Am I Not a Man? The Dred Scott Story, by Mark L. Shurtleff

I graduated from college with a degree in history, and have taught American history and written numerous test questions over various issues in American history. But I have to admit that I didn’t know much about Dred Scott before I read Mark L. Shurtleff’s Am I Not a Man? The Dred Scott Story, newly released by Valor Publishing Group. (Disclosure: I received an advance reader’s edition of the book from the publisher, with the expectation that I would review the book.)

I knew the basics—the kind of thing you read in American history textbooks. Dred Scott was a slave in the years before the Civil War, and lived with his master in a free state for several years. Because slavery was illegal in the free states, he sued for his freedom on that basis: once free, always free.

At first this was granted by the court. But then—as we see in the opening chapter of Am I Not a Man? --his owner had that decision reversed. Eventually the case Dred Scott v. Sanford went all the way to the Supreme Court. Here the court delivered a stunning verdict that slavery could not be outlawed in any state, because to do so would be to deprive owners of their property. The American ideal that all men were created equal did not apply to blacks. As a result, the Missouri Compromise, which had been keeping the slave and free states in an uneasy balance for the last few decades, was unconstitutional. The slave issue continued to spiral out of control from that point, and the Civil War began only a few years later.

So that’s what we get in the basic history books. But Am I Not a Man? shows us Dred Scott and his family as real people, torn apart by injustice. It shows some of the background of the slave question, the history of Dred Scott’s family and the first family who owned him (who were shown to be good and caring people, by the way). It shows Dred’s faith in the American system of justice all the way to the point where it completely betrayed him by declaring that as a black and a slave he had no rights.

The book does not quite read like a history book, although it is full of information and quotes from real individuals. Neither does it really read like a novel. It’s something in between: something a reader can learn from, and something with historical information, but probably not something a scholar can definitively quote from because scenes have been dramatized and to some extent fictionalized. Chapter notes would definitely have been helpful; in any given scene, I wondered how much dramatization had occurred. However, there are also long strings of narrative that simply explain background situations; these are the parts that read more like a history book and less like a story.

The action of the book begins at the crucial event of Dred’s being arrested and returned to slave status. The pivotal event is a great place to start. Then it explores several backstory lines, and returns periodically to the “real” story of Dred trying to regain his freedom. Dates are given at the beginning of each chapter, and I understand a chronology is available in the final printed version. Still, there is a dizzying array of events and people spanning multiple centuries in non-chronological order for the reader to keep track of. That said, it creates a nice effect of showing the contributions of many individuals to Dred's final triumph--or defeat.

The story of Dred Scott, slavery, and the conflicts that led to the Civil War are important for Americans to understand, and this book does a fine job of laying these out. Yes, these things are in our past, and there are few people who would support slavery today. But it did happen. It is a part of our past and we need to understand what went wrong. Besides explaining the ongoing issues of civil rights and other difficulties blacks encounter and overcome today, it reminds us that Americans—even those who consider themselves enlightened, pious individuals—can support causes that are terribly wrong. And no amount of legislation and trying to keep the peace can change whether something is wrong.

A Man of His Word, Or, OU Really Should Have Won

Let's face it: the Sooners really, really should have trounced the Cougars in the big game last weekend. I mean, this is the Sooners we're talking about. The Sooners live, breathe, and die football. They have little bitty footballs flowing through their veins. I'm an OU alum myself, and even though I was never interested in football as a sport, I couldn't help but get excited about it when I lived on campus. It was just something in the air. (Or maybe it came from living across the street from the stadium.)

But OU has been a consistently strong team and has brought home several national championships. BYU won the national championship once, in a fluke season when no one could figure out a good reason not to give it to them. (Yes, I said that! Boomer Sooner!)

This situation, in which the Sooners really SHOULD HAVE won, sets the scene for an interesting tale from Eagle Mountain, Utah. Much of Utah, of course, is Cougar country. But Alen Howard, a teacher at Rockwell Charter School in Eagle Mountain, is a graduate of OU and a true Sooners fan. (I know this because he is also one of my many awesome brothers-in-law.) Knowing the sport and the teams like he does, his prediction of an OU win didn't seem unreasonable to, well, anyone. (At least, to anyone who wasn't a Cougar.) And before the game, he made a wager with his class that if BYU won, he'd eat a cricket.

Guess who had to eat a cricket.





You have to agree, Mr. Howard did keep his word to his class. Of course, I'm sure his kids have just loved the whole thing, and they all think he's really cool because he ate a cricket in class. And I'm sure they love having the video up on YouTube to show everyone.

But twenty years from now, they won't remember specific lectures their teacher gave, or most of the information he tested them over. They may not even remember their teacher's face (except from re-watching the YouTube video). But they'll remember that he ate a bug in class. And they'll remember that he kept his promise to them.

Well, there's your inspirational thought for the day. Enjoy the video!

BOOMER SOONER!!

GO UTES!!!!!

Altared Plans, by Rebecca Cornish Talley

As a teenager, part of me thought teen romance novels were really stupid. After all, falling in love as a teenager and scoring a date to the prom certainly were not end-alls to everything in life. Besides, as soon as the hero and the heroine are introduced and the sparks fly, you already know how the story’s going to end. It doesn't matter what else happens; you know they'll be together in the end. Why read a whole book about it? (Incidentally, there is a reason why I was voted “Best Scholar” of my graduating class, and not “Most Romantic.”)

But part of me enjoyed reading teen romances anyway. I liked the idea that there was someone out there who cared deeply about the heroine (and maybe that meant that there was someone out there who would care deeply about me, too). And I have to admit I was fascinated with scenes that actually showed how guys and girls acted when they were interested in each other and how relationships were built. (Yeah, that’s me again—taking something romantic and turning it into an educational opportunity.)

I bring all this up because as a teenager, I also was very curious about what it would be like to date LDS guys with the objective of marrying in the temple. After all, I knew that as an LDS girl, that was supposed to be my ultimate goal as far as romance went. So I think I would have really liked Altared Plans by Rebecca Talley, if it had been available a few+ years ago. It’s now available in bookstores.

Altared Plans is a fun romantic novel that does in fact involve students at BYU dating with the objective of marrying in the temple. Books with characters at this stage of life can be hard to classify, since marriage involves adults, but most adult readers are older than typical BYU singles. Altared Plans has been listed as a young adult novel. And while I enjoyed reading it myself, and I’m sure many other adults would enjoy it as well, I think it would best resonate with young adult readers looking forward to this time in their lives. It does address some serious issues such as marrying outside the temple, the importance of commitment, and dealing with nonmember parents and painful break-ups, but the whole tone is light-hearted. The banter between the characters is great, the dialogue is well-executed (especially important for young adult readers) and the whole thing is fun.

The book starts with Caitlyn’s wedding day—or, with what is supposed to be Caitlyn’s wedding day. She arrives at the temple only to find that the groom has decided to date someone else instead. Without anything better to do, Caitlyn returns for more school at BYU, but with an enormous chip on her shoulder against the whole dating scene. This eases with time, and with some good masculine attention. But she’s still afraid of trusting her heart to anyone again.

That’s the gist of the story. I could discuss individual characters and twists to the plot, but—hey, it’s a romance. You can guess how it will end.

I would have liked the relationship between the hero and heroine to be fleshed out more; I felt like their mind games took precedence over a real courtship. But then again, I’m probably the only female in the world who thinks Bella should have just decided she wasn’t going to date until college and then skipped the Edward thing altogether. So all you romantics out there, do take what I say with a grain of salt. Or two.

And enjoy Altared Plans. I did. And while I was happy for the characters in the end, I was sorry the book was over.

Blueberries for Sal and My Lifelong Dream

Today I fulfilled a lifelong dream: I picked blueberries. Now, it's not my only dream, and it's certainly not the only thing I ever want to accomplish. But it's something I've wanted to do since I was about four.

You see, my mom checked out Blueberries for Sal from the library for me when I was little, and we read it together. And I remember being completely enthralled with the story of Sal and her mother picking blueberries together. Her mom had a big bucket, and Sal had a little bucket. Sal picked her own blueberries, and they fell plunk! into her pail. And she could eat the berries, too. In fact, she ate all three berries in her bucket.

The pictures in the book were beautiful, and Sal and her mom looked so happy. By the time the story was over, I knew what my mom and I needed to do.

We had to go pick blueberries.

However, there was a small problem with my plan. We lived in Oklahoma, and there were no blueberries there. It wasn't just that we couldn't go right that minute, or it wasn't the right season. We couldn't go, period. Ever.

The idea that I just couldn't do something I wanted to, no matter how much I wanted to do it, was quite a concept. After all, I still believed kisses made owies better.

Fast forward a few years to today. I'm, well, a lot older now. My own kid outgrew the Sal book a long time ago. And I don't live in Oklahoma anymore. Here in Wisconsin, there are blueberries to pick.

And when friends invited me to go berry-picking with them, I figured I at least owed it to myself--my four-year old self is still in there somewhere--to go pick blueberries just like Sal.

And you know, in a way it was as magical as I'd imagined. The berries are sweet and plump, and come right off the bush when you pick them. They're full of good flavor, unlike the bland ones from the grocery store. I'd tried the grocery store ones occasionally over the years, and always wondered if blueberries were really as good as they were supposed to be.

They are. The real ones are.

Another interesting parallel is that Sal met a baby bear when she picked blueberries. I did not meet a bear today, but I did manage to bring home a tiny slug who was hiding in my berry bucket. I even picked it up and let it crawl on me, and I forgot to be grossed out.

Now that's some real magic.

The Day I Locked My Keys (And My Husband's Keys) in the Car

Author Janet Kay Jensen is running a contest at her blog, which you can find at http://www.janetkayjensen.blogspot.com/, where readers are sharing stories about times that they've locked their keys in the car. After writing out my sad story in Janet's comment trail, I looked at it and thought...hey, this looks like a blog entry. So, my apologies to anyone who has already read or will read this on Janet's blog, but here is (drum roll) THE STORY OF THE DAY I LOCKED MY KEYS (AND MY HUSBAND'S KEYS) IN THE CAR--with some paragraphing and other edits added in that I couldn't make when this Blog Entry was only a Comment.

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I have some fun stories about times (yes, multiple times) that I've locked myself out of our house or apartment over the years. And times when I've "lost" my keys and had people looking everywhere for them, including the dumpster, only to find them later in my coat pocket.

But the time I actually locked all of our keys in the car, we were about to hike the Narrows at Zions National Park. I didn't have any pockets in what I was wearing, so I'd already put my keys away carefully in the car. My husband let me use his key to open the trunk for some last-minute rummaging around--making sure we had everything, making sure I was wearing the shoes I wanted, and so forth. I set the key down while I took care of my business. When I finished, there was a split second between the time that I slammed the trunk lid and the time that it actually latched where I suddenly realized that I'd left our only key in the trunk! Of course, the split second was not long enough for me to have a second realization that I really should stop the lid from closing and grab that key!

I felt very sheepish as I told my husband what I'd done. Our solution? We went on our hike anyway.

But when we came back, we had to involve the park service in unlocking our car. And they had to involve a highly technical device known as a coat hanger. It left little scratches on our newly tinted windows, and the fancy security locks were tricky to get past. But they did finally get our car open.

New Glasses

I ordered some new glasses last week. I've worn glasses since grade school, so I've been through this ordeal several times over the years. And I have to say that I've never really enjoyed it. Actually, it's kind of scary to choose something that's about to become a part of my face.

At the optical shop last week, I did everything I was supposed to do. I found several frames that I liked, tried them on in front of a mirror, narrowed down my choices, and finally settled on the one I liked best. It helped when the saleslady oohed and ahhed over one frame in particular. (I have to wonder if she was ooing and ahhing over the price tag more than the style.) Well, I liked them, and I decided they looked pretty good.

But one thing I failed to take into consideration was that what I could see in the mirror at the optical shop was not actually quite in focus. They have lenses in the frames there, but they certainly weren't the same as my prescription. So, what I saw when I looked in the mirror there was slightly blurred--sort of like those hazy glamour shots that blend away your flaws and make you look like an angel on a cloud. Or something like that.

So when my new glasses came in yesterday and I tried them on, I was amazed at how crisp everything looked--including every single wrinkle and line on my face.

To be honest, I'm not sure I like these new glasses. I'm still going through the shock of seeing myself every time I pass a mirror, because I'm not used to seeing these new glasses on my face. So I can't really be sure if I like the style of the frames until I'm not surprised to see them. Meanwhile, I do like seeing the world around me in crisper detail. So I guess the new glasses are a good thing, whether or not I end up liking the frames. But I'm not sure I like seeing myself so clearly.

The Brilliant Writings of My Unconscious Body

I am living proof that trying to get more done by getting less sleep just doesn't work. And until early morning seminary is over in a couple of weeks, I'm going to keep proving it. 5:30 comes awfully early every morning. In a couple of weeks I'll be getting a little more sleep.

Today I actually accomplished quite a lot, and I didn't feel sleepy at all...until I sat down to work on my book. A few paragraphs into the scene, I was nodding off.

Yeah, I know; it doesn't sound too good for an author to talk about falling asleep while writing her own book. But my book really isn't that boring, I promise. I can assert this on the basis that it doesn't always put me to sleep. Just sometimes.

Today, after snapping out of my fog, I eagerly checked my computer screen to see what I'd come up with while I was out. After all, maybe my unconscious mind had come up with something so utterly profound, or so completely creative that I'd be praised later for the brilliant insights contained in my book...someday, after it's hit all the bestseller lists and sold millions of copies.

Turns out I did actually type something during that brief moment when I was out. And now, here it is, completely uncensored and in its entirety:

dddddddddddddddddd

I still may find some way to work that in to the rest of the book, but I have a feeling I'll be cutting that line.