil War broke out, other women of Harriet Tubman's age were considered "old" and expected to act like grandmothers, rocking and knitting. Perhaps because she was already a legend, Mrs. Tubman was not allowed to act "old." She served in the U.S. Army as both a spy and a nurse.

She never received even the pathetic wages regular (male) soldiers got, and never retired. She had bought a house and some land; she raised vegetables and sold them on the streets to make the house payments. She received some money for talking about her experiences. Her stories were collected and published as books, which she was never able to read. John Tubman died first, and Mrs. Tubman married a fellow veteran. He was already dying; he never collected his wages either, and had nothing of material value to give his wife. Harriet Tubman and her parents depended on neighbors' donations of food to balance their own diet.

Novelist Ann Petry fleshes out these facts with fictional details that show some of the ways Harriet Tubman's adventures might have been pulled off. Her version of the story is generally accepted as fact-based enough that some libraries classify this book as nonfiction. Petry's matter-of-fact narrative style, full of color, conversation, and even menus, brings the story to life for young readers, even if it is fictional life.

The books that were based on transcriptions of Harriet Tubman's own stories are no longer in print, though they ought to be. This book is still in print.

 

Book Review: The Waiting Time

Title: The Waiting Time

Author: Eugenia Price

Date: 1997

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: 0-312-96506-0

Length: 345 pages including afterword

Quote: “I know you’re a slave owner now, Abigail, but—your loving mother is an abolitionist.”

Eugenia Price wrote uplifting nonfiction for Christians, and big fat novels about the Old South in the tradition of Gone with the Wind or Jubilee. Readers expected her to mix history into fiction more smoothly than in Jubilee, and provide more and deeper conversations about politics and philosophy, less passion and less detailed descriptions of everyone’s clothes than in Gone with the Wind. Her historical novels were based on the known facts about real people, but of course, the people being long dead and most of their private affairs having remained private, she embroidered lavishly around the bare bones of history. Several characters in each novel appear under their real names.

The Waiting Time lives up to expectations. Finished a few weeks before Price’s death from cancer (just before her eightieth birthday), it describes the adventures of Abby Banes, a Boston girl who thought life on a rice plantation would be romantic. Once married to a much older man whom she loves more as a father-figure than as a partner, Abby finds herself so starved for conversation that (as many real women did) she finds herself talking to and bonding with slaves. During a consolation visit with her mother following her husband’s death, Abby becomes an abolitionist. She’d like to set all the slaves free. She’d also like to fall in love and get married again...but she finds it necessary to wait before doing either of these things.

Is Abby’s chaste, low-key romance with Thad the overseer realistic, or toned down to suit the sensitivities of a Christian writer who was born in 1916? I think Abby’s mourning, recovery, and second chance at love are remarkably true to life, considering that they were written by a bachelor. 

In the afterword we learn that the reason why this story breaks off where it does was that Price had planned at least one sequel, which would have carried Thad and Abby forward into the Civil War years. We don’t know what would have happened to them in the war, but from the fact that Price had made these fictional characters close friends of a real historical family whose house was not burned during the war “evidently because they were Unionists,” and had specified that both Thad and Abby were Northern-born, we may guess that the young couple would have been given some role in protecting their friends.

Though not an apology for slavery (of either the modern or the classical kind), this novel does document some of the historical reasons why some rational Southerners kept slaves in the 1850s. It was not that slavery was profitable (farmers felt financially stuck with slavery), but that hysteria about slave uprisings had spawned ludicrous laws intended to keep the slaves in their places. To free a slave was no longer, if it had ever been, a matter of signing papers and telling a former slave, “You are free.” Slaves had to be given a reasonable amount of money to allow them to start their own lives, and were not necessarily allowed to live in the state or town where they had been enslaved. Slave owners who were well known, rich, and regarded as public examples often had to make it an ongoing project to emancipate one or two slaves each year. Less scrupulous slave owners, especially in less settled areas, are known to have left opportunities for slaves to “escape” and wished them luck.

Although only a few of the slaves in The Waiting Time are given speaking parts, the novel also discusses the historical reality that slaves remained individuals with different situations and outlooks on life. We can guess that, in sequels, the enslaved couple Obadiah and Rosa Moon would have been loyal friends to Thad and Abby but needed little help to start their lives as freedmen. We are vaguely told that some of the other slaves wouldn’t have had the skills they needed to enjoy their freedom; we can guess that sequels might have characterized some of them and shown how they adjusted after emancipation.

Had I been Price’s editor, I would have tried to encourage her to drop the oldfashioned practice of trying to spell the variations in people’s accents. It’s a small fault, but it’s the kind of thing that can spoil a novel for English majors. Price spells out the pronunciations of words that deviate from the educated Anglo-American standard in Georgia. The standard accent in Georgia, however, deviated considerably from the standard accent in Boston. If Abby had been writing the story, she would have noticed the way her affluent White neighbors said things like “po-laht suthun woe-man” as much as she noticed the way Rosa Moon said “ob dat.” Since Price transcribes what Abby hears Fred Bentley saying in standard English, her spelling out “ob dat” sounds prejudiced. Price succeeds in the difficult task of showing us how a character who is obviously sympathetic to Price would handle an emotional situation Price never experienced, then fails at the comparably easy task of showing us how that character would hear her neighbors’ speech. That’s why most writers don’t try to “write dialect” any more.

This novel is recommended to those who enjoy long thoughtful novels with genuinely grown-up, as distinct from “adult,” content. If you’re old enough to know exactly what Thad and Abby would have done if they had gone into the house together, and to appreciate that they don’t go into the house together but stay outside talking about politics, economics, and rice farming, then you’ll love The Waiting Time. If you are the parent of a child who’s interested in Silhouette Desire romances, this is the sort of novel you can recommend to her (or him) as being really grown-up.

Book Review: The Big Family

Title: The Big Family

Author: Viña Delmar

Date: 1961

Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company

ISBN: none

Length: 375 pages

Quote: “Historically, only one incident rests on a shaky foundation. There is nothing to substantiate that John, upon learning that he would be defeated in his first attempt to win a seat in Congress, then cleverly devoted himself to Andrew Jackson’s cause. However, it is true that after the election Jackson rewarded him with the position of United States district attorney at New Orleans.”

If you look up "Vina Delmar" online, with or without the tilde or old-style double N, the first thing you'll find is that it's the name of a city in Chile. The author really was married to a man whose stage name was "Gene Delmar," although his father's name was Zimmerman, and her parents really had named her Alvina. She is not remembered as a scholarly writer. Though first and best known for smutty novels and dramas (her first book was actually called Bad Girl), later on in life she wrote several family-friendly, relatively clean historical novels, only mildly Hollywooded-up. The Big Family is one of those.

I’ve written some harsh reviews of “family saga” novels about fictional families of unpleasant people; The Big Family is my kind of “family saga” novel. It’s about a real family, the descendants of Jane Mackenzie and John Slidell of New York, several of whom really did achieve distinction. John Slidell, Junior, advanced from being a district attorney at New Orleans to being a U.S. Senator for Louisiana. Jane Slidell was married to Commodore Matthew Perry, who opened diplomatic relations between the United States and Japan. Alexander Mackenzie, John’s and Jane’s brother who chose to use the name of his mother’s (much richer) family, also commanded a ship, though not quite so successfully as Perry.

History has spared the Slidells from any documentation of some of the less impressive events in the family saga. These events Delmar has filled in, not always with the most felicitous results.

John Slidell, Senior, was a soap-boiler’s son with nothing to recommend him to the wealthy Mackenzies. He didn’t know who his grandparents had been, or, when the question arose, whether they had been ethnically Jewish or nominally Christian--they were not, in any case, religious. How did he ever marry into that family? A scenario that was not uncommon, in the nineteenth century, was the rich girl who had been deliberately kept so “innocent” of the facts of life that she didn’t realize that one of the stupid, childish gross-out games a boy friend proposed could lead to pregnancy; sometimes, by way of punishment, she was ordered to marry the boy. Another possibility, suggested by old portraits, was that Jane Mackenzie was considered so unattractive that she thought she had to marry “down” or not at all. Another possibility, suggested by the corresponding point in this reviewer’s family history, is that some rich American parents were taking democracy very seriously and thought it was fantastic for an heiress to marry a self-made man. All of those things really happened but Delmar ignores these possibilities and spins a 1950s movie romance for the couple, where a hormone surge leads straight to a happy-ever-after marriage. There was no need for that. The story is really about the next generation, and could just as well have started with the known facts of Jane Slidell’s marriage to her brother’s superior officer.

Delmar also admits having filled in some of the details of Senator Slidell’s early life in what seems to have been the most sympathetic way, and used an unverified legend about his daughter’s old age to wrap up the story. John Slidell was always, to put it mildly, a controversial politician. His alliance with Andrew Jackson may well have been based on similarities of character, and Jackson’s readiness to balance the budget by cutting it, as well as his loyalty to an unpopular wife, were admired (and still are). Slidell probably wasn’t all bad. He was not, however, the fiscally conservative egalitarian Jackson had been. About a politician remembered for his associations with James Buchanan, with slavery, and with the doomed Confederate Cause, it’s hard to find good things to say. Delmar tries.

I don’t know why she doesn’t turn to the Congressional Record for pro-Slidell material; whether she thought that would be too wonky for a novel, or whether the Congressional Record does not in fact record anything Delmar thought would work as pro-Slidell material. I suspect the latter.

The adventures of the naval officers in the family, however, were abundantly documented and are good stories. Those stories are told in a way that addresses adults not children, but won’t embarrass the adults if the children happen to try reading this book, and may actually appeal to the children. Perry succeeds by studying a situation and thinking creatively about the constraints of the problem set before him; Mackenzie doesn’t succeed so much as he survives by being fair and decent enough that one of the men who’ve plotted to rob and kill him feels obliged to warn him.

If you like family stories with ambitious, glamorous, human but not vile characters who owe at least some of their success to talent and effort as well as family connections, The Big Family is for you. It's available (for now) at the standard price of $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen; one more book of this size, and perhaps one or two smaller ones, would fit into one $5 package.

Book Review: Preacher's Justice

Title: Preacher's Justice (“The First Mountain Man”)

Author: William W. Johnstone

Date: 2004

Publisher: Kensington

ISBN: 0-7860-1548-9

Length: 272 pages

Quote: “Preacher, who was twenty-seven years old, had been trapping in these mountains since he was fourteen.”

Not especially evangelical or devout, Preacher was called “Art” before he was kidnapped by some “Indians” to whom he preached a sufficiently long and fervent sermon that they decided he was an inspired lunatic and let him go. He has had an adventurous life—there are several volumes in this series.

He's never felt sure enough of his ability to live “in love” to want to settle down, but he has a girlfriend, an enslaved prostitute called Jennie. Horrid though Jennie's life story is, in real history many women's stories were even worse; the 1840s and 1850s were the period when idealization of Pure and Innocent Ladies reached literally sickening levels (tuberculosis was actually fashionable among people who scorned exercise, wholesome food, and “rude health”) while poor and enslaved women, whom nobody believed to be “innocent,” had no rights at all. If the best Johnstone can do for Jennie is to write her off with a good clean murder rather than a slow horrible death from a loathsome disease, which it is, Jennie has been one lucky little victim. Preacher, of course, doesn't see it that way. He feels obliged to be detective, judge, and executioner—and, this being a classic “shoot-'em-up Western novel,” he'll take out a lot of people, all nasty characters who'll never be missed, before page 272.

Racists, rapists, land grabbers, and busybodies get killed. Other baddies get a nice healthy dose of humiliation; Preacher buys a sackful of rusty “washers” to hand over to baddies who want to steal his money, a trick that actually worked, in the 1850s, because relatively few people (or horses) had the energy to carry around sacks of junk metal as well as sacks of gold coins. Johnstone has written novels with higher body counts, but “Western” publishers, and presumably readers, expect levels of violence that would be unacceptable in fiction set in their own century.

The real explorers who trapped and traded in the Rocky Mountains in the 1850s led lives of high adventure all right, though their life-and-death combat was more often against weather, infections, and animals than against other White men. An honest, detailed memoir would be much more interesting than the “shoot-'em-up Western” genre, invented by writers who had never been in the Rockies but had been in a fight somewhere. Perhaps especially valuable for our time, when stupid people sentimentalize about wanting to “protect” animals that eat humans, might be accurate accounts of how our more sensible ancestors dealt with bears and cougars. Nevertheless, among living writers in this genre, Johnstone rates high.

A glance at Amazon shows that "for people who like this kind of book, this is a book they like." "Good series...great read...good adventure...very good book...excellent...very well done...kept me interested all the way...a mighty fine job...hard to believe they wouldn't have a script in Hollywood for the Preacher." Lots of people have read Preacher's Justice and the majority of them have liked it. 

The bad news? It's not a Fair Trade Book; William W. Johnstone has a nephew who's promoting his series, but Preacher's creator is dead.  This web site's minimum price for gently used books is $5 per book plus $5 per package; the best deal we can offer would be a total of $45 for eight Mountain Men novels, which might be competitive with the prices offered by sellers who don't send a percentage of the price to the author if the author is alive. Add $1 to send e-payments to the Paypal address you get by e-mailing salolianigodagewi, or send a U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, at the addresses at the very bottom of the screen.

Book Review: Many a Voyage

Title: Many a Voyage

Author: Loula Grace Erdman

Date: 1960

Publisher: Dodd Mead & Co.

ISBN: none

Length: 311 pages

Quote: “I was able to find only three recorded facts about Fannie Lathrop Ross, my heroine. These were the date of her birth, the date of her marriage, and the date of her death...There is no doubt in my mind, however, that she must have been an extraordinary woman. She would have needed to be to have lived with...Edmund Gibson Ross, past their golden wedding anniversary. Through him, in one way or another, her life was touched by almost every great national event during those tumultuous years, 1848-1889...”

I've observed more than once, in recent years, that his refusal to take sides in the American Civil War makes John Ross, of Oklahoma, one of my heroes. Enough things in east Tennessee have been named after him to show that others share this feeling. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century another man was making the name of Ross even more famous.

Edmund Ross, of Kansas, was Horace Greeley's ideal young man. Rather than waiting for a job on Greeley's newspaper he bought his own little printing press and “went west to grow up with the country.” Abolitionist, frontiersman, “Indian fighter,” he was twice appointed territorial governor and even elected U.S. Senator. As a Senator he acted out the ambivalence many Americans felt about the Civil War at the time. Although he'd started fighting for the Northern side, in Kansas, long before the actual war started, and showed no particular admiration for Andrew Johnson's frantic efforts to show disloyalty to Tennessee, Ross didn't blame Johnson for President Lincoln's death or think Johnson needed to be removed from office. Thanks to the rules of procedure in use at the time, some blamed or credited Ross for President Johnson's opportunity to finish his term. Later, President Kennedy would list Edmund Ross among his Profiles in Courage.

Should any of the “Indian fighters” be regarded as heroes? Can that question be taken up some other day? In their own minds, by the standards of their own culture, the men who slaughtered the buffalo and the Plains people were brave. Certainly they were tough. Arguably their culture was wicked and they, individually, were its fools—the late Vine Deloria used to argue that position—but Erdman completely ignores arguments about the morality of North American immigrants' unofficial war on their host ethnic groups (and, in some cases, their cousins in those groups) in the nineteenth century. Her focus, like Kennedy's, is on Senator Ross's voting for conscience over constituents.

Loula Grace Erdman was an historical novelist popular with school librarians and book clubs in the pre-feminist mid-twentieth century. The story of Senator Edmund Ross moved her to invent a fictional character for his obscure wife. Although the fictional Fannie whose mock-biography this novel is cannot be positively identified with the real Mrs. Ross, as Erdman admitted in the endnote quoted above, history made it easy for Erdman to spin a story in which fictional Fannie comes through as a plausible, likable character. The endnote explains which of fictional Fannie's adventures seem likely and unlikely to have been similar to the real Mrs. Ross's.

But the writer can never not communicate...even when a writer like Gertrude Stein or Kim Kardashian publishes a book that communicates mainly “I'm so rich and famous that I don't have to write anything coherent to get people to buy my book.” What Erdman put into her fictional Fannie Lathrop Ross was an ideal of sanely submissive wifehood...that worked, because there are sanely submissive, passionately monogamous wives, and they behave like fictional Fannie.

Fictional Fannie is hardly docile, although she always wishes people could calm down and live in peace and harmony. She stands up to slave catchers, Civil War guerrillas, plagues, famines, and riots; after a battle she charges out to help the wounded, soothe the dying, and dispose of the dead. She's “in love” with her husband even into their old age, thanks to a generous supply of hormones (the real Mrs. Ross aged rather slowly, by nineteenth century standards, and died fairly old) and the romantic tension created by his constantly going off on adventures of his own. When tempted to disagree with her husband she's not afraid to do that, but she seems to ask herself “Do I want my own way, or do I want to be with him?” and decide she wants to be with him.

In the 1950s many wanted to believe that that was the way all women were, or ought to have been, or needed to be in order to be really happy in life...and we don't even know that it's the way the real Fannie Lathrop Ross was. The real Mrs. Ross may have been a teacher—Senator Ross went on record supporting women's rights to be fairly paid and recognized as teachers—but fictional Fannie is never employed in that profession. (The old French Socialist ideal of never-employed women being “innocent” of money was still kicking in 1960.) The real Mrs. Ross may have enjoyed travel and “frontier” living as much as Senator Ross did, but fictional Fannie is a homebody who has lost her home. As explained in the endnote, Erdman didn't even really know whether the real Mrs. Ross originally had brown hair, or whether she'd always been short; only one old, bad photo of her in her sixties survived. (In her sixties the real Mrs. Ross was short; in the nineteenth century brown hair was considered as suitable for romantic heroines as blonde, red, or black hair, and in the twentieth century many women wished that were still the case.)

So bah, humbug, I remember thinking when I read Erdman's little propaganda studies of “femi-ninny-ty” in high school. Fannie was admittedly fictional. Girls who wanted to be like fictional Fannie married early, generally got divorced early, and grew up miserable. Girls who wanted to be happy in life went to college, got jobs, and didn't let ourselves need men, even if we did eventually yield to a really choice admirer's really determined pursuit—and never allowed ourselves even to consider marriage with anyone whose life goals were different from ours. I wanted to live in my home town and not have babies; into my thirties I expected that to mean I'd never be married at all. And yet...in my early thirties, when I was finding it possible and even pleasant to live on two of the three corners of Virginia at one time, I started asking myself “Do I want to do my own thing, or do I want to be with him?” and deciding I wanted to be with my husband...in Maryland. Rereading Many a Voyage, I now find fictional Fannie believable. If not based on the real Mrs. Ross, fictional Fannie is based on some real women.

Lots of school libraries stocked Erdman's books in the mid-twentieth century. Lots of libraries have discarded them since; the copy of Many a Voyage I just reread is a discarded library book. But it may be time to reconsider whether Erdman's heroines deserve to be considered heroines after all. Maybe the real Fannie Lathrop Ross never met Jesse James, but then again the fictional encounter between those characters may have something to say to modern readers. Read or reread this book and tell me what you think.

To buy it here will cost $5 per book, $5 per package (four books of this size would fit into one package), plus $1 per online payment. The story is too long, the print too small, to appeal to most children who play with dolls, but adult doll collectors may commission a doll dressed like Fannie for an additional $10. 

Book Review: Alias Grace

A Fair Trade Book (on principle, drattit!)



Title: Alias Grace

Author: Margaret Atwood

Date: 1996

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: 0-385-47571-3

Length: 465 pages

Illustrations: reprinted drawings

Quote: “[W]hen you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.”

For those who’ve not already met Grace Marks, the murder suspect whose story is retold in this novel, perhaps the simplest way to introduce her is to say that she was the Jodi Arias of the 1850s. Very young and apparently quite attractive, she was the most logical suspect of a murder she would hardly have been able to commit all by herself. She told several different stories about how the murder might have been committed, apparently based on what she thought people would believe or understand rather than any actual memory she may or may not have had. Based on the logical probability that she was an accomplice in some way, she was transferred among various prisons and mental hospitals for years until it became obvious that, in any case, she wasn’t violent. She seems to have left a different impression on the staff at each institution. When finally released, she disappeared; she was still early in middle age and had seemed healthy, and in those days it was easy for a woman to change her identity by merely getting married and moving to a different town. And Grace Marks was a bit of a celebrity; some of those who hoped her story would end that way were men who could have made it happen.

Alias Grace is a story based on one of the possible explanations of the baffling facts of Grace Marks’ story. We’ll never know why the real Grace Marks bothered to use an alias when her legal name was known. Atwood, always fascinated by lies and distortions, offers one possible explanation: as the quote above (found on page 33) warns us, Grace Marks might have had multiple personality disorder.

Not many writers can invent a plausible character like the one this explanation requires Grace Marks to be, and make reading a full-length book about her fun. Nevertheless that’s what Atwood has done.

She does it by showing us, rather than telling us, all about the snobbery and sexual hypocrisy and bigotry and cruelty and filth and folly, and faith and courage and self-control and public spirit and friendliness, of nineteenth century Anglo-culture. To a considerable extent Anglo-culture had remained isolated and homogenous. Grace Marks was born in Ireland and became infamous in Ontario; the rules for good-girl conduct in those places, in the U.S., and in the U.K., were much the same.

The real Grace Marks was described as beautiful and witty, as unattractive and stupid, as mousily modest and (by Victorian standards) brazenly frank. As a good Victorian girl employed in domestic service, trying to avoid being “ruined” by premarital pregnancy in order to save up and be the lady of her own house some day, she might have felt obliged to be all of those things even without the benefit of multiple personalities. In the days when every well-off family shared their home with a staff of servants, the “maids” and “girls” got the short end of every conceivable stick. They might be dismissed without references by the men of the house if they said no to sexual invitations, by the women if they failed to say no;  unmarried mothers and their children were social outcasts, unmarried mothers who abandoned children and their “orphans” were even worse off; probably there were more sophisticated rich men who seduced (or simply raped) maids than there were maids who seduced teenaged boys, but in all cases, if sexual relationships were known to exist, the maids were blamed. ("Blame it on the maids" is a refrain in another Atwood novel.) The safest course of action for the maids was to make themselves as unattractive as possible.For this purpose any degree of dirtiness, stupidity, or poor health that the lady of the house would tolerate was useful to a maid. Childishness was good if none of the men in the house happened to be a pedophile. When Atwood’s rendition of Grace-as-character tells her own story, she’s in her mid-twenties, but she generally talks like a rather shy, slow child of twelve or thirteen. It’s not inconsistent with the facts that this might have been the real Grace Marks’ strategy; people who thought her “little more than an idiot” seem to have been men and jealous wives.

Some other disparities in the record of Grace Marks may be meaningless. Was her hair red or brown? People who have red hair at fifteen generally have brown hair at forty. If she was never visibly violent, did she at least act demented at times? She wouldn’t have been the first Irish woman who got drunk enough to act foolish on “one innocent glass of wine or beer with meals,” as served by Europeans and by many early nineteenth century English families; nor would she have been the first nineteenth century mental patient whose reactions to harsh experimental treatments included genuine temporary insanity, nor, for that matter, the first whose fear of abusive hospital employees or more deranged patients prompted the patient to act demented.

But...was she a mousy, narrow-minded, innocent, rather boring Nice Girl who wasn’t terribly troubled by memories of murders she had not planned or witnessed, whose mind was full of recipes and needlework patterns, or was she a Mean Girl who planned the murders during an adolescent mood swing and all but literally saw the victims’ eyes following her everywhere? Is it possible to be both?

Atwood and her fans enjoy ambiguities and the novel contains a further one. Are alternate personalities simply different aspects of a single personality, as rationalist psychologists prefer to believe, or are they ghosts or devils that invade the afflicted personality, as occultists have always claimed? Is it possible to draw the line, and, if so, where? If a timid patient always admired someone else’s reckless courage, even though the reckless person died by misadventure, and the timid patient then acts bold and reckless while identifying self with the reckless person, is it possible that the reckless person’s spirit has any real influence on the patient? Atwood’s Grace makes it very clear what she believes, but she’s only an ignorant housemaid. Readers are free to interpret Grace’s story either way.

Stories like the real Grace Marks’ were never commonplace, but neither were they unique. They were, as Atwood suggests toward the end of this novel, useful to those who wanted to sell the idea that owning lots of machines “liberated” people from the whole servant/employer relationship, rather than (as Betty Friedan claimed) isolating women in houses full of machines. Then as now, many “personal assistants” and their employers became each other’s closest friends...but Victorian elitism probably made it easier for housemaids to feel more like what Grace Marks’ accusers made her out to be than like what, e.g., Alice B. Toklas really was.

Margaret Atwood has been the rock star of fiction-writing-in-English for a long time now. Her books hardly need reviews; they need announcements. She needs a dollar from the sale of a Fair Trade Book about as much as any of the deceased authors of other books recently reviewed here need one. However, a rule is a rule; Atwood has charities like anybody else (and has written in aid of her charities for a long time). If you buy Alias Grace here, for $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment, we'll send $1 to Atwood or the charity of her choice. What I have is a hardcover copy of luxuriant size, such that only the smaller, cheaper paperback editions of Atwood's other books (or maybe one of her picture books) would fit comfortably into a package beside it, but that $5 per package applies to as many books as fit into the package, and if you choose to add other vintage Atwood books to the package we'll send her charity $1 per book. Charities she's been known to support have included Amnesty International and Audubon Foundation.

Book Review: Jubilee

(Reclaimed from Blogjob, where the tags were American Civil War, historical fiction, interracial sex in the nineteenth century, novel based on family legend, romance novels, women’s fiction.)

Title: Jubilee

Author: Margaret Walker

Date: 1966 / 1988

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin / Bantam

ISBN: 0-553-27383-3

Length: 416 pages

Quote: “I don’t see how come that make Big Missy hate me so bad. I ain’t done nothing.”

What makes Mrs. Dutton hate Elvira is of course the open secret of Elvira’s ancestry. With her blonde hair and “milky white” complexion, enslaved Elvira is obviously the sister—practically the twin—of Lillian Dutton. (My paperback edition of the book, as shown above, features a Black woman on the front cover. This would have to be Elvira’s foster mother, Sally. Where's Elvira?) Mrs. Dutton is one of those dark brunettes who would, if it hadn’t been considered slanderous at the time, have been asked about possible African ancestors of their own...which accounts for the virtual-twin look of the Dutton half-sisters. Both girls are blonde like their father.

Enslaved half-siblings of the heirs occupied a peculiar position in several rich families in early U.S. history. Probably each case was handled differently. While her darker siblings are merely slaves, Elvira gets the full Cinderella treatment; Mr. Dutton doesn’t want to sell her off, or use her for hard labor or prostitution, but neither can he bring himself to claim her as his daughter (although everyone in town knows she is, and non-local acquaintances always think she’s White). So she’s kept in the house as a cook, where Mrs. Dutton can abuse her freely and sell off any other slave who seems to be her friend, specifically including Sally.

Both Dutton daughters are pretty and attract admirers. Lillian naturally gets the debutante season and fancy wedding; Elvira gets to cook all the extra food, knowing that she’s likely to be accused of poisoning the guests if anything is seasoned wrong and dosed with purgatives “to find out what she’s been stealing” if she looks happy. Elvira, perhaps due to disagreements between Mr. and Mrs. Dutton, is sent out to meet an attractive Free Black man who wants to marry her, but her father refuses either to set her free or to sell her to someone who will. They’re allowed to spend nights together and produce two children, without the punitive “medication” Mrs. Dutton freely dispenses when other house slaves seem interested in sex, but they’re not allowed the legal status of marriage.

Then the war breaks out. While watching her father, her wicked stepmother, and her half-brother die Elvira is notified that the father of her children is dying. Then she’s notified that she’s free to marry another man who wants to be the stepfather of her children. After making arrangements for the care of Lillian, who gets the sort of ending her mother deserves, Elvira goes west to start her life as a free woman.

Like Gone with the Wind, Jubilee took its author ten years to write. However, the stories are completely different, and so are the writing processes that led to them. Margaret Mitchell spent a great deal of time working out a fictional plot that, consciously or not, turned the cultural history of Georgia into a romance—which is why Scarlett bears little resemblance to any actual woman living or dead. (Plenty of women may be as selfish as Scarlett, but in the real world men who know them as well as Rhett and Ashley knew Scarlett don’t stay “in love” with them.) Margaret Walker spent her time researching the historical details to flesh out a family legend. Elvira Dutton was a real woman—as posthumously re-visioned by an adoring granddaughter. For those who read either story as a mere romance, the difference is that one can imagine Elvira as a good friend to have.

For me, personally, the detail that adds a special charm to this book is Elvira’s choice of suitors. She’s clearly attracted to both, and both have displayed heroic characters. How is a woman to choose? The word “introvert” is not used in the book, but...

What’s not to love? Well, there are a few obvious flaws in Walker’s novelistic style. Unable to find a credible way to weave war news into the story, she drops in chunks of historical narrative, sometimes opening them with the clumsy device of “Elvira didn’t know that...” And, even in the tensest moments, she makes her characters recite long unlikely speeches.

However, people who enjoy novels have been agreeing for several years now that, given a chance, the story carries them across these rough patches. Few fictional heroines deserve a happy ending as much as Elvira does, and although readers can guess that she’s going to get one they want to find out how, when, and with whom it will be. I'm not often moved to any emotion by a novel; I cried the first time I read this one.

The minimum price for books I sell online is $5 per book + $5 per package (for shipping). Really, when the authors no longer need 10% of that price, you don't need to feel bad about finding a better price elsewhere. However, if you buy Jubilee from me, you may add it to a package with one or more Fair Trade Books for only one shipping fee, which may make the overall price more competitive.

(P.S.: Amazon is tempting its Associates to try something new. It's not new, it's "I-frames"! In this part of the world, when "I-frames" are run through any computer, the code is automatically scrambled so that it can't possibly work.)