#and i have opinions

Jam on the Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett

10/10

Do the wlw end up together : Yes

Here’s a book that looks at the darker side of American history. Which, to be fair, is most of it. Ivoe grows up in the shadow of slavery and watches as the local white plantation owner switches from one form of bondage to another, opening up a prison farm with convicts forced to pick cotton in deleterious conditions. She slowly sees her freedoms eroded as Jim Crow laws become codified, barring black people from all forms of public life. 49 years before the Montgomery bus boycott cemented Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. as symbols of a burgeoning civil rights movement, Ivoe covers for her college paper the Austin, TX streetcar boycott that successfully overturned a new segregation ordinance and learns that her future is in racial justice advanced through the printed word. Despite her college education Ivoe has no hope of convincing the white newspaper owner of ever hiring a black woman, and chooses instead to head off to Kansas City, MO, opening her own paper with the woman she loves. Soon she’s deep into investigative journalism, exposing the lies of other papers covering race riots in the Red Summer of 1919 and confounding the truth about the black men incarcerated on imaginary crimes (and if the history of convict leasing and prison labor is something your school conveniently left out of its curriculum, start with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name). Soon she’s a major force, drawing the ire of Kansas City’s political elite and the admiration of other black journalists nationwide. Jam on the Vine is the story of a woman’s crusade to spread truth that the ruling powers don’t like known in a world committed to injustice predicated on ignorance (and how different is that from today?). There’s certainly a comparison to be made to Ida B. Wells who co-owned her own newspaper and whose investigations and reporting on the truth of lynching often had her the subject of threats and mob violence. Barnett chose a quote from Toni Morrison’s Jazzto start this book and you can clearly see the inspiration in the way she weaves a community and a family struggling under the brunt of unending inequalities. If you like any of Morrison’s books (and if you don’t know who I’m talking about/haven’t read any, that’s your new mission) you will love this one. Among the many aspects of this book that I loved, Ivoe and Ona’s relationship is a non-issue, beyond a jealous ex-lover. If you want a story of black lesbians in history advocating for racial inequality that doesn’t end in tragedy, I have exactly one book to offer you, and it’s this one.