Notes and Quotes From Reading Book - July 12, 2023
These are my thoughts and observations while reading this very interesting and challenging book. I read The Color Line by Igiaba Scego almost a year ago and recently came across notes taken while reading. I remember it was the unusually haunting cover which drew me to it. Once I opened its pages the history, although fictionalized, along with the courage of this Black female artist from nineteenth-century America aroused my curiosity. Here are my thoughts, notes, and quotes from "The Color Line."
NOTE: There are plenty of quotes and spoilers in the following notes, so viewers be advised.
The Color Line by Igiaba Scego
Time is unapologetic, unrepenting, unremorseful. (unable to fully remember quote or page in book)
Time Is?
Parts arts about Dogali Massacre in 1887 were very good historical detail. When Ethiopian soldiers left the Italian army to help their rebel brothers rout the Italian army. Dogali is near Massawa in today's Eritrea.
I asked two Ethiopian men in Vegas outside a Starbucks if they knew of the historic Dogali conflict. They both said yes.
pg 19. "Ever since Mama died, Rome seems just like one, big, long funeral. A generation's disappearing, a world, our world."
pg 25 "They're a strange breed of humanity," she'd tell Lafanu complicitly. "They have museum faces. You'll find many opportunities to exercise your skills by painting portraits of the specimens in that circle."
pg 26 "But what's become of the spirit of the city?" Hillary would ask forlornly. And Lafanu would just shake her head.
note: this comment about the change in Rome after Italy went from papal states to united Italy, reminds me of someone today returning to San Francisco after D.A. Boudin's policies on crime and homelessness during the pandemic.
Early on the book reminds me somewhat of "Grace" by Natasha DeLeon. It has a dreamy way of jumping between time periods. The characters are well defined, and all add to the story. It reads like a family memoir, linking together past, present, and future events. It is going to be a challenge not to give up on this book. I must take it in chapters, letting all the pieces come together in their own times. I really like the true History being shared.
Lafuna feels uglier than her sister Teenie, blaming her Haitian father. He was in and out of Lafuna's mother's life (2yrs).
pg 58 While there on their honeymoon, they'd watched Ethiopian distance runner Akebe Bakila win the marathon barefoot in the legendary 1960 Summer Olympics, held in Rome. So my parents told each other that they too could win the marathon of life.
mote: Every so many pages a historical person, place or event rises from the book's pages and infuses me with historical energy. It teases and incites the researcher in me.
The author has written a novel seasoned heavily with historical facts. Its a banquet for any history buff.
pg 78 It was in that moment
pg81 It was then that the future
The author has used this type of sentence too often. In trying to convince me, the reader, that she had these life enlightening epiphanies so often, it makes the story feel forced and overthought.
I have had to suspend my belief a number of times while reading The Color Line. And I'm not even a quarter of the way through it. Not good!
The short stories are what keep me reading this book. I rate them stand-alone fascinating but very difficult to chronologically connect.
Made it to my first 100 pages. The story seems to be changing direction and picking up steam, sort of. It went back in time to Lafanu as a kid with Timma, her half Chippewa sister. It details how Bathsheba McKenzie came to their village and fell in love with Timma. But after Timma bit her while faking crazy, she settled on taking Lafanu instead.
Then the story gives Leila's background and modern-day setting. It is a more complex and confusing read, very similar to Lafanu. I'm gonna give it another 100 pages, mainly because I like the clear, well-spaced print and writing.
pgs 114-15 The story keeps reflecting back on itself, like a squeezed accordion playing the same tune. It's not a bad thing but does require the reader's undivided attention. Unable to maintain a grasp on just who is telling the overall story. A complex story to say the least. One with many, many episodes.
My Eritrean friend called his father's brother's wife (aunt) "the Lost Woldu." And said he thinks of his brother as a sort of Lost Woldu; cut off from family and their homeland. Book kind of rings with that feeling of a Lost Person trying to escape their village fate and create their own path in life.
pg 125 Something about Lanafu entering class reminded me of learning reading in 2nd grade.
School was like a new world opening up to me. It was alive, fun, scary, and totally unpredictable. I loved it most of the time, I think. So it is that this story reminds me of being in a young reading circle of classmates and taking my first stab at reading.
I'm starting to get the sad feeling of poor-poor Lafanu. Everything is so against her. Feels contrived to the point of amateur writing. What I thought a historical novel of sorts turns out to be a mishmash of black history, mostly during slavery times.
I suppose at page 133 the author is trying to give an accounting of how Lafanu faced adversity. Only why give so much detail about everyone over and over. Big problem with story is author tells way more than she shows. The telling voice gets tired and boring at times, to the point of putting me to sleep. Not Good!
pg 149-155 Leila is describing her old memories of Somalia, then gets a letter from cousin Binti who has run away from Somalia and needs money to cross the Sudan desert to get to Tripoli. Reminded me again of Eritrean friend's experience: low flying planes, smuggler truck, men watching young females, Bollywood movies, 1980's Mogadishu.
note: around page 175 the story is still flipping back and forth, and I still get lost on what location they're at and who is talking. However, the writing is addictive, and the history and incidents written about very interesting. But much of the story still seems a bit hard to believe, if not farfetched.
Oh well. I made it to page 206. and this final frustration with how the author goes off into one direction, losing me as a reader, only to realize you are still at a place where she is just now returning after she left you hanging is the final straw.
She went into Frederick Douglas Bailey and tried a style that didn't work. Now I am done.
pg 245 "She was nineteen now, and she wore it like a trophy."
pg 246 "This slavery business won't be going away anytime soon," Lafanu always thought. "They'll hold that knife to our throats as long as they can."
Yes, I am still reading. I guess it reads so well at times that I just can't set it aside. And again, the print is so easy on the eyes.
Pg 275 Lafanu is trying to understand why she turned down Frederick Bailey's marriage proposal. Molly says they all know why and presents Lafanu with the book by Madame de Stael (Corinne). Lafanu and that book were never apart.
The sculpture at fountain in Rome and the book of Corinne hurt by a no-good love affair are two things that influence Lafanu's artwork. Her feelings of having to turn down Frederick's proposal also influences her art. To be an independent woman in those days of 1860's, was to be a woman of sacrifice and possible scorn. Her benefactress Bathsheba MacKenzie seems to have turned against her after she refused Frederick.
Passed page 300 and still feel okay reading another 100 pgs. Lafanu isn't so interesting/believable, but the peoples and environs around her are. As for Leila, I am still waiting for Binti's story to unfold.
Its as if I am peddling on a bicycle and if I stop peddling I will fall off. I'm not ready to get off the bicycle just yet.
pgs 306-09 Letter from George Harwell denigrating Lafanu because he felt tricked into giving her, a member of the negroid race, a passport to travel. He did not consider negroids as American citizens. Only American citizens are allowed passports.
pg 315 "If Miss Brown is so eager to travel, let her be put in shackles and be brought back to the ape-land where she was conceived."
pg 343 Life flows inside the bones of these dead
One breathes art in this place.
English Cemetery in Florence
pgs 342-43 "These people are buried here because the Catholics didn't want them in their consecrated ground. See over there, those are Protestant graves, and behind is a Jewish section, and here . . . right here, where the sod is raised . . . there's a handful of atheists, and farther to the left, some Freemasons. There are Anglicans, and there are Baptists like me. Nobody is turned away. Suicides have found fresh earth to welcome them. As well as exiles, stillborn babies, and adults so strangled by debts they didn't have so much as a penny to put toward a grave. There are syphilitics, tuberculosis victims, people who died of sheer melancholy or were killed by romantic passion. Here are people who were servants in noble houses, chambermaids, whores, pimps. Here are some just rulers. And also some slaves . . . whom nobody dares to mention."
"Slaves?"
"That's right. Only twenty years ago there were still a lot of them around. Slavery never really ended, not even in Europe. In America, it caused a bloody war and inflicted great suffering on the people in bondage. You know something about that, dear Lafanu, you saw so many poor wretches in Salenius, running to escape their masters' clutches. What an intolerable spectacle that suffering was! But the wickedness of men was bestial in Europe too, don't think otherwise."
Elizabeth Browning Barrett - Casi Guidi Windows (poem)
Ouroboros - a snake biting its own tail. symbolizes eternal time. seen on a tomb in cemetery. from ancient Egyptian culture. rebirth/reincarnation
pg 346 "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." both Lafanu and Frederick bailey had said this at the cemetery.
(change takes a long time, but it does happen.)
After meeting Henrietta and visiting the English Cemetery I realize this is truly a history book full of art, poetry, love, life. A book that rightly chose me.
I am now glad I stuck with "The Color Line." To not finish this travelogue would be to cheat myself out of a wonderous vacation adventure. It has such a mix of history. Yes, Italy had slaves.
The book is about a female negro artist in 1860's Italy, as well as an Italian-Somalian art curator in modern day Italy researching the 1860's artist. Maybe it is about reincarnation or rebirth.
I continue to read because of individual stories of interest that come up. And I do want to see how it all ends, especially with Binti. The Binti story has fallen to the side. it seems more like a tease the longer Leila's not talked about her.
note: And there it is on pg 386, another interesting character and episode. a man and his wife enter Lafanu's studio. She never sees Lafanu but he goes up to her with guilt and shame, to apologize to her for that night she was attacked and humiliated at Oberlin college in America. I wonder what effect if any this will have on Lafanu.
pg 387 Then, however, we saw you come out of the theater and almost immediately some girls came running down from their opera boxes and told us to 'give that nigger a good lesson, she thinks she can go to the opera with white girls.'
At the time of his visit, a well-respected American art critic is visiting the studio. Mrs. Diana Cleveland and Lafanu get along very well. They both love the novel Corinne.
pg 396. The year is 1870 and Rome is about to be made the capital of the republic. "Don't think for a moment that the church is dead. She'll take back in spades all that's been taken from her." And in spades, as it turned out, the church started making deals. they started to speculate on and selling lands for their weight in gold. They were the first to make Rome the capitol into capital for themselves.
pg 397 city of Castelli Romani has a pure, bracing air that Goethe had praised in his writings. Lafanu and Beersheeba have left Rome to take refuge in the peace and quiet and cool air of Castelli Romani.
Today the area is a pleasant and popular retreat from the heat that builds up in central Rome. The summer home of the Popes is here at a town on the southwestern side of Lago Albano called Castel Gandolfo, the most popular of the Castelli Romani towns.
pg 398-9 Bernini's Fountain of the four rivers, the horses of the Dioscuri Fountain near the Quirinale Palace, the tight-rope walking turtles of the fountain in Piazza Mattei, the bees on the Berini Family's coat of arms, the Lions from Piazza del Popolo.
The book cover, with a black woman seated, staring forward as if frozen into submission. not seeing, just soulless. dressed in late 1800's early 1900's blouse and skirt. slim, long and elegant Hands lying in her lap as if by someone's command. This cover is what got my initial attention. The woman's image was haunting, and yet the grayish lavender background with the purple title written thickly as if it were in Blood caught my eye. I still don't like looking at the cover long. It feels like someone is staring down your soul.
Image is of photographer/filmmaker Ayana V. Jackson.
on page 414 Lizzie argues against protest and wins approval by the art committee in Salenius to include Lafanu's work at their exhibit. on condition that Lafanu's presence remain invisible.
"We haven't planned to have a section for negroes." Eventually the commission agreed but with conditions.
All this reminds me of how today's artist Ayana V. Jackson's art was treated at an exhibit. Her pieces had screens put up to limit their viewing. when she came to see the exhibit the screens were removed that day, then put back up afterward. (read of this in an online article)
Mary Beard Meet the Romans on youtube. rides around Rome on bike.
pg442 Uarda, as her name itself suggests, flowered like a rose among those wounded souls. Her art, powerful and impassioned, had finally found in that context an outlet for putting herself in service to humanity.
Lafanu Visiting Binti helped her see herself as a young girl again. to laugh and do things she dreamed of doing.
pg444 "It was the Rome where Corinne the half-blood had loved her cruel Nevil. And it was the Rome where Beatrice Cenci had been beheaded by an unjust power that hated women.
pg451. The trompe l'oeil dome
"That woman up there looks just like you, Lafanu."
Lafanu glanced at the figure's foot, sticking out of her red tunic; it was so beautiful. A foot yearning for some movement.
Andrea Pozzo
Vault of the Nave of the Church of Sant 'Ignazio: Detail, Africa
In this portion of the painting the people of Africa rise toward the Cross in Heaven. The complete painting also includes the continents of Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
pg 463 Woman in Chains painting by Lafanu Brown (fictional)
A painting representing the liberation of black women from bondage. even artists
pg 468 Lafanu finds out from Lizzi about Frederick and Helen Bright ("blindingly white") engagement.
"She wanted to cry over that despicable man whom she still loved."
Frederick wraps up Lafanu's story and Binti wraps up Leila's. It felt like the author got to a point where she felt she had to wrap it all up. In reality it could have and should have ended sooner, but with same wrapup.
I still have the epilogue to read and the author's note, which is about 30 pages long.
So, am i glad i stuck with this 491 page slog? Yes I Am. Why? Because it showed me another side of womens' pain, white and black. A scarred woman suffers long internally. The right man can sometimes ease the pain, but only time and a will of her own can rectify the hurt and smooth over the scar. When it does the result is a woman unafraid to not only face the world as a tough, no holds barred woman, but one who demands her womanhood be seen, heard, and respected. R-E-S-P-E-C-T!
I began this book around July 3, 2023. Just finishing Aug. 11th. Its traveled with me on visits to los angeles., las vegas, sacramento. its stayed overnight in each of those places. I dont regret having it as a companion these past weeks. it served me
well during time spent with angie's family and friends. As i write this we are lying in aileen's adu after at hot but enjoyable stay in sacramento, our second here since i began the book.
3.5 stars, but it felt like a 3.0 at times and a 4.5 at other times. Maybe the length and so many characters attached me to it more than expected. Historical fiction that jumped around to three countries and two different centuries was a challenge. I pat myself on the back for meeting the challenge with a student's tenacity to learn and understand its message. Never Give Up, keep fighting.
So many of the women had to get back up after being knocked down. I suppose The Color Line is an inspiration to women.
epilogue: just who the heck was the man, Ulisse? I thought it had been a woman all this time.
maybe author's note will shed light on some characters. Would be nice to have a character and place index. The author must learn how less in a story can highlight more about it. So much info and repetition make it seem forced and unable to carry its own weight. Let readers decide some things, its not necessary to give away everything. unless it's written for a younger audience maybe.
I'm being more critical than normal because I forced myself to finish. And mostly because of the history and race issues. The art and Italy were interesting, but I wanted something the book didn't quite give. I wanted to be taken there and experience it all. I felt more like an outsider, being told an unreliable/unrelatable story.
pg494- Sarah Parker Redmond, midwife, human rights activist, feminist, and a highly cultivated woman inspired this book. born in Salem, Mass., died in Rome on Dec. 13, 1894. was buried in the non-catholic Cemetery. Also Edmonia Lewis .
pics on twitter account "@mediavalpoc pg496
Edmonia had gone to Rome during that time period to become an artist. She, Sarah, and Frederick Douglas were the author's inspiration. The three met in Rome while Frederick and his wife were visiting. Edmonia was his official guide as she took them for walks around the historic city center. pg500
The two women make up the fictional character Lafuna Brown. both experienced physical abuse at the hands of whites, simply for their blackness.pg502
pg 512The Four Moors Fountain in Marino is a catalyzing center of the novel.
But there they are, Black women chained to the fountain, to tell us that no one is innocent in history.
Book title comes from W.EB. Dubois
pg 515 author wanted an evocative cover that not only spoke of the past but also of our dystopian present.
Piazza dei Cinquencento, I recount who the 500 were that gave the plaza its name; the Italian soldiers killed in Dogali.
pg521 Although I have written about an African American woman, this is not an African American novel. . . . Its an African Italian novel/story. It is a dialogue with America. note: this helps explain my discomfort with the African / American places, characters, and settings that had me suspending belief.
pg 521 Author says Frederick Bailey only resembles Frederick Douglas in name. For F. Douglas was much more committed and courageous. Bailey was much more fragile and ambiguous.
pg 509 Henry James defined Edmonia's black skin maliciously, as very different
from the white marble that she worked with as a sculptress.
Harry Henderson said one of the sisterhood was a negress, her color was the pleading agent of her fame.
pg511 Love is impossible without freedom. That is the idea of the protagonists in this book.
