Back to the booksellers, back to the bank. I if may return to the matter of the red velvet cake, I now recant my earlier advice: don't buy a mix. Or don't buy whatever kind of mix we're using, because every crumb leaves a pink trail of disodium 6- hydroxy-5- ((2-methoxy-5-methyl-4-sulfophenyl)azo)- 2-naphthalene-sulfonate, which may not be made of beetles, but I should probably come clean and say it's regarded as unsafe for children in much of Europe, and the British government is supposedly about to release a study linking it to temper tantrums in young children.
At least the beetles are organic. (I just feel bad about how they're poured alive into boiling water. Also, knowingly eating insects is icky. I prefer them invisibly speckled throughout my peanut butter.)
We have now another card of the book stalls, and I'm afraid another brief message: "7-9-76. All's well. See you 16 September 1976. Andy," who underlines his name. It was sent to Mr. & Mrs. D. Leggatt, 14 Annesly Road, Blackheath, London.
I suspect tensions. I will attempt to cut through it by changing the subject.
Once again the "book stall" seems to be mostly art, which I'm hoping someone better traveled than I will jump in to explain.
Books... I'm reading the first Artemis Fowl because everyone makes Harry Potter noises over it. Those people should stop making those noises, but the jury's still out. I tried to read Undead and Unpopular, but I'll reserve scathing commentary because it's unfair to jump into the middle of a series. Ditto Must Love Dragons, which I know someone recommended to me a long time ago, because it's unfair to kvetch about books where there main problem is that you don't like the genre. (In this case, I don't like the genre of thick main characters, but the idea for the book is really cute and clever, and many perfectly sane people would probably get a kick out of it.)
If I didn't mention it already, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime was every bit as good as everyone has promised. Loved it. The narrator has Asperger syndrome and may be a bit autistic. Very fresh reading. Also, it taught me the word "invigilator," which I know I can make good use of.
However, similar sources pointed me to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and that hasn't worked out as well. I'm intrigued by the world, but I don't care about any of the characters yet, so I find myself not reading, and the rift grows.
Mike plods through a little more of North and South with every potty break. He shouts out questions about pre-Civil War America, and I answer back, pleased that some of those dates and places now have a larger purpose in my head.
Because of these questions, I realized that, shockingly, I'd never looked at the slave schedules that accompany the 1850 and 1860 censuses. I guess I always just assumed that, well, lots of people had slaves, and that was bad - very, very bad - but since it was a societal norm you can't be looking up grandpa and getting all riled at him that he had fifteen slaves. Slave-owning in itself doesn't say much.
The most you can hope for is, say, a will where the person asks that the slaves be set free upon the writer's death (has happened a few times) or a will where a slave is given to another family member, so at least you get to know the names of the slaves. Sadly, these are rarely mentioned on the schedules.
But I did add a "Slave Owners" category to the genealogy wiki, and as I looked at those schedules, I was surprised by how many of my ancestors didn't own slaves in those decades. (Or at least didn't have them enumerated.)
And then - oh my! - I found one case in a late 1700s Louisiana census that I must've overlooked in ignorance before, where - about 10 years before the ancestor married - he was living with one female slave and a small child. UM. I'm thinking my family was not his first family. Oo la la. But, you know, those crazy Belgians of the False River.
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