Highlights from this issue...

The real David Brock?
Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock. New York: Crown Publishers, 2002, 336 pp., $25.95 hardcover.

By Florence George Graves

ANYONE WHO CARES about the struggle for women's equality, about our all too fragile democracy, about how easily the mainstream media can be manipulated--anyone who wonders whether one individual can indeed make an enormous difference (for good or, in this case, evil) should read this book.

Please note that I do not recommend buying the book. David Brock, the guy responsible for The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story (Free Press, 1993), has already made hundreds of thousands--probably a couple of million--dollars peddling his misogyny, lies and distortions. In addition to Anita Hill, Brock trashed Angela Wright, the woman whose corroborated stories of how Clarence Thomas talked dirty at work and pressed her to go out with him probably would have dealt Thomas a fatal blow had she been allowed to testify. He also smeared Bill and Hillary Clinton in the infamous, salacious and (he now says) largely unverified Arkansas state trooper stories he wrote for the American Spectator. By his own account, he was part of a right-wing conspiracy bent on destroying the Clintons at any cost.

No, I urge you to keep your $25.95. Why help David Brock pay the upkeep on his tony nineteenth-century Georgetown digs, no matter how revealing his mea culpa for the destructive and malicious role he played in American politics? Instead, borrow the book from a reviewer who gets copies gratis, or, better yet, from the library. Then be prepared to weep.

This book is a true tearjerker on many levels. Brock confesses that much of what he wrote about Hill, Wright and the Clintons was, as Anthony Lewis characterized his Hill book, "Sleaze with Footnotes." As for Hill, he did "everything I could to ruin" her credibility. "I took a scattershot approach, dumping virtually every derogatory--and often contradictory--allegation I had collected on Hill from the Thomas camp into the mix." He admits to producing "a witches' brew of fact, allegation, hearsay, speculation, opinion, and invective labeled by my editors as 'investigative journalism.'"

Not that this is really news to those who were paying close attention during the nineties, or read Brock's work with any discernment. But the details of what he and others did, how they did it, and who helped them and paid them, are riveting and revealing: for example, he says the new Supreme Court Justice Thomas, working under the radar screen, provided damaging tidbits when needed. And Brock's tortured personal history of being a closeted homosexual, looking for love in all the wrong places, will make you want to write a check to the Children's Defense Fund and then go hug a kid. "There were times when I was not sure I would live through it to tell this story," he writes. I can understand why.

But now, full disclosure: I am not a disinterested reader or reviewer. I have spent most of the last ten years--since the October 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings, to be exact--reporting on the gender and culture war being waged in Washington politics and media. I broke (with Charles Shepard) the 1992 Senator Bob Packwood sexual misconduct story for The Washington Post, a story that was a direct result of the Thomas hearings. Thanks to a 1993 Alicia Patterson Fellowship, I was able to spend almost a year investigating why Angela Wright--a woman whose testimony several senators told me would have torpedoed Thomas' bid for the Supreme Court--never testified, even though she had been subpoenaed and was in a Washington hotel waiting to be called. In 1999, as the culture wars and Conservatives' Crusades reached their zenith during the Clinton administration, I also broke a story in The Nation documenting Kathleen Willey's history of lying during legal proceedings, including to Independent Counsel Ken Starr's own investigators.

I have interviewed Brock several times. And I had my own close--and very unpleasant--encounters with him in 1994, both before and after my investigation of why Angela Wright never testified was published in The Washington Post. (Brock lied to me in an interview before publication and again in a letter to the editor after publication.) My article revealed for the first time the bipartisan secret agreement between Democratic Senator Joe Biden and Republican Senator Alan Simpson to engineer Wright's non-testimony, thus assuring Thomas' ascension to the Supreme Court. As Brock writes in Blinded by the Right, "the discrediting of Wright was seen by the Thomas loyalists as perhaps the most important part of my [Anita Hill] book, for it had been widely believed by both sides in the struggle that if Wright had testified, the nomination would have been doomed."

Now Brock acknowledges what my many months of reporting uncovered--that when working on his best-selling The Real Anita Hill, he never contacted a single source to try to corroborate the vindictive gossip about Angela Wright contained in "unfiltered and unverified" FBI files he claims he read. He simply repeated the information given to him--probably illegally, he says--by a top aide to Republican Senator Strom Thurmond (who has denied Brock's claim). "This enabled me to do to Wright what I had already done to Hill," Brock writes with complete accuracy.

BROCK’S APOLOGIA is loaded with confessions. He was "a witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine," "a Jew in Hitler's army," "a whore for cash," a "closeted opportunist" and a co-conspirator "in the anti-Clinton jihad." And he lied, lied and lied some more, he tells us.

Although much of what he writes tracks with my own reporting, I can't vouch for all of it. However, one thing I know is true: our democracy was almost hijacked by a Taliban-like right-wing cabal that was obsessed with sex--and I do mean obsessed--especially with gay and lesbian sex, and with a fear of the opposite sex--especially women who thought differently from them. All of this, even though many of their own players were Republican gays (some came on to Brock; others, he says, jokingly referred to themselves as "laissez-fairies"), women who got to where they were thanks to feminism, and "moral chest thumping" adulterers like Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. None of this means that Clinton was a saint. As Brock agrees, Clinton handed his enemy the gun and said, "Shoot me."

I also know that David Brock's (now admittedly) error-filled, misguided, hate-mongering article about the Arkansas state troopers and their claims about the Clintons' sex lives while President Clinton was governor brought us Paula Jones and her right-wing-financed sexual harassment lawsuit. (In an unthinking throwaway line, Brock claimed a woman named Paula was willing to be Clinton's paramour.) The lawsuit was eventually designed, Brock says a Jones lawyer told him (which is consistent with my own reporting), to rummage through Clinton's sex life past and present, trap him into lying under oath, create a crisis and thus destabilize his presidency. Destabilize, we know now, was an understatement.

Almost a year later, a judge dismissed the lawsuit as having no legal merit (which is not saying Paula Jones was necessarily lying). During the legal process, however, Clinton's inappropriate and suicidal relationship with the ingénue Monica Lewinsky was exposed. This stranger-than-fiction affair led to a federal case charging Clinton with lying under oath about his relationship with Lewinsky and ultimately to the president's impeachment by the House of Representatives.

By secretly financing and managing Jones' lawsuit, the right wing also achieved another long-time goal: undermining the legitimacy of all sexual harassment lawsuits. Mocking the feminism they still passionately fear and hate, they helped finance a platoon of young, highly educated, hostile-to-feminism and more-than-willing-to-be-used blondes in mini-skirts to defend their agenda on television. Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham are two whom Brock profiles.

READING THIS BOOK indicates that the tortured soul of David Brock seems to have made significant progress on its journey for redemption and reconciliation. He appears to come clean about his own deeply etched character flaws on just about every page. He acknowledges his greed. "I wanted the million bucks," he says of the advance given to him with the understanding he would do a hatchet job on Hillary Clinton in his next book. He tries to make amends, atone for what seems like a sociopathic need to lie, correct the historical record, while offering "a cautionary tale of lessons learned the hard way." He concludes that "even from the depths of depravity and desolation, a conversion of politics, morals, and ultimately of spirit is possible."

Many have questioned whether his transformation is "real." I am happy for him that he now has a "loving relationship" with a man "who has helped me see that self-discovery is a daily process, and that whatever my future commitments may turn out to be, they must be grounded in compassion."

So do we now have "The Real David Brock"--new, improved, and truly compassionate?

I conclude that Brock (like all of us) is still very much a work in progress. Many of the telling portraits of his numerous former co-conspirators seem something short of compassionate. (He told an on-line Q&A that his revelations are restrained, considering what he knows.) In describing his own sexual coming of age, he commits the same thoughtless blunder he did when he carelessly, gratuitously threw Paula Jones into his state trooper stories. Even though he does not name the woman he says he had a "torrid" and inappropriate affair with, he gives enough detail to identify her (at least to her circle of friends and family). There goes her reputation.

I can't tell from reading this book whether Brock truly understands the devastation that his despicable, cascading lies wrought on the lives of so many people who got in his sights and who didn't have the resources of a president or First Lady even to begin to fight back. I salute him for sending Anita Hill a written apology for unfairly savaging her (even though, as he admits, he never had the guts to return her voice-mail message acknowledging his note). But I still think of her dignified, anguished family from Oklahoma who stood so proudly by her during and after the hearings. Is a letter and an admission really enough?

As painful as these confessions must have been for him, it's clear to this reader that writing the book was easier than giving up any ill-gotten wealth. As others have suggested, we'll know the transformation is complete when he hands over to Ms. Hill the keys to his treasured Georgetown real estate--the house that Anita paid for. I also am waiting for him to apologize to Angela Wright and her family for the unspeakable pain he so recklessly caused them. Maybe the Wright family could get the keys to his beach house in Delaware, if he still has it.

Yes, David Brock tells us, he is sorry--very, very, very sorry. But Brock's also on The New York Times bestseller list again. And although it's certainly trite, it's also true: there's nothing like putting your money where your mouth is, David. And speaking of money, when you return his book to the library, you might want to drop a check in the mail to your favorite civil rights organization. When you're deciding how much to give, remind yourself what this book makes clear: rich and generous right-wing zealots almost succeeded in buying your democracy. <@rdingbat>

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Uncompromising talent
Open the Door: The Life and Music of Betty Carter by William Bauer. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002, 456 pp., $29.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Ellen Cantarow

Betty Carter in Hamburg, Germany, 1983, with David Penn on bass. From Open the Door.

BETTY CARTER STANDS with musicians like Miles Davis as one of jazz's true revolutionaries. She redefined the human voice as a jazz instrument equal or even superior to its counterparts. Directing trios through orchestras, she arranged and composed; commanded the largest concert halls as intimately and infectiously as Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins; was a shrewd businesswoman who turned down a Warner Brothers contract and successfully launched her own record company, Bet-Car Records. She brought jazz to both a national and an international public without compromising the integrity of her own concept.

I first heard her sing in 1976 at Sandy's, a now-defunct club north of Boston. At 26 years' distance, what I remember best is her sheer physical and emotional impact. I think she wore a splashy gown rather than the cross-dress outfits I'd see in future concerts, but her performance turned what she wore into an ironic commentary on traditional jazz femininity. A column of sheer dark-skinned energy, her body twisted, swayed and gyrated; her mouth stretched elastically into all sorts of grimaces, her face contorted; she seemed almost grotesque. And it suddenly burst on me: this wasn't a "singer"--Carter's whole body was an instrument! She was pure sound, soaring to intoxicating highs, dropping into murmuring lows as sensuous as a tropical bath.

Many people have shared this reaction, not the least of them Carter's peers in the business. Norman Simmons' description of a 1970s jam session is typical: "Betty sang some notes I wish I could find on the piano. She sounded as far into it as any horn I'd heard play and she was singing fantastic lines and intervals. Miles [Davis] got turned on and borrowed Bobby Hackett's trumpet to get up there and join her."

Born Lillie Mae Jones in 1929 to a working-class family in Detroit (her father was a press operator at Ford), she assumed the name "Lorene Carter" when she joined Lionel Hampton's band in 1949. Deep into bebop, the era's revolutionary jazz movement, she'd auditioned informally for Hampton when his band had visited Detroit the year before, bowling him over with her scatting--wordless vocalizing over the chords of tunes. (Louis Armstrong had pioneered this technique, but Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald, two of the young woman's idols, were honing it to an art within the bebop idiom.) Hampton insisted on calling her "Betty Bebop." When she struck out on her own in 1951, she dropped "Lorene" and "Bebop," coining the fusion-name she'd keep for life.

OPEN THE DOOR (for the record, the author is a friendly acquaintance) began in 1998 as William Bauer's doctoral dissertation. In general it's a pleasure to read, with the feel of good journalism--occasionally even of fiction.

Carter's life was the stuff of fiction. She drove through the greatest barriers--racism, sexism, corruption in the music business, pressures to go commercial, decades of obscurity--to further her art. To the displeasure of her taskmaster mother, who like many religious African Americans thought jazz "the devil's music," she sang informally in her teens with other future greats (among them young Detroit pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris). On leaving Hampton's band she went to New York City, where she achieved cult status with her peers and black audiences. But only in the '70s did her career really take off. Like Art Blakey's, her bandstand became a launching pad for young musicians. The '90s found her acclaimed worldwide, packing Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, singing at the White House. "[S]he found a way to embrace jazz purity and pop celebrity," writes Bauer. "Hers was a talent that emerged from the convergence of a distinctive personality and a particular historical moment, both of which will never come again."

Betty Carter at the Prospect Park band shell, Brooklyn, 1981. From Open the Door.

Why Carter's fame came so late in her career, how she made her way to acclaim, who she worked with along the way, constitute the book's story line. Open the Door is a fifty-year portrait of jazz as Carter lived and shaped it in the company of well-known contemporaries like Davis, Parker and Gillespie as well as a myriad of lesser-known ones like saxophonist Gigi Gryce, a major influence on young talent in the 1950s. We discover subcultures unknown outside of inner jazz circles--for instance the world of independent, African American jazz recording before the US music scene got desegregated in the 1960s. Vignettes of Carter with performers like arrogant trumpeter Freddie Hubbard (she cut him down to size at a recording session) and the difficult Carmen McRae (the two performed together happily in 1987, then broke bitterly over a contract dispute) reveal the vicissitudes of daily life and work among musicians. An 82-page appendix with music and phonetic transcriptions of Carter's improvisations, as well as a discography suggesting CDs for listening as you read, are helpful. Twelve pages of photographs include a teenaged Carter in bra and shorts wielding a bat in what appears to be a female softball game, and a picture of her beaming in cap and gown with an honorary doctorate Williams College gave her in 1997, the year before her death.

Bauer attends to the ways race and gender shaped Carter's life. He describes her childhood experience in black Detroit churches, informing us that she sang not gospel but "plain chant" whose "haunting intonations... suffused hymn tunes with a blueslike wailing quality." The "vocal timbres she encountered... from warmly resonant to coarsely raspy, sensitized her to the coloristic potential of the voice... The freedom of movement typical of African American worship helped her become comfortable with using her body as an expressive instrument."

Carter sang at the Hartford Avenue Church; its pastor was Reverend Charles A. Hill, central in Detroit's early civil rights struggle. A UAW backer, he was president of Detroit's NAACP; invited Paul Robeson to sing; was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (he pled the Fifth, saying, "The Bible is my only guide"). Given such influences, it's not surprising that Carter "viewed jazz as a distinctly black music... [and] did not yield ground in order to cross over to a white audience." This conviction, together with her determination to develop her own concept without going commercial, blocked any easy fame. "I'm not supposed to have a hit record," she proudly told a Downbeat interviewer in 1966, "I've always been a jazz singer... I've tried to compromise and couldn't sleep. I'll stay with what I'm doing and be happy on the stage rather than compromise."

Gender prejudice also blocked her. Not only was she an uncompromising, aggressive black woman; she had a "concept" female vocalists weren't allowed. She retooled songs the way players like John Coltrane did, introducing horn-like effects through her shaping of vowels and consonants; laying so far behind the beat that only the most astute musicians understood where the music was going; extending syllables far beyond their original confines within particular bars and meters. "Other jazz singers also took expressive liberties with their material," writes Bauer, "but they tended to assert their concept surreptitiously by following the melody's broad outlines and the lyrics' original prosody... The same listeners who did not mind if any instrumentalist took off on a melody, or even ignored it... expected a vocalist to hew closely to the melody's outlines... Over her career Carter defied the accepted role of female vocalist, expanding it from that of interpreter to bold improviser." Perhaps it was this defiance that gave Carter's persona a certain hard edge. Invulnerability marked her performances: she always took me soaring--she never made me cry.

CARTER GOT MUCH HELP from women, starting with Gladys Hampton, Lionel's wife and personal manager, and she took frequent bandstand swipes at men in tunes like "Most Gentlemen Don't Like Love (they just like to kick it around!)" Women in her audiences loved her sexual wisecracks about her sidemen; men were uncomfortable. Yet she hired only male instrumentalists for her trios and recorded only once with a woman instrumentalist, pianist Geri Allen.

Maybe Bauer never saw her cross-dress: he refers only to photos of her, "often dressed in pants, hair tucked under her cap, [which] suggest that she toyed with a traditionally masculine persona at this time [the '70s]." He observes that while "Carter's play with traditional gender boundaries made men feel uncomfortable, it made her popular with "young people... especially in San Francisco." Of sexual partnerships he tells us only that after leaving her common-law husband, James Romeo Redding, she took up for a while with her pianist Daniel Mixon, twenty years her junior.

What inner strengths gave Carter the nerve for such a liaison? The dead opposite of a "chick singer," she had no personal beauty to trade on. Her gifts were fortitude, stubbornness, sublime self-confidence... and a driving sexuality? Did she ever experience a moment of self-doubt? What went on behind the scenes with Mixon? Were there others besides him? Don't expect this book to probe those questions.

Bauer often, and admirably, pieces together quotes from the artist and her siblings to form a complex psychological portrait of this intensely private person. Speculating about Carter's "antagonistic relationship" with her mother, he comments: "Reflecting back on [the antagonism] gave Carter a deep sense of loss; yet it sounds as if Carter's own willfulness may have influenced her mother's reaction to her, especially in her adolescence. Her brother recalled, 'She gave my mother, really gave her the blues, to put it mildly.'" Carter was far less like her mother than her father who, in her brother's words, was "a battering type of father... he liked physical violence." This suggests questions Bauer never broaches.

About Carter's marriage and relations with her two sons, we learn far less. She met James Romeo Redding in 1960 while singing at a Newark venue where he tended bar; she was chief wage-earner in the family. In the composition, "Open the Door," she tried "to get him to understand... why I couldn't give up what I was doing to go for the money." Bauer describes Carter's flight from home with the kids in the car, "no driver's license, and little driving experience." I found myself worrying whether Redding was a batterer like her father and would pursue her. One gathers he wasn't, and didn't; Bauer quotes him saying mildly, "Once she got an idea in her head, you got on the wagon for the ride 'cause the trip was going to be made." Carter phoned Redding when she learned she was dying of pancreatic cancer. He rushed to her side; so did her sons. We gather they all liked and respected her.

About Carter's difficult professional personality there's more detail--for instance her many firings of sidemen (none lasted more than a year on her bandstand). Bauer says she was also capable of great generosity toward them as well as toward the young talents she fostered in projects like "Jazz Ahead," a concert she produced at Brooklyn's Academy of Music in 1993.

What bothered me far more than the gaps in personal information were pages of close textual analysis of tunes, where Bauer falls into dissertation lingo. An editor's heavy hand was badly needed; I skipped much of this. As it stands, Open the Door is a landmark work for anyone who wants to learn about Carter in particular and jazz in general. "The battles she fought, to preserve the dignity of people who work for the love of what they do, regardless of how little their society rewards such efforts, must still be waged," concludes Bauer. In an increasingly money-oriented musical climate Carter's memory can inspire the general public and move younger artists to follow her great example. Open the Door will help them do that.

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Public transportation
The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts by Siân Rees. New York: Theia/Hyperion, 2002, 236 pp., $23.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

Representation of the transports going from Newgate to take water at Blackfriars. From The Floating Brothel.

IT WAS DIFFICULT ENOUGH to get by in eighteenth-century England as a convict, and nearly impossible to survive as a female felon. Pickpockets, prostitutes and shoplifters, even without being caught, grew old before their time. Apprehended and thrown into prison, they endured fever, malnutrition and abuse--and these were among the luckier ones. At a time when the theft of a shilling's worth of fabric was a capital offense, women who entered shops and stuffed bolts of cloth up their skirts while the shopkeeper's back was turned could soon find themselves swinging from a gibbet, cheered on by a spirited crowd.

Despite the odds of receiving the death penalty, women singly and in small groups pilfered from the houses in which they served, lured men into squalid rooms where they robbed and even beat them, and jealously accused each other of stealing their borrowed clothing. Or at least this is the picture that Siân Rees paints of Georgian London, a place where "the unemployed veterans and amputees were joined by ex-shopgirls, ex-milkmaids, ex-laborers, and ex-maidservants, now 'disorderly girls' living off gin and plates of fatty meat, scraping by on pennies supplemented wherever possible by stealing from someone marginally better off."

In 1788, more than two hundred of these women joined their male counterparts in a newly popular alternative to the death penalty, "Transportation to Parts Beyond the Seas." "Beyond the Seas" could mean any place from Africa to Quebec to Australia. Although attempts to set up penal colonies rarely met with success, government officials continued to believe in them as a way of ridding English streets of the growing number of criminal offenders, many of whose crimes were merely petty theft. There was little creativity or even thoughtful time put into sentencing; juries, judges, the accused and their desperate families, alongside prurient onlookers, crowded into the courtrooms of the Old Bailey, rooms connected by walkways to the disease-ridden Newgate Gaol, as questionable justice was quickly dispensed. "Although merciful compared to the death sentences which would have been handed down had the law been strictly enforced," Rees writes,

the frequency with which the judges resorted to the one-size-fits-all sentence of Transportation to Parts Beyond the Seas for women felons illustrates the severe limitations on sentencing. Even had they wanted to hand down something more lenient, they could not: there was nothing else to hand down. For this reason there appear cruel anomalies. Elizabeth Sully ran a pack of teenage prostitutes in Cable Street and routinely robbed the men they picked up. She got seven years. Esther Curtis got drunk in the privies--and got the same sentence. Justice was a blunt stick. (p. 41)

The court near Covent Garden where Ann Gallant and Francis Bunting were taken in 1788. From The Floating Brothel.

Relying upon documents in London's Public Record Office, as well as the journals of John Nicol, a ship's steward and cooper who dictated his memories of the voyage he made in 1788-1790 to a journalist thirty years later (The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, was republished in 2002), Rees also uses her considerable knowledge of eighteenth-century ships and sailing voyages to produce a lively and readable account of the transportation journey of the Lady Julian to New South Wales, a sort of Moll-Flanders-goes-to-sea.

Books that look back to Defoe's England and shipboard adventure have caught the imagination these days. Diana Souhami's Selkirk's Island (Harcourt, 2002) similarly breathes life into scant records of true adventure by inserting the sights, smells, names and diseases into drier historical accounts. In Rees's book the ballast "rattled and swished about the bilge for years, growing steadily more foul as it absorbed the waste of years of life on board. Dead rats, dead cats, compost from mounds of vegetable peelings, feces, urine, rotting fabric and decomposing sick all lay below the boards." The stench was strong enough to blacken the walls and tarnish the officers' buttons.

Newgate Gaol (left) with the Sessions House adjoining on the right. From The Floating Brothel.

WHAT SEPARATED THE VOYAGE of the Lady Julian from earlier transports to Botany Bay and Sydney Cove was its female cargo. Their women's bodies made them valuable, in the government's eyes, to the colony's survival. They were intended to be the wives of the transported convicts already shipped there, and the mothers of the next generations of colonists. Along the way, though, many of the women quickly became the live-in companions of the ship's crew, an arrangement that Rees is careful to describe as mutually beneficial to those who managed to pair up. Girls like John Nicol's lover Sarah Whitelam, Ann Bryant and Jane Forbes, some of them barely into their teens, found themselves the temporary partners of officers and sailors, trading shipboard security for shipboard maternity.

As the ship inched its way across half of the globe in a voyage lasting a year and a half, the women's sexuality often controlled its reception and activities on board. Stops in Catholic ports saw many of the women adding to their finances by prostituting themselves; months later, the Lady Julian becomes a floating maternity ward as woman after woman gives birth at sea under a maternity tent erected on the upper deck. The men paid scant attention to these female matters, but the well-heeled madame Elizabeth Barnsley rolled up her sleeves and acted as the supervising midwife.

As she does throughout the book, Rees uses informed poetic license to recreate these scenes.

Sarah Whitelam was into the eighth month of her pregnancy. Since leaving London, she had gained anywhere up to 30 pounds in weight. Her belly was now fully extended and she had had to give up her convict serge, with its seams designed for the chaste. She or Mary Rose had probably sewn a drawstring cotton skirt of some type for her pregnancy. She could no longer wear stays so her swollen breasts were unsupported and movement was painful. It was difficult to find a position in which to lie or sit which did not leave some part of her body aching. She and the other heavily pregnant women moved from their backs to their sides on mattresses on the deck, drawing up first one leg then the other. They were sleepy from the heat and the weight of their bodies, waking occasionally from a doze to put a cushion between their knees, turn a pillow for coolness or answer some question from Mrs. Barnsley. Frequently, they would rise carefully, turning to one side, swinging the shoulders round, pushing themselves up to kneel and then staggering up to go and use the bucket. (p. 152)

A view of the wreck of the Grosvenor merchantman off South Africa in 1782. From The Floating Brothel.

In this genre of lively historical writing unsupported by footnotes, Rees conjures up a colorful evocation of life on the voyage. Writing like this adds a vigorous verisimilitude, but also leads the reader to wonder how Rees knows what she purports to know. She has the facts of the women's lives at her fingertips, thanks to her scrupulous comparisons of the available records and her technique of reading between the lines. Yet certain historical errors call her descriptions into question.

For example, while Rees draws a valuable picture of the ironic ways that transportation and slavery literally worked side by side--for a long stretch of the voyage the Lady Julian sailed alongside slave ships that protected her--she gets the racial context wrong. In claiming that "slavery had been outlawed in Britain by a high court judgment of 1772," she repeats a long-refuted misunderstanding of Lord Mansfield's decision, which freed a single slave but did not outlaw slavery on British soil. And although she rightly places the Black population of eighteenth-century Britain at somewhere around 14,000, her claim that children of mixed race "were unknown on the streets of London" ignores the fact that intermarriage between black and white servants in Britain produced a visible number of mixed-race children--one famous example growing up in the privileged household of Lord Mansfield himself.

Rees's strength, and the undeniable power of the book, is in her ability to marry a keen novelistic sense to more scholarly research, and to achieve a cinematic vividness. The book leaves us longing for even more information about the women who were the foremothers of modern Sydney. If it's true, however, that the journey and not the arrival matters, then perhaps the star of the story is not the intriguing ensemble cast, but the Lady Julian herself.

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Indira Nehru Gandhi.

Star of India
Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi by Katherine Frank. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002, 592 pp., $35.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Sarita Sarvate

ONE OF MY EARLIEST childhood memories is that of sneaking up on Indira Gandhi. The Congress Party Session had come to my hometown of Nagpur, and canvas tents had gone up in the fields facing our house. My friend Viju and I had been roaming the grounds one afternoon when we stole into a tent and discovered Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru sitting beside his daughter Indira. Picking up a bouquet of flowers from a tray during the break, I presented it to Nehru. The year was 1959.

Dressed in a black-and-white-printed silk sari, her short hair styled in an exotic wave, Indira seemed to me then the most elegant woman on earth. Her father's books, such as Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History, lined my father's bookshelves. That year, she was president of the party that had liberated the nation from British rule. I adored Indira.

Nearly a decade after that encounter, I met Indira again, at her prime ministerial residence, with a group of fellow students traveling to Kashmir. By then I had developed such distaste for her politics that I cringed at being photographed with her.

I've often wondered how Indira metamorphosed from the idealistic daughter of our idol Nehru into a ruler who curbed civil liberties in order to reign. I've always wanted to know if Indira was a feminist or a woman who transcended the gender barrier because of her class. Most Indians and Westerners find Indira an enigma. Was she a misunderstood idealist or an unscrupulous power-monger? Should she be hailed as the first woman prime minister of the largest democracy in the world or vilified as the alleged destroyer of that very democracy?

Indira and her father en route to England where she enrolled at Somerville College. From Indira.

I hoped that Katherine Frank would resolve this dichotomy. In many respects, this is perhaps the best biography of Indira yet. Earlier efforts, mostly by Indian writers like Zareer Masani, assume too much knowledge of Indian history, politics and personalities on the part of the reader. In contrast, Frank offers a comprehensive account of Indian politics into the eighties, and for that reason Westerners as well as Indians will want to read it. Unfortunately, although Frank moved me, and made me realize that Indira had a hard life, ultimately she failed to answer many of my questions about Indira's years as a politician.

(A note about the use of "Indira": Frank refers to her subject by first name throughout the book, perhaps as a sexist lapse, but more probably to avoid confusion with Mahatma Gandhi, who was no relation to Indira. Frank also goes to some trouble to distance Indira from her husband Feroze Gandhi and to associate her with the Nehru name instead; the book's subtitle calls her "Indira Nehru Gandhi"--perhaps the only time anyone has called her by this name.)

BORN ON NOVEMBER 19, 1917, in her ancestral home of Anand Bhawan--or "Abode of Joy"--located in the holy city of Allahabad on the banks of the Ganges, Indira came into "a world of storm and trouble" according to one of her father's letters from prison. Her birth coincided with the start of the Indian non-cooperation movement against the British led by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi, who was Jawaharlal's mentor, would influence Indira throughout her life, starting with her training in austere living at his ashram at the age of three, then her schooling at politically correct institutions across the country and through his support of her marriage to an unsuitable boy.

Indira's earliest memories were of a bonfire of foreign goods burning on the lawns of Anand Bhawan, where her family, headed by her grandfather Motilal, had until then led an anglicized life. To join the boycott of British products, Indira, after much turmoil, set fire to her doll. Frank makes the reader root for the frail little girl who was often left to fend for herself among a flurry of relatives and servants, while her mother and father served long sentences in jail for their role in the independence movement.

Margaret Thatcher and Indira in front of 10 Downing Street, 22 March 1982. From Indira.

Frank is at her best in evoking that golden era of modern India, when women and men, untouchables and Brahmins, industrialists and laborers, worked together to make a new world. Here she describes the historic All India Congress Committee session in Calcutta in 1928: "Motilal had been elected President of Congress, and he and his entourage were treated like royalty. In Calcutta they stayed at a mansion decorated with bunting, flowers and national flags.... They rode to the opening...in a carriage drawn by thirty-four white horses, followed by mounted Congress volunteers, marching women in green and red-bordered khadi saris..."

Skillfully weaving the strands of political events with the tapestry of Indira's personal saga, Frank tells the story of her multicultural but nomadic life. She describes solitary Indira playing mock politician on the grounds of Anand Bhawan and later being treated as an outcast at St. Cecelia's British School for wearing khadi clothes made of yarn woven on the spinning wheel, a symbol of the freedom movement. Frank movingly tells of nine-year-old Indira carrying her satchel aboard two or three buses to the League of Nations School in Geneva, where her mother was being treated for pleurisy in a cheap pension.

Frank recreates the life of this extraordinary family, not only through the literary and passionate letters Nehru wrote to his only offspring but also through the lucid and loving letters Indira wrote back. In her very first letter, the eight-year-old implored, "My dear Mummie and Papu, I am sorry that I wasn't good. But from today I am going to be good. And if I am not good, do not speak to me.... I will do whatever you tell me to do. Love from your, Indu."

Since the Nehru family's history is India's history, to include the critical events of the independence struggle, such as the "Quit India" campaign, Gandhi's Salt March and the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre (in which British troops killed 379 peaceful protesters), is essential. Even as a young girl, Indira was at center stage in many of these events, as when she offered orange juice to Mahatma Gandhi to break his "fast unto death" in 1932. Despite Indira's reputation as an intellectual slacker, her letters are full of an incisive understanding of politics, culture, art, nature and people, as in this one from England, written in 1937 to Nehru about his proposed visit there: "The only thing that is worrying me is your intention of staying with Lothian.... He is a very prominent member of the...set that is commonly known as 'Hitler's friends in Britain'. He is a thorough Fascist & doesn't make any bones about it.... Your staying with him would amount to the same as if you spent a weekend with Hitler himself or with Mussolini."

Frank's challenge as a biographer is never to lose sight of Indira and Nehru as human beings full of frailties, passions and misgivings, even as she presents them as larger-than-life figures on the national scene, at times riding chariots amidst throngs of adoring masses. In describing Indira's youth, Frank is clearly equal to her task. The death of Indira's mother in a sanatorium in the Black Forest in 1936 after a long battle with tuberculosis constitutes the climax of this traumatic coming-of-age.

Indira with her one-year-old grandson Varun and Maneka Gandhi at a remem- brance ceremony of Sanjay Gandhi’s death, 1981. From Indira.

In Feroze Gandhi, a charismatic, daring and intelligent family friend, Indira quickly found solace from the political and personal struggles of her parents' lives. Feroze's relationship with Indira has been portrayed as dysfunctional for so long in the Indian press that one is pleasantly surprised to read about their passion, as when Indira speaks of her engagement in a 1937 letter to a friend: "it was on the steps of the [Basilica of] Sacré-Coeur that we finally and definitely decided.... Paris was bathed in soft sunshine and her heart truly seemed to be young and gay..." There are a few other surprises in the biography: her parents' passionate rediscovery of one another during their stay in Geneva; her mother's emotional involvement with Feroze during an earlier, feminist phase; and Indira's own illness while in Europe, allegedly from tuberculosis.

THE RETURN TO INDIA with Feroze and their subsequent wedding concludes the magical part of Indira's tale--and the portion of this book that is most revealing. What follows is the birth of her two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, her gradual estrangement from Feroze, and her subsequent life as Nehru's companion after his appointment as the first prime minister of free India. Much of this story has been told before. Personal glimpses of Indira are few and far between; in one, she writes to Nehru while honeymooning in Kashmir in 1942: "Truly if there is a heaven it must be this.... Since I cannot bottle the beauty of Mohanmarg, I am sending you two little flowers as a token--forget-me-not and edelweiss."

Once Indira becomes the leader of the world's second largest nation, however, she appears as in a newsreel, mimicking the public life that most Indians as well as Westerners are well acquainted with. Frank provides no insights about the forces that drove her; comments like this are typical: "From the start, the Emergency [rule] was touted as a programme of national regeneration. Not only would democracy be saved, India would be reborn."

In contrast with the first part of the book, in which Frank draws from Indira's letters as well as interviews with relatives and friends, in the second half we get a recreation of history, seemingly through a compilation of articles from the Times of India. I wish Frank had divided this project into two books, with the second providing a fuller exploration of Indira the politician, as told from the perspective of family, friends and associates. More moments of levity would have helped, too. Frank quotes a comment Indira made during a 1962 visit to America, "Speaking is rather a bore because of the lack of knowledge; one has to say the same thing over & over & to say it in words of one syllable."

Perhaps it would take a psychologist to explain why Indira, who had always complained of being thrust into politics due to the accident of her birth, agreed to become the token prime minister after her father's death and then tenaciously hung on to that power for years. Why did she become a megalomaniac? Did her intellectual insecurities plague her so much that she was unwilling to compete in the world of parliamentary politics, choosing instead to rule by "emergency power," exercised by amending the constitution? Yet she believed, with justification, that the "people wanted her."

These and other contradictions are unresolved. Frank leaves many personal threads loose; no explanation is given, for example, as to why Nehru never married one of the many adoring women who surrounded him. She glosses over important events such as the partition of the country, without reporting any reactions from Indira or Nehru.

Indira in Kashmir shortly before her death. From Indira.

One of the reasons Indira was so maligned in the feminist press, I think, was her refusal to align with the cause of women. Katherine Frank herself may have been driven by this prejudice; once we get beyond Indira's youth, Frank is unable to empathize with her, to read in between the lines of the newspaper stories, or to see her as a person with a heart and soul. This lack of sympathy seems obvious in the flat description of Indira's assassination: "Indira said, 'What are you doing?'... Indira raised her right arm and hand to protect her face. Beant Singh fired four more shots at point-blank range. These bullets entered Indira's armpit, chest, and waist."

A life that began with such fanfare seems to have ended so violently and with so little remorse or grief on the part of a nation that once adored its first daughter. Yet India survives as a democracy. Westerners often write about the country as if it were a lost cause. I came away from this book with a sense of political holocaust, and wish Frank had offered me more reason for optimism and hope.

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The language of occupation
Refugees in our Own Land: Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem by Muna Hamzeh. London, UK and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001, 165 pp., $25.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Amal Kawar

From Refugees in our Own Land..

IN 1990, EXPATRIATE PALESTINIAN American Muna Hamzeh decided to return to live and marry in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in the West Bank. Dheisheh camp, home to some 10,000 refugees, is adjacent to Bethlehem and close to Jerusalem, Hamzeh's home town where she spent her early childhood. As the book's title reminds us, Dheisheh is also an unusual refugee camp: along with the others in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it has been under Israeli military occupation inside the Palestinian homeland since 1967. The residents live not far from their former home towns and villages, now inside Israel. This short book offers a glimpse of life in Dheisheh camp during the decade in which Hamzeh lived there.

The first half of the book consists of diary entries from a few months in 2000, the first year of al-Aqsa Intifada. This is the uprising that began in September of that year, when Prime Minister Sharon, then a minister in the former Labour government of Ehud Barak, entered Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque site along with a large contingent of soldiers and police. It was a hostile, symbolic act, meant to assert Israel's claim to this third-holiest mosque of Islam, and it was interpreted as such by the Palestinians. Soon afterward, Hamzeh, who had been living in Dheisheh camp since the first Intifada, found herself witnessing the bombardment that Israel inflicted on the occupied Palestinian cities and refugee camps.

Hamzeh's pages are splattered with the familiar mechanisms and consequences of military violence: tear gas, rubber bullets, artillery, LAW missiles, Apache fighter helicopters, check-points, closures and the funeral processions of the many young martyrs. These terms have become part of the language of occupation, collectively shared by Palestinians of both genders and all generations.

Hamzeh succeeds in putting into words a very personal response to a collective tragedy. The audience she addresses includes the Israelis, the international community and the adults and children of the Dheisheh camp. Her feelings are expressed in page after page of pain, anger and despair, accompanied by graphic description of the occupation's violence. She writes of Um Hazem, a mother whose son was Dheisheh's first martyr in the current uprising:

Oh, the pain in a mother's heart. Oh, the agonizing pain in a mother's heart when she finds out that her youngest son has been blasted away by watching him, on her TV screen, stretched on a hospital bed. Oh, the horrible agony of finding out this way. Israeli bullets charred Mustafa's chest and arm, Um Hazem! Over and over and over again, they kept showing us a close-up of his spent body as it lay on the hospital bed. We could see all the way through to the bones in his arm, Um Hazem! And so could you. Four sniper bullets riddled his body as he stood there by the side of the road with his best friend Akram. (p. 13)

Hamzeh also writes of the determination not to give up, describing the sentiment of so many Palestinians toward the present uprising in their decades-long struggle for liberation: "Oh yes! Our people are coming through, they're holding on, they're moving forward. No one wants agreements for a ceasefire. Ceasefires are reached between fighting armies, and we are not an army. We are civilians who are fed up with Israel's occupation of our land. We want to continue with the fight to the end."

THE SECOND HALF OF THE BOOK, offering glimpses of events during the decade prior to the second Intifada, comes almost as a relief after this outpouring of emotion, even though its subjects are just as grave. This latter half is a collection of short articles, most previously published in English-language Palestinian magazines during the nineties. They describe ordinary social routines and extraordinary lives under occupation intertwined with historic international events. Hamzeh records daily activities that miraculously survive the most stressful conditions:

All around Dheisheh, life goes on. Someone fixes a leaky roof. Someone else finishes plastering his walls. A peddler walks around selling cheap honey-sweet pastry. Nasser, who was injured early on in the Intifada drives by in his car, waving at passersby who greet him and thank God for his speedy recovery. Two boys walk by arm-in-arm. Women everywhere in the West Bank hang the laundry out to dry and hose down the alleyways. And everywhere in the West Bank, women and children climb up olive trees to shake the leaves and force the olives to fly down to the ground. It is olive picking season in Palestine. (p. 58)

Hamzeh was present when Iraqi Scud missiles attacked Israel during the Gulf War. Along with Palestinian residents of the occupied territories, she endured the constant curfews imposed by Israel and the fear of a chemical gas attack from Iraq. (Palestinians were not supplied with gas masks, as the Israelis were.) She explains that the thrill produced by the Scud missiles was the result of seeing the Israeli occupiers show vulnerability and fear:

The moment the first scud hit, the Israelis panicked. They appeared on our TV screens, scared and vulnerable. It was precisely this that made us feel so euphoric. The same people who had occupied us with their guns, bombs, and iron fists were gripped with fear. We watched, with great delight, armed Israeli soldiers run out of the camp terrified. It happened every time the sirens went off. Loaded with their guns, helmets, trench coats and gas masks, they would dash out of Dheisheh to the military camp across the street. We would watch them and laugh. (p. 84)

Hamzeh only partially addresses the question: how do Palestinians live under occupation in their own homeland? The book is not likely to satisfy a reader seeking historical, sociological, or economic analysis of Palestinian refugee life. (For that sort of information, I recommend the writings of the anthropologist Rosemary Sayigh, who has written extensively about Palestinian refugee life, especially in Lebanon.(1)) She does succeed in registering the complex reality of a Palestinian refugee camp, where elements of normal existence survive over decades of abnormal political, economic and social conditions: closures, families unable to see each other, high unemployment, a high level of physical and psychological injury. She describes a society where children one day are having fun playing in the streets and the next day are afraid to go to school for fear of being shot by Israeli soldiers. This is a society thoroughly economically distressed but in touch with the external world through telephones, emails and the ever-present television screen.

Hamzeh portrays a society in which the old social norms of Palestinian village life are alive after half a century of expulsion from home towns and villages. Clans have survived in the neighborhoods of the camps, but the people are united in common values, warmth and a close and interdependent social life among old and young, women and men. Dheisheh camp upholds the traditional gender roles at the same time that it readily accepts women who must work to survive.

The relative absence of women from clashes with the soldiers does not mean they are not totally involved: the occupation politicizes everyone. Hamzeh writes: "But women are the unknown soldiers, the ones holding the fort in every Palestinian household. They're the ones calming their kids and tending to them while keeping their eyes glued on their TV screens. I don't know a single woman in Dheisheh who isn't closely following every single development."

OCCASIONALLY MY AMERICAN FRIENDS want to know how it feels to live under occupation and military rule. Hamzeh poignantly answers this question in a very personal way. This book is essentially about what it feels like for an expatriate Palestinian to return home and witness both the violence of the occupation and the defiance of the occupied, who remain to this day steadfast in their fight for national survival and the right to self-determination. It was a battle she lost, for in the end she was unable to stay, knowing that her personal survival was threatened: "I never know if I live another day to write another entry," she writes. The very same sense of national alienation, her "despair and anger at the international community," which brought her to Dheisheh camp, forces her to leave in the end, returning to the United States, now the country of her citizenship.

Hamzeh, however, returns alone, apparently leaving her former husband behind in the camp. This left me wondering about the effect the political situation had on the marriage, especially since the utter connectedness of the personal and political is an underlying theme of the whole book.

I found Hamzeh's story personally relevant because I also went home to Palestine, although for a much shorter time and without any intention of staying; during the mid-nineties, I was doing research on the Palestinian women's political leadership and the state of Palestinian civil society following the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. I also felt the warmth and generosity of the people and the culture, the same bittersweet emotions of being with my people but under foreign occupation. Like Hamzeh, having US citizenship gave me the ability to go back to Palestine on a tourist visa and then be able to leave. This is a privilege most Palestinians, stateless or with limited and tenuous travel documents, do not have.

The story of the expatriate's return is a universal theme that can be shared by an ever-rising number of people who escape refugee camps and oppressive regimes in their countries, only to live on the border between cultures in a permanent state of alienation. Some readers might dismiss these diary entries as too emotional or too personal, but I would like to see more of this sort of writing. Expatriates like Hamzeh and myself often find it too painful to express their emotional connection to the homeland, which makes this book valuable for its honesty and straightforwardness.

(1) Rosemary Sayigh, "Palestinians in Lebanon: (dis)solution of the refugee problem," Race and Class, Vol. 37 (October/December 1995), 27-42; Palestinians from Peasants to Revolutionaries (Zed Press, 1979).

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