Word: nated
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...celebrate Halloween, Bok dresses up as Kingman Brewster and announces that there is no money to continue building the Pusey Library. "The only point of it was to name something after Nate," Bok says. "Now, instead of the Nathan M. Pusey Library, it'll just be the Nathan M. Pusey Hole In The Ground." In another effort to save money, Bok cancels all classes...
Only an accident saved this astonishing narrative from oblivion. In 1969, Theodore Rosengarten, a young Amherst graduate, and a friend were doing research on a sharecroppers' union that surfaced briefly in Alabama during the Depression. Visiting the state, they stumbled across Nate Shaw, then 84, a onetime union member who had served twelve years in prison for resisting the trumped-up confiscation of a neighbor's property back in 1932. A single question, "Why did you join the union?" spurred the black man into an eight-hour answer. More than 120 hours of taped reminiscences eventually followed...
...must be added, history in the ordinary sense. "Nate Shaw" is a pseudonym, as are almost all the proper names in the book. The privacy of relatives and survivors (Shaw died in 1973) remains intact. Tukabahchee County, Ala., is as fictive as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha -and, where it really matters, as real. For Nate Shaw was a formidable bearer of memories. Illiterate, denied even the semblance of an education, he had nowhere to file the details of his life but in his head. Once dropped, the baggage of the past is lost forever. So Shaw held on to everything...
...tale has weight because his life and history intersected. Although he stayed behind, Nate Shaw watched the migration of blacks away from the rural South and into the factories and cities of the North. As intimately as anybody has, he tells why they left. But All God's Dangers is most valuable for its picture of pure courage. Knowing he was ridiculed and despised, aware that whites would frustrate his plans, Shaw simply went ahead, surrounded by a shell of pride. He wonders where this grit came from, recognizes that his nature welled up from something deeper than race...
That was not Nate's way. Faulkner's celebrated epitaph for all the blacks in The Sound and the Fury was "They endured." Nate Shaw did more than that...