"Band Of Angels" by Robert Penn Warren, A Wonderful Old Novel And Still Worth Reading!

 

"Band Of Angels" is a 1955 novel by Robert Penn Warren, one of the handful of American writers who was never awarded a Nobel Prize and probably should have been.  But he was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel "All The King's Men", and the second for his poetry.  He was also a Rhodes Scholar and taught at both Vanderbilt University and Yale.  He also worked as a Consultant In Poetry for the Library of Congress.  He was an amazingly prolific writer and produced 12 novels, 15 non-fiction books on a variety of subjects, 3 children's books, 2 major dramatic versions of his novel "All The King's Men", 1 short story collection, and 21 collections of poetry.  

 

"Band Of Angels" was made into a 1957 movie which starred Clark Gable, Sidney Poitier, and Yvonne de Carlo.  The heroine and narrator of the book is Amantha "Manty" Starr, a woman who was raised by her father on a Central Kentucky plantation in the years preceding the Civil War.  Her mother is dead and buried near the house instead of in the plantation cemetery some distance farther away.  Her father who pampers her, apparently loves her deeply, and regularly takes her to Cincinnati to meet his friends there.  He also enrolls her in Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.  But he never tells her much about her mother, and the primary female influence in her childhood is an older slave woman.  The father dies suddenly while Manty is still in college and, when she returns to the plantation just in time to see the end of his funeral proceedings in the cemetery, she learns that her mother was a slave, that she was never freed by her father, and is seized, as part of his personal property, at the graveside by a local loan shark who has loaned her father large sums of money.  She is shipped to New Orleans to be sold as a slave in the slave market there and bought by an older man who pays $2,000 for her to keep her from falling into the hands of a young southern ne'er do well.  She becomes the mistress of her owner who turns out to be a former slave trading ship's captain.  He also owns a unique male slave who is the actual overseer of his plantations but has been raised much like his son and holds a great deal of power over the other slaves.  

This book is full of one surprise twist after another and flows with wonderful prose which is the trademark of Robert Penn Warren.  Modern readers, especially readers of color, are likely to be deeply offended to the prolific use of racial slurs in the book which are not just limited to the "N" word.  But it is an accurate book for the times which it describes in the slave holding south both before and after the Civil War.  Manty is eventually set free, marries a former Union Army captain, and lives for a time in New Orleans high society.  She also eventually joins her husband in a long westward migration as he seeks a career as a lawyer but finds one reason after another to fail in town after town.  There is a great deal to love in this book along with a somewhat sizeable portion of things some readers will hate.  But it has survived, as every word Robert Penn Warren published has and should have survived.  It's arguable weaknesses are clearly overcome by its powerful strengths.  Put aside any negative emotions you might have for Warren's broad usage of language which is historically accurate but despised today and read the book.  In fact, I would say that any reader who likes to read broadly of the best writers in the world would be remiss to avoid reading Warren as broadly as possible.  He is one of America's great masters of literature.  

Reading And Defending "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn"

I have written more than once on this blog about reading banned books, both those previously banned and those currently banned or being threatened with banning.  Many of the greatest books in the world have been or are still banned in many countries and smaller jurisdictions ranging from nations down to tiny school districts.  Both of Mark Twain's incredibly well written and well loved novels about growing up as a boy on the Mississippi River have been banned at times and many school districts in America today still refuse to allow them to be taught in their public schools.  There is no more important organ of democracy in the world than a free and unfettered press which is why the Founding Fathers in their infinite wisdom guaranteed it in the US Constitution.  The very reasons they guaranteed it are the same reasons that are being used today to attack that constitutionally guaranteed free press.  Despots, tyrants, zealots, and idiots are likely to attempt to ban books for as long as they are printed and to move on, as they are today, to also attacking and banning all other forms of mass communication.  Nothing scares tyrants, despots, zealots, and idiots more than the truth and the free expression of it.  I have stated at times in writings on this blog that it is likely that one of these two books in discussion in this blog post was probably the first book I ever read which had been banned.  So with the need to preserve a free press in mind, I have recently reread both of these masterpieces from Mark Twain.  

I fully realize that there are many reasons these two books were banned and that many of those reasons are legitimate on their face.  Much of the content in the books which refers to African Americans can be considered to be racist.  But when we read any book, we should examine the date of the original copyright and attempt to determine if the book in question was an accurate portrayal of the people, places, and times which they are depicting at the time of their original publication.  There can be absolutely no doubt that Mark Twain understood the Mississippi River, Missouri, and the people who resided there in the late 1800's as well or better than any other human alive at that point.  He also understood the institution of slavery and he did not endorse it as any intelligent reader of the two books can tell you.  These books were much more stories about friendships between unique and very different individuals who were living at the margins of Missouri society in the later years of the 19th century.  Two white boys, one the heavily abused son of the town drunk, and the other raised by an aunt after being orphaned befriend and have that friendship returned by an African American slave.  Throughout the books, at no time do these three persons ever treat each other as less than equal.  They never fail to reciprocate with the same loyalty and trust which is offered to them.  They take turn about standing up for, fighting in support of, and rescuing each other from one peril after another ranging from murderers, con men, and fugitive slave hunters, to a highly dangerous and deadly Big Muddy.  Along the 800 or so pages contained in the two books, each of the three faces opportunities to take the easy road out without being forced to suffer and they all always stand up, grit their teeth, and take the road less traveled in support of their friends.  At various times in the manuscripts, each of them is hailed as a hero when the easier route would have been for them to accept their own personal villiany and walk quietly away without losing any skin off their nose.  They never do that.  They stick by each other from start to finish and never flinch.  

Mark Twain--Photo by Ebay

Yes, I know that the language in the books, especially that in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is racist.  But it was the common language of the day among all the groups whose dialects Twain was writing.  Mark Twain wrote in the original foreword to "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" that he would be writing the book using three dialects of three different groups of people in the area of his fictional town on the river.  Here is what he said: "the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary Pike County dialect; and four modified varieties of this last."  And that is exactly what he did.  I am not always a fan of writing in dialect and that aversion is deeply rooted in the fact that I grew up speaking and still speak my own version of one of the most maligned and vilified dialects in the country, the Southern Appalachian dialect.  When Mark Twain wrote in those various dialects of Missouri, he was required to use their verbiage, vocabulary, accents, and idiosyncrasies.  And he did a damn fine job of it.  He has ever since been pilloried by his detractors for having used the singular, and sometimes singularly repulsive, vocabulary of Missouri slave holders and poor whites.  And if we, in our self-appointed "wisdom" (translate ignorance) attempt to edit those words out of the books, we are doing a great disservice to the average reader who had no idea how poor slaves were spoken of and treated at the time of the books.  

I have little doubt that some of my readers here will accuse me of racism for having taken this position in defense of two of the greatest American novels ever written.  So let me tell you a little about my life history.  I have spent twenty years living and working in settings, both in agriculture and the human services, in which the employees and clientele were roughly 80% African American.  I have performed home visits in the ghettos of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Erie, Southern New Jersey, and Lexington, Kentucky.  I know whereof I speak when I speak of the downtrodden since 8 of those years were spent working with a homeless population who were primarily African American.  But if you choose be well rounded in the area of American Literature or to produce children who are well rounded, you need to read and you need to assure that those children read the work of Mark Twain, and if possible, to read all of his works.  Do not in your self-appointed righteousness refuse to read two of the best American novels ever written.