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Much work ahead. I feel slightly hungover from yesterday's trip (the puddle-jet ran into what the pilot cheerily termed "moderate turbulence" and hopped up and down like a jumping bean; there was an hour and a half delay on the flight from Phila-SFO, and headwinds, and seats that didn't recline, and a tired, cranky 14-year-old to deal with) but am drinking coffee, tying up the last of this rev. of the book, and getting on with a freelance job that jumped into my lap.

Sadly, or fortunately, I need to do one more pass on the book before I send it in. I think I was so focused on getting all the happening down on paper that there are bits where all there is is happening; soul must be reapplied. I have the tools, I have the technology, I even know what I have to do. After more coffee.

An Underground Zagat

I had never heard of The Negro Motorist's Green Book before this morning. Reading about it I had one of those "of course" moments, and a big wallop of sorrow and rage that such a book was ever necessary in this country, and a chunk of admiration for Victor Green's way of dealing with the problem of Traveling While Negro in Jim Crow America.

Essentially, the book was a guide for African American travelers, giving them information on lodging, restaurants, even gas stations where they could reliably be served, as well as information on "sunset towns"--the places where by law African Americans were not allowed to remain after dark. It was a guidebook to avoiding humiliation and approaching something like the privilege of freedom to travel that white folk took for granted.

It's easy for me, comfortably white and middle class and of an age where things were beginning to change when I was first aware of segregation and prejudice (and hell, I was growing up in Greenwich Village, where, theoretically at least, everyone was against prejudice and was therefore to be considered virtuous), to look on a work like The Green Book with historical interest. But really, what I admire is the creativity of people responding to what amounted to a blanket "No" by saying, "Well, Actually, Yes. Go to Niagara Falls for your honeymoon. Travel to that convention in Chicago. It can be done, let's show you how."