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I've been reading Chains. It does the harsh work of talking about the cruel irony of our our revolution, that people fighting for their freedom denied it to even slaves who helped them. The nasty truth smoothed over in the textbooks most children read in school. It's beautifully written, painful, and utterly engrossing. We deify the founders, forgetting often what it must have felt like to be one of those for whom the freedom was a lie and the high flown statements of principle a taunt. I love that at a time when politicians are openly pining for the days of slavery, this book is out there reminding people that even a comparatively kind slave owner is still a slave owner, and not owed a cookie.

In my head, reading it, I remember the smell of colonial kitchens, wood smoke, stone, baking bread, stew, and herbs. I remember my grandmother's hands chopping vegetables and kneading dough. I remember her using the big paddles to pull the bread from the oven. I imagine the kitchen in the book smelled that way, the comfort of that unique smell contrasting with the cruelty of an unforgivable institution. I think of all those women's hands, free and unfree, over the centuries, chopping and plucking and scaling and kneading dough to feed generation after generation of those in power and taking what bits of freedom and sustenance they could for themselves and doing the things needing doing because someone in the end must.

Chains came out after I finished teaching, but I hope they are reading it in schools now. We feed the middle school kids Johnny Tremaine and "The midnight ride of Paul Revere." Seems like their ought to be a rebuttal.