Curiosity and Community

Good journalism is about telling stories. Peter Lovenheim is a good journalist and he knows how to tell a story.

Lovenheim grew up in Rochester, NY. He traveled, married, began a career, and decided to raise a family back in his home town. He and his wife purchased his childhood house from his parents, giving Lovenheim an unusual perspective on his old neighborhood. As Lovenheim’s marriage was unraveling, a tragedy took place just a few doors away. A physician murdered his physician wife and then turned the gun on himself. The murder-suicide left two orphaned children and the neighborhood in a state of shock. No one in the neighborhood, an upper-middle class enclave with a good reputation, really knew the family.

Most in the neighborhood offered help, gossiped, and moved on with their lives. Lovenheim dug deeper, driven by curiosity, his loss of sense of community, and his personal issues. He wondered if engaged neighbors might have prevented the violence. He wondered, too, who his neighbors were and if they shared his worry about isolation. Were they really all strangers to each another? A year later, Lovenheim developed a plan to learn more about his neighbors and more about his community. The result was a well-received 2010 book, In The Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at at Time.

Lovenheim reached out and found some neighbors who let him sleep in their homes, who shared their day-to-day with him, who brought him to events. He ate breakfasts with his neighbors, rode with the newspaper delivery man, and visited people whenever and where ever he could. He made a few real connections, some true friendships. He interviewed the family of the slain couple. He also was unable to forge much of a relationship many who lived on the street. Lovenheim’s genuine curiosity about his neighbors and their lives makes for interesting reading. He tells a story of a neighborhood and the diversity of its people. What might initially look like a homogeneous upper-middle class community turned out to be something significantly more dynamic and heterogeneous.

Lovenheim also wrote about his life and his search for connection and meaning. Careful not to draw many broad conclusions from his experience, he also knows that his search is part of a bigger issue for many of us. In the Neighborhood is not a rigorous study but it aligns with broader work about contemporary society. Many of us feel isolated. However, if we seek companionship, it is possible to reach out and connect with others. We can build bridges and help each other out. It takes initiative and courage, but it is not impossible. And that when we do, we feel better about ourselves and our communities.

In the Neighborhood is a thought provoking book. Lovenheim certainly has me thinking about my neighbors, and my community, in different ways. No immediate plans for sleepovers, though.

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David Potash

December 19, 2019 American Culture Today, Reviews

Rethinking Rufus

A friend and colleague recently loaned me Thomas A. Foster’s Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men. The first monograph to tackle the difficult issue of sexual violence against enslaved men in the United States, it is an important study. It is also chilling and horrific, bringing a deeper and different kind of understanding to the evil that was slavery.

Foster is a historian and dean at Howard University, a scholar who works on issues of sexuality, gender and slavery. Foster knows both theory and history, and is as comfortable with primary sources as he is with queer theory. That range and skill set gives Foster the ability to re-examine and re-cast historical accounts through different eyes and with different tools. Perhaps the best example of that is drawn from the book’s very title.

Rose Williams was a former slave who was interviewed by the WPA in the 1930s as part of a slave narrative project. These interviews and other first-hand accounts of slavery are well-known to historians. Williams’ account, which the book includes in its entirety, tells of her forced pregnancy by Rufus, another slave, who she characterizes as a “bully.” Williams had two children by Rufus, her first at the age of sixteen. Once freed from bondage, Williams also freed herself from Rufus. It’s a terrible account of a woman’s hardship. Foster explain the story and also looks at it from a different perspective, that of the enslaved man. Rufus had no agency in the matter. As a slave, he was forced into the relationship. Male slaves had extremely limited agency when it came to issues of sexuality, as the book explains. Rufus’s body was a symbol and site of enslaved violation.

Rethinking Rufus’s chapters look at key themes without following a traditional chronology. Foster draws from a wide range of primary sources, from court cases to songs to art. Chapter One examines the objectification and distortions around black men’s bodies. Chapter Two explores manly autonomy and intimacy; families and more “traditional” forms of living a male ideal as husband and father were impossible in slavery. The ugliness of coerced reproduction is explored in the third chapter. Foster provides an overview of the debates with scholarship over the years, sketches the ways that the issue was interpreted, and concludes that the practice was widespread and a key component in the narrative of pain and suffering of slaver. Chapter Five focuses on white women and enslaved black men; the penultimate chapter looks for ways of exploring same-sex relationships in slavery. The historical record does not offer the scholar much of direct sources. Foster’s conclusion calls for a rethinking of the community in slavery.

The book is well-researched, well-written and well-argued. I expect that it will be taught for many years to come. It is also an important reminder that as we do more research and more work on slavery, the more we are aware of its lasting evil.

David Potash

December 9, 2019 Reviews