happiness

Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather 

and a little music out of doors, played by someone I do not know....

John Keats

Pictured:  Still Life with Fruit and Wine -- Severin Roesen, 1852 (Wikimedia Commons)

the right wright?

 

Chris Wild's Mashable feature of 1946 Alfred Eisenstaedt photos taken at Howard University includes a young woman described as Sophomore Sara Wright.  Sara, standing next to dapper Walter Hall, has a bit of a quirky smile on her face, and both she and Walter look like they're trying not to seem self-conscious or burst out laughing at the prospect of being photographed for Life magazine.  Flashing forward to September of 2009, the New York Times laments the passing of Sarah E. Wright, novelist, whose 1969 This Child's Gonna Live received rave reviews and is considered a groundbreaking work of African-American fiction. 

According to Margalit Fox's obituary, Wright was born in 1928 and attended Howard University, eventually becoming editor of the college newspaper.  A serious lack of funds forced her to leave Howard before graduating, yet she continued to write through lean times.  She married, raised a family and became Sarah Wright Kaye, pursued political and literary passions, and worked as a bookkeeper.  This Child's Gonna Live came deep from Wright's personal experience of growing up along the Maryland shore, introducing an overburdened but still spiritual heroine named Mariah Upshur.  Death and poverty are intertwined in Wright's fictional Depression-era Tangierneck, Maryland, and Mariah struggles to keep her troubled world together: 

Mariah commenced into wrestling with Satan on that long road -- road that stretched on forever.  Went into her secret closet praying, "I'm in your service, Lord.  Clean my soul.  Clean my mouth that I may speak your words."

Sarah's husband noted in her obituary that a Tangierneck trilogy was planned and considerable work had been put into a second novel.  But she had kept progress on the project to herself, and the pages now are in the same box they were placed in by their author before her death.  And whether Sara Wright of the 1946 Eisenstaedt photo is the same Sarah E. Wright whose full life was detailed by the NY Times -- This Child's Gonna Live is a pearl of a novel worth discovering, along with Wright herself.