Course Readings

The texts in this course are listed below.  The books are available for purchase at the Vanderbilt bookstore.  You should review the printed syllabus for the dates readings are assigned.  Readings should be done before you come to class that day; a quiz will be taken to test your familiarity with the material in each story.   

JOHN HOWARD GRIFFIN’S BLACK LIKE ME (1962). On October 28, 1959, John Howard Griffin underwent a transformation that changed many lives beyond his own—he made his skin black and traveled through the segregated Deep South. His odyssey of discovery was captured in journal entries, arguably the single most important documentation of 20th-century American racism ever written. More than 50 years later, this newly edited edition—which is based on the original manuscript and includes a new design and added afterword—gives fresh life to what is still considered a “contemporary book.” The story that earned respect from civil rights leaders and death threats from many others endures today as one of the great human—and humanitarian—documents of the era. In this new century, when terrorism is too often defined in terms of a single ethnic designation or religion, and the first black president of the United States is subject to hateful slurs, this record serves as a reminder that America has been blinded by fear and racial intolerance before. This is the story of a man who opened his eyes and helped an entire nation do likewise.

MARY GRUENWALD’S LOOKING LIKE THE ENEMY (2005). In 1941, Mary Matsuda Gruenewald was a teenage girl who, like other Americans, reacted with horror to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Yet soon she and her family were among 110,000 innocent people imprisoned by the U.S. government because of their Japanese ancestry. In this eloquent memoir, she describes both the day-to-day and the dramatic turning points of this profound injustice: what is was like to face an indefinite sentence in crowded, primitive camps; the struggle for survival and dignity; and the strength gained from learning what she was capable of and could do to sustain her family. It is at once a coming-of-age story, an engaging narrative on a topic still not widely known, and a timely warning for the present era of terrorism.

DAVID MALDONADO’S CROSSING GUADALUPE STREET (2001). To grow up as a Mexican-American Methodist in a small town in south central Texas in the 1940s and 1950s was to be a minority within a minority. This account of a boyhood in Seguin, Texas, broadens our understanding of Latino culture by evoking a time when Catholics and Protestants had nothing to do with each other and the word Chicano was not yet in use. But in spite of ethnic and religious segregation, the Maldonado family and their neighbors flourished in the rich Mejicano culture of their barrio west of Guadalupe Street, a world totally separate from the Anglo world. The language spoken in schools, churches, restaurants, bars, and beauty parlors was predominantly Spanish. The sounds and smells were Mexican. School teachers were the most successful and respected members of the community. Guadalupe Street separated Protestant families like the Maldonados from the Anglo and Catholic communities. But it did not keep them from attaining success in the Anglo world. David Maldonado's memoir of how he crossed Guadalupe Street is the story of a man who became bilingual, bicultural, and successful, but it is also a tribute to the traditions in which he grew up.

ELAINE SOLOWAY’S THE DIVISION STREET PRINCESS (2006). Set in the 1940s, Elaine Soloway’s memoir takes its title from the street that Studs Terkel exalts in his classic book, Division Street: America, and from the pet name her father gave her. Soloway lived in a three-room flat above her family’s grocery store. In her tale of bookies, poolrooms, sidewalk playgrounds, and relatives who lived down the block, we learn about her loving but embattled parents, her adored older brother, and neighborhood kibitzers. Along with her recollections of a lively, unique community, she also shows the underside of childhood and urban life. Although far from the Holocaust and the war overseas, Soloway faced dangers close to home when a child her age was horribly murdered, and when predators preyed on voiceless little girls. As Soloway struggled to find her own identity, the family store and Division Street waged battles too: for post-war prosperity, television, supermarkets, and suburbia threatened an end to corner stores—and to old neighborhoods everywhere.

LUIS URREA’S ACROSS THE WIRE (1993). This memoir offers a compelling and unprecedented look at what life is like for those refugees living on the Mexican side of the border—a world that is only some twenty miles from San Diego, but that few have seen.  Urrea gives us a compassionate and candid account of his work as a member and "official translator" of a crew of relief workers that provided aid to the many refugees hidden just behind the flashy tourist spots of Tijuana.  His account of the struggle of these people to survive amid abject poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and the legal and political chaos that reign in the Mexican borderlands explains without a doubt the reason so many are forced to make the dangerous and illegal journey "across the wire" into the United States. More than just an expose,Across the Wireis a tribute to the tenacity of a people who have learned to survive against the most impossible odds, and returns to these forgotten people their pride and their identity. 

GREGORY WILLIAMS’ LIFE ON THE COLOR LINE (1996). Williams, dean of the Ohio State University College of Law, tells the affecting and absorbing story of his most unusual youth. Born to a white mother and a black father who passed for white, Williams was raised as white in Virginia until he was 10, when his mother left. His father brought his two sons back home to Muncie, Ind., in 1954 and sank further into drink. The two boys were eventually taken in by Miss Dora, a poor black widow. Williams's many anecdotes are a mixture of pain, struggle and triumph: learning "hustles" from Dad, receiving guidance from a friend's mother, facing racism from teachers and classmates, beginning a clandestine romance with a white girl he eventually married. And while his scarred, grandiloquent father was never reliable, he did instill in young Greg-though not in Greg's brother-sustaining dreams of professional success. Along the way the author decided, despite his appearance, he would proudly claim the black identity that white Muncie wouldn't let him forget. Williams ends his narrative when he reaches college; in the epilogue, he regrets that "there were too many who were unable to break the mold Muncie cast.

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN’S BROTHERS AND KEEPERS (1984). A haunting portrait of lives arriving at different destinies, Brothers and Keepers is John Edgar Wideman’s seminal memoir about two brothers — one an award-winning novelist, the other a fugitive wanted for robbery and murder. Wideman recalls the capture of his younger brother Robby, details the subsequent trials that resulted in a sentence of life in prison, and provides vivid views of the American prison system. A gripping, unsettling account, Brothers and Keepers weighs the bonds of blood, tenderness, and guilt that connect Wideman to his brother and measures the distance that lies between the two.en them.