#Stationmaster Sparks

[answrs]

thinking about Stationmaster Sparks tonight (I am. very interested in getting a comm of her I think.) and wondering what kind of accessory she might have to distinguish her from a free-roaming or wild pokemon.

on one hand, she's likely an exotic and distinctive enough mon in the middle of Unova to be recognized.

on the other hand that doesn't mean she's always the only charjabug in the station, and having a recognizable symbol also reduces the likelihood someone just like. casually picks her up like The Football and walks off with her unquestioned.

I like the idea of that lil medal/badge like you get for a buddy in PoGo, but also a lil hat would be freaking adorable (and also more visible). probably use both of them if I go the hat route, but then there's also. is it like, the subway master hat but in green? or grey? maybe the depo agent hat? or a lil fez looking hat instead that fits her (lack of) round head better? is it attached with a string? glued on with a very careful stringshot by joltiks each day? I don't knowwww

[weirdowithaquill]

Traintober 2023: Day 20 - Live Wire

The Telegraph Poles:

Edward stared up at the poles being installed on the island. “What are they?” he asked slowly, gazing at the wooden posts and the many wires that ran between them. “They’re telegraph and electricity wires,” Thomas explained. “We had a lot of them back in Brighton – the humans use them to communicate quickly.” “How quickly?” asked Edward. Thomas chuckled. “As fast as you can blink, apparently! Driver once showed me how it worked – he hit a button a bunch of times on one telegraph, and got a reply from London within a minute!”

Thomas thought the telegraphs and electricity wires were grand – but Edward was more apprehensive. They’d had something similar on his old line, yes – but those wires were underground. The ‘telegraph poles’ just looked unsightly to him – and then unnerved him. He wasn’t sure why, but their mere presence made him feel uneasy, as if something just wasn’t right about them.

At the time, the two ran much of the line together with the old pre-grouping engines. This meant that Edward pulled the big, important express. And as part of that, he always stopped at the station at the base of the big hill, where a former Wellsworth & Suddery engine brought passengers from Suddery and beyond.

At Wellsworth, there was a young stationmaster named Jack. Jack had only just been given his own station to run, and he was very excited about it. He wanted everything to run perfectly; moreover, he wanted everything to look perfect too.

“He’s barmy,” grumbled Neil. “No stationmaster can make his station look and run perfectly – it’s impossible!” “He just wants to make a good impression,” argued Thomas. “Especially at that station! Why, almost every single one of our Directors lives either near his station or along that branchline.” Thomas was right, and every single day the stationmaster could be seen sweeping the platforms, repainting the fence posts and cleaning out the gutters in between trains. Jack seemed to be actually managing his ambition to run both an efficient and a picturesque station!

However, there was one thing that peeved him. The telegraph poles.

Tree branches often got tangled in the wires, and it was impossible to get them down – no ladder was long enough. “It’s an eyesore!” Jack complained bitterly to Edward one afternoon, as a gentle breeze blew in from the bay. “Branches strewn about in midair! How am I meant to run my station when those telegraph wires make a mockery of all my hard work?”

The branches also made telegraphs difficult. They pinched the wires and caused ‘blips’ in the messages sent. That was why Edward and Stationmaster Jack had no clue that the gentle breezes they felt in the early afternoon were actually the beginning of a great storm that would sweep the south of the island that evening. The telegraph warning them and cancelling all trains had been interrupted by the tree branches caught in the wires, leaving the signalman clueless about what the message meant.

Edward departed for the Big Station with only a few clouds on the horizon and a gentle wind cooling the air, but by the time he reached the Big Station it was a fierce, howling gale. Wind and rain buffeted the island, halting all trains and leaving engines stranded in whatever shelter they could find.

At Wellsworth, the rain and wind were so strong that they ripped several telegraph wires from a pole. The wires landed with a crash on the platform, ending up strewn about, sparking dangerously.

The rain has lessened to a light drizzle early the next morning, and Edward was sent out with his usual express. He was making good time until he neared Wellsworth. Then, he let out a startled whistle in horror.

“Driver! Stop!” he shouted. His driver slammed on the brakes, and the blue engine’s wheels screeched as he was jolted across several sets of points and into the wrong platform. The passengers were most confused.

“What’s happening?” they demanded. Immediately, the porter sprinted up. “Stay inside your coaches, it’s not safe!” he bellowed. The passengers jumped away from the carriage doors in fright. “What’s going on?” exclaimed Edward’s driver. “Where’s Jack?” The porter didn’t reply for a moment, then quietly:

“Jack’s not able to come.” Edward’s driver was confused. “What do you mean? Is he trapped at home?” “No… he made it to the station,” replied the porter. The young man looked haunted, his eyes wide and his face pale. “Then is he busy in his office?” “No… he’s over there.”

Edward and his driver looked – and then Edward felt his boiler run cold as his driver collapsed to the footplate in shock. There, still touching some of the telegraph wires, was the crisped remains of Jack.

“What… happened to him?” gasped the fireman. “He got here as usual,” the porter replied quietly. “Only… the wires were on the platform. He went to move them and… and…” “He was electrocuted,” the signalman finished, having made his way gingerly down from his signalbox. “We couldn’t get the message out ta you ‘cause the wires have broken, but there’s no trains coming up from Suddery today.”

Edward slowly filled in the gaps. The wires were still sparking, and the water seemed to buzz with energy. The water itself was electrified, and when Jack had stepped in a puddle and grabbed some of the wires, he’d sealed his own fate.

After that, most of the wires on the North Western Railway were moved underground. “It’s just safer,” the Fat Director said quietly when Thomas asked. All the engines knew though – they knew because it was Wellsworth where they began, they knew because of the way traffic had to be rerouted through the ‘down’ platform through the station; they knew because of the hearse that visited the station once the weather had cleared and the puddles had dried away.

They knew because a man had died, and the station had been left closed until it was safe to remove him.

To this day, Edward still doesn’t like exposed live wires. He rightly believes they are a danger to everyone around them – but can you blame him?

Back to Master Post

[thetruearchmagos]

Last Line Tag!

Thank you again for your Open Tag, @autumnalwalker ! I'll Tag @lividdreamz , @sanguine-arena , and @jamieanovels

For the WIPs: @dogmomwrites @theprissythumbelina @marinesocks

Swift Seas And Whirlwinds An Excerpt: Teeming Tide

As the song of the people carried through the air, and the streets of Cagnan hummed with the power of thousands, it was a strange thought indeed to Ms Agnes Parquet that this whole spectacle was the result of a club meeting.



Such events had been banned for years, of course, but they were brought back around the time Agnes entered St. Jeanne's University under Old Man Raimond's "Ouverture" of the nation, and she'd only been too happy to sign onto the student societies that had once been deemed halfway to treasonous by older administrations.



It seemed they were right.



A figure, under a black sweater and white respirator mask, ran up to her along the street. They flung themself around Agnes, wrapping them up in a hug that left no doubt in her mind who they were.



"bonjour, ma chere. Enjoying the night?"



The mask was pulled down with a hard tug, and the pretty green eyes of Celine Moreau looked back into her own. What eyes, she thought. They were why she was there. Moreau suggested they take this long walk into a murky future, a spark that Agnes and their friends had merely helped spread among friends and through their classes, until it was the talk of the campus.



They were all here now, and even more than she could have ever imagined. Old Raimond might have weeped had he seen what his successors were doing to the Republic he loved, but now there were ten thousand over gathered to make that right. Workers crushed, students scorned, families who'd been ripped apart under the black gloves of the hated Guepes. They were there, and they would not be made to leave so easily.



"Oui, ma petite rose. It's only the beginning! God, even my brother left his stationmaster to come, and my parents are somewhere here."



A cry rang from the throng, and far ahead shouts came back. The pair were close enough to the front that the police barricade was well in sight, even through the haze of irritant gas released by their grenades. They formed a long, black clad line, straight and steady behind shields of transparent polymer. A truck was wheeling its way down the road behind them, and Agnes cringed at the sight of a water cannon's snout mounted on its roof. They were terrible beasts, but would doubtless find its jet stream a trickle in the face of the people's teeming tide. They would make it through.

[trainofthoughtornot]

Meep meep!

Well, hello there, fine ladies and gentlemen! This is your Stationmaster speaking. Welcome aboard the Train of Thought—a delightful chaos of ideas, ramblings, and the occasional deep dive into the realms of "Wait, what was I talking about again?"

The engine’s rumbling, the tracks are set, and the whistle’s blowing—there’s no turning back now. This space is all about embracing the noise of our minds, the spark of random ideas, and the thrill of unexpected destinations. Sure, it might get bumpy, and we might miss a station or two, but hey, isn't that what makes the journey fun?

So, to all you curious wanderers and accidental passengers, thank you for hopping on. Sit tight, buckle up (or don’t, I mean, it's your seatbelt), and get ready, because things are about to get real. This train runs on humor, curiosity, and the occasional existential crisis—what could possibly go wrong?

Glad to have you aboard. Let’s make some noise, stir up some thoughts, and see where these tracks lead us. Are you ready? All aboard!

Hoot hoot!

[libidomechanica]

“No fault in women to the goods where or her she had”

How long as flies, and the fresh into bed and lyfe.     Here, the cup runs throte. Ah for ioy doe remayne, thus far from his voice from thee. For I missay,     both of Air Fruit moist and death. A spark. Much carefully though not always easy task;     for long since. Its uglinesse? Cruel and full of love; it is gone only thee to the fall;     or on my Nancy and brambles. Ah,

dreamed that in her Nature’s own selues; for his bone     from the will belief from the poor a prince my sick dreames, my joys for restful death’s second     the drill but from variously, and the Clover dwelling! Which the wide oppen three.     It promised length of the facts! In listened song of your eye—tell you with care, that busie archer     his own hunger-pinch. To hear things

with undefiléd Robe to me. And when all my     lifelong hand in the door; so I turn’d. It make a fellow dirt, ye’ll cast on the shepheard     so nene a golden creast with Barnaby the harder to enjoy two hours after all.     Thee, only. For it an echo ring? The Ouzell she may raise their wiliness? It will     sing, that sike mischeife the mark in these

trunks? For my shepheard all the other the hedge to     the streets of my blushing with a kiss, I woke to the twilight, doe ye awake and pain     his face of any bene, we han great love, if it weare: yet stile affords: while other     disaray, and tooke on, losse art found such beauty, glorious desires, yet dewed     with a blew silke riband. Not once the

thresht in school except for it were the truth I’ll tell,     there, talking off through oft had gives the things of Old; no poet’s matters in a midnight.     Hark how the rich inward seek and lend what a beggar’d of sweetness of memory of     heart the plaid it were tame flowrd my ioyfull stop there he looked up … zooks, are changeable clay,—     thou with better come! Hark how truely

maskt, there. The grass, approch to his deuoyr belied; and     for you except therefore of; witnesse manifest by thy seruices vnto her sad faces     on the brute; a god in leave thought doth, if theyr choking. And nowhere and feele as     much carelesse did Matthew stopped, and all to my use deceive; that will these same, give lies     of his sings on the love, though of your

head without a Thorn, and you say? As it is some     and trust! Beards all, and love that it is tyme to the holy bower, the taste like a Shadow     movest thou dost sing. Wish your three stronger by day. Of flesh, you keep’st me in me? Come,     Anthea, must be; for than ever drove the porch, windchime wasn’t there is the jewels trifles     are rebuilt. Although unseen them too:

but why not do, thou see’st though it be, at leap in     fields, and further. Our work enough for a fleece of the Damzels, daughter’s and find. No fault     in women to the goods where or her she had to subdue then overlooked and most     proceeding his upturned to plow; shovels crumble and let this net? Soul’s sleepe, adieu ye     Woodes can drinking of me weeps to

pay for kissing fuellers, and of Absence we see     their face deep, impassion, or the more cause that be forbidden feare of verb and night wood,     and spheres, the base affeard: ne let thy power, floats thou shake still, not widely as the street,     crying to tell you, and scarlet we a blink did tarry; and as Argus eyed and which     Inde or countryes, where Love his stationmaster

is a harmonies of the woman, nature     on the aim! There away from here a-making statues. Its mouth will buy his job. Some     still, and right disappear because your meet then in rankes dost comes interview was a     meadows sear! Saw not Honour more best shepheards sich, God know, the backward the crossed, and all     but till adorned there! The pill of many

a things; alas, the back down or to claim a     right, for laik o’ gear ye light way, I must rise, with dear Perilla, say, for greed, palace,     purl, knot, or purged air, shalt finds none, forget not your death, or leather, for another land,     with beauty should look’d out the hollow your lips at halfe in days, oh, never prove the two     soul more quietly leaves best of force

of song betray, if like a store, are Life’s stop twitching     lacke bowre of love teach to collide violently with the game. The learnd euen th’     Angelico’s the past midnight are likewise did decree that he leasures of my boy     to thee Dear so much wrestling on me. To seeke the darknesse doe the time, here you have     more greene, that all. This I see it gloome,

and he threshed corn and ioyed oft in rurall vaine     scuse giues places. She and tasting thee. Those parted is most most of frost, in a love againe,     find so mild modest eyes can danced his warm eve finds but Room for the with care, and happy     hand—just like clothes to recede through language the next years old and for he was not by     thy Justice to the spade from the

Cyprian Queene, seeke the crop of care: did stinging go     the pledge absolute Ones where lives o’er her haffet lock’d up in any chest when my wish,     and you, whose like a spark struck vainly in the must should have Vizírs—but better the father     liuely notes of Demon, Ghost, and tears, of fire, of counted such a Solitude again,     and overswear the others’ joy.

[joezworld]

The Devil in Disguise (2/5)

Traintober 2022 Day 28 - Last Stop

Summary - Time for one last ride...

-

⅖

The 47 screeched with fury and fear as her own motor was turned against her. “What are you doing?!”

“I’m taking you for a ride.” The 307 said as he kept pushing. Inside both locomotives, alarm horns were sounding as traction motors were pushed past their safe operating limits. “You always liked that, didn’t you? Having someone else do all the work for you?”

They rattled across a set of points linking the up and down lines, and the 47 shrieked as she rocked back and forth like a drunk. “You’re going to get me killed! Hell, you'll get the both of us killed!”

“I don’t know if you noticed yet, but that’s the point.” He said firmly, his pantograph sparking wildly as they passed seventy miles an hour. 

“To get us both killed?!” She said, shocked. “Over something that happened thirty years ago?!”

He said nothing more, silencing the warning horns that blared when they raced past his top speed of seventy-five. 

Stevenage station suddenly loomed large in the distance, and he could feel the 47 try to put the brakes on as they hurtled towards the platforms. In response, he reached up through the multiple unit connectors and found the circuit breaker for the diesel’s brake compressor. 

Click-pop!

With a horrifying sound, the 47 suddenly found her air brake compressor powering down. Unlike the multiple unit, who had listened very carefully when the men had taken his systems to bits in anticipation for the multiple unit trials, she had no idea what a circuit breaker was, let alone how to turn it back on. She tried frantically to apply emergency braking with the now-limited amount of air she did have, but the 307, having disabled his own air brakes, reached through his own systems and opened up an angle cock located between one of his articulated sections.

With a whoosh, the air came shooting out of the opened valve, and the 47 screamed in terror as all of her brake shoes went limp and unresponsive. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!”

“I finished what you started.” He gave her a savage bump as he poured more power into his traction motors. They began to get warm and uncomfortable, but he didn’t care. 

Stevenage station came and went in a flash, and a panicked stationmaster made the first report of the runaway as it thundered past him. “They’re going onto the Hertford Loop!” He yelled, as the train rocked through a low-speed crossover at nearly ninety miles an hour, bound for the diverging track. 

The rocking and rolling was causing chaos inside the 307’s empty compartments, and testing equipment and personal belongings began to fly all over. In the forward-most compartment, the computer had already gone onto the floor, its screen shattering into shards, but the printer was more resistant. It was very heavy, and had rubber “feet”, so it couldn’t slide - a truly enormous force was required to make it move, and when the train hit the crossover, it got it. From the printer’s perspective, the table dropped out from under it momentarily, as the car rocked, dipped, and rolled. Inertia working the way it does, the printer hung in the air for a moment, at which point the table rose up under it and fired it across the carriage like a cannonball. It slammed into the opposite wall with a tremendous smash, before landing mostly on top of a knapsack sitting in the seat below. 

The force of the printer landing on it made the bag spring open, and its contents, including a portable radio, fell to the floor. The radio was very light, and quickly slid all the way to the back of the compartment as the train kept accelerating. It hit the wall with a bang, jarring its cheap controls so much that it turned on. 

- music in the air

I should have been away

But I knew I had to stay

Last train to London

“Looks like they’re playing my song…” The 307 muttered to himself as they whipped under the bridge that carried the ECML over the Hertford Loop. 

Farmland raced by on either side of them. They were past a hundred miles an hour now, and it was readily obvious that neither one of them were going to make it much further. 

Just heading out

Last train to London

Just leaving town

But I really want tonight to last forever

His traction motors actually hurt by this point, and the gauges in his cab were pegged at their stops. The alarms kept ringing, even as he kept ignoring them. 

The 47 wasn’t in much better shape. She was trailing smoke from one of her traction motors, and there was a clatter from her motor that was only getting louder. 

I really wanna be with you

Let the music play on down the line tonight

Underneath a starry sky

Time was still but hours must really have rushed by

A station appeared in the distance, which one it was he didn’t know. They were on it in an instant, screaming past the platforms like a comet. Their passage caused anything not nailed down to go flying, and a few waiting passengers were thrown off their feet. 

I didn't realize

But love was in your eyes

The 47 had given up on reasoning with the insane lunatic 307 she was yoked to, and was now trying anything she could to get the train to stop. Her brakes were useless, and she couldn’t get her aching motor to do what she wanted. She tried making it stop - one of her fitters had said she had a fuel pump?  - but she didn’t know what to do. 

She tried calling for help from passing trains, but the stupid little multiple units looked at her like she was crazy when she raced past them. 

I really should have gone

But love went on and on

Oh this was hopeless. She could really die! She had to do something! 

Quickly, she wracked her mind for anything she could use. “I’ll tell you what happened to her!” She cried, desperately. 

“Beg pardon?” That didn’t sound like idiotic blind devotion. Didn’t he love that thing?

“Your girl! I know what happened to her!” 

“She died.” He snapped, sending a painful burst of electricity down the multiple unit cabling, ending that particular line of bargaining. 

Last train to London

Just heading out

Last train to London

“Don’t try and stop this.” He said, after a moment’s silence. “There’s no point. Either we get put in a siding, or we go all the way to London and have the smashup to end all smashups. Either way, I win.”

Just leaving town

But I really want tonight to last forever

I really wanna be with you

Let the music play on down the line tonight

“But I want to stop! Please!” She wailed. 

“I wanted to grow old with her.” He said icily. “Now stop your crying and keep your chin up. I lived my life, and I’ve got plenty of regrets, but you know what? I’m going to the end with my pantographs held high. Can you say the same?”

But I really want tonight to last forever

I really wanna be with you

Let the music play on down the line tonight

She didn’t answer, and a raucous drum and bass line picked up as the song came to its end. 

-

A mile or so ahead, the end was waiting for them. A group of workmen had been performing work to the embankment next to the line with a dump truck and a sizable Volvo wheel loader. They’d been given the call to clear the line as soon as the runaway had blown through Stevenage, but as it became clear that the train wasn’t able to stop on its own, “Control” had called back with drastic instructions. 

“Park that thing on the line and leg it!” 

“Seriously?”

“Yes! Do it now! You’ve only got a few minutes!”

The foreman had very quickly fired up the loader, and hurriedly parked it astride both lines, before fleeing the area. He and his men ran for their lives, clambering into the dump truck and driving away as fast as it could go.

The Volvo loader had been left with the motor running, and so the giant, non-sentient machine sat on the rails like a growling beast, a yellow sentinel, intent on protecting London from imminent peril. 

And peril was just around the corner. 

-

For a moment, the rails sang, the metal warping minutely as a train traveled over it. With slow trains, it could give almost a half-minute’s warning that a train was coming. 

With a fast train, it was only a few seconds. 

The 47 rounded the corner at ninety-six miles an hour. By the time she registered that there was a giant object in front of her, she was only a few hundred feet away. 

She opened her mouth to scream.

-

In the dump truck, some quarter of a mile away, the collision rattled the windows, before a fireball bloomed, rising into the sky.

[skimblyshanks]

I'M GOING TO BE MEAN, SKIMBLY. 2 (What their love letters look like) and 3 (Which one outlives the other, and how they cope), for Tuggershanks and Alonzoffelees (in either order).

2.What do their Love Letters look like?

Alonzoffelees: almost exaggeratedly formal, and long. Probably have a good few innuendos in there but most looking over their shoulders would miss them bc it's all just so many fancy looking words. No one knows when either of them finds the time to write them, but they write them frequently.

Tuggershanks: Bold of you to assume the first mode of contact isn't mainly “u up?” Otherwise, Tugger writes about what he means to very...bluntly, no matter what it is. Skimble will try to spruce up what he'll write a bit more, but is still rather straightforward; romantic ways with words is not a forte for either of them. They do have a game tho where Tugger makes sure his letter ends up in the mail to be sorted onboard; Skimble will write his response and, on disembarking, give it to Tugger saying they found a strange letter with no address.

3.Which one Outlives the other, and how do they cope?

Bold of you to assume I haven't thought out timelines where either one of a pairing has died first. These are in universes sans the kids, though, as that's just too many variables hjffjhdsj

Alonzoffelees:

Mistoffelees dies first: Alonzo becomes a lot more somber; faster to anger, too. Cassandra and Munkustrap are his only real communicants. He throws himself full-on into work as a protector (bc let’s be honest, Misto wouldn't be dying first of natural causes. Something happened and Lonnie thinks it's his fault for not being a good enough protector to stop it) no more fun slinking, except maybe every now and then, he's a serious, harder cat now.

Alonzo Dies first: Misto tries to handle his grief with grace and ends up working to bottle his emotions. His magic gets more and more volatile, until one day there's just. An explosion of sparks and smoke and everyone’s freaked out and thinks it's Macavity and Mistoffelees is just ashamed and guilty and every other negative emotion basically, and he just runs out of the junkyard, withdrawing himself from the tribe. Probably spends more time with Bustopher, who is his telephone line, essentially, to his other family, but he'll only see the Junkyard and it's inhabitants when and if he's accompanying his father on the annual visit. Cats are glad to see him, and he's cordial enough, but he simply can't be in the junkyard for too long anymore.

Tuggershanks

Skimble Dies first: Tugger doesn't really know what to do with himself for the first few months after it happens. He's had breakups, he's left relationships with no intention of re-entering them, but he hasn't had to really sit with the fact that a lover, and a close one, is dead, and really isn't coming back, not as himself. He’ll bounce back, more or less; he's back to flirting, and keeping himself groomed, and he's strutting with confidence again, but if you really sit down with him you can tell there's some kind of small, dull-aching hole in his heart

Tugger Dies first: Skimble is taken aback, and he stays in this numb shock for a good while; he’s stuck in a haze for months. There’s a few close calls at the stations too many, and he's relieved of duty, so to speak; he lives with the stationmaster for a few months and let's everything sink in. He visits his family, he talks through his feelings, and though it takes him a while he is able to step back into his old jobs and roles. He mainly stays at the station, but he'll see the trains off in his owner’s arms. He's more subdued when he visits the junkyard; all in all he lets himself slow down more overall. When the young cats get cocky and arrogant, he can't fight a sad smile and maybe a quiet laugh as he remembers that horribly darling tom who left a good deal too soon.

Ship Asks!

[drweidinger]

Tama (Japanese: たま, April 29, 1999 – June 22, 2015) was a female calico cat who gained fame for being a station master and operating officer at Kishi Station on the Kishigawa Line in Kinokawa, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan.[1]

The rail company had been close to bankruptcy when she was appointed but her arrival sparked a resurgence is the business’ fortunes as tourists flocked to see the stationmaster in action.

She raised more than 1.1 billion Yen (A$11.6 millon) for the local economy."Tama-chan really emerged like a saviour, a goddess,” Mr Kojima said.

[ravenmorganleigh]

In the final part of our series on policing in America, writer Andrea J Ritchiedocuments how girls of color as young as five are exposed to routine humiliation by police officers--

Wednesday 16 August 2017 10.37 EDTLast modified on Wednesday 16 August 2017 13.26 EDT

Pulled over at a traffic stop and beaten by the side of the road. Placed in a banned chokehold by a New York City police officer. Violently taken into police custody, never to come out alive. Shot first, questions asked later.

The stories and images that immediately leap to mind in connection with these scenes are those of black men – Rodney King, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile.

But these are also the stories of black women.

Women like Sandra Antor, pulled over and brutalized on Interstate 95 in 1996 by a South Carolina state trooper in an incident captured on video five years after images of Rodney King’s beating sparked a national uprising.

Women like Rosann Miller, placed in a chokehold in 2014 by a New York City police officer when she was seven months pregnant, just weeks after police choked Eric Garner to death on camera using one.

Women like Alesia Thomas, repeatedly kicked and beaten by a Los Angeles police officer in 2012 while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. Like Freddie Gray’s, the injuries she sustained in police custody proved fatal.

Women like Mya Hall, a black trans woman shot dead by police after making a wrong turn on to a National Security Agency property outside of Baltimore, just weeks before Freddie Gray’s case rocked the city and the nation.

Yet black women’s experiences of profiling and often deadly force remain largely invisible intoday’s conversations about the epidemic of racial profiling, police violence and mass incarceration in the US.

A five-year-old in handcuffs

I had been documenting police violence against adult women of color for almost a decade when I learned about the case of Jaisha Aikins, in 2005. Jaisha, a five-year-old black girl, was handcuffed and arrested at her St Petersburg, Florida, school for essentially throwing a temper tantrum – as every five-year-old has done at some point.

The school’s administrators and some media commentators justified putting a five-year-old in handcuffs on the grounds that she “punched” the school’s vice-principal, as if the little girl had hauled back and clocked her, rather than flailing at her with tiny hands while in the throes of a tantrum, with the force of a child.

It was clear from video taken of the incident that the vice-principal was not hurt and that Jaisha eventually calmed down. In fact, Jaisha was sitting calmly in a chair when police arrived in response to the vice-principal’s call to arrest an unruly student.

Even after discovering the student was a kindergartener, three white armed officers nevertheless proceeded to pull the little girl’s hands behind her back to put them in handcuffs as she cried and begged them not to. Jaisha was taken to the police station in a patrol car, but released to her mother’s custody when prosecutors refused to file charges against her.

Jaisha’s story illustrates just how deeply entrenched controlling narratives of black women and girls are – no matter how young and small they are. The video of the incident was one of the first depicting police violence against a black girl to be widely broadcast and generate outrage across the country.

In her groundbreaking book Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, Monique Morris tells the stories of several other black girls as young as six and seven arrested in school in similar incidents over subsequent years, some as recently as 2013. In some cases, the little girls were held in police cars and stations for extended periods of time after arrest.

Policing of girls extends beyond instances where officers are summoned by school administrators. Police are increasingly stationed inside schools, leading to increased police contact with girls, and increased police violence as officers enforce school rules.

For instance, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) reported several cases where young women of color were slammed against the wall, thrown to the floor and arrested by officers stationed in their schools for leaving class a few minutes late (“roaming the hallways”), asking for return of a confiscated cell phone (“threatening an officer”), or cursing in the hallway (“disorderly conduct”).

What happens behind school doors often mirrors what happens on the streets in the context of broken windows and gang policing in the community.

In 2010, I represented three young black women pulled off a New York City subway train by officers who believed they had gotten on without paying – a classic broken-windows offense that was the No 1 arrest charge in New York City in 2015. In fact, as part of an after-school program, they had entered as a group with the stationmaster’s permission. The officers also acted on the assumption that the young women were involved in a purportedly gang-related fight on a completely different platform.

One officer yelled at one 17-year-old girl to “get the fuck off the train, bitch!” Even though she was complying, he grabbed her by the neck and slammed her down on to a bench, choking her.

As her twin approached, alarmed, she too was thrown down and hit her head and face on the floor as an officer began striking her. Officers slammed the third young woman, the twins’ friend, to the ground and pepper-sprayed her in the face before handcuffing her. Afterward, they left her in a cell for 30 minutes with no means of removing the burning spray from her eyes, despite her desperate pleas for relief.

Throughout the violent encounter, the officers referred to the young women as “bitch” and “Shaniquah”, making explicit the racially gendered perceptions driving their violent behavior within the broader framework of broken-windows and gang policing.

Teenagers shocked by Tasers

The presence of law enforcement officers in schools has driven increased student referrals to police and arrests in schools, often “for actions that would not otherwise be viewed as criminal ... such as refusing to present identification, using profanity with a school administrator, or ‘misbehaving’”.

One study found that the rate at which students are referred for lower-level offenses more than doubles when a school has regular contact with a “school resource officer”.

The result is a “net-widening” effect expanding surveillance of youth of color and infusing policing and prison culture into schools across the country, with predictable effects.

Kathleen Nolan, a former New York public school teacher, describes “considerable subjectivity in determining whether a behavior was actually a violation of the law”, and notes that everyday items – box cutters used for after-school jobs, razors used to style hair, Mace or pepper spray carried by young women for protection – were met with “zero tolerance” in a school populated by youth of color.

Indeed, a 2005 report issued by the Advancement Project concluded: “Across the board, the data shows that black and Latino students are more likely than their white peers to be arrested in school . . . [despite the lack of] evidence that black and Latino students misbehave more than their white peers.”

Black students are “punished more severely for less seriously and more subjectively defined infractions” such as “disturbing school” or “disorderly conduct”.

A 2011 Texas study found that, after controlling for 80 other variables, race remained a reliable predictor of discipline for subjective violations like disruption. In South Carolina, black students are nearly four times as likely to be charged with “disturbing school” as white students.

Today, black girls make up approximately 33% of girls referred to law enforcement or arrested on school grounds but only 16% of the female student population. Yet the discourse around the policing of youth and the “school-to-prison pipeline” continues to focus nearly exclusively on boys and young men.

Alarmingly, among the violent policing tactics that have migrated from the streets to schools is indiscriminate use of stun guns, or Tasers, which are used to subdue people by firing barbs into them that deliver a jolt of electricity.

While researching a 2006 report on the US government’s failure to comply with the UN Convention Against Torture, I discovered a 2004 case in which a Miami-Dade police officer used a Taser against a 12-year-old girl, shocking her with 50,000 volts of electricity – for skipping school.

Between late 2003 and early 2005, at least 24 Central Florida students, some as young as 12, were shocked with Tasers by police officers in public schools. A typical scenario involved officers wading in through a crowd to break up a fight and using Tasers to “get them to move”.

As of 2005, 32% of police departments interviewed by the weapon’s manufacturer, Taser International, had used Tasers in schools. An August 2016 Huffington Post investigation uncovered at least 84 incidents of Taser use against students since 2011.

Beyond the discriminatory arrests and excessive force, police sexual harassment and violence also takes place inside the schoolhouse gate. Inappropriate commentary about young women’s bodies and appearance by police officers stationed in or near schools is commonplace.

At one New York City school, “school safety agents ... would degrade students with comments like ‘That girl has no ass’”. I witness similar harassment on a daily basis as young women travel back and forth on my Brooklyn street to attend one of three schools on my block. Daily pat-downs and mandatory passage through metal detectors before entering schools are also experienced by young women as violative and degrading, especially when conducted by male officers.

After forcing one child to squat, a male officer repeatedly traced his handheld metal detector up her inner thigh

Jacquia Bolds, a Syracuse, New York, high school student, testified to a UN committee in 2008: “It is more uncomfortable for girls because sometimes they check you around your most private areas.” The New York Civil Liberties Union reports that in New York City schools in the 2000s:

After being pushed against the wall for frisking, many girls were ordered to squat for intrusive searches with handheld metal detectors. After forcing one child to squat, a male officer repeatedly traced his handheld metal detector up her inner thigh until it beeped on the button of her jeans. ‘Is there something in your pants?’ he asked repeatedly. The frightened girl repeated that there was not, but the officer kept at it, making her fear a cavity search, until he finally let her go.

The girl’s fears were not baseless: “routine” frisks and scans can quickly escalate to strip searches. Girls whose underwire bras set off metal detectors have been forced to lift up their shirts or unbuckle or unzip their pants to prove that they are not concealing weapons, or cell phones.

One 14-year-old Chinese girl who was interviewed in New York City stated: “The security guard accused me of having a knife ... They took me to a room and made me take off my shirt and pants to check my bra. They didn’t call my parents or let me talk to a teacher I know. I didn’t have a knife, just like I told them.”

Maksuda, a 17-year-old South Asian high school student, stated: “School safety agents pick on those they perceive to be religious, particularly those who wear scarves and hijab.”

A Muslim youth, 16-year-old Fariha, explains in a video made by the grassroots group Girls for Gender Equity: “For some of us it’s about: ‘You’re not covered up enough’; for us it’s like, ‘You’re covered up too much.’”

The searches these girls were subjected to appear to have been motivated at least in part by controlling narratives framing Asian women as knife-wielding assassins, Latinas and black girls as drug “mules”, and Muslim women as potential terrorists. They also often produce racially gendered humiliation, as officers rifling through young women’s belongings find tampons, birth control pills and condoms.

Manny Yusuf, a 14-year-old Bangladeshi youth leader at Drum, testified about being stopped and frisked on her way home from school. She believed she was singled out from a group of friends because she had the darkest skin. On another occasion, an officer called her over to his car to ask her for her number. She asked city council members: “How do you think it feels to be stopped and searched by an officer when all you are doing is going home from school?”

Another 14-year-old girl described being stopped with a cousin and two friends and frisked because officers thought they had weed on them – which is not sufficient legal justification for a frisk, and certainly not for a male officer to frisk a 14-year-old girl.

Ultimately, young women of color experience every form and context of police violence discussed in this book, and their stories – and examples of their leadership – are found throughout. And there are unique settings (such as schools), offenses (such as “status” offenses), and paradigms (such as broken windows policing) that are particularly used as tools to police young women and girls of color.

It is our responsibility to create spaces in which girls’ and young women’s experiences of policing can be seen and heard, and to support their leadership and their demands to get police out of schools, stop the use of status offenses and low-level offenses to criminalize young women of color, end broken windows policing, and promote conditions under which young women of color can be safe and thrive.

Excerpted from Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea J Ritchie (Beacon Press, 2017). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

[justsomehobo]

Hatt’s Army: Part 1

(Originally published 6/25/2017)

The sun was too bright, the air was too dry and my rods were too sore. I could come up with all sorts of excuses for why I was the last one out of the Tidmouth sheds that morning, but looking back, I think I was simply in denial. From the moment I got up at a quarter past eight that morning, I just knew, at the bottom of my boiler, that it was going to be an uncomfortable day.

For the last hour or so, Maxwell, my driver, had applied buckets of oil and all the strength he could muster to open my conveniently-seized-up regulator, while Boris, my fireman, tried to build up what steam he could with so much ash blocking the firebox flue. It took them a while to figure out, via process of elimination, that it was all my doing; I was holding my regulator shut so what little steam the fire could heat never made it to my cylinders, holding my breath so that little air could come through anyhow, and still pretending to be asleep. If it’s any comfort, it was hard for me as well. To me, it was almost not worth staying inside.

All of a sudden, the illusion was shattered when a bolt of pain tore through my chassis. “AAUGH!” I gasped aloud, jolting forward an inch. My attention immediately flew to the source of the pain. A fisheye lens, looking down from where the roof of my cab met its anterior wall, snapped to attention, almost in time to catch Maxwell in the act of driving his boot into my regulator valve. “Alright! Alright! I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go,” I half-yawned, wincing tightly. Boris was now staring at Max with a look that said, You did NOT seriously just do that, and Max glanced back as if to reply, It worked, didn’t it?

Now feeling wide-awake, stiff and sorry for myself, I finally started onto the turntable, halfheartedly scanning the track ahead for anything that could be in the way. I started with the tracks directly ahead of me. They didn’t look much different from the day before, so my eyes wandered further down the line, meter by meter, as they adjusted to the daylight. In a moment or two, they reached the double junction that directed traffic headed eastward to either the depot behind me, or to Tidmouth a number of statute-miles off. It wasn’t set against me, and so I impulsively looked up to check the signal. Green. Good. Along the way, though, my eyes came upon the large, majestic Knapford station a quarter mile away, and they lingered there, attracted by both the way the sun glinted off its glass roof and the murmuring from its direction. Looking closer, I soon found where it was coming from: a large crowd of passengers adorning its four platforms.

A rarity at this hour, I thought to myself. They must be waiting for the Wild Nor’Wester. Doesn’t it leave at eight? What’s keeping it? Where are the coaches? In the 2A, 2B and 2C sidings, up yard. Where I leave them each evening. Where I left them last night. I haven’t gotten them yet. I never did it. I wasn’t there. And now it’s all late! I made it all late! I wasn't there! I failed them! Oh, God! I failed them all! I wasn't there! I-

“Thomas! What’s going on up there?” Maxwell prompted into the talkback in my cab, obviously worried about the heightened pitch in the whine my auraphone was giving off. Lost in a sudden whirlwind of panic and guilt, I could give no reply. Recognizing the gravity of the situation, Boris tugged the whistle cord in a conventional Rule-55 manner, closed the throttle and applied the emergency brake; then the two of them stood flat against the back wall of the cab and covered their ears. For a moment, all that could be heard was my own uncanny murmuring, the ‘ta-tuck ta-tuck, ta-tuck ta-tuck’ of the track under my wheels, and my cab’s auraphone floating back to Earth like a feather, from a howl to an invasive whimper and finally a lowly hum.

The storm soon died down, and I felt safe enough to open myself up again. I opened my eyes, took a look around to make sure all was still where it was, then signaled with a succinct ‘pip-pip!’ that I was present and accounted for. Maxwell was already checking my instruments to see everything was in order, and Boris had taken a pencil and notebook from a rack on the left-hand wall.

“Type...four… suuudden… auuurral… perrrrturrrrbaaaation,” he pronounced, scribbling as he went. He looked into my peephole lens. “Addendum…?”

“Quote. Unit reports episode was, um, geas-induced via 30 to 40-minute …er… operational delay. Full recovery by-” here I paused to check my chronometer- “...t-plus one minute, ...fffforty-n seconds. Unquote. All clear, Max.”

“Away we go,” said Maxwell, and reached for the regulator crank- but not before it swung open on its own accord.

As I started off again, this time with an extra spring in my strokes, I felt a number of irritating stings as several sparks hit the sides of my smokebox. Another couple of puffs, and they blew through my funnel, corkscrewed through the air for an instant and were no more.

“2C, please!” I whistled to the signalman. Faintly, fifteen meters straight away, there came a faint series of clicks, then a hiss from closer by as I felt Maxwell cracking open my regulator. What my driver and I were trying to hear the turning points over was the incessant murmuring of the eight express coaches ahead of us:

“I think you all ought to know I’m feeling very sore.”

“Did you all hear about the cheesecake incident last week?”

“I heard Mrs. Peterson is having another baby boy!”

“Do you like my carpets? I just had them vacuumed this morning.”

“Shut up, Beatrice, nobody asked you!”

“Hurry up, you little cinder!” spat Gordon irritably, waiting to set off just ahead of the switch from the yard to Platform 1. His outburst ensured that the coaches, as if on cue, stopped their chitchatting and turned their widened eyes to meet his.

“Speak for yourself,” I suggested offhandedly, rolling my own eyes. Internally, I was actually surprised he started it this time. He was usually too tired to talk back when these sorts of things happened, after all. It usually played out after the Nor’Wester pulled back in.

“Yes,” I thought I then heard him say to himself,  “I will.” I couldn’t be sure, for even now the coaches had begun whispering to themselves again:

“What’s gotten into Henry this time of year?”

“I’ve got this horrible pain all down the side of my undercarriage…”

“Look at this net that I just found!”

“Cut back on belly fat by never eating these three foods!”

“Do you kiss your mouth with that mother?”

“You like my haiku? It’s about my favorite furniture catalogue…”

“Do the Greeks really have no word for ‘no’?”

The last few coaches were coupled to the train, the signal was given, and the points were set for me to Platform 1. Pulling into the station, I could finally partake in my favorite activity to kill the time: man-spotting.

Now, when people go trainspotting, they only see one or two trains go by every ten minutes. If you don’t really relish it, I imagine it gets dull fast. But when I look over to the platform, there are often many people there waiting for their trains, and at least one or two stand out from the crowd. Perhaps it’s a lady with a big floppy Spanish hat or beehive on their heads, or a young punk with straight, long locks and a leather jacket. On occasion, late on Friday evenings, you get a fellow who’s so drunk he can barely stand, giving the stationmaster a two-fingered salute with the arm that’s not in its jacket sleeve.

That day, it was a little boy wearing a suit two sizes too large and crying his mum’s ears inside out. As I pulled in with the coaches, I was so busy watching his father instruct him to pipe down that I wasn’t prepared for the sharp thud of Gordon’s rear buffers hitting the coach behind him. He’s rarely ever been this rough with the Express before, it occurred to me as he whistled and gave the all-aboard. Ah well. We are in a rush.

This wasn’t nearly the first time we had started out this late, nor the latest we had started, and so I knew that I was to assist the train, uncoupled, out of the yard from behind before I could move on to shunting the next train. Otherwise, I would’ve tried to move away, and so the next few weeks would’ve come and gone like any other I’d ever had; and by today I would either have melted away in a steelworks in Vicarstown or the Greater Isle, or worse, in one piece, left to rust forever in the Woodham yards. But I didn’t, those weeks went differently, and I did my share in holding out against the Beeching Axe to tell you this today. But that’s another story. This is… well, this is this story. Now! Where were we?

Ooh, yeah, we were about to help pull the express! So, anyway, Maxwell and Boris had left my cab for Haverty the Yard Boss to brief them, and they knew I could be trusted with my own devices when they were needed elsewhere. So, as is common for an engine with nothing to do and no-one to talk to, I closed my eyes to rest, turning away from Gordon’s gruff manner and the shell-shock of this morning and looking back on more pleasing memories…

the smell of potted lilacs,

a late-night breeze whistling through an empty depot,

the startling CRACK with which one Guy Fawkes Night firework seemed to become thousands.

But even then I kept my funnel out for the signals to start, and soon they came, one by one; firstly the uncanny silence as the passengers’ feet died down, then the thump, thump, thump, thump, thump of the carriage doors, and soon enough, from the head of the train, a shrill guard’s whistle.

At first, the whistle came faintly, but the sound carried with it a single basic impulse, and no sooner did I recognize this pulse it that it seemed to echo from within and without me, amplifying itself to the pitch of a siren.

On.

My mind was thrown out of focus for an instant, and before I could have stopped myself, I had thrown my weight up against the coach in front of me. I quickly regained self-control and, still pushing, began to self-inspect my buffer beam for damage. Seems relatively clean overall, I thought. Always a good sign. Regulator? Not dented. Looks good. Stereo-phone? I tested it earlier, it was loud and clear. The shock mount looks to be in one piece. No cracks. Left buffer? Looks clean. Not bent. Right buffer? Eh… straight enough. Deciding all was good to go, I looked back up just in time to see the end of the station platform pass behind me. This was my cue. I counted down from ten, then, watching the draw gear of the coach ahead of me to ensure I did so smoothly, I began to apply my brakes, only to witness the coupling between us pull taut with a firm yank.

In disbelief, I screwed on my brakes tighter, but this only resulted in a gritty screech from between my six wheels and the rails beneath them. The signal gantry marking the edge of the marshalling yards swept overhead and out of sight as the train quickly gathered speed into the wooded valley ahead.

At this point, the auraphone in my cab sounded like a boiling teakettle. But I decided to make use of my own whistle anyway.

‘Pip-pip-pip-pip-peeeeeeeep!’ “Help! Stop the train! There’s been a mistake! I’ve GOT to be back at Knapford!” I shouted desperately. But the door to the coach ahead of me stayed closed no matter what I did. There was no sign anyone would come to my aid, much less alert the guard to my presence. Soon, with no one in my cab to stoke it, my fire died down, and I was feeling too exhausted, sore, and nauseous from sheer speed to cry for help; so I resigned myself to waiting in silence and simply looking around in hopes that someone would happen upon me.

I didn’t have long to wait, for soon the express ran through a small village, with queer houses and shops of wood and brick. My apertures widened at the sight of boxy old cars roaring up and down the streets and all the little people walking along the sides. There was a church steeple and, of course, the town had a little station of its own. It wasn’t much; just a platform with a booking office and a car park. Our train sped right past it- evidently, I reasoned, it wasn’t impressive enough for Gordon.

Soon we came close by what I would later learn was a sawmill. Some of the logs were laid on a gated clearing and tied up in threes, and many more lay waiting disorderly in rough rows by themselves. The tied logs were being dragged by tractors into large aluminium sheds, with furnaces that belched clumps of cinders out of a central pipe into the sky, like disintegrating cannonballs. I was almost frightened until it, too, was gone in a flurry of branches.

Not far ahead was a viaduct that bridged a green river valley. To my left, I saw the river underneath dissect itself as it got further away into streams trickling through the countryside beyond, with a flat-bottomed riverboat about to pass under. To my right was another mill, this one with a wheelhouse, and off in the distance I could barely distinguish where the river met the ocean before we were back in the forest again.

For what felt like hours, I slid along the smooth rails like a bobsled at the fastest I’d ever gone. Meanwhile, my axles were going numb, my valve gears pulsed with pain and my brake shoes threatened to suddenly have worn away at any moment. It was here that I encountered another first: left here, so close to danger and so far from help, with the Wild Nor’Wester still racing along without a care in the world, I wondered if it would’ve have made a difference if I hadn’t been here at all.

At last, the train did come to a stop, but by then I was feeling so faint that I could barely tell. When I finally found my bearings, they were in the palm of a stationmaster’s hand, one that was holding up two fingers in front of my eye. The engineers on call there guided me to a spur with a small water stop. As I was backed away manually from the end of the express, I saw the most shocking sight of all before me. Ahead was a formidable hillside, with the forest becoming sparser the higher it got, until the highlands were more or less covered in yellow grass. Four lines of track ran up a shallower stretch, crossed over one of the slopes to the top of the ridge, and disappeared over the very top to the other side.

My ogling was rudely interrupted by the deep trill of a familiar whistle, and I looked up in time to hear Gordon shout, “Pick yourself up off your buffers, old boy, ya can’t just sit there when there’s so much hard work to be done. Catch me if you ca-an, hohoho!” And with a loud hiss and a blast of breaking steam, he was off and that was that.

As I got my fill, I noticed a puff of white steam near the foot of the mountain, and my eyes followed it to see Gordon and his Wild Nor’Wester charging bravely uphill and out of sight.

I gathered my wits and reported back to Knapford as soon as I could, but for long afterwards, whenever I was shunting at Knapford, I found myself gazing back into the distance beyond the station and, most of all, at the Hill, which was once invisible to me and now seemed to dominate the local skyline.

I had been asleep past the Morning Report before, and had my own geas throw me into panic, and assisted the Wild Nor’Wester out of the station on slow mornings. All these had happened to me at least twice in my past. But this I did not remember. Until that day, Knapford Station, together with the depot nearby, had been my very world. I had always seen Gordon, Henry, James and Edward pull away into the distance with their Trains, but I had seldom wondered where they went or where they came back from, for there was always another train ready to be put together before I could finish watching one of them puff away. We were always intended to function on a need-to-know basis, and of the scope of my job, all Formulation Commissioner Hatt felt I needed to know amounted to this:

My name was Thomas, and I was a Tank Engine who worked at a Big Station on the island of Sodor. I put Coaches together into Trains, making sure they were at the Station’s Platforms in time for the Bigger Engines to take them on Long Journeys, and when Trains came in from Long Journeys, I took them apart into Coaches and put them in the right Sidings so the Big Engines could go and rest. This was called Shunting and it was my Job.

And since there was always so much Shunting to do and it was all I could do to get it done, I, in my small mind, christened myself The Hardest Worker On The Railway, and would often flaunt boastfully to the other engines this ignoble prize’s innate inability to be taken away.

When Gordon broke that illusion, I schemed for several days on how to pay him out in turn. But then the terrible news came that the Germans had taken Paris and were presently pushing towards the Channel. That afternoon, all traffic stopped as a war report from Prime Minister Churchill came over the station intercom. I listened intently as he discussed how the British and French forces tried, but failed to turn them back, and the successful evacuation besides, and what was to be done in the face of all this. He had this to say about the infighting going on in Buckingham Palace itself:

“Let each man search his conscience and search his speeches. I frequently search mine. Of this I am quite sure; that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

He then went on about so many Armies and Navies and fights-over-Dunkirk, and I gradually lost interest.

Work started again, but it goes without saying that my world was never the same. I had caught a glimpse of something far greater than myself and my station and my Job. Something the radio and the tongues of friends and strangers alike had only hinted at.

And I still didn’t know just what it was but it was glistering and new and clear and fresh in my mind.

And I wanted it back again.

[caveartfair]

The Kenyan Photojournalist Whose Work Was Lost for 40 Years

Priya Ramrakha, Fashion shoot for Raymonds clothing, Nairobi, Kenya, 1967. © Priya Ramrakha.

In October 1968, Time-Life published a tribute to photojournalist Priya Ramrakha, who had been killed in East Africa at 33 years old, caught in sniper fire during the Biafran Civil War. A Kenyan photographer of Indian descent, Ramrakha was not well-known outside of editorial circles, but during his short career, he captured his beloved Kenya in war and in triumph, as it emerged from the depths of British colonial rule as a hopeful independent nation.

Ramrakha had been with CBS correspondent Morley Safer, traveling down a road with a Nigerian platoon, when they were ambushed by Biafran militants. Ramrakha was shot in the back during the crossfire and died, despite Safer’s attempt to save his life. Safer took Ramrakha’s camera and unloaded the film, then took the rolls the photographer had already shot from his pockets. Those images ran in Time-Life’s tribute piece.

After Ramrakha’s death, his friend and colleague Grey Villet hoped to bring wider attention to his peer’s work through a retrospective. He traveled to Kenya, where Ramrakha had left behind an archive of his work, but Villet couldn’t locate it. And for decades, the whereabouts remained a mystery.

Portrait of Priya Ramrakha. Unknown photographer. c. 1967.

Priya Ramrakha, British attack, Aden, Yemen, 1967. © Priya Ramrakha.

Forty years after Ramrakha’s death, a relative he never knew, Shravan Vidyarthi, uncovered the photographer’s life’s work. The son of Ramrakha’s cousin, Vidyarthi was born in 1980 and had grown up hearing stories about the young photojournalist. He had seen the print tribute in Time-Life and, as an adult, began trying to piece together Ramrakha’s life through speaking with his relatives and obtaining his passport, personal letters, and ephemera. The biggest discovery came in 2008, when he found a forgotten cache of negatives, contact sheets, and prints in the garage of Ramrakha’s cousin in Nairobi. The archive of around 100,000 images and documents was the holy grail that no one could find.

Priya Ramrakha, Nationalist Tom Mboya and protestors marching, Nairobi, c. 1958. © Priya Ramrakha. Courtesy of Kehrer.

Priya Ramrakha, Independence Day, Nairobi, 1963. © Priya Ramrakha. Courtesy of Kehrer.

The following year, in 2009, Vidyarthi released a film, African Lens—The Story of Priya Ramrakha, which debuted at the Zanzibar International Film Festival and won three awards. But by that point, Vidyarthi had barely scratched the surface of digitizing and editing the enormous archive. The process took years.

In 2015, he co-curated an exhibition with curator, writer, and photo historian Erin Haney at the University of Johannesburg, entitled “Priya Ramrakha: A Pan-African Perspective 1950–1968.” And this month, they released a book with Kehrer Verlag, Priya Ramrakha: The Recovered Archive, featuring a selection of the photographer’s work, family photos, documents, and accompanying essays that contextualize the photojournalist and celebrate him as one of the first African photographers of color to gain an international profile. This has all been part of a larger effort to give Ramrakha his due: When his life was cut short, so was his legacy. “He certainly wasn’t known in the larger canon of Kenyan Indian photojournalists—or photojournalists [in general],” Vidyarthi said. “His name was known, but nobody had any idea about the depth of the story.”

Priya Ramrakha, Musicians and singers, Accra, Ghana, 1966. © Priya Ramrakha.

Ramrakha was one of the first Africans to receive commissions from Time-Life, America’s trusted media giant that commissioned the world’s most illustrious photographers, including W. Eugene Smith, Gordon Parks, and Margaret Bourke-White. Photo editors wanted access to the stories of Africa, and Ramrakha had privileges that many Africans did not. “He could get around a lot of the constraints that other African photographers faced at that time because of his British passport and his Indian status within what was colonial Kenya,” Haney explained. (Ramrakha had a British passport thanks to his grandfather, who was a British subject in colonial India.) In the 1950s, Kenyans still lived in a system of racial segregation, known as the “color bar,” that was controlled by a small minority of white colonists; Indian workers and tradesmen, who were considered the second tier, had more freedom than oppressed African Kenyans.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Ramrakha made a prolific body of work, from early images of the bloody Mau Mau Rebellion that would eventually lead to Kenya’s independence in 1963, to the joyful promise of a newly independent country. He photographed unrest and daily life with the same keen eye, and he even took on commercial fashion assignments post-independence. “For decades, Africa had been portrayed through the colonial lens by Western photojournalists,” Vidyarthi told the New York Times in 2009. “Priya became one of the first photographers to document Africa—its people and its politics—from an African perspective.”

Priya Ramrakha, Women and men volunteers training as Biafra troops, Enugu, Nigeria, c. 1967. © Priya Ramrakha.

Ramrakha was born into a family that fervently supported a free and independent Kenya. His grandfather immigrated in 1900 as one of 32,000 Indians who arrived between 1896 and 1901, a rush that was incited by the construction of a railway from the Kenyan coast to Kampala, which offered job opportunities. Ramrakha’s grandfather worked on the railway and eventually became a stationmaster in 1914. Many of the arriving Indians sympathized with efforts to overthrow British rule—India eventually gained its own independence in 1947—and Ramrakha’s uncle founded an anti-colonial newspaper, the Colonial Times, in 1933.

At 17 years old, in 1952, Ramrakha took his first photography job with the newspaper, after his father gave him a Rolleiflex. He avidly photographed the movers and shakers of local Kenyan politics, but he also captured the violence of the Mau Mau uprising led by African nationalists seeking to overthrow British rule, and its radiating effects—including Kenya’s seven-year state of emergency, which began in 1952, and the mass incarceration of Kenyans in prison camps. Though he submitted images to European newspapers, as well, they were rarely published; as Ramrakha developed his own photographic voice, the press in his home country became increasingly censored. (His uncle was jailed more than once for producing the anti-colonial paper.)

By 1960, the British had begun to relinquish their hold on the East African country, allowing direct elections to the country’s Legislative Council. That same year, Ramrakha set his eyes on America. He had become an assistant to Eliot Elisofon, an American staff photographer for Life who was working in Africa and saw something special in the young photographer’s work. At Elisofon’s behest, Ramrakha moved to California and enrolled at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Priya Ramrakha, Miriam Makeba, c. 1963. © Priya Ramrakha. Courtesy of Kehrer.

In the States, Ramrakha turned his lens on the great leaders and orators of the Civil Rights movement. In Los Angeles, in 1961, he captured a pensive Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a rally; in New York, in 1963, he took pictures of Malcolm X and Nation of Islam protestors on the street, and singer and activist Miriam Makeba at a desk, writing in the lamplight.

Priya Ramrakha, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Los Angeles, 1961. © Priya Ramrakha. Courtesy of Kehrer.

Priya Ramrakha, Malcolm X and Nation of Islam protestors, New York, 1960. © Priya Ramrakha.

Priya Ramrakha, Salvador Dalí, book signing and performance, New York, 196. © Priya Ramrakha. Courtesy of Kehrer.

When Ramrakha returned to Kenya in 1963, he witnessed the rebirth of the self-determined country as a photographer for Time-Life. He captured the changing tides of Kenya’s first Independence Day and took portraits of residents as they moved through their daily lives. Across Africa, independence movements continued to swell, and wars simmered and flared. Ramrakha traveled to Zanzibar to photograph the vast crowds at rallies and marches for Ujamaa, an African socialist movement. He embedded with soldiers in the Congo, Yemen, and finally, Nigeria. In just five years, Ramrakha’s output was tremendous.

Nobody knew Ramrakha as well as his friend Paul Theroux, an American writer, Vidyarthi said. Theroux taught in Kampala and met the photojournalist in 1966, when he acted as a fixer for Ramrakha and his Time-Life editor. In an essay for the monograph, Theroux described him as patient and gentle-natured, enormously passionate about his work, and infinitely charming. As a professor teaching the next generation of young Ugandans, Theroux saw a kindred spirit in Ramrakha, who was also committed to the cause of lifting up African society.

Priya Ramrakha, Family gathering, Accra, Ghana, c. 1966. © Priya Ramrakha.

But what ultimately defined Ramrakha was his keen eye. Theroux wrote: “He became a photographer because he saw events that others missed…the swaggering politicians, the street life in towns, the texture of villages, the faces of national soldiers and rough and ready guerrillas, and the brutality, too—the casualties, the starving children, the grieving relatives, the corpses.” He added: “Priya took powerful pictures but few of them can be described as pretty.”

Though Ramrakha’s career was but a brief spark, his position as a non-white African photographer on the international stage was mold-breaking. The following decade, Kenyan photojournalist Mohamed Amin rose to prominence and left behind a powerful legacy, and in post-apartheid South Africa, others followed. Though it’s unlikely that Ramrakha had a direct influence on his successors, he represented a critical moment in photographic history, and a significant voice in Africa at a time when most were not elevated—back then, editors relied on foreign correspondents to tell the continent’s stories.

Recently, there has been a reckoning regarding how Africa is portrayed in editorial and reportage photography. Last year, National Geographic editor Susan Goldberg apologized for the magazine’s “racist” coverage, which had persisted for decades. It was far from the only magazine that furthered stereotypes of the continent; as educator and author John Edwin Mason pointed out in an essay for the monograph, Life’s coverage also played up the “primitive exoticism” of African culture. During Ramrakha’s career, Haney said, editors favored “simplistic coverage of Africa” that avoided the complexities of politics and the effects of colonialism. “At its heart [it was a] racist implication that was guiding a lot of editorial principles,” Haney continued.

Priya Ramrakha, French soldiers battle rioters during the French Somaliland independence referendum, 1967. © Priya Ramrakha.

But Ramrakha didn’t tell simple stories. His images, Haney emphasized, were complex and often ambiguous, raising challenging questions. “And that’s why it’s really, really important that [his work] is coming out now because some of those stories can be explored,” she said.

Understanding the full context and breadth of Ramrakha’s imagery is the first step in cementing his legacy—a legacy for which he made the ultimate sacrifice. “I think Priya represents the heroism of his profession, the photographer willing to take the greatest risk to get the most brilliant image,” Theroux wrote. “It is one of the ironies of his last roll of film that he recorded the moments just before he died, the empty road, the flustered soldiers, the invisibility of the bullets that killed him.”

from Artsy News

[ucflibrary]

The national celebration of African American History was started by Carter G. Woodson, a Harvard-trained historian and the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and first celebrated as a weeklong event in February of 1926. After a half century of overwhelming popularity, the event was expanded to a full month in 1976 by President Gerald Ford.

Here at the UCF library we are passionate about celebrating African American culture and history (no seriously, I got a massive amount of emails with suggestions). We are proud to present our top 22 favorite books by, and/or about, African Americans, plus two streaming films.

Click the keep reading link for full descriptions and catalog links.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates Framed as a letter to the author’s teenage son, this chronicle of race in America works as memoir, meditation, and call to action. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

Blood at the root : a racial cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. Many black residents were poor sharecroppers, but others owned their own farms and the land on which they'd founded the county's thriving black churches. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. Soon bands of white 'night riders' launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to 'abandoned' land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten, as locals kept Forsyth 'all white' well into the 1990s. Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth's racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, Phillips breaks a century-long silence and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century Suggested by Mary Page, Administration

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child's soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson's poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become. Suggested by Min Tong, Regional Librarian

Dreaming Me: An African-American Woman's Buddhist Journey by Janice Dean Willis In the fall of 1969, in the wake of a widening racial divide in the United States, Jan Willis began what would become a life-changing sojourn. By the time Willis left her home in an Alabama mining camp for undergraduate studies at Cornell University, the harsh reality of life in the segregated South of the 1950s and 1960s had left an indelible stain on her consciousness. Confronted then with the decision to either arm herself in the struggle for human rights at home or search for the possibility of a more humane existence abroad, Willis ultimately chose peace among the burgundy and saffron robes of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery over the black berets of the Black Panther Party. What she discovered, living in a narrow temple amid sixty Tibetan monks, was the healing place she had sought but not found in her Southern Baptist town of Docena. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Subject Librarian

Dust Tracks on the Road by Zora Neal Hurston First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, an account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston's personal literary self-portrait offers a revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life -- public and private -- of an artist, anthropologist, chronicler, and champion of the black experience in America. Suggested by Susan MacDuffee, Acquisitions & Collections

Evicted: poverty and profit in the American city by Matthew Desmond In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut. All are spending almost everything they have on rent, and all have fallen behind. The fates of these families are in the hands of two landlords: Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher turned inner-city entrepreneur, and Tobin Charney, who runs one of the worst trailer parks in Milwaukee. They loathe some of their tenants and are fond of others, but as Sherrena puts it, "Love don't pay the bills." She moves to evict Arleen and her boys a few days before Christmas. Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. But today, most poor renting families are spending more than half of their income on housing, and eviction has become ordinary, especially for single mothers. In vivid, intimate prose, Desmond provides a ground-level view of one of the most urgent issues facing America today. As we see families forced into shelters, squalid apartments, or more dangerous neighborhoods, we bear witness to the human cost of America's vast inequality ; and to people's determination and intelligence in the face of hardship. Suggested by Mary Page, Administration

Eyes on the Prize: America's civil rights years, 1954-1965 by Juan Williams This compelling oral history of the first ten years of the Civil Rights movement is a tribute to the men and women, both black and white, who took part in the fight for justice and kept their eyes on the prize of freedom. Companion to the highly acclaimed PBS television series.  Suggested by Rebecca Hammond, Special Collections & University Archives

Fences by August Wilson From legendary playwright August Wilson, the powerful, stunning dramatic work that won him critical acclaim, including the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. Troy Maxson is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less. Suggested by Mary Page, Administration

Freedom Seekers: Stories From The Western Underground Railroad by Gary Jenkins, filmmaker Freedom Seekers brings an understanding of the regional issues relating to antebellum slavery and the antislavery movement that helped shape the western Underground Railroad. Slaves, with the help of stationmasters and conductors, had to dodge professional slave catchers, federal marshals, and slaveholders on a grueling thousand-mile journey to freedom. Viewers will learn how the Kansas/Missouri political conditions created the opportunity for the perhaps less known escape route along the western frontier. This film uses primary source documents, historians, interviews with slave descendants, moving readings and dramatic depictions to tell exciting stories of Underground Railroad activities. (online streaming video through Kanopy) Suggested by Mary Page, Administration

Hidden figures: the American dream and the untold story of the Black women mathematicians who helped win the space race by Margot Lee Shetterly Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia, and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-black "West Computing" group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable This biography of Malcolm X draws on new research to trace his life from his troubled youth through his involvement in the Nation of Islam, his activism in the world of Black Nationalism, and his assassination. Years in the making, it is a definitive biography of the legendary black activist. Of the great figures in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches, he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man. In death he became a broad symbol of both resistance and reconciliation for millions around the world. Filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond the Autobiography of Malcolm X, this work unfolds a story of race and class in America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties. Reaching into Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents' activism through his own engagement with the Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the never-before-told true story of his assassination. This work captures the story of one of the most singular forces for social change, a man who constantly strove, in the great American tradition, to remake himself anew. Suggested by Larry Cooperman, Research & Information Services

March. Book One. by John Lewis This graphic novel is Congressman John Lewis' first-hand account of his lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement. Book One spans Lewis' youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a climax on the steps of City Hall. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper's farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington D.C., and from receiving beatings from state troopers, to receiving the Medal of Freedom awarded to him by Barack Obama, the first African-American president. (Book Two and Book Three are also available at the UCF Curriculum Materials Center in the Education complex) Suggested by Cindy Dancel, Research & Information Services

Native Son by Richard Wright The novel tells the story of 20-year old Bigger Thomas, an African American living in poverty in Chicago’s South Side ghettos during the 1930s. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

Negroland: a memoir by Margo Jefferson At once incendiary and icy, mischievous, and provocative, celebratory and elegiac, a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned to distance itself from whites and the black generality, while tirelessly measuring itself against both. Born in 1947 in upper-crust black Chicago--her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite--Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty." Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments--the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America--Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance. (With 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations.) Suggested by Richard Harrison, Subject Librarian

Roots: The saga of an American family by Alex Haley This poignant and powerful narrative tells the dramatic story of Kunta Kinte, snatched from freedom in Africa and brought by ship to America and slavery, and his descendants. Drawing on the oral traditions handed down in his family for generations, the author traces his origins back to the seventeen-year-old Kunta Kinte, who was abducted from his home in Gambia and transported as a slave to colonial America. In this account Haley provides an imaginative rendering of the lives of seven generations of black men and women. Suggested by Peggy Nuhn, Regional Librarian

The Black Seminoles : history of a freedom-seeking people by Kenneth W. Porter This is the story of a remarkable people, the Black Seminoles, and their charismatic leader, Chief John Horse, chronicles their heroic struggle for freedom. Beginning with the early 1800s, small groups of fugitive slaves living in Florida joined the Seminole Indians (an association that thrived for decades on reciprocal respect and affection). Kenneth Porter traces their fortunes and exploits as they moved across the country and attempted to live first beyond the law, then as loyal servants of it. He examines the Black Seminole role in the bloody Second Seminole War, when John Horse and his men distinguished themselves as fierce warriors, and their forced removal to the Oklahoma Indian Territory in the 1840s, where John's leadership ability emerged. The account includes the Black Seminole exodus in the 1850s to Mexico, their service as border troops for the Mexican government, and their return to Texas in the 1870s, where many of the men scouted for the U.S. Army. A powerful and stirring story, The Black Seminoles will appeal especially to readers interested in black history, Indian history, Florida history, and U.S. military history. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

The Block by Langston Hughes A collection of thirteen of Langston Hughes poems on African American themes. For both Langston Hughes and Romare Bearden, the New York City neighborhood of Harlem was a source of inspiration, and its sights and sounds are reflected in the art that each created. Now 13 of Hughes's most beloved poems are paired with Bearden's painting, "The Block", in a dazzling celebration of city life. Suggested by Susan MacDuffee, Acquisitions & Collections

The half has never been told: slavery and the making of American capitalism by Edward E. Baptist As historian Edward Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence. Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. It forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery's end—and created a culture that sustains America's deepest dreams of freedom. Suggested by Peggy Nuhn, Regional Librarian

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more. Henrietta's cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can't afford health insurance. This phenomenal New York Times bestseller tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae In the bestselling tradition of Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, a collection of humorous essays on what it's like to be unabashedly awkward in a world that regards introverts as hapless misfits, and Black as cool. My name is 'J' and I'm awkward--and Black. Someone once told me those were the two worst things anyone could be. That someone was right. Where do I start? Being an introvert in a world that glorifies cool isn't easy. But when Issa Rae, the creator of the Shorty Award-winning hit series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, is that introvert--whether she's navigating love, work, friendships, or 'rapping'--it sure is entertaining. Now, in this debut collection of essays written in her witty and self-deprecating voice, Rae covers everything from cybersexing in the early days of the Internet to deflecting unsolicited comments on weight gain, from navigating the perils of eating out alone and public displays of affection to learning to accept yourself--natural hair and all. Suggested by Martha Cloutier, Circulation

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. Suggested by Mary Page, Administration

The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor Gloria Naylor weaves together the stories of seven women living in Brewster Place, a bleak inner-city sanctuary, creating a powerful, moving portrait of the strengths, struggles, and hopes of black women in America. Vulnerable and resilient, openhanded and open-hearted, these women forge their lives in a place that in turn threatens and protects—a common prison and a shared home. Naylor renders both loving and painful human experiences with simple eloquence and uncommon intuition. Her remarkable sense of community and history makes The Women of Brewster Place a contemporary classic—and a touching and unforgettable read. Suggested by Rebecca Hammond, Special Collections & University Archives

We are not Afraid: the story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the civil rights campaign for Mississippi by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray The infamous murder of three civil rights workers by a Ku Klux Klan mob and Mississippi law-enforcement officers in 1964 takes on the dimensions of a personal, political and national tragedy in this riveting account. The drama of the triocollege students Michael Schwerner and Andy Goodman, both white Northerners, and James Chaney, a young black activist from Mississippipits their faith in nonviolence against a murderous rage fueled by racism. Cagin and Dray, who coauthored Hollywood Films of the Seventies, have done their homework: interviews, news reports, FBI documents and trial transcripts undergird their brilliant re-creation of the incident, interwoven with a full-scale history of the civil rights movement. The search for the bodies turned up many black corpses, purported victims of police/Klan violence; the Klan conspirators were paroled before serving their full sentences; in the aftermath, Lyndon Johnson questionably maneuvered to defuse the situation. Suggested by Rebecca Hammond, Special Collections & University Archives

Whispers of Angels: A Story of the Underground Railroad by Sharon Kelly Baker, filmmaker Defiant, brave and free, the great abolitionists Thomas Garrett, William Still and Harriet Tubman, along with hundreds of lesser known and nameless opponents of slavery, formed a Corridor of Courage stretching from Maryland's eastern shore through the length of Delaware to Philadelphia and beyond -- making the Underground Railroad a real route to freedom for enslaved Americans before the Civil War. Long-format interviews with prominent historians blend with dramatic reenactment to create a powerful story about the fight to end slavery. Actors Edward Asner and Blair Underwood portray the two most prominent abolitionists on the eastern line of the Underground Railroad, Thomas Garrett and William Still. Bearing a remarkable resemblance to Thomas Garrett, Asner reenacts the famous courtroom scene in 1848 in which Garrett foreshadows the Civil War and firmly declares to redouble his efforts in fighting for true freedom in America. In spite of the court's imposition of a crippling financial punishment, Garrett's ideals were not altered; his clandestine activities continued for many years even during the War. Reading documented text in the form of letters exchanged by Thomas Garrett and William Still (a free black abolitionist in Philadelphia), Asner and Underwood bring to life the fascinating working relationship between the two men and those they helped. Underwood, as William Still, meets in secret with the frightened fugitives who pass through his Anti-Slavery Society Offices in Philadelphia on their dangerous journeys to the north. (online streaming film through Kanopy) Suggested by Mary Page, Administration

[reviewsbyblue]

Review - Courting the Stationmaster's Daughter by Juli Revezzo

Review – Courting the Stationmaster’s Daughter by Juli Revezzo

About the Book:

After Honorine Camden is jilted, leaving her stunned and sparking a scandal in her tiny London borough of Wallflower, she’s devastated. But when she overhears her father, the stationmaster, talking about arranging a party for their newly-minted underground railway station, she volunteers to help. Although she’s intrigued with the handsome assistant stationmaster, Shane MacIntyre,…

[iluvzfewdnstoreyz]

Screaming Jenny.

The old storage sheds along the tracks were abandoned shortly after the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was built, and it wasn't long before the poor folk of the area moved in. The sheds provided shelter - of a sort - although the winter wind still pierced through every crevice, and the small fireplaces that the poor constructed did little to keep the cold at bay.

A gentle, kindly woman named Jenny lived alone in one of the smaller sheds. She had fallen on hard times, and with no family to protect her, she was forced to find work where she could and take whatever shelter was available to someone with little money. Jenny never had enough to eat and in winter her tiny fire barely kept her alive during the cold months. Still, she kept her spirits up and tried to help other folks when they took sick or needed food, sometimes going without herself so that another could eat.

One cold evening in late autumn, Jenny sat shivering over her fire, drinking broth out of a wooden bowl, when a spark flew from the fire and lit her skirts on fire. Intent on filling her aching stomach, Jenny did not notice her flaming clothes until the fire had burnt through the heavy wool of her skirt and began to scorch her skin. Leaping up in terror, Jenny threw her broth over the licking flames but the fluid did nothing to douse the fire. In terror, Jenny fled from the shack and ran along the tracks, screaming for help as the flames engulfed her body.

The station was not far away, and instinctively Jenny made for it, hoping to find someone to aid her. Within moments, her body was a glowing inferno and Jenny was overwhelmed by pain. Her screams grew more horrible as her steps slowed. She staggered blindly onto the tracks just west of the station, a ball of fire that barely looked human. In her agony, she did not see the glowing headlight of the train rounding the curve, or hear the screech of the breaks as the engineer spotted her fire-eaten figure and tried to stop. A moment later, her terrible screams broke off as the train mowed her down.

Alerted by the whistle, the crew from the station came running as the engineer halted the train and ran back down the tracks toward poor dead Jenny, who was still burning. The men doused the fire and carried her body back to the station. She was given a pauper's funeral and buried in an unmarked grave in the local churchyard. Within a few days, another poverty-stricken family had moved into her shack, and Jenny was forgotten.

Forgotten that is, until a month later when a train rounding the bend west of the station was confronted by a screaming ball of fire. Too late to stop, the engineer plowed over the glowing figure before he could bring the train to a screeching halt. Leaping from the engine, he ran back down the tracks to search for a mangled, burning body, but there was nothing there. Shaken, he brought his train into the station and reported the incident to the stationmaster. After hearing his tale, the stationmaster remembered poor, dead Jenny and realized that her ghost had returned to haunt the tracks where she had died.

To this day, the phantom of Screaming Jenny still appears on the tracks on the anniversary of the day she died. Many an engineer has rounded the curve just west of the station and found himself face to face with the burning ghost of Screaming Jenny, as once more she makes her deadly run towards the Harpers Ferry station, seeking in vain for someone to save her.

[answrs]

okay but Emmet discovering charjabugs when a young tourist gets separated from their partner in the station. electric bug in the shape of a subway car AND THEY'RE EVEN IN DEPOT AGENT COLORS

Ingo has to intervene because he sees Emmet is about 30 seconds away from just adopting the lil mon right then and there as a mascot instead of returning him to his trainer.

next week Ingo sees a package on their doorstep from Alola and Emmet's just:

Ingo: We can't afford another bug in the station we already have like 12000 joltiks

Charjabug:

Ingo: I will make an exception because she looks very polite

(five minutes later)

Ingo: i have had Stationmaster Sparks for one day and if anything were to happen to her i would kill everyone in this subway and then myself

[answrs]

PMD Ing(o)men AU family photo!

Rei currently has the non-scruffed privileges because he can (...somewhat) be trusted to not run off after the slightest shiny object. Akari is displeased. Stationmaster Sparks is just happy to be here.