The Bad Mother Complex
Why are so many working mothers haunted by constant guilt?
Boston Globe, March 13
One night, my 6-year-old wandered into my room and found me buried in a stack of magazine proofs, scanning line after line of text and marking errors with a red pen. He asked what I was doing. When I explained that mama was “making the magazine” — fixing mistakes, moving words, and eventually entering the changes into computer files that would then go to a printing press in Vermont — Owen wondered out loud how grown-ups could be in charge when they had so little common sense.
Francie writes.
Mostly, she writes about race, ethnicity, culture, gender, motherhood, art and academia (and sometimes roofing) for newspapers and magazines.
She wrote her first story, about the smell of her grandmother's Haitian oatmeal, on an ivory Charger 11 manual typewriter. She still misses the sound of a carriage return lever.
New England's Hidden History
More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery
Boston Globe, Sept. 26, 2010
In the year 1755, a black slave named Mark Codman plotted to kill Leader, his abusive master. A God-fearing man, Codman had resolved to use poison, reasoning that if he could kill without shedding blood, it would be no sin. Arsenic in hand, he and two female slaves poisoned the tea and porridge of John Codman repeatedly. The plan worked—but like so many stories of slave rebellion, this one ended in brutal death for the slaves as well. After a trial by jury, Mark Codman was hanged, tarred, and then suspended in a metal gibbet on the main road to town, where his body remained for more than 20 years.
The Roofer's Song
Tales of blue-collar misadventure in a white-collar world
Boston Globe, Feb. 9
The knee surgery was scheduled for January—that time of year when roofers across New England enter their season of hibernation.In the wild, hibernating brings a slowing of metabolism and breath. In roofing, where pitched heights and exposure to the elements are givens, winter is when my husband Brian’s nail-gun rhythms fall dormant. Time to order newboots and fix busted knees. Time to worry about his best guys jumping to other companies. Time for Brian’s hand-wringing—will there be enough work come spring?—to replace the daily purpose his hands find laying down shingle over shingle.
Sick Over Jungle Fever
An interracial dating guide leaves one reader ill
Boston Globe, Feb. 20
What’s a single, white 21st-century gal to do in a world where, as the saying goes, all the good guys are either married or gay? As someone who is not single or white, I’m probably not the person to ask. But apparently J.C. Davies is. Davies used to specialize in equity investments at Goldman Sachs. Since getting laid off a few years back, she’s re-branded herself as an intercultural dating expert, and she’s out with a new book. Is it called I Got the Fever: Love, What’s Race Gotta Do With It? Yes, it is. Does the cover feature the 40-something Davies in a red dress with five Chippendales-types arranged like ethnic flavors around her vanilla? Yes, I’m sorry to say, it does.
©2011 Jud Guitteau c/o the ispot.com
LINKS TO LIKE:
Francie writes about the Dec. 28 disappearance of Phylicia Barnes and racial disparities in the treatment of missing-persons cases in "Without A Trace," a featured story in the May 2011 issue of Ebony magazine.
Banner image: Luce Turnier, Untitled (Marie-France Latour), 1991
Update: Phylicia Barnes' Body Found
Ebony.com April. 22
Four months after she vanished from her sister’s Baltimore, Md., apartment, Maryland authorities yesterday identified a body found in the Susquehanna River as Phylicia Barnes, the college-bound honors student whose disappearance baffled investigators and reignited a national debate about racial disparities in the handling of abduction cases.
Without A Trace
A young, photogenic, star teenager goes missing, and the media falls silent
Ebony, May 2011
With her megawatt smile and all-American girl-next-door story, Phylicia Barnes closely mirrors the profile of Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teenager whose 2005 case captured international attention when she disappeared in Aruba. But while Natalee’s story ignited a media firestorm, Phylicia’s disappearance barely registered a blip on network news. Initially, several media outlets declined to tell her story or show her face during prime time.
Race on Yawkey Way
On baseball, Boston, and being a black Red Sox fan
Boston Globe, June 12
If my interracial marriage of nine years were a screenplay, it would open on a scene like the one that recently unfolded on our living-room couch, as my husband and I vegged out watching the Red Sox in hi-def.
“Look!” I said in the 3rd inning, jumping in my seat. “There’s a black person in the seats at Fenway!” Then Brian, absolutely deadpan and without missing a beat: “That’s computer-generated. Like the ads behind home plate.” And so began another night of banter across America’s race divide.
© Dark Girls Movie
Rise Women Rise
Francie Latour Guest Blogs on Dark Girls Movie Website
Officialdarkgirlsmovie.com, June 30
We called it ‘ring around the collar’: At college parties, it was that moment when you could clearly see black men with light-skinned black women dancing in the middle of the room, and dark women, like me, left to form a ring along the edges of the wall. Naturally, we joked about it. We trivialized it. We looked down on the boys who fueled it. But as stark as that color line was, we rarely talked about how much it hurt.
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