Some People, Some Other Place - Hardcover

Cooper, J. California

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385496826 ISBN 13: 9780385496827

Publisher: Doubleday, 2004

Synopsis

J. California Cooper returns with a sweeping novel about love and heartbreak, perseverance and luck, telling her tale with an insight and grace that reaffirms Alice Walker’s words of praise for her previous works: “Her style is deceptively simple and direct and the vale of tears in which her characters reside is never so deep that a rich chuckle at a person’s foolishness cannot be heard.”

In her acclaimed novels and short stories, J. California Cooper has created moving portraits of people striving to make their way in a hard, often unjust world. Whether it explores the blatant racial and class biases of nineteenth-century America or the more subtle forms of discrimination that exist today, “It is the universality of her themes that has made Ms. Cooper’s work popular,” as the Dallas Morning News has written.

Some People, Some Other Place is Cooper’s biggest, most far-reaching novel to date. A multigenerational tale, it is set in a town called “Place,” on a street named “Dream Street.” In the words of the novel’s narrator, “the block surely had about it a feeling of long accumulation of history, of life, of many lives intertwined.” As she chronicles the interlocking lives of the residents of Dream Street, Cooper places the stories of the individuals and their families within the wider context of America’s social and economic history. We meet the narrator’s great grandparents, who left the poverty of the Deep South in 1895 and made their way to a farm in Oklahoma; her grandparents, who continued the northward journey with their eyes on the promised jobs of the industrial Midwest but were forced to settle without reaching their goal; and her mother, who finishes the journey and discovers that life at 903 Dream Street carries new burdens as well as rewards. The neighbors on the block are people of all colors, all striving to overcome personal troubles and disappointments, and all holding fast to their dreams of a better life.

About this title

About the Author:

J. CALIFORNIA COOPER is the author of the novels Family and In Search of Satisfaction and five collections of stories: Homemade Love, the winner of the 1989 American Book Award; A Piece of Mine; The Future Has a Past; Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime; The Matter Is Life and Some Soul to Keep. She is also the author of seventeen plays and has been honored as Black Playwright of the Year. In 1988, she received the James Baldwin Writing Award and the Literary Lion Award from the American Library Association. She lives in California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One
Sometime around 1895 in America, Negroes were spreading out and up from the hard past of the poor South seeking food and survival. Among them were a man and woman with four young children: two, three, four, and five years old. The traveling was hard and they were often hungry. They reached what seemed to them to be a large city in Oklahoma . . . and stopped. They had to stop because the mother did not have another step in her feet. She could not bear to drag her children another step.

The husband left them behind, near a small river, as he went to seek a Negro person to get information about a place for his family to sleep a few days and, perhaps, a job. They did not have a morsel of food. He found an old couple who were sharecroppers and worked a piece of land on another man's property. The old couple had only a small room and kitchen they lived in, a small shed for tools and a mule.

Used to seeing such troubles, even having had them themselves, they allowed the man to bring his family into the shed for the little warmth and protection it offered from the cold nights. The old farmers could not, in their heart, allow the sad, bedraggled, unfed and unrested children go hungry and tired. They took some greens and a few potatoes from their garden. The tired mother wanted to help, but was shooed away by the old wife who cooked for the family, her own memories roiling around in her mind. They had no meat to share. Her two chickens were for eggs to sell.

The traveling family arranged themselves against the walls and on the floor in the farmer's small, and now crowded, kitchen for a meal. Then they were situated in the shed to sleep with what worn quilts and rags the old couple could spare. The old woman grimly smiled and said, "I sewn these here'n quiltes myse'f," as she handed them to the wife. Then the old wife took the two youngest children into her kitchen and laid them down on pallets beside the burning stove to keep them from the cold of the night in the shed. The exhausted husband and the farmer talked into the night about the town and work for Negroes there.

Awakening in the morning to the crow of a rooster, the still tired husband, stiff with cold in the shed, slowly removed the ragged quilt from his self. No need to dress. He had not undressed. The farmer took him, walking, to the white man who owned the land. The white man said, "Your woman can work 'round the house and fields with my wife and you can take that ole barn yonder, close up some of them holes in it, and make a home for your family til harvest. People always leavin', movin' on, so there prob'ly will be a house and some land free 'bout that time and you can move and go to work for yourself. Til then, you can work here for food and shelter for your family."

"Thank ya, suh. Mighty kind'a you."

"We ain't got no lotta food, now, but we share." The white man smiled.

"No pay, suh?"

The white farmer smiled, "Not none as I know of . . . yet. Maybe later on. We got to see what kind of workin' man you are. You want it?"

"I'll take it, suh. Thank you kindly."

So that's the way things went and the husband was able to shelter his family and feed them . . . a little. Too tired and disheartened to move on, the husband thought, "At least this ain't Mississippi!"

Things turned out exactly as the old farmer had said they might after he had introduced his new friend to the owner-boss. When sharecropper people moved out of a little piece of shack on a little piece of the owner's land, the owner let the new family move in it to work the land.

They took the sharecropper job, intending to move on to better things when things got better. But life being what it is sometimes, they ended up staying in that place for thirty years . . . until the husband died from overwork and overworry. They had changed shacks a few times, but they never did get their own piece of land or build their own house as the man and his wife had dreamed of doing; living on their own place.

Their eldest boy moved on when he was sixteen. The next oldest, a girl, married at fourteen and moved on. The next child, a girl named Eula, did the same. (Eula would be my great-grandmother.) The youngest child stayed in the place they called "home" around his mother. He was a little retarded from his mother being undernourished and having babies so close together. In the end the two, widowed mother and retarded son, moved in with a friend who needed the little help they could provide.
Chapter Two
Now . . . Eula was growing up to be a strong, healthy, lusty woman who wanted something else. She had become tired of Oklahoma and "home" when she was about fourteen. During the same time, she became tired of the farming business: harvesting fields, milking cows for milk she couldn't drink, feeding chickens she had to steal to get a bite of, and sweeping yards endlessly. So Eula married a laborer from the oil fields. She moved into a shotgun shack in a near town with her new husband until something better came along. Something better could be almost anything and everything. And Eula wanted something better.

Well, Eula's husband was a go-getter hardworking man for his wife. He was also a brawny, lusty lover. By 1912 Eula had given birth to several children and both husband and wife were tired, near exhaustion, waiting for some job to pan out. Money was, as usual, almost nonexistent. "Something" was always up ahead, beyond them. But life continued on somehow, as it usually does.

Eula gave birth to my grandmother. She wanted a child named after herself so she named one of her pretty children, my grandmother, EulaLee. The family survived, barely. Eula thought everybody in the world was poor except the owners of the oil wells. There were no schools her children could attend. Even white children had a difficult time getting and keeping a schoolteacher. Those few schools which Negro people managed somehow to make arrangements for were too far away. Eula was getting old for those hard, scrambling times and began to feel it. But she was still young enough to dream, so she set her sight on Chicago. "Someday," she would daydream as she washed her family's clothes down at the creek looking beyond the trees, through space. She cooked her family's meals, looking over the crackling woodstove through a hole in the wall at the far horizon. "Something got to come my way someday. I know it's some money in Chicago."

Around 1912 a Woodrow Wilson was marked in to become president of the United States. In 1913 Woodrow signed into law that ominous amendment to the Constitution, the federal income tax laws--even though the U.S. Supreme Court made constant rulings against it, saying it was unconstitutional. He also signed into law the Federal Reserve System, among other things, taxes that went hard against the people. Still does.

Nineteen thirteen was not a good year for the world because, among other things, there was no cure for the Spanish flu, which took so many people from the face of the Earth. Eula lost two children, but EulaLee was one of those who survived. Barely. Eula and her husband wanted desperately to leave Oklahoma, but there was no way. They both did every kind of job they could just to put a little food in their family's mouths. Working for food only. No money available for them. They were stuck in place.

Woodrow Wilson also approved the Underwood Tariff, which reduced duties on foreign importations and, since they competed with American industry, it created greater problems for the common working people. Many tens of thousands of American workers were put out of jobs. Does not that seem strange for an American president to do? Or for any leader of a people to do? Because then, a depression came, bringing with it, of course, huge, widespread despair. With no production for American working people, starvation and much misery became nationwide. It will be done again and again by Earth's leaders the people put into office, or those who just take leadership away from the people. It will be done to all peoples, all colors, all over the world. The love of money is the root of all evil. Believe me.

Eula's family could not pay their rent, but the owner of the shotgun shack in town did not put them out. At least the owner knew them. He thought if the dilapidated shack was to sit empty, there was no telling who or how many would squat in it and eventually tear it completely up.

Eula's husband worked for a white landowner who gave him an automobile that did not run and had no gas even if it could have run. The husband worked on it a couple of months, finding parts, even stealing parts from cars that were parked and discarded because it took money to run a car, and the previous owners had none. Finally the husband stole some gas. He told Eula, "If we can get somewhere else, maybe East, maybe I could find some work."

Eula's thought was, "Chicago." They started planning their trip to somewhere, maybe Chicago.

In 1914, the government under Woodrow Wilson started a small war with Mexico. (Financed with the new income tax resources.) The war was quickly settled because small nations are powerless against those who control the money. Usually.

Eula's husband was not called upon to enter the military because he had a family and he was Black. And who knew where everyone was, anyway? People, all colors, were scattered all over the country, trying to find work or food, trying to survive. The military call was heaviest among the small middle class, the people who divided the rich and the poor. After them, the poorest people were taken. Both classes seemed dispensable . . . to the governing body.

EulaLee, my grandmother, was growing up through all these things.
Chapter Three
The family started their journey to the East in the faulty car with stolen gas, hungry children, and twenty...

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0385496826
• ISBN 13: 9780385496827
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384