Word: nated
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THERE ARE TWO things about Nate Shaw's life that are striking and dominant: work and race. The two are on every page, dwelt on more often than people less outspoken than Shaw would feel comfortable with. Shaw was born poor and spent all his life trying to make a living by farming while white people tried to take his money and crops away from him. His life was a struggle from beginning to end, and his courage in remaining fiercely independent is striking. He was something of a pariah in his community because of his belligerent attitudes towards whites...
Rosengarten is operating on some tricky assumptions in his book: if Nate Shaw is a typical black Southerner, only with an unusual mind, then in telling his own story he is also telling the story of all other black Southerners as well. His smallest action, if seen as typical of an entire race and class, immediately becomes universal in its importance and profundity. If Nate Shaw buys a mule, say, it may make an interesting story in itself; but if it's actually all struggling black tenant farmers acting, with Nate as a distillation of all their experiences, whatever...
Looking at Nate Shaw as a spokesman for all Southern blacks is dangerous, however. It diverts attention from the real merits of All God's Dangers and becomes an excuse for judging it uncritically. White liberal critics have heaped an avalanche of unstinting praise on All God's Dangers, calling Nate Shaw "a black Homer." They seem to be saying, with great relief: See, black people can be as profound as white people, they just haven't had the chance to tell their story until Rosengarten tape-recorded Nate Shaw. But saying Nate Shaw's story is the story...
TAKEN JUST IN itself, Nate Shaw's account of his life does lag at times, as would any account of any life. Shaw often goes through entire paragraphs explaining how he is distantly related to people who come up only peripherally in his story. The hundreds of interrelated names in the book are impossible to keep track of and only give a general impression that Shaw lived in a tightly circumscribed community. Only twice--in passing references to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt--does Shaw mention anyone outside his native county in Alabama...
...Nate Shaw was too independent to represent or speak for anyone but himself. His book is not unusual because he told the story of an entire race, but because he could understand his whole life and make sense of it and tell his own story...