Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons and the Search for a Room of My Own
- Book Review,
by Patricia J. Williams
From Publishers Weekly
With a résumé that includes degrees from Wellesley and Harvard Law School, a law professorship at Columbia, a column in the Nation and a trio of books, Williams would seem to have enough material to fill several volumes of memoirs. In this thought-provoking, unconventional one, she combines family history with discourses on everything from race, class and slavery's legacy to why she likes O magazine. One chapter, "The Kitchen," begins with an account of buying herself a cappuccino maker, moves to a consideration of homelessness in New York City, continues on to detail her father's heritage, segues to thoughts on why African-Americans give their children unusual names, returns to cappuccino and her sophisticated godmother, makes its way around to trying to cook a turkey and on from there to other food anecdotes and a description of sharing cinnamon toast and steamed milk with her young son. Williams skillfully integrates her probing analyses of social and political issues with riffs on such topics as turning 50 and Michael Jackson's "carving up his face like a paper doily" to form a fluid whole. The book's most affecting parts are the rich, loving stories about Williams's family, from those born into slavery to a grandfather who graduated from Meharry Medical College in 1907. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Williams, a law professor, offers her sharp legal and personal perspectives in this collection of essays on a variety of topics from race, politics, and family to personal identity. She recalls a vivacious great-aunt who was indentured as a young girl, later passed for white and married a wealthy white man, and eventually reclaimed her racial identity and settled into a life as the family's grand dame. Williams' participation in Anna Deveare Smith's Institute for Arts and Civic Dialogue provokes her to recognize her hidden talents and longings. The trend toward minorities, most notably Michael Jackson, using plastic surgery prompts observations about standards of beauty. She reveals more of her personal perspective as the mother of an adolescent adopted son, coping with middle age. Williams notes her admiration for Oprah Winfrey for having accomplished with her magazine and her television show the integration of black folks into regular status. Williams has done something similar with her book, which examines race and sex within the context of mundane life and its simple struggles and observations. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Patricia Williams writes about timely subjects in a timeless way, in a voice that is both personal and objective. She is the rare writer who can be trusted with both our minds and our hearts." --Gloria Steinem
"From one of our great theorists of race and the law comes this lovely and personal book. But this is no sweet little romp through Patricia Williams’s family photos. Rather, she manages to write about Oprah, a manicure, and her Aunt Mary who passed as white (among countless other topics) with both warmth and incisiveness. No one does this kind of essay-writing—melding private and public, personal and political—with the grace or critical acuity of Patricia Williams." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and Chair of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University
"Open House is an astonishingly wise and important book. Whether meditating on Oprah Winfrey's photograph on the cover of Vogue or reflecting on the difficulty of explaining the arbitrariness of race to her young son, Williams possesses a rare gift: the ability to see the big picture in the details of everyday life. Her graceful and hopeful observations, tempered by irony and wit, tell us much about our nation in this troubled time." --Maurice Berger, author of White Lies: Race And The Myths Of Whiteness, Senior Fellow, the Vera List Center for Art & Politics, New School University
"From the intellectual powerhouse who brought us The Alchemy of Race and Rights comes a delightful book that could well be called 'The Alchemy of Passion and Purpose.' This book is a treat. A real bon bon for the brain." --Veronica Chambers, author When Did You Stop Loving Me
"In Open House, Patricia Williams again exhibits her singular skill in transforming life’s problems, perils, and possibilities into an incandescence of understanding." --Derrick Bell, law teacher and author of Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform
"Open House is an open sesame to a storehouse of rich riffs on subjects as varied as eccentric aunts, genetic engineering, lobster, the hazards of conformity, computer profiling, cappucino machines, the social significance of Oprah, the politics of watermelon, (and passing as white--or Indian), and the challenge of raising a black child in a still-racist society. Spending time with Patricia Williams in this provocative, gorgeously-written collection of essays, is like sitting on the porch with a tall iced tea and the smartest person you know." --Letty Cottin Pogrebin, author of Three Daughters
Praise for Seeing a Color-Blind Future:
"Seeing a Color-Blind Future is a slender book that challenges us to dream the biggest dream--a deep democracy in which we see ourselves in each other. Patricia Williams instills it with her gifts of intelligent rage, compassion, and hope." --Gloria Steinem
"This powerful text examines the everyday realities of race in such a powerful and poignant way that we can never fall back on the myth of color blindness even as we transcend race in our quest for humane ends and aims." --Cornel West
Praise for The Alchemy of Race and Rights:
"One of the most invitingly personal, even vulnerable, books I've read...Williams has a knack for keeping you just a bit off balance...Her readings invigorate familiar controversies: If you thought there was nothing new to be said about Howard Beach or Eleanor Bumpurs, Tawana Brawley or Baby M., read Williams on them. But some of the most magical turns of argument flow from far less public events...The law needs a brain...and, even more, a heart and some courage. Certificates won't help. This book just might." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Nation
"Williams' candor about the law and her life is refreshing...The Alchemy of Race and Rights brings jurisprudence to the people while leaving no doubt that the author is among the finest legal talents among us." --Evelyn C. White, San Francisco Chronicle
Praise for The Rooster's Egg:
"[Williams's] overall contribution to contemporary political debate is invaluable. Her insights are complex and compelling. Few today see so clearly, and write so engagingly, about the prejudice that has settled so insidiously into our lives." --Jane Goldman and Miranda Joseph, In These Times
Book Description
Open House strings together a delightful array of observations, reminiscences, anecdotes and commentaries by renowned columnist Patricia Williams. Written with her trademark wit and insight, she relates stories about the many facets of her life - as a lawyer, scholar, writer, African-American, descendant of slaves, mother, and single, fifty-something woman - always aware of the ironies inherent in situations when her many identities don't conform to societal expectations. She tells us of her Great Aunt Mary, who crossed the color line one day, while boarding a train; about her Best White Friend, who believes that the only thing standing between the author and an eligible husband is a make-over; about the day she and her family learned how to eat watermelon without fear of racial judgment; and about why she worships Oprah. She also tackles serious subjects, such as cloning and the legacy of slavery and privacy issues in the cyberage, all with her characteristic sparkling humor and originality. Always provocative, never didactic, Open House is an entertaining journey through the rooms of Pat Williams' imagination.
About the Author
Patricia J. Williams, a recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" award, is a columnist ("Diary of a Mad Lawyer," The Nation), and a professor of law at Columbia University. Her previous books are Seeing a Color-Blind Future, The Alcnemy of Race and Rights, and The Rooster's Egg. She contributes regularly to Ms. and The Village Voice.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own by Patricia J. Williams. Copyright © 2004 by Patricia J. Williams. Published in November, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
I
The Fourth Wall
It was the dinner from hell, I'm not sure why I went; I was trying to be polite, I think. I wanted to be open-minded, to show myself an engaged citizen, a lover of the debating arts. Besides, it began so innocently.
"My wife and I like the kind of trouble you've been stirring, Miss Williams," he said, with a smile and a challenge. He had an avuncular, wizardy twinkle, very Albus Dumbledore. It made me feel feisty and smart like Hermione Granger. They liked my kind of trouble. But let this be a lesson: When a woman of my great dignity and years loses her sanity and starts imagining she's one of Harry Potter's magical little friends, you can be sure that the cosmic gyroscope is wobbling off its center . . .
It was only after I'd accepted the invitation that the host, a courtly old-school conservative, added that he wanted me to come because he thought it would be interesting to have me "take on" his friend J.B., an aggressive, much-published neoconservative with a reputation for sheer meanness. I should have pleaded my dead grandmother right then. But instead I got dressed up, bought a bottle of overpriced but understated red wine, and presented myself at their doorstep, feeling vaguely penitent.
My host and his wife were rich old conservatives, no middlebrow barbecue-throwing conservatives they, and so the dinner was more of a dinner party, small and formal, with four staid couples in tasteful attire. I came uncoupled, unhitched, free-floating as a dandelion puff, but they had thought ahead. They paired me with the head of the local Federalist Society a states' rights organization whose positions on legal issues fly as far to the opposite extreme of everything I believe in as is possible under the cosmos. He was young; passionately Confederate; energetic; sharp of mind, tooth, and tongue—the kind whom no one would mistake for a vegetarian. He stapled himself to my side and proceeded to grind me down over drinks: Had I ever heard of the great legal philosopher J. L. Austin? (It was a very condescending question. It's rather hard to graduate from law school without having heard of J. L. Austin.) Was I a Christian? (God knows . . . ) Explain why liberals hate everyone. (Huh?)
Over the first course, a delicate chilled soup of pureed apple and watercress, my host started gnawing at me from the other side. What year had I graduated from law school? 1975? Ah, yes, he was teaching at Yale back then and never did he encounter a worse group of students. The affirmative action students were not just badly prepared, they really didn't have the ability, you know . . . He used to read The Nation. When did I start writing columns for them? 1997. Ah, well, then, no wonder he hadn't read me; that was the year he canceled his subscription. More potage?
The main course was veal, pale and pink as a baby's bottom. "J.B. likes his meat," laughed his champagne-suited, champagne-colored wife. J.B. himself was all glistening knives as he slashed into he innocent flesh. He was a tall, hearty man, very much the gruff colonial administrator, straight-talking and speed-talking right on past the stop signs of ordinary conversational exchange. He was full of plans for the world; he knew just what was what. Head Start was a complete waste of tax dollars. Affirmative action was corrupt. If civil rights activists were so keen on integrating they'd stop trying to glad-back hand their way into jobs they weren't qualified for and go back to the ghetto where the real problems were. Genes were everything, you either had it or you didn't. Environmentalists were fanatics. Young black men who had children out of wedlock should be put in jail. When he learned that I had adopted my son as a single parent, he opined that women who raised children without a husband were engaged in child abuse. Anti-hate speech advocates were the real haters.
Two years later I am still coming up with snappy answers for that evening, witty retorts, little barbs that would have made me seem above it all, as dry-humored as a stiff martini, cynical even, please-God-less-earnest. At the dinner, however, I was hopelessly earnest. I cited statistics, studies, books—until J.B. cut me off as being elitist and out of touch. After that, I sat tongue-tied and sweaty, feeling even more powerless than he assumed I was. I could feel a deep roiling in my gene pool, a gurgling eddy in the mitochondrial stream I share with Grandfather Orangutan—I could feel the ancestral monkey blood grow red—hot and unkind, plotting sad little scenarios of revenge. I wanted to walk out but didn't have the courage to—it would be so rude—until after dessert was served, whereupon I turned down coffee and excused myself. Take that!
This is who I am. A soft-spoken, fiftysomething mush of a minority, deferential but strong, really I am. I confess to a tendency to collapse under rightish pressure, but I try to compensate by writing brave, leftish articles for The Nation under the Joan of Arc byline "Diary of a Mad Law Professor." I teach courses in contracts, consumer protection, history of civil rights, theories of equality, and general issues of law and public policy. My hair is so unruly that new students get mesmerized by it before they finally manage to wrestle themselves back down to eye contact with me. I am an anxious mother, a worrier by habit, and therefore a pretty decent lawyer. My skin is a soft custardy, mustardy brown, with lots of freckles and imperfections. I am punctual. I am good at math. I wish I had found someone to marry so I wouldn't always have to go to dinner parties by myself—to say nothing of avoiding arrest for child abuse should J.B. ever become president—but I have no regrets. I like the independence. My life is good. When not consumed by my many official duties as a politically correct, feminazi black single mother, I like poetry, walking on the beach at sunset, and traveling to new places.
Buy from Amazon
Compare Prices
|
|
Home
