Monthly Archives: February 2023

02.28.23
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Train Ride

One bright morning in 1952 I boarded the Santa Fe Chief in Streator, Illinois, and rode to Galesburg, a hundred miles away. 

The Santa Fe Chief pulls out of Chicago in 1957. Kansas Historical Society.

All by myself. 

I was seven years old.

Mom had given a small tip, probably a dollar or two—equal to ten or twenty of today’s dollars—to the porter, a smiling man in a white coat and brown skin, for the extra trouble of looking after me. It was a commonplace transaction.

But for me, a train ride was an adventure. 

You could take a train from almost anywhere to almost anywhere. This was near twenty years before the railroads gave up on passenger service and turned it over to a tax-funded company called Amtrak.

It was more than twenty years before computerized ticketing and reservations. To ride the train, you spoke to an agent through the metal grille of a ticket window. In small towns the ticket agent might also be the station agent and telegrapher (although by the time I was riding the train, manual telegraphy had been replaced by teletype machines). 

You told the man—it was always a man—where you wanted to go, and he gave you a rectangle of pasteboard which conveyed that information to the conductor of the train. If you were going on a long trip that required changing trains, or even changing railroad lines—starting on the Milwaukee Road and ending your journey on the C.B.&Q., for example—your ticket might be a long, multipart form with two or more sections stapled together. 

The conductor punches a ticket. Photo by Donnie Nunley, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

The conductor—a white man in a dark blue uniform—came through the car soon after the train left the station and asked for your ticket. He punched it with a hand punch to show it had been used. He kept the ticket and placed a slim paper tab in a clip above your seat. The tab was color-coded and marked to show your destination. 

I wore my best clothes—of course one did that for such an important thing as a rail journey—and carried a small cardboard suitcase and my best friend, Teddy. The stuffed bear rode in the seat beside me, at no extra charge. If a grown-up sat there, Teddy could ride in my lap.

A great panoply of the Heartland blurred by the large train window at sixty miles per hour. We sped past the clotheslines, tenements, and scrapyards of Moon, Ancona, Leeds, Caton, Toluca, LaRose, Wilburn, Atlas, Holton; crossed the Illinois River and stopped for several minutes at the important town of Chillicothe; then clackety-clacked through the stockpens, car lots, and water towers of North Hampton, Edelstein, Princeville, Monica, Laura, and Williamsfield; jumped the Spoon River at Dahinda, and rolled on through the quaint backyards and byways of Appleton, Knoxville, and East Galesburg, to stop at Galesburg, where I got off and was met by Grandma Sommers, with her big old Hudson sedan. 

(Confession time, Dear Reader. My brain does not contain the full litany of railside towns after seventy years. I cheated by looking at an old railroad map.) 

The smiling porter, who had checked my well-being from time to time during the two-hour trip, handed me down the passenger coach steps onto the platform, where Grandma waited. She and I  walked through the station—or, as we called it, the depot—on the west side of North Broad at Water Street.

Santa Fe depot interior, 1950s. Kansas Historical Society. Between the bulletin board, left, and the ticket window, center, stands the shiny metal Chiclets dispenser.

Where you left the passenger waiting room there stood a gum machine. You could put in two of Grandma’s pennies and choose among four flavors of Chiclets. Down a little chute they slid, two pieces of hard-shell chewing gum in a bright-colored cellophane packet. Tutti-frutti was the best flavor, and its packet was peach-colored, not unlike Tennessee Avenue on a Monopoly board.

That color, halfway between orange and pink, marks in my mind not only tutti-frutti Chiclets and Tennessee Avenue, but also Tuesday, my favorite day of the week. For no reason I can think of, Tuesday is peachy in color. 

That may be peculiar to me. If you don’t like it, Fair Reader, you’re free to paint your Tuesdays a different color. Go ahead, I dare you.

The grand exploit of soloing by rail into the wilds of western Illinois, like most of my youthful pleasures, is denied to young people now. Today, minors under twelve may not ride unaccompanied on Amtrak, and those of twelve years and older may do so only subject to numerous regulations. 

In the safe world of my childhood, we did not think strangers were likely to be perverts. It was unspoken and universal that adults would protect children. Adults trusted other adults to safeguard their children; and we who were children believed that adults—even the legions of grouchy ones—would watch over us if need be.

Others may remember things differently. Perhaps my memory wears rose-colored glasses. But those growing old along with me can testify that in those days, though we were often fussy and formal, sometimes about trivial things, we were at the same time more relaxed and confident in the major departments of life. 

Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again. Galesburg, however, is still served by Amtrak. But Amtrak rides the old Burlington main line, now owned by the mega-railroad company called Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF).

That means you can go home again, but you get off the train at a different station. The old Santa Fe main line tracks still run just north of Water Street, owned and operated by that same Burrlington Northern Santa Fe. But that line is traveled only by freight trains. The old depot that had the Chiclets machine is long since demolished.

Santa Fe depot at Broad and Water, about 1962. Kansas Historial Society.

That stately old depot, and the way of life it embodied, are now gone with the wind, as Margaret Mitchell might say. They are with the snows of yesteryear, per François Villon. 

The old depot site at Broad and Water, as it is today. Google Earth screenshot.

No matter. Those trains and stations and clackety-clack journeys still exist in memory . . . for a few years yet.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)

02.21.23
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BOOK REVIEW & INTERVIEW

CHARRED

by G.P. Gottlieb

Charred, the third book in G. P. Gottlieb’s Whipped and Sipped mystery series, puts the reader deep in the mind and heart of Chicago café owner Alene Baron at a time when Covid seems to have shut down everything except arson, murder, and chicanery.

A construction site is torched, an unburned body found in the debris. Amidst pandemic-imposed precautions, protest marches, and opportunistic looting, it’s all too much. A dead body at a fire scene shouldn’t have anything to do with Alene’s café, but—as things turn out—it does.

Baron is hardly an eager sleuth. She just wants to protect her family, her friends, her business—and her love commitment to divorced police detective Frank Shaw. The rhythm of these concerns as they overlap and clash in Alene’s brain forms a distinct heartbeat for this engaging story. Everything is further complicated by the skeleton in Alene’s closet—an estranged uncle who wants absolution for his role in a long-ago bank robbery.

Juggling characters, relationships, and conflicts in a way that flows swiftly to a compelling conclusion is Gottlieb’s special strength as a mystery writer. This is the third literary outing for Alene and her coterie, and the author strikes a confident pace with a narrative which, though complex, always moves forward.

Readers of the first two books, Battered and Smothered, will certainly enjoy Charred. And so will anyone else who enjoys mysteries whipped, sipped, and basted with the juice of uptown intrigue.

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INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

G.P. GOTTLIEB

Dear Reader,

Few authors I have met since entering the literary world can match Galit Gottlieb for hard work, organization, and brains. It was Galit who introduced me to my book publisher, DX Varos Publishing. And when the book was published, she helped me spread the word by interviewing me on her New Books Network podcast, New Books in Literature. Besides organizing and conducting this weekly half-hour author interview show, she has found time so far to write and publish three engaging murder mysteries, the Whipped and Sipped series from DX Varos.

These are great books, and if you like a mystery, they’ll be right up your alley.

A few days ago, on your behalf, I asked Galit these questions:

ME: What made you become a novelist, and more specifically, a mystery writer? 

G.P. GOTTLIEB: In 2014-15, I made it through an epic cancer battle by dreaming of the novel I was going to write if I made it out on the other side. I’d written stories, poems, and songs, but because I loved reading mysteries, I wanted to write one. I read a lot of classics, and especially enjoyed Rex Stout’s descriptions of the gourmet food his protagonist enjoyed. In my book, I thought, I’ll also include recipes, and the food will be what I like best-vegetarian, healthy, clean. So, I sat down and started writing a story about a café owner in Chicago, very close to where I live. I worked with a fabulous teacher, spent three years perfecting that first novel, and won a publishing contract in a rare stroke of good luck!

ME: How much of your protagonist, Alene Baron, is G.P. Gottlieb? How do the two of you differ?

G.P. GOTTLIEB: Alene is nothing at all like me; she’s from a different generation, a different neighborhood, and had different dreams. Also, I have no business ability and can’t imagine running a café, dealing with employees, or facing endless dilemmas. I do love eating and drinking in cafes though, and I enjoy being around people, so maybe there’s just a little bit of me in her.

ME: What is next on your horizon as a writer? 

G.P. GOTTLIEB: I’ve started another novel in the Whipped and Sipped series (it might be called POUNDED), I’m writing lots of essays to submit to journals and as guest posts, and I’ve been working on and off on a novel in short stories for several years. I enjoy most of the process except for the marketing, which I wish wasn’t as necessary as it is. My plan for this launch is to write so much that every day people around the world look at social media and see another essay by me – some are standard, but some might be (and have been) referred to as “odd.”  As long as it entertains me to write it, I’m okay if anyone thinks it’s odd!

02.17.23
by

Writing a Historical Novel

Dear Reader: This is a Friday Reprise of material originally posted on 28 May 2019. It’s amusing to read it now, because when this was written, I thought the book was done. I had no idea! At any rate, hope you enjoy the retrospective.

Three and a half years ago, in January 2016, I retired from other pursuits so I could try to write fictional stories that other people would like to read. 

Coastal village in Norway. “Enligt AB Flygtrafik Bengtsfors: ‘Havstenssund’.” by G. AB Flygtrafik Bengtsfors / Bohusläns museum is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 

After a few small success with short stories, I got the idea to write a historical novel based on my ancestors Anders Gunstensen and Maria Nybro, who came to Illinois from Norway in the 1850s. We had scant information about their lives—a few dates,  places, and milestones—not much more. Not enough real knowledge to support a detailed, book-length factual account of their lives—even if I had wanted to write one. But what I actually wanted was to use the bare facts as a framework on which to hang a made-up story, through which we might discover the world in which they lived.

I spent more than six months on the trail of Anders and Maria. I struggled to imagine a plot around the known and unearthed events of their lives that would make a good fictional story, yet would not much distort the known facts. At last, early in 2017, I began to write text. 

Me writing.

The first draft of this novel, Freedom’s Purchase, took more than a year to write, at a steady rate of 1,500 to 2,000 words per week.This time also included research “on the fly” to support the detailed demands of particular scenes in the story.

My writing process is iterative. Contrary to what many great writers recommend, I invest a lot of time and effort, while laying down the first draft, in simultaneously revising passages already written. So by June 2018, when I finished the “first draft” of the novel, it was really anywhere between a fifth and a fifteenth draft, depending which part of the book you’re looking at. 

I loved my book so much that I started to query agents, seeking a traditional publication contract. After nine months, I felt a bit stymied. At the UW-Madison Writers’ Institute in April 2019, I asked Laurie Scheer about this. She said, “How many agents have you queried so far?” I said, “Thirty or forty.” She guffawed. “Try three hundred!” she said. 

Discouraged? On the contrary, I found myself reassured. The problem was not necessarily with my book; only that the literary market is tough to crack. However, that very reassurance gave me the freedom to consider the niggling little thought that if the manuscript itself were a bit better, that would make it easier for agents to see its merit. Perhaps a hundred fifty queries would be enough to do the trick!

My other friend in the UW Writers’ program, Christine DeSmet, read my first ten pages—the most important part of any book for making a first impression—and gave me very useful feedback. Her comments showed me how I could make the first chapter not a little better—rather, a whole lot better. So I did. But Christine also recommended dissecting the whole book scene by scene, then improving each scene as needed. I blanched at the thought. I decided to do it anyway.

Toward a Smashing Second Draft

I spent the whole next month just reading my book. I analyzed 159 separate scenes; I wrote down the overall purpose of each scene, its setting, its characters, their goals, their conflicts, the resolution of those conflicts, and the particular moments of dramatic change. This yielded an analytical document 54 pages long.

So now, I revisit each scene to fix the problems that have shown themselves through this process of analysis. A huge task. Yet, not enough.

After I work my way through a chapter of scenes, I do the next step, suggested by another friend, Tracey Gemmell, author of More or Less Annie, and other members of my Tuesday evening writers’ group. In Microsoft Word, I search for every “ly” in the chapter (many of these turn out to be adverbs); for every “ing” (present progressives, present participles, gerunds); for every “and,” “or,” and “but” (conjunctions); for every “is,” “are,”  “was,” and “were” (verbs of being); for every “saw,” “heard,” “knew,” “felt,” “smelled,” and “tasted” (“filter” words). Then, I re-read the chapter in search of introductory time phrases or other introductory adverbial constructions. 

That step is a lot of work, too.

Not that there is anything wrong with adverbs, a progressive verbs, passive constructions, conjunctions, or introductory adverbial expressions. All those things have their places in effective prose. But they can become crutches that allow us to write gimpy narrative, when overused. By considering each occurrence in isolation, one often finds a more vivid and robust way—a less distanced, less stand-offish way—to say what one meant to say. If you change even a quarter of those expressions to more powerful constructions, it’s worth the effort. 

By the end of this process, I’ll have a book more worthy of readers’ time and attention. And, perhaps, a traditional publishing contract.

Stay tuned, dear readers.  

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)

02.14.23
by

Windward and Leeward

After our escape from Devil’s Island, we sailed north, bound for the Windwards.

If you’re already confused, Dear Reader, allow me to set you straight. 

Mandatory Geography Lesson

The islands in this part of the world are called, for no good reason, “antilles.” If you will consult your map—or your globe, should you own such a princely object—you will see a line of giant antilles running east-west. They are named, from left, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. These are the Greater Antilles. They form a ridge that walls off the Atlantic Ocean, to the north, from the Caribbean Sea, to the south.

Now, look to the right side (east) of Puerto Rico and there, hanging down like the tail of a large west-facing chameleon, you will note a north-south string of teensy antilles with names like Antigua, Martinique, Saint Lucia, and so forth. These would be your Lesser Antilles. They do not wall off, but do demarcate, the South Atlantic, to the east, from the Caribbean, to the west.

So now you know.

The Greater Antilles, across the top; and the Lesser Antilles, down the right side. From Google Earth.

None of this, Kind Reader, applies to the Dry Tortugas, so get that out of your mind right away. But let me ask you, in all candor—what good is a wet tortuga?

Getting back to the Antilles, I regret to inform you of one further development: Some of the lesser ones are known as Windward Islands, whereas others are called Leeward Islands, on account of the lamentable tendency of sailors to chalk everything up to the wind. Because the Trade Winds, in those latitudes, blow from east to west, therefore the southern islands of the Lesser Antilles are windward and the northern ones are leeward. 

There you go. Don’t ask me. It is what it is.

Now, Back to Our Story

Two long, rolling, sea days after not landing at Devil’s Island, we came to Bridgetown, the principal city of Barbados—which may be a Windward Island or may not, depending which way the wind is blowing. Barbados is technically in the Atlantic Ocean, yet it seems Caribbean, for what that’s worth.

Not yellow, but our submarine nonetheless. Jo Sommers photo.

Barbados is the birthplace of rum, and it still makes some of the best. English is the main language spoken there, along with a local patois that is also part English. After centuries as a British colony, Barbados gained independence in 1966 and is still a member of the British Commonwealth. 

We visited a pineapple farm and later saw the coral beds of Barbados from the viewports of a real submarine!

Our next port of call was Castries, the main port city of Saint Lucia, which is for sure one of the Windward Islands. Between 1660 and 1814, France and Britain fought fourteen times for control of the island. Seven times it came out French and seven times British. Finally the French, exhausted after the energetic reign of Napoleon, gave up. Saint Lucia, like Barbados, is now an independent state in the British Commonwealth.

Saint Lucia’s caldera–the low spot between the lumpy mountain on the left and the two craggy pitons on the right–looms over the fishing town of Soufrière.

I found Saint Lucia lovely and appealing. It is volcanic. The southwest shore of the island features two great stone spires, called Petit Piton and Gros Piton, and a caldera or basin formed by a gigantic blow-out more than thirty thousand years ago. Hot steam still oozes skyward from the unhealed wound in the earth. 

Thirty years ago, after Gabriel, a tour guide, was burned by steam, the government built a safe viewing platform that overlooks the steam vents. The platform is safe, that is, until the next eruption. But geologists hope the Earth will give warning before that happens. I hope so too. 

The steam vents.

For the present, I can only report that I am happy to have escaped alive.

On we went, ending our voyage in San Juan, Puerto Rico. As a young man, I had paid a brief visit to San Juan. A fellow passenger on our ship asked me how long ago that was. “Oh,” I replied, “it was about thirty years ago. No, wait . . . forty . . . uh, no—make that fifty years ago.” 

Time sure sneaks up on one, does it not? 

San Juan astounded me. Gleaming white buildings stretched along the shore as far as I could see. Old San Juan, the place marked by a pair of famous old Spanish fortresses, is still there. But the city now spreads out over the countryside. Those gleaming white buildings are hotels, apartments, and condos with price tags up to and beyond a million dollars apiece. 

Puerto Rico’s residents are exempt from U.S. income tax, and the island recently passed legislation cutting its own corporate tax rates. As a result, a lot of folks from the U.S. mainland are moving to Puerto Rico, establishing residency, and bringing their businesses with them. No doubt there are still many poor Puerto Ricans, but the new prosperity is not to be sneezed at. 

We had only a little time on Puerto Rico, for our airplane home was waiting. And it was great to get back to good old Madison. Who doesn’t love zero degree weather and foot-deep snow? 

It beats a wet tortuga any day.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)

02.10.23
by

Boatman on the Tamsui

Dear Reader: This is a Friday Reprise of material originally posted on 28 May 2019. Enjoy!

Taipei, 1968

The boatman bends to his oars. He guides his sampan with the ease of a sage, gliding by a large gate, toward a three-masted junk that looms beyond. Shadows and ripples tether him to water, yet he hangs suspended, the center point on which the misty harbor turns. 

“Look at this, Ralph.” 

My drinking-, carousing-, philosophizing-buddy peers through the shop window at the row of canvases. “I can’t believe the same guy painted all of these.”

“Me neither.” Six oils in sepia monochrome. Five show stark village streets, all sharp angles, hard lines, crisscossed phone wires; the sixth reveals a dreamscape that evokes the timeless China of peasants and poets. All six have the same name at the bottom.

“Good afternoon, you like these paintings?” A man stands at my elbow. A smiling man, a chubby Chinese with a servile aura. (Hen heqi,“very affable,” his mother might say.) He wears dress slacks and a gray short-sleeve shirt, stands before the storefront, shares our perspective on the art.

“Not bad,” I say.

“These are my paintings.” He smiles full wide. “I am Peco Yeh.” He shakes hands, gives us each a small card. On one side, Chinese characters; on the other, in English,  “Peco Yeh, Traditional Chinese Artist.”

Sidewalk commerce, typical for Chungshan North Road. I downplay the boatman in his watery realm, feign attraction to the sterile village scenes. But Peco Yeh homes in on my real interest. “This, Tamsui River,” he says.

Chungshan North Road, 1960s. Courtesy Taipei Air Station Blogspot.

“Local scenery, huh?” 

He waxes lyrical on Taiwan’s mountains and rivers. Besides his fawning attitude, typical for Chinese pitchmen, there is something else. One can’t mistake Peco’s effeminate manner. It suggests he is queer—a surprise, in broad daylight, here in Chiang Kai-shek’s Methodist/Confucian state. However—to each his own. He’s trying to sell his paintings, that’s all.

Ralph bad-mouths the artwork. I walk away twice; both times Peco Yeh shepherds me back to the storefront for “one more little look.” Eventually I make the watery scene my own for three dollars American, twenty-two less than his original price. The artist smiles, gives us a good-bye wave, bends his head, palms together, in the timeless Asian gesture.

A fictionalized account of true events.

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Larceny at Twice the Price

My only defense: It was a different time and place. The event narrated above is fictional only to the extent that I have invented bits of dialog I can’t recall, word for word, from fifty years ago.

Ralph and I were U.S. airmen stationed on Taiwan to monitor radiocommunications of the Chinese Communist Air Force, who flew operations just across the hundred-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. We had been taught Mandarin Chinese for eavesdropping purposes; it also came in handy when we mingled with the people of Taipei. 

Young men on our own in a place where most prices are negotiable, we took haggling to extremes. We prided ourselves on the discount we could wring from anyone selling anything. The sum of three dollars in those days was equivalent to about twenty-two of today’s dollars. One U.S. dollar bought forty NT (New Taiwan dollars), the local currency. You could get a nice restaurant dinner for half that or less. So Peco Yeh got more purchasing power from me than may be apparent. Still—when you consider that Peco’s asking price of twenty-five U.S. dollars would be less than two hundred today—I feel chagrin at having driven such a hard bargain, in the service of youthful pride. 

The value derived from this picture is far beyond the three dollars paid. That price, by the way, included the wood frame that the canvas still wears today. I took the whole thing to the U.S. Navy’s Headquarters Support Activity just up Chungshan Road. They crated and shipped it to my mother and father in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for fifteen dollars—five times what I had paid for the painting, but a worthwhile expense. 

The canvas graced my parents’ living room wall for decades. It came back to me when they died. Now it hangs in our house, where I pass it every day, oblivious to the quiet beauty it radiates. When I do stop to notice, I can’t believe my good fortune in having encountered Peco Yeh fifty years ago in Taipei. 

In Search of Peco Yeh

Who was Peco Yeh? It seemed he spent a lot of time on the street, promoting his art to any American who happened to walk by. His effete manner made him the butt of ridicule. “That guy’s as queer as a three-dollar bill,” one of my fellow airmen said. In 1968 “queerness” was not accepted. Homosexuality, although common and known of (even in the military), stayed under cover.

A Google search on “Peco Yeh” yields thumbnail photos of a few pictures attributed to him on various online auction sites, at modest prices. The paintings shown do not much resemble my boatman in style or substance, any more than did the stark village scenes with which it appeared in the store window. Peco, I think, dabbled in many styles.

Some sites give an unattributed, apocryphal biography of the artist:

“Peco Yeh is/was a Chinese man living in Taipei Taiwan during the 1970s. He came from Chengdu, China with the nationalists in 1947 with his mother. His mother was the mistress of the last court artist of the Qing Dynasty. When Empress Dowager Cixi was poisoned, the court artist went to Chengdu and took the mistress.”

A romantic tale. It seems farfetched. Could it be true? Yes. Stranger things have happened. 

China was in turmoil in the late 1940s. Communists under Mao Tse-tung defeated Kuomintang (Nationalist) forces under Chiang Kai-shek. In 1949, the Nationalists fled the mainland, occupied Taiwan, became its government. Wikipedia says, “The Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese Nationalist Party), its officers and approximately 2 million troops took part in the retreat; in addition to many civilians and refugees, fleeing from the advances of the Communist People’s Liberation Army.” Most civilian escapees came from Sichuan or other southern provinces.

The thumbnail bio puts Peco Yeh on Taiwan two years before the main exodus. That’s possible; or it could be a misprint. He is said to hail from Chengdu, which happens to be the capital of Sichuan. Many civilians who fled with the Nationalist Army were members of, or related to members of, the upper crust. The mistress and child of a former imperial court artist could have been among them. So this narrative, though extravagant, may be true. Hard to tell.

I pray that Peco Yeh lived out a long life to its proper natural conclusion. And may God forgive me for appropriating his fine artwork at such a mean price. 

Mountains and Water

Whatever the merits of his other works, the one that hangs on my wall seems to me a fine example of a modern impressionistic work that embodies important elements from classical Chinese art: Careful composition, calligraphic brushwork, and the suggestive use of negative space—areas of the canvas that seem occupied by nothing at all yet contain the universe in that nothingness. The effect is of beauty, tranquillity, eternity. The masters of the Southern Song would recognize an affinity with their landscapes.

Chinese people use the term shan-shui(山水), “mountains and water,” to mean both natural scenery and the landscape painting that depicts it. They also have an old maxim, “The wise delight in the mountains; the good delight in the waters.” 

I can only hope the delight I now take in Peco Yeh’s Taiwan waterscape, purchased in 1968, suggests some upward evolution of my soul in the intervening fifty years.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)

02.07.23
by

What the Devil!

We sailed out the enormous maw of the Amazon River and headed north.

Our good ship began to roll with the waves of the broad Atlantic. I headed for sick bay and picked up a few tablets of meclizine for myself and my wife. That was a good move, because crossing the ocean from Brazil to French Guiana becomes a long haul. 

Alfred Dreyfus in 1894, photographed by Aron Gerschel. Public domain.

On the morning of our third day at sea, we stood a few hundred meters off Devil’s Island.

And there we stood. 

Our cruise itinerary noted a brief excursion, on foot, over the grounds of the now-defunct penal colony, where Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been imprisoned from 1895 to 1899.

The French Army’s counter-intelligence section discovered a leak of military secrets in 1894. Suspicion quickly settled on Dreyfus, the only Jew on the general staff, and he was convicted of treason. Even after another officer confessed to having been the spy, it took years for Dreyfus to regain his freedom and clear his name. So “the Dreyfus affair” became France’s most celebrated case of miscarried justice—justice colored by more than a tinge of antisemitism.

As background to our projected trek on Devil’s Island, Viking Cruises had shown us the film Papillon—the 2017 film starring Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek, not the 1973 classic with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman—which was based on a mostly fictitious memoir by Henri Charrière, one of the few Devil’s Island prisoners ever to make a succcessful escape.

Our disappointment was palpable when, after this buildup, we were not permitted to land. The only way ashore was by ship’s tender. We would have had to step from the large, stable ship into a small lifeboat bobbing on the tremulous sea. Had we been a shipful of young Olympians, Viking might have chanced the maneuver, but hardly a passenger aboard was under seventy. The captain’s decision was undoubtedly correct; the swells were too great.

Émile Zola in 1902. Self-portrait. Public Domain.

The thing is, Dear Reader: We cannot know precisely what we missed. No guided tour was planned—only self-guided exploration of some ruins, perhaps bearing explanatory signs. But would we have been exploring the real Devil’s Island, the place where Dreyfus languished until a nationwide campaign led by literary lion Émile Zola prompted the reconsideration of his case?

The answer is not clear, Gentle Reader. “Devil’s Island” is one of those terms that has several varying degrees of precision. 

For example, if you say, “Mâitre Renard, convicted of stealing cheese from Mâitre Corbeau, was shipped off to Devil’s Island”—you may be referring generally to French Guiana. The whole colony was a large penitentiary, to which more than 80,000 prisoners were banished over the 101-year period from 1852 to 1953. Devil’s Island, the most notorious part of this penal colony, has come to stand in common parlance for French criminal punishment in general.

Mâitre Renard prepares to grab Mâitre Corbeau’s fromage. Public domain image.

One small part of this large penal system was the group of three small islands—the Îles du Salut or Salvation Islands—collectively known as “Devil’s Island.” The three islands are Île Royale, Île Saint-Joseph, and Île du Diable. All three of these islands held prisoners, but only one of the three was the Île du Diable—Devil’s Island. This island was originally the colony for prisoners with leprosy, now known as Hansen’s disease. Later, it was reserved for political prisoners, of which Dreyfus was one.

Devil’s Island seen from Île Royale. The small cottage at right is where Dreyfus was imprisoned. Photo by Christian F5UII, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Our cruise director, David, called our planned excursion site “Devil’s Island,” but he also called it “Isle Royale.” I conclude that, had the excursion happened, we would have been landed on Île Royale, which appears to have a pier where our tender could have dropped us. From there, a short hike would have taken us to the back side of the island, where we could see Île du Diable across six hundred meters of water, as shown in the photo above. So we would not have set foot on Devil’s Island, but only on “Devil’s Island,” in the plural sense.

But we’ll never really know, will we? 

The best thing about Devil’s Island would have been the simple opportunity to set foot on land after three days at sea.

The second best thing about Devil’s Island—speaking more generally—is the 1955 movie We’re No Angels, a wry comedy in which three Devil’s Island escapees—desperadoes played by Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov, and Aldo Ray—come to the rescue of a bumbling shopkeeper and his family in the mainland town of Cayenne at Christmas. 

If you haven’t seen We’re No Angels, do yourself a favor. Pop some corn, put your feet up, and make a highly enjoyable two-hour escape into Devil’s Island.

Next week: Up the Caribbean.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

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