by Kitty Kelly

With the publication of Just Pursuit, Laura Coates takes her place in a pantheon with Frank Serpico, who blew the whistle on police corruption in the 1970s. A former detective with the New York Police Department, Serpico’s public testimony led to the Knapp Commission and massive police reforms. But, as Coates writes in her second book, the corruption continues, poisoning every part of the justice system.

Serpico’s exposé led to a bestselling book and a film starring Al Pacino, as well as a TV series and a documentary. Five decades later, Coates’ Just Pursuit carries that same commercial potential as it exposes lazy lawyers, preening prosecutors, cynical cops, and judges who preside over their courtrooms like tin-horn dictators, leaving in their wake an outsized number of poor, Black people forced to stand before them.

Citing one particularly egregious example, Coates writes about a white female judge who used her time on the bench to shop a website for boots rather than listen to the young Black adolescent before her testifying about the sexual abuse she suffered for years at the hands of her mother’s live-in boyfriend.

“Skipping down the center aisle, [the youngster approached] the witness stand in an above-the-knee skirt, breasts bouncing unrestrained,” writes Coates. “She giggled as she raised her right hand…She tugged at her skirt…the skirt buckled along her hips, slightly twisting her zipper…she slouched and tugged again at her skirt on one side…She rubbed her glossed lips together.”

Immediately, Coates knows the case is lost. “The judge’s focused glare on the child’s appearance said everything,” she writes. Still, Coates hopes she’s wrong, staying in the courtroom to find out. Sadly, the judge meets Coates’ expectations and lacerates the victim: “No one who has been raped, even a young teenager, would have skipped down the aisle of the courtroom dressed like that…her clothes were ill-fitting and she was not even wearing the appropriate undergarments, not even tights.”

Coates hung her head in sorrow, “unable to watch this child try to understand what about herself had warranted such contempt.”

Not every one of the 15 chapters in this book is equally weighted but each carries the heavy load of racism that Coates saw during her seven years as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Writing with verve and style, she relates her experience as a poll watcher in “a small town somewhere in Mississippi” during Obama’s second presidential campaign.

“The Deep South made me nervous,” Coates admits, as she walked into the same territory where the KKK once bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young Black girls attending Sunday school; where Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated; and where 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. A Black female poll watcher in Mississippi, even in the 21st century, must feel like a Bengal tiger walking into a gun store.

It’s unnerving to read about the precautions Coates felt she had to take to be safe on that trip. Pulling into a sit-down restaurant, she scans the menu “to find whatever food would easily show if someone tampered with it. Nothing with gravy or sauce or anything else that covers someone’s spit under a bun. Something fried, served so hot it would kill the bacteria, was always the best option.” At the hotel, she elects to take the elevator a few floors. “I didn’t want to risk getting trapped in the stairs.”

In some chapters, Just Pursuit reads like a personal diary, such as when mother-to-be Coates experiences her first pregnancy. Walking into a courtroom to try a case, she stops to take a call from her OB-GYN, who tells her that tests show the fetus has an elevated alpha‑fetoprotein level, indicating spina bifida.

Coates tries to steady herself. “Don’t worry,” says the physician. “You’re still within the range to terminate your pregnancy. You want to call me after your trial? We can talk more then.” Raw and vulnerable, Coates lashes out. “Do you have any idea how heartless that just was? Why would you tell me that news in that way?”

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” the physician apologizes. “I just knew you didn’t have much time and you always seem so matter-of-fact.” Up to this point in the book, the doctor is correct: Coates has presented herself as she now appears on CNN — head-of-the-class smart and tensile tough, with a bit of suffer-no-fools impatience. At that time, though, you could almost hear her echo Sojourner Truth’s lament: “Ain’t I a woman?”

Coates does not reveal how she resolved that first pregnancy, but in later chapters, she discusses giving birth to her son and being pregnant again with a daughter. Nursing mothers who work (and their husbands) will relate to her various mentions of “pumping” and “keeping at least five full bottles [of milk] during my workday” and “drinking water incessantly to keep up with my milk supply.”

Having children seems to have changed the hard-charging prosecutor. “When I first became a prosecutor, I had thought each case could represent a dot on the arc that Dr. King hoped would bend toward justice,” she writes. “Now, I wondered if I was bending the arc of justice or breaking it, and I was afraid the justice system might just break me.”

Nor does she look back on her years of public service with pride:

“[T]he collective memories of trauma are so overwhelming that I fear I might lose myself if I don’t fill my time. The violence didn’t happen to me. But it…eviscerated me…and I still grapple with the scars of secondary trauma.”

Laura Coates once believed that justice was binary, achievable, and universally understood. No longer. Her experience has shown her a grotesque, twisted system corrupted by racism that needs to be reformed. She offers no solutions, but she supports her premise in horrific detail: “[T]he pursuit of justice creates injustice.”

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

If “perseverance is genius in disguise,” then Bernardine Evaristo is a 22-carat gold, diamond-encrusted genius. She is the patron saint of persistence and proves it with her ninth book, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up. Having received the 2019 Booker Prize for her novel Girl, Woman, Other, Evaristo was the first Black woman and the first Black Brit to win the prize in its 50-year history. So she now has a global audience for her gospel on persevering.

In this Manifesto, she offers insights into her biracial heritage (white English mother and Black Nigerian father), her “lower class” childhood (number four of eight children) in London, where she was considered by the British class system to be “inferior, marginal, negligible,” and her personal relationships (10 years living as a lesbian followed by a heterosexual marriage).

Whether homosexual or hetero, she was always a feminist and approached her struggle for success with a winning strategy: persistence — no matter what. “I’ve always felt myself to have an inner strength, by which I mean that I’m not needy or clingy. I don’t crave approval all the time…a tough inner core has been essential to my creative survival.”

In a chapter entitled “The women and men who came and went,” Evaristo expends several pages on what she calls her “lesbian era,” because she feels the problem is not with same-sex attraction but with a homophobic society that requires queer people to justify their existence. “Put it this way: my lesbian identity was the stuffing in a heterosexual sandwich.” In 2005, on a dating website, she met her husband, whom she describes as “a white middle-class man.” She portrays their marriage as a life preserver that freed her to get on with her most important work — writing.

Readers might wince as they read of Evaristo growing up Catholic, biracial, and brown-skinned in an overwhelmingly white Protestant area, enduring the name-calling of neighbors and the dismissals of the “unholy men…the half-drunk priests” who heard her confession every week:

“In my family, we had no doubts about the hypocrisy of the Catholic clergy, and as we each reached the age of fifteen, after ten years of attending Sunday Mass, my siblings and I were given the choice whether to continue or not. One by one we left the church never to return; as did my mother in due course.”

Evaristo began her creative journey by writing poetry; after college, she started writing and acting in the Theater of Black Women, Britain’s first such company. To survive, she lived on the dole and by her wits:

“I moved into slummy old properties, ready for demolition…A futon served as both sofa and bed. Boxes for clothes. Planks of wood and bricks became a bookcase…I prided myself of being able to stuff the rest of my meager possessions — clothes, books, bedding, kitchen utensils — into a few black rubbish bags.”

Leaving the theater in her 30s, Evaristo concentrated her creative energies on writing with London as her muse, having lived so many years in the city’s various districts. Finally, at the age of 55, she bound herself to a mortgage and settled into a life of writing, writing, writing. “I had become unstoppable with my creativity…writing became my permanent home.”

Now 62, Evaristo is unsparing about her own racism. As a child, she was ashamed of her father’s very dark skin. “I remember crossing the road when I saw him walking towards me. It was internalized racism, pure and simple…Black was bad and white was good. As a child I’d have killed to be white, with long blonde hair.”

She addresses “colorism or shadism,” and notes that, “sadly,” some people choose to pass because they’re light enough to be racialized as white, such as the Hollywood stars Carol Channing and Merle Oberon.

Throughout her life, Evaristo believed in herself and her talent, even when others did not. “[This] self-belief…is the single most important thing a writer needs, especially when the encouragement we crave from others is not forthcoming.”

The last section of her book, entitled “The self, ambition, transformation, activism,” echoes the principles of Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, M.D., which was published in 1960 and sold over 30 million copies. The biracial British writer and the late Jewish American physician share the same philosophy: Envision the goal, believe you can accomplish the goal, and then achieve the goal.

When Bernardine Evaristo wrote her first novel, Lara, in 1997, she wrote, in part, an affirmation about winning the Booker Prize. Twenty-two years and eight books later, she finally received it. Dreams really do come true.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

In 1999, the Brooklyn Museum exploded a bombshell on the battlefield of artistic freedom and First Amendment rights with its exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,” which the museum’s director, Arnold Lehman, brought to Brooklyn from the Royal Academy in London.

Among the other provocative paintings in the exhibition, artist Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” created an uproar at city hall. The painting depicted a Black Madonna with one breast created from shellacked and carefully decorated elephant dung. The painting outraged New York’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who tried to shut down the exhibit, fire the board and director, and throw the museum out of its historic building because he viewed the display as “sick” and “disgusting.”

The museum’s trustees, represented by attorney and First Amendment expert Floyd Abrams, sued Giuliani in federal court to stop his attacks. The exhibition and lawsuit dominated New York’s front pages and the international media for six months. In the end, the museum was victorious. Now, Lehman retells this story — still relevant today — in a book appropriately titled in all caps, SENSATION: THE MADONNA, THE MAYOR, THE MEDIA, AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT.

You’d been a museum director for 25 years when you brought “Sensation” to Brooklyn. The exhibition had already occasioned outrage in the U.K. Did you anticipate the same reaction in the U.S.?

I knew that “Sensation” included numerous strong, exciting, and provocative works, most not seen in the U.S., which was the reason I wanted it for the museum. However, at the Royal Academy in London, it was one painting, “MYRA,” that was the cause of the uproar. “MYRA” went almost unnoticed in New York. “The Holy Virgin Mary,” on the other hand, which the British media hardly mentioned, was the core of the frenzied media and legal battle in New York. However, I believe the outrage over the Madonna was planned and politically motivated.

What does the extreme reaction say about museumgoers in both countries?

“All politics” is often said to be local. Similarly, without the U.K. backstory of “MYRA” being a serial child-murderer, visitors to “Sensation” at Brooklyn only saw a huge portrait of a woman. For “The Holy Virgin Mary,” a backstory was created and incited by the conservative media to support Mayor Giuliani’s early race against Hillary Clinton for the New York Senate. The vast majority of New Yorkers approved of the Madonna despite the media frenzy, while the painting was never the center of any attention in London. In this instance, I believe the focus for the audiences was information rather than any cultural differences.

How much were the Brooklyn Museum’s legal fees, given that Mayor Giuliani opted to settle the case rather than wait for the opinion of the appeals court?

Even with a very substantial discount from our extraordinary attorneys, Floyd Abrams and Susan Buckley, preparing and prosecuting a First Amendment case in federal District Court [that was] continued in the court of appeals…together with the required depositions, court appearances, and a multitude of meetings, was a very time-consuming and costly undertaking. The museum raised funds from its dedicated trustees, engaged foundations, and other supporters to underwrite these costs.

Why did it take you two decades to write SENSATION and document the cultural clash?

Although many tried to “unseat” me, with the total support of our trustees, I remained director at the Brooklyn Museum for almost 16 more years. During that period, although I had always thought about writing a book on “Sensation,” I was both immensely busy and also believed strongly that it was inappropriate to write such a personal narrative about the institution I was then serving. With the beginning of the Trump Administration, I became increasingly concerned about the issues and challenges to the freedom of expression, which was critical to the very core of the battle over “Sensation.” It was at that moment I knew I had to write and publish SENSATION as soon as possible because of its relevance. The monumental undertaking of reviewing all the original research materials, much of which had been collected by my wife, took immense time. Hiring a researcher (which was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation), finding a publisher at the beginning of covid, and the actual writing, in total, took over three years.

Why is SENSATION being published in Britain and not the U.S.?

I approached several American publishers whose books I admired during my career. While there was enthusiasm expressed for the book’s concept, a mixture of current politics and the unknown stemming from the advent of covid were, I believed, deterrents to an agreement. Along with the others, I sent an outline and two unfinished chapters to London’s Merrell publishers, who had worked earlier with us at the Brooklyn Museum on several excellent publication projects. Hugh Merrell responded almost immediately that he had read everything I sent him, and despite being only art-book publishers, he offered to work with me on the book. My partnership with the incredible editor and designer assigned by Merrell to SENSATION was beyond superb. And the tangible book, amazing in every detail, is the result. SENSATION is a narrative or memoir, but it was produced as an elegant art book!

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

Kitty Kelley interviews the author of Robert E. Lee and Me, October 29, 2021

Biographers International Organization Podcast #76

by Kitty Kelley

England is strangled by its pernicious class system. Even in 2021, the country’s rigid social structure dominates, and its snobbish acronyms still apply: N.O.C.D., usually whispered, means “Not our class, dear.” British aristocrats prefer associating with P.L.U. (“People like us”). If you’re born working class in Britain, you’ll die working class — unless, like Fiona Hill, you manage to cross the pond and move to the U.S.

The title of her memoir says it all: There Is Nothing for You Here, which is what her father told her — nothing for a coal miner’s daughter born in the North East of England with an accent that marks her fathoms below those who speak the “Queen’s English.” That cut-glass British enunciation, defined as RP (received pronunciation), determines one’s standing from cradle to grave.

“Aspirational Brits, mockingly dubbed ‘social climbers,’ would take elocution lessons to change the tone and the pitch of their voice as well as their diction,” Hill writes, citing Margaret Thatcher, who famously took voice lessons to rise above her roots as the daughter of a small-town grocer. But at least Thatcher, being middle class, was allowed into Oxford. Not so Fiona Hill.

Despite her outstanding scholastic record, Hill was steered from Oxbridge to attend St. Andrews University in Scotland, still impressive, but not of the peerage. “This was a case of guilt by linguistic association with a region once completely dominated by heavy industry and thus by ‘workers,’” she writes of her background. “I wanted to leave the UK’s place- and class-based discrimination behind and move on.”

She immigrated to America and received a partial scholarship to study at Harvard, where she earned her Ph.D. in Soviet studies. Hill traveled to what was then the USSR, where she lived for a year, and later wrote a book about Vladimir Putin.

In Russia, Hill was respected as the standard bearer of the working class; in the U.S., her Harvard credentials gave her social mobility. As a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution, she worked in the White House for three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump — and was invited to be a presenter at the prestigious Aspen Ideas Festival in 2014. There, she was introduced to Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair as someone who once lived close to his former constituency.

“Blair was taken aback when I gave my quick potted history,” she writes. Then came his “determinative question”: “How did you get here?”

Hill played dumb and said she’d flown from DC to Denver.

“No…really…come on,” said Blair. “I obviously mean from County Durham to the U.S. That’s quite a journey, isn’t it?” Hill said she was a product of his own “Labour Party at work.” But, she continues:

“Tony Blair looked more pained than pleased…He seemed most perplexed by the fact that I had attended a County Durham comprehensive school and retained my northern accent. The two of those together were confounding.”

Blair, who graduated from Cambridge and no longer spoke with his regional pronunciation, seemed to have trouble digesting Hill’s presence (and her unrefined accent) in the elite setting of the Aspen Institute. Their encounter sounds like the song lyric: “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this.”

The subtitle of Hill’s book is “Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century,” which she does when she falls in love and marries a man she met at Harvard. She later becomes an American citizen. Her experiences working in the White House, particularly for Trump’s National Security Council, make her book timely.

Hill describes Trump’s awe of Putin as “autocrat envy” and disdains his attempts to transform the presidency into an “elected monarchy.” Worse, she sees the U.S. headed for economic collapse and unrelieved suffering because of its structural racism. She blames Ronald Reagan and Thatcher for driving “the nail into the coffin of 20th century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off.”

There Is Nothing for You Here is not a book for the faint of heart.

Crossposted with Washingt0n Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Despite their mutual animosity, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill will be forever linked as a result of the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. At that time, she accused him, her former boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of sexual harassment.

The televised hearings, chaired by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, riveted more than 20 million Americans and many others around the world watching on CNN as the unknown law professor testified under oath that President George H.W. Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court had harassed her by talking suggestively “about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts, involved in various sex acts,” which included animals, group sex, and rape scenes. After three days of testimony, Thomas was confirmed 52-48. Hill was pilloried as a liar, a fantasist, and an erotomaniac.

It’s worth noting, three decades later, that now President Biden sits in the White House and Justice Thomas sits on the highest court in the land, whereas Professor Hill struggled for years to survive her notoriety as a whistleblower. Although it cost her a tenured position at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, she does not regret her decision to testify.

For years, Hill shrank from the divisive reactions to her Senate testimony (a CNN/Gallup poll showed 52 percent of the country believed Thomas), but now she’s unafraid to step forward and take on her critics. “As a victim and a teacher, I had a unique perspective to speak from,” she writes in her third book, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence. Reflecting on the 1991 hearings, she chastises late Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) for “his tittering tone” and “his smirk” and for claiming there couldn’t have been sexual harassment because Thomas never physically touched Hill.

She further faults Specter for his flawed thinking “that sexual assault was the only behavior that called for judicial disqualification.” She blames the entire committee for being slow to recognize the right to work in a workplace free from abuse.

Hill also upbraids the late Justice Anthony Kennedy for his 1999 dissent in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, in which he wrote that “boys will be boys” and condoned groping by grade schoolers as “routine behavior.” Kennedy dismissed such conduct as a prank, mere hijinks. Hill denounced his dissent for normalizing harmful misogynist behavior “that [holds] the country back from making progress toward equality.” Lest anyone suggest her criticism to be a carp, she writes:

“Any student of the law knows that language that starts in dissent can someday become the majority opinion.”

Twenty-seven years after her debacle before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hill watched in dismay as history repeated itself when Christine Blasey Ford testified about her alleged sexual assault by Brett Kavanagh. In those contentious hearings, Hill recognized the same “victim blaming, flat-out denials, mansplaining and gas-lighting” that she’d endured. Kavanaugh was confirmed 50-48, the second-closest Supreme Court confirmation vote in history.

Now a professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis, Hill has put herself in charge of shining a light in a very dark place. She’s become the poster child for ending gender violence and intends to change the violent psyche of America with Believing, which springs from decades of personal recovery and professional research into humanity’s bestial behavior. “For thirty years, this has been my journey and I expect it to continue in some fashion for the rest of my life,” she writes.

Hill has schooled herself in the miasma of gender violence and how it imperils our country’s health, safety, economic security, housing, transportation and educational opportunities. As might be expected of an academic, her tone is a bit pedantic as she makes her grim case with studies and citations and statistics. She admits up front that she’s “neither charismatic nor a gifted speaker.”

Unfortunately, she’s right.

At various points, this disquisition cries out for a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, but Anita Hill is not Mary Poppins. Her treatise is on man’s inhumanity to man, and while her catalog of ills is short on solutions, she spotlights behavior that will make some readers cringe at the extent of sexual violence in our society.

Hill focuses like a laser on gender-based attacks in homes, schools, courts, companies, and corporations. She outlines how difficult it is for victims, especially rape victims, to file suit, even if they can afford the lawyer fees. “[T]he hurdles to prevailing in assault and rape suits are still extremely high,” she writes, citing rape as the least-reported criminal offense, with “less than one percent of rapes…likely to result in conviction.”

Midway through her manifesto of misery is a short chapter entitled “Believing that Change is Possible,” which reports the progress made by activists who formed the Hollywood Commission to seek justice for victims of gender violence in the entertainment industry. As a result, men like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Les Moonves lost their positions, which gave Hill hope and made her a believer, justifying the title of her book.

“The task of a writer is not to solve the problem, but to state the problem,” Anton Chekhov wrote, and for that, Anita Hill gets high marks. So, caveat emptor: Do not look to Believing for inspiring prose or literary flourish. But perhaps that’s appropriate since there’s no poetry in gender violence.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

The essays in Margaret Renkl’s Graceland, at Last began in grief as the author mourned the deaths of her mother and mother-in-law and wrote to exorcise her misery. Eventually, she found her way to gratitude for the gift of life, which she celebrates in a weekly column for the New York Times about living in the South.

Born in Andalusia, Alabama, and now living in Nashville, Renkl honors the natural beauty of her lush roots while acknowledging the ravages of slavery still embedded in the terrain, which, she suggests, might be why the region “keeps giving birth to more than its fair share of writers.”

As a white Southerner, she’s a bit defensive (but graciously so) about the sin of the South, writing that slavery was not restricted to the Confederacy, but must also be owned by states such as Ohio, New Mexico, Illinois, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, all of which exacted torture and death on those they enslaved:

“The fact that the rest of the country shares in the South’s greatest moral failing doesn’t excuse our brutal history or the way its vestiges linger. But the South has always been more than its most appalling truths.”

So Renkl sets out to illustrate the assets and attributes of her region’s blood-stained soil, as well as its widely varied culture. Graceland, at Last begins with the South’s beauty. In these essays, Renkl rhapsodizes about Cooper’s hawks and blesses Broadhead skinks while delighting in the New Guinea Highland wild dog. From fauna she segues into flora, praising the purple Tennessee coneflower, “the star of the cedar glades of Middle Tennessee.”

In another offering, she travels to the delta to find the American lotus, not as intoxicating as the sumptuous lotuses that ensnared sailors in The Odyssey, but even Homer might bow to Renkl’s description of “the thousands of pale-yellow flowers rising on foot-high stalks, the petals of each bloom curling gently in the sun.”

Renkl introduces readers to some of her region’s progressive publications, too, such as Facing South, an online magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, North Carolina; Scalawag, a nonprofit print and digital publication focused on Southern politics and culture, also based in Durham; and Southern Exposure, a journal with special emphasis on investigative journalism and oral history.

So far, this lovely little book is bright, courteous, and informative, even lady-like, but then Renkl ventures into territory that more timid Southerners would avoid: sex, religion, and politics. Here, she shows her soul as she lambasts the Tennessee legislature for its misbegotten attempts to amend the state constitution to prevent same-sex marriage, for denying birth certificates to babies born to undocumented parents, and for outlawing abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is, Renkl writes, frequently before a woman even knows she’s pregnant.

In sharply crafted essays, she also upbraids the state she loves for its immoral array of tactics to undermine voting rights. She pillories Tennessee’s Republican legislators for refusing to expand Medicaid, which she condemns as an “act of cruelty.” She then lacerates them for their lax gun legislation:

“It’s easier to purchase an AR-15 in Tennessee than it is to become a licensed exotic dancer, as two employees of Déjà vu Showgirls, a Nashville strip club, demonstrated in a recent YouTube video.”

Renkl doesn’t seek to repeal the Second Amendment — she just wants guns out of the hands of psychopaths who shouldn’t have them. While she identifies as a Democrat in the red state, she praises Tennessee’s Republican governor, who commuted a prisoner’s life sentence and chose mercy and understanding over the strict letter of the law. “We may never agree on what real justice looks like,” she writes of that case, “but we will always know mercy when we see it. And mercy will do.”

As a “cradle Catholic” who became a “cafeteria Catholic” — picking and choosing which tenets of the religion to practice — Renkl supports a woman’s right to choose abortion. “No matter how you define it, protecting human life should never stop at the zygote.” She also writes essays supporting voting rights, immigration, affordable healthcare, and same-sex marriage. She abhors capital punishment and challenges “pro life Christians” who condemn “pro choice” advocates while still championing the electric chair.

Seeking reassurance in the unsure world of 2018, Renkl drove to Plains, Georgia, to attend Jimmy Carter’s Sunday school class at the Maranatha Baptist Church. “[He] still has faith in this country, and I hoped his Sunday school lesson might restore my faith, too.”

The former president, then 94, addressed more than 350 parishioners as he read from the Acts of the Apostles and discussed how the apostles worshiped together and took care of each other’s needs, an example for all of us to follow. Then Carter acknowledged: “We have lost faith in a lot of things that have always nurtured us.” Still, he continued, “I believe…that God’s love will prevail.”

His faith cheered Renkl, who left that morning feeling as if she’d attended “a master class in responsibility and goodness, and above all, love.”

As for the title of this book? Perhaps it’s a metaphor for a little girl who grew up in Tennessee yet, having lived there for decades and made numerous trips from Nashville to Memphis, had never made the pilgrimage to Graceland, home of Elvis Presley, and its walls and walls and walls of gold-encrusted mirrors. There, as an adult, in the midst of all those mirrors, Renkl saw herself as a woman — a wife to a beloved husband and the mother of three sons schooled and embarked on their own lives.

“Walking past all those mirrors, I kept catching glimpses of myself,” she writes. “Mirror after mirror, there I was, right in the heart of Graceland, smiling and smiling and smiling.”

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books