The Children's Crusade by Anne Packer

Ann Packer's new novel The Children's Crusade will not disappoint fans of her previous novel The Dive From Clausen's Pier .

The Children's Crusade explores the private and corporate failures of the Blair family. Physician Bill returns from the Korean War tired of death; he decides to specialize as a pediatrician. Surrounded by children perhaps he could regain his optimism. First he buys a plot of California land surrounding a California Live Oak tree; he plans to build a home there some day.

He meets Penney, a woman who has never found herself. They fall in love. Penney dreams of having three children. They marry and seem destined for fulfillment and happiness.

The novel fast forwards. There are now four Blair children: Rebecca the analytic psychologist; Robert the dependable doctor; the romantic Ryan who teaches at his childhood school; and James, the 'problem' child, impetuous and emotional. Penney has discovered a career in art. Bill has died. Their childhood home is now in the 'Silicon Valley', rented out until Penney and one child decide to sell.

Packer allows us to discover each character in the first person, learning about their childhood memories and adult life. The characters are vivid and alive, complicated and flawed, sympathetic and likable.

Penny became overwhelmed by family needs, her self-expectations to be the perfect housewife, and especially by her youngest child James. He was the kid who soiled his pants and sat in a patch of poison oak while removing them; whose emotional outbursts could only be tamed by his father's calm presence. Penney turned a shed into a separate world where she immersed herself in art made of found objects. 'Prefect' Bill kept the family together in spite of his long hours as a pediatrician. With an absentee mother, the older children had to care for James. They are overwhelmed and fail. When their mother started to drift away Rebecca had come up with the idea of a 'crusade,' finding ways to involve their mother back in their lives.

Adult James returns to his family to take stock of his choices. After years of restlessness, he settles in Eugene, OR where he has become part of a community that accepts him and affirms his strengths. James now has to make a hard decision. He is in a relationship that threatens to destroy the community that has given him family. Instead of support he finds himself trapped in the 'loser' role of his childhood, his siblings still in the roles of caretakers, not friends. It has been years since he has spoken to the mother who emotionally abandoned him. It is time they met again.

These characters have stayed in my mind over a  week as I worked on my review. So many books fade away quickly. This family has become part of my own world, as if I knew them somewhere along the way. And that is about the best thing anyone can say about a book.

I received a free e-book from the publisher through NetGalley for a fair and unbiased review..

The Children's Crusade
Ann Packer
Scribner
Publication Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 9781476710457
$26.99 hard cover

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"How To Make Your Own Candies" Circa 1891

Pulling Taffy

The 1891 Home Remedies for Man and Beast includes information on all kinds of instructions, including candy making.

Here are the recipes:

Maple Sugar Candy
Boil maple sugar until it becomes sufficiently thick. Then add a teaspoon of vinegar for every two quarts of syrup; smaller amounts proportionately. When the candy has reached a sufficient consistency, pour out. Any kin of nuts may be dropped into it, or different flavors may be used, to make almost any kind of candy preparation.

Fig or Raisin Candy
1 pound of sugar
1 pint of water
Set over a slow fire. When done add a few drops of vinegar and a lump of butter, and pour into pans in which split figs/raisins are laid.

Scotch Butter Candy
1 pound of sugar
1 pint of water
Dissolve and boil. When done add 1 tablespoon of butter and enough lemon juice and oil of lemon to flavor.

Taffy
2 1/2 cups of brown sugar, 1/2 cup of butter, 4 tablespoons of molasses, 3 tablespoons of water, 2 tablespoons of vinegar. Boil 20 minutes.

Peppermint Drops
2 1/2 cups of sugar, one-half cut of water; boil 10 minutes. Flavor with a few drops of the essence of peppermint. Stir until quite thick, then drop on a buttered paper.

Caramels
1 cup of molasses, two of sugar. Boil ten minutes. Add one large Tablespoon of flour, butter the size of an egg, 1/2 lb. of chocolate. Boil twenty minutes.

Molasses Candy
2 1/2 cups sugar, 1 cu of molasses, 1 1/2 cups of water; after it begins to boil add 1/4 tsp cream tartar; cook in the usual way, but do not stir. Before taking from the fire, add butter half the size of an egg. Do not butter your hands while pulling.

Everton Toffee
1 1/4 lbs of powdered loaf sugar; 1 teacup water, 1/4 lb butter, 6 drops essence of lemon. Put the water and sugar in a brass pan on the stove. Beat the butter to a cream; when the sugar is dissolved add the butter and keep stirring the mixture over the fire until it sets. Just before the toffee is done add the lemon.

Cocoanut Drops
One pound of cocoanut, 1 pound of powdered sugar, quarter of a pound of flour, whites of six eggs. Bake in a hot oven.

Ice Cream Candy
Two cups of granulated sugar, one-half cup of water; add one-fourth teaspoon of cream tartar dissolved in hot water as soon as it boils. Boil about 15 minutes; don't stir. When done it will be brittle if dropped in cold water. Add butter half the size of an egg  just before taking off the stove; pour into a buttered tin to cool, and pull it as hot as possible. Flavor while pulling with vanilla, or any extract to suit the taste.

Pop the corn and leave it in the pan, rejecting all the unpopped kernels. Then sake sugar or molasses and boil it until it becomes sufficiently waxy when dropped in water, so it will adhere to the kernels of the popcorn. Pour it while still warm on the corn and stir throughly. Then lift out with a spoon in such quantities as may be desired to roll into balls. If the corn gets too dry it will not pop. Immerse the ear one-half minute in water and it will pop nicely.


When I was fourteen a girlfriend taught me how to make hard candy. I remember boiling the sugar, adding flavoring,  and placing it on buttered wax paper. After it cooled we'd break it into sharp pieces. The recipe is similar to the first one found here http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Old-Fashioned-Hard-Candy

Part Two of 1891 Home Remedies: Domestic Animals

Keeping chickens became popular for city and suburban dwellers a few years back. I knew a few ladies who had chickens in their large yards. In 1891 raising chickens was more than a fad. And Home Remedies had pages of illustrations and information on their care and treatment.

 No one wants me to write about the symptoms of chicken diseases! It is gross! But the treatments given include carbolic acid in water for cholera, sulfured butter for asthma, castor oil and burnt butter for fever, and brown sugar water for loss of feathers.

"Poultry Raisers' Egg Food Powder": Red pepper, powdered, 2 ounces; Allspice powdered, 4 ounces; Ginger powdered, 6 ounces. Mix by sifting. 1 tablespoon to be mixed with every pound of food, and fed 2 or 3 times a week. Also feed chopped-up fresh meat.

 "How to Doctor Sheep" included use of Epson salts, Jamaica ginger and peppermint for colic.

The most space was given for the care and treatment of horses. In 1891 horses were important and were causing environmental issues in urban areas. But within two decades they would be 'old technology.'

 "To man, whether as a civilized being or as a barbarian, no animal is more useful than the horse. The beauty, grace, and dignity of his noble creature, when in a properly developed state, are as marked as his utility. As an intelligent animal, he ranks next in scale to the dog, that other companion and fiend of man. Taking into consideration, then, his usefulness, his attractive appearance, and his intelligence, what is known of his history cannot prove unacceptable."

 How to Enliven an Old Horse.
1 ounce of oil of cloves
2 ounces oil of sassafras
1 ounce of oil of wintergreen
1 ounce tincture cantharides
5 ounces of alcohol
3 ounces of tincture of assfoetida
Mix well and give twelve drops daily in a pail of water

NOTE: I would not suggest actually using any of the home remedies presented in this book!

 "Remember that he who buys a horse needs a hundred eyes."

1891 Home Remedies

"The object of this volume is, to instruct every housekeeper and every owner of domestic animals in the use and applications of simple domestic remedies. It may be properly called a book of Self Instruction in the art of home doctoring. This work has been especially written to benefit and bless suffering humanity everywhere."

The Midwife's Revolt character Lizzie medicine bag held herbal cures, including Belladonna used in childbirth to dilate the cervix. But most medicinal herbs were less deadly.

I have a battered second edition of Home Remedies, passed down through my husband's family. It was first owned by James H. O'Dell and given to his son John H. O'Dell. Then it went to his daughter Laura and then to her son, my husband.
  

  

Sick room foods included chicken broth: Boil the dark meat of half a chicken in one quart of water with a little rice or barley Take off the fat and use as soon as the rice is well cooked. Add bits of brown toast.

Milk Porridge was made by boiling a quart of milk and adding one and a half tablespoons of flour, arrow root, or cornstarch wet in cold water. Salt to taste.

One recipe that has come down through my husband's family was Hot Lemonade! Lemonade was considered a sick room drink: Juice half a lemon, one teaspoon o sugar, one glass of water either hot or cold. Hot lemonade was used for colds.

"During the paroxysm dashing cold water in the face is a common remedy. To terminate the spasm and prevent its return give teaspoon doses of powdered alum. The syrup of squills is an old and tried remedy; give in 15 to 30 drops doses and repeat every 10 minutes until vomiting occurs. Seek out the cause if possible and remove it. It commonly lies in some dearrangement [sic] of the digestive organs."

According to A Modern Herbal, Squill "stimulates the bronchial mucous membrane and is given in bronchitis" and is used with other expectorants. It should not be over used, as it irritates the "gastro-intestinal mucous membrane" and can cause death in overdoses.

Alum was used to staunch bleeding, mixed with molasses to make cough syrup, mixed with water to relieve inflamed eyes, and used to cur pimples and prevent 'offensive sweating.'

Rules include "A Child should never be weaned during the warm weather in June, July or August." One wonders if that is because of a previous rule, "Not until a child is a year old should it be allowed any food except that of milk, and possibly a little cracker or bread, thoroughly soaked and softened." It was hard to keep milk from spoiling in warm weather.

Ginger tea was used to cure a cold or for bowel trouble, Sassafras tea was used to relieve dysentery and 'inflammation of the bladder. Peppermint oil on a lump of sugar or dissolved in water,was used for neuralgia, Cinnamon oil was applied to toothache. 

This little wonder book also has household tips and a section on keeping domestic animals healthy. That will be another post!

Meanwhile, Back in Braintree...

In 1818 Lizzie Boyleston prepares her dear friend Abigail Adams for burial. Together they had endured great hardships keeping their family farms going while their men were caught in Revolution--Abigail a 'widow to the cause' when her husband John Adams and their son John Quincy went to France, and Lizzie as a war widow. Lizzie was trained in herbal remedies and midwifery. The Midwife's Revolt by Jodi Daynard tells the story of their home front experience.

On June 16, 1775 Lizzie heard the noise of battle and walked to Penn's Hill to look down upon Boston Harbor. The British were attacking Boston. Abigail Adams and her son John Quincy were also drawn there, and the older woman befriends twenty-one-year-old Lizzie. In her first unladylike act of courage, Lizzie borrowed the Adams horse to ride into Boston and learn her husband's fate. He had been with Colonel Prescott, trying to take Bunker's Hill. It was Prescott who gave the famous command, "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes!" (To save gun powder!)

Making her way through Cambridge, Lizzie is shocked by carnage and suffering. She discovers the body of her beloved husband. Devastated, she loses all interest in life. But community was important in those distant days, and Abigail Adams and other neighbors bind together for support and succor. She rouses and becomes determined to make it on her own.

Abigail Adams from Remember the Ladies by Nancy Bekofske

Lizzie takes in Martha, daughter of Loyalists who returned to England, and her sister-in-law Eliza whose wealthy Loyalist parents disapprove of her involvement with an 'unsuitable attachment' that has led to pregnancy. Lizzie is attracted to Martha's brother; later Martha becomes attached to Lizzie's brother when he returns from sea. Meantime a stranger in town uses his charms on Lizzie.

Wooed by two men, Lizzie must determine if she can love again, and if so which man is worthy of her love. One of them may be a Loyalist spy. When two strange deaths show signs of belladonna poisoning, Liza decides to become a spy herself, dressing as a boy to infiltrate local pubs. The novel then focuses on a Loyalist plot to kill John Adams upon his return from France. A subplot about Eliza and her son will be spun off into Daynard's second novel in the series.

Daynard has done wonderful research. I had read Bunker Hill by Nathaniel Philbrick last year and thought of it while Lizzie looked down upon the battle in Boston. See my post at http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2014/05/when-yankees-realized-they-had-declared.html
I had also read a lot of biographies on Abigail and John Adams and their son John Quincy in recent years. Daynard's Abigail seems quite reasonable a portrait. There are a few issues of characters or an event not being in keeping with their times. But why quibble over a few details? It was an engaging read.

I received a free e-book in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Midwife's Revolt
Jodi Daynard
Lake Union Publishing
ISBN:9781477828007
$14.95 paperback
Publication April 7, 2015

Romantic Outlaws: the Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her Daughter Mary Shelly

1831 illustration from Frankenstein

"I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection." Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Chapter 15

I have struggled for days now, endeavoring to put my feelings into words. I read over 500 pages in four days, staying up late into the night, negligent of the time, enraptured by these people. And now four days have passed and I still cannot find my tongue--what language can frame the whirling images and restless feelings that trouble my dreams?

What can I do? Offer names, dates, and events to create thin, ghostly images without substance? Reduce passions and sufferings to a few scratches on a virtual page? It is impossible to limn the characters who lived and breathed in these pages with mere words. No! I must tell my impressions, how what I have read has brought out in my emotions, aroused my sensibilities.

+++++

Ah, the Romantic Era! The sublime art, the emotional music! The poetry and grand passions!

The Romantic Outlaws: Mary Wollstonecraft and her Daughter Mary Shelley was a compelling read. Charlotte Gordon presents parallel biographies of  Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in alternating chapters.

These brilliant and iconoclastic women embraced ideals that made them social outcasts. They fell hard for men who broke their hearts. They both spent time as outcast, single mothers of illegitimate children. They believed--gasp--that women were equal to men in intelligence and potential; they eschewed the marriage market that sold women's love for four-in-hand carriages and a large pin allowance. They actually believed that women should work and earn their own support--they were against marriage--and they believed they had found soul-mates with whom they could share spiritual, intellectual, and sexual love.

Mary Wollstonecraft is known as the philosopher who first championed equal rights and opportunities for women. Her Letters Written From Sweden introduced a personal element into travel writing. (Robert Louis Stevenson took his battered copy with him to Samoa.) She had a brilliant mind, deep passions, and high ideals. She stayed in France during the revolution. After a torrid love affair ended badly she had to fend for herself and her daughter Fanny. William Godwin, a political reformer and novelist, came into her life. They were intellectual equals, philosophically compatible, and complete opposites in personality. Neither believed in marriage, but went through the formalities when Mary became pregnant. Five months later Mary Godwin (later Shelley) was born; her mother died from complications of childbirth leaving a bereaved husband and two daughters.

Mary Shelley was two years old when her father was visited by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the first generation Romantic poets. Coleridge was well loved and told the girls spellbinding stories. After he returned to his home, Mary and her half-sister Fanny missed him. After their father remarried Coleridge visited again. The girls were sent to bed by their evil stepmother, but they surreptitiously crept back into their father's study to hear Coleridge recite The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The poem became imprinted on Mary's mind for life; its influence can be seen in her novel Frankenstein: the tormented outcasts, the suffering for sins against nature, the awesome settings of mountains, ice, and tumultuous seas.

At sixteen Mary fell in love with 21-year-old poet Percy Shelley. His father did not approve, so they ran away together. Theirs was the ideal Romantic romance, but it ended seven years later with Shelley's death.

I appreciated Gordon's setting them in context of the shifting cultural background, from Enlightenment, through the French Revolution, to the flowering of the Romantic era, and finally against the Victorian age. The book is well illustrated throughout with portraits of all the major players. I didn't have to Goggle them! The book was intellectual stimulating and told the stories of two great romances. It's the whole package.

I received a free ebook in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Romantic Outlaws: the extraordinary lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley
by Charlotte Gordon
Random House
Publication Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 9781400068425
$30.00 hard cover

Censored: The Book of Negro Spirituals

After finishing Song of Sorrows and reading how spirituals were neglected until the publication of The Book of American Negro Spirituals I wanted to revisit my 1926 printing of that work.

First published in 1925, it was edited and with an introduction by James Weldon Johnson and with musical arrangements by J. Rosamond Johnson.

My book has a battered cloth cover and a few loose pages. I paid $12.00 for it at an antique mall. The inside front pages are well marked. Most prominent are two stamps reading, "Property of the POW Camp Fort Devens, Mass."
A smaller stamp states, "Censored Fort Deven Mass." Someone has written the names and pages of the spirituals. The printed name Anne Epstein is written in fountain pen ink and in cursive the words "Parisian[sic] Libere, Samel [?]Oct. 10."

I researched the Fort Deven camp and found that during WWI it was the major East Coast induction center for soldiers. The 1918 flu epidemic started in Boston but within weeks reached the 50,000 soldiers stationed there and soon after the devastation began. As those soldiers traveled across the US they took the flu virus with them.
http://www.flu.gov/pandemic/history/1918/your_state/northeast/massachusetts/index.html

During WWII an internment camp for German and Italian aliens was created at Fort Devon. 22 of the men died there, and their graves are found on the campground.
https://lostinnewenglanddotcom.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/a-few-of-the-22-wwii-pows-at-fort-devensma/
http://gravestonecollector.blogspot.com/2014_10_01_archive.html

Why was a book of American Negro Spirituals censored and removed from the camp library?

According to James Weldon Johnson's introduction, the songs were the pure and spiritual expression of the slave's higher natures: "...you catch a spirit that is...something akin to majestic grandeur...always noble and their sentiment is always exalted. Never does their philosophy fall below the highest and purest motives of the heart."

Wheldon chaffed against the performance of the songs as art songs and believed that white singers could only sing them if they "felt" them, holding interpretations by Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes as ideals. Johnson addresses dialect and movement and their place as folk music.
Read more on Johnson's views at http://www.bartleby.com/269/1000.html

He says nothing to suggest they were veiled protest songs, hymns of hopeful release from their enslavement, a challenge to the status quo. Newer musicologists have other views about the slave songs.

I found the article Veiled Testimony Negro Spirituals and the Slave Experience by Professor John White at http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/slavery/JAS-1983.pdf and was interested in this quote and what Frederick Douglas thought about this music of his people, in his time:

"Writing in the Journal of Negro Education (October 1939) on 'The Social Implications of the Negro Spiritual', John Lovell, Jr, rejected the 'escapist' and purely religious reading of the slave spiritual. To Lovell, a black scholar, the spiritual was 'essentially social', a graphic and revealing record of slave resistance and earthly aspirations. Three themes, Lovell suggested, run through the songs: (1) the slave's desire for temporal freedom, as revealed in Frederick Douglass' remark that the spirituals were ' tones breathing the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery '; (2) ' the slave's desire for justice in the judgment upon his betrayers which some might call revenge '; and (3) read correctly, they formulated the slave's tactic of battle, the strategy by which he expected to gain an eminent future'. The spiritual, then, conveyed physical and metaphysical resistance to enslavement, as witnessed by such lines as : ' My Lord delivered Daniel... Why can't He deliver me?' or 'We'll Soon Be Free'. These songs were 'the slave's description of his environment', and 'the key to his revolutionary sentiments...his desire to fly to free territory '.

In this context, these song's messages would have been a succor to the interned aliens of the Fort Deven camp. Is this why the book was censored and removed?

I have not found a clear understanding of the Parisen Libere Oct. 10. Some mysteries are harder to solve.

The music by J. Rosamond Johnson in this volume are arrangements for piano accompaniment and solo voice. The words retain some of the original dialect and pronunciation discussed in Johnson's introduction.

This music is a far cry from Lucy McKim Garrison's settings; here is her Roll, Jordan, Roll:

My brudder^* sittin' on de tree of life,
An' he yearde when Jordan roll;
Roll, Jordan, Roll, Jordan, Roll, Jordan, roll!
O march de angel march,
O march de angel march;
O my soul arise in Heaven, Lord,
For to yearde when Jordan roll. 

 Little chil'en, learn to fear de Lord,
And let your days be long;
Roll, Jordan, & etc.

O, let no false nor spiteful word
Be found upon your tongue;
Roll, Jordan, &c.

        * Parson Fuller, Deacon Henshaw, Brudder Mosey, Massa Linkum, &c.

        [This spiritual probably extends from South Carolina to Florida, and is one of the best known and noblest of the songs.] http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/allen/allen.html

Here is the version in 1925:

McKim's Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Had:

[Nobody knows de trouble I've had,^*
Nobody knows but Jesus,
Nobody knows de trouble I've had,
(Sing) Glory hallelu!

One morning I was a-walking down, O yes, Lord!
I saw some berries a-hanging down, O yes, Lord!]

I pick de berry and I suck de juice, O yes, Lord!
Just as sweet as the honey in de comb, O yes, Lord!

Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down,
Sometimes I'm almost on de groun'.

What make ole Satan hate me so?
Because he got me once and he let me go.

        Variation on St. Helena Id.

[O yes, Lord! I saw some berries hanging down.]

        * I see.

[This song was a favorite in the colored schools of Charleston in 1865; it has since that time spread to the Sea Islands, where it is now sung with the variation noted above. An independent transcription of this melody, sent from Florida by Lt. Col. Apthorp, differed only in the ictus of certain measures, as has also been noted above. The third verse was furnished by Lt. Col. Apthorp. Once when there had been a good deal of ill feeling excited, and trouble was apprehended, owing to the uncertain action of Government in regard to the confiscated lands on the Sea Islands, Gen. Howard was called upon to address the colored people earnestly and even severely. Sympathizing with them, however, he could not speak to his own satisfaction; and to relieve their minds of the ever-present sense of injustice, and prepare them to listen, he asked them to sing. Immediately an old woman on the outskirts of the meeting began "Nobody knows the trouble I've had," and the whole audience joined in. The General was so affected by the plaintive words and melody, that he found himself melting into tears and quite unable to maintain his official sternness.]

http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/allen/allen.html

And the 1925 version:

Here is the 1925 Go Down, Moses:

And Gimme That Ol'-Time Religion:

Gimme Dat Ol'-Time Religion (3x)
It's good enough for me.
It was good for Hebrew Children, (3x)
An' it's good enough for me.
It will do when de world's on fiah (3x)
and it's good enough for me.

Deep River was dedicated to Booker T. Washington.

Deep river, my home is over Jordon,
Deep river, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground,
Lord, I want to cross over into campground,
I want to cross over into campground.
Oh chillun, Oh don't you want to go to that gospel feast,
that promised land, that land, where all is peace?
Walk into heaven, and take my seat,
And cast my grown at Jesus feet, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground.

Most of the songs in Johnson's collection are different from those in McKim's. But today we sing songs from both collections. I had no idea of the history behind the spirituals we sang when I was a girl and no awareness of how recently they had become mainstream. Now I understand that they are the roots of American music.